I see this opinion everywhere: “Tech and tech culture is awful now.” It’s not, it has the same problems that it did before, possibly fewer because effort has b

I see this opinion everywhere: “Tech and tech culture is awful now.” It’s not, it has the same problems that it did before, possibly fewer because effort has been put into acknowledging and correcting them. Things today are objectively better than what came before. The difference is PR. It’s no longer “cool” to report on technology. It’s cool for people with little to no background in technology to trash technology for the amusement of other, similarly uninitiated, people. The current anti-tech media trend started with the show Silicon Valley [0]. It exposed some tech non-sense to non-tech people and gave them effective tools to make fun of the nerds they didn’t like anyway. Instead of generating empathy or sympathy for the good people stuck in or trying to change those systems, it made it ok to paint every person working in tech with the same brush you’d reserve for its worst actors. It’s like Blockchain and NFTs. All the sudden people started getting up riled up about them. But, when you ask them how they feel about the dark implications of HTTP they don’t have much of an opinion. An opinion hasn’t been given to them. You can usually swap out Blockchain for HTTP and their arguments would still make perfects sense.. But then, who’d listen? It’s hard to become a competent workaday programmer. The people who know how to program are able to generate and accumulate wealth at a rate unattainable by most non-programmers. With the fabric of our society wearing thinner and thinner the gulf between an engineer at DoorDash and a delivery person contracted by DoorDash is widening. There’s something inherently unfair about what’s happening today. We can all feel it. But, the answer isn’t to burn everything down and start over with a NEW ANTI-CAPITALIST UTOPIA. It’s to correct course. I’ve worked with anti-capitalist people in media. The way they treat each other is shocking, only slightly better than the way they treat everyone else. Instead of seeing laws, corporations, and technology, as how people interact and engage with one another, they see evils that they refuse to master. Instead of empowering themselves by understanding the systems of the world and making them accessible to others, they’ve decided that it’s easier, and more profitable in the short-term, to rail against these inherent evils and their practitioners. They’ve concluded that the system is corrupt, the board needs to be flipped, and anything short of that is heresy. Hating on tech and tech people is something that the cool kids do now. I’d wager that you feel the way you do in part because you’re being bombarded with messaging about the evils of technology as stand-ins for almost every problem the world is facing. Sometimes the criticism is nuanced and thoughtful. It’s usually not. [0]: Which is fantastic.