7 ms·

We talk about externalities. A chemical company pours toxins into a river, an automaker knows its products kill X people per year. These are tangible, understan

We talk about externalities. A chemical company pours toxins into a river, an automaker knows its products kill X people per year. These are tangible, understandable. But we don't yet think of the effects on the workforce as social externalities. Industrial safety has made the workplace a much safer space physically, but not mentally. The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it. But I have a few observations. I meet lots of people who "got out of tech". People with PhDs who became landscape gardeners or opened a juice bar. I meet smart and engaging people in their 30s who dropped out of games or media careers. The cost (to society) of educating a graduate is, what, $100,000? Average post-grad education is another 4 years. Then it costs approximately 20% of someones salary to hire and onboard them. For what? So they can drop out after 5 years and go open a wind-surfing school? In a way, these people, the workforce/pool are a national asset, and it could regarded a tragedy of the commons that harming them is inflicting an externality on the whole industry. By culturing inhospitable, mentally harmful environments the tech industry is pissing in its own drinking water.

gspr 4y ago
I think you're right. I'm just afraid that any solution here will be much more on the "stick" side than the "carrot" side that you propose.
CalRobert 4y ago
There's a great read on this at https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-people-nobody-cares https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-peop... Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure. """ She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support. You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """ """ t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases. Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress. And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  Social pollution isn't a new concept. In the 1970s the, um, I'll be charitable here and say "well meaning but somewhat less than perfect", welfare efforts of the 1960s were often compared to factories that churned out some product and patted themselves on the back for great work while ignoring the havoc wreaked on the local environment. Industrial pollution was a big deal in the 1970s so it's unsurprising that people made this comparison back then. A key point of the comparison was that these messes take a long time to clean up. You screw a generation out of stable families and father figures and, well, we're still dealing with that, the same way that we're still dealing with industrial pollution of decades past.
- jseban 4y ago
  I agree about the criticism against long working hours, but it's unfortunate I think to use the nuclear family as an example of another superior example here, to shove people further into another old fashioned failing arbitrary power structure comes a bit short as a vision of a better alternative.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    What's arbitrary about a family? It's changed in size over the history of homo sapiens, but it has always existed and is pretty obviously a biological necessity and unavoidable natural law for us. The arguments against it are entirely abstract and ungrounded.
    - jseban 4y ago
      You assign an enormous amount of special status to certain people who you happen to be related to by blood, and that's arbitrary. It works when it works, and it doesn't work when it doesn't. What natural law says it's better to spend time with/live only with people who are related to by blood? The only necessity for reproduction is sexual intercourse. A family is susceptible to the same abuse and corruption as any other arbitrary power structure. The arguments against it are the divorce rates, and they are not abstract or ungrounded.
rainboOow9 4y ago
Do we have some tangible numbers on the long term situation of those "quitting tech" people? Like, ok, they open a wind-surfing school, but then what? Does that work, are they more fulfilled and able to work the next 10+ years in that situation without burning out? Or do they go back to tech after a while because grass is always greener, and a job is a job and there are not as much fulfilling jobs as we would like to be. Looking around me, I do know a fair amount of people quitting tech. To become a sport or management coach, a sound designer, a bar owner, a writer, etc. But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.
- 21723 4y ago
  Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it. You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad. In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.
  - rainboOow9 4y ago
    But is the system really responsible for all of this? I mean, if we go back to a more "natural" state, with simpler jobs and with more direct impacts, are we actually happier? Is cutting woods all day long more fulfilling that a tech job? Or being a mason and putting block on top of each other for other people that you do not know about? Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and to potentially take several years without working much thanks to our high salary?
    - SenHeng 4y ago
      As like many others here, I started writing code in my late teens. And experienced my first bout of burn out sometime in my mid 20s. I was sick of making all these 2D, non-real things and wanted to make real world products that I could hold in my hand. So I did. Then I learnt that the pay was often shit, the work was really difficult and the physical toil it took on my body was not something I could take for long. So I went back to writing code in a comfy, climate controlled office with all the snacks I can eat. And spend my weekends instead doing amateur carpentry. That's so much more fulfilling on all levels.
goodpoint 4y ago
> A chemical company pours toxins into a river ... a great many jobs make us sick [Developed] societies have been systematically failing at addressing externalities for the last hundred years. We do have many scientific methods to measure pollution, climate change, mental health, physical health, income inequality. The socioeconomical system is designed to prioritize economical growth [for large company owners] over everything else.
towaway15463 4y ago
It’s interesting that you don’t consider landscaping, juice bars, and wind surfing schools as beneficial to the economy. Could it be that these highly educated and intelligent people you are talking about see things differently? Perhaps after 5 years in tech they realize that none of the companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative. That realization is sure to produce instant burnout as the work you’re putting in is now meaningless or even harmful. At that point it becomes a rational choice to start a small business that provides some immediate benefit to people no matter how trivial. I don’t think there’s a damned thing you could change in the work environment to fix that, it’s the work itself that is the problem.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative Right? When I started out, 1/3 of my interviews were with gambling machine companies, another was with a company that only existed to arbitrage betting odds for their own profit, and one was some kind of quasi-AI surveillance thing. A lot of GDP is generated on completely parasitic activities, and you can do a lot worse for society than running a "soft" business ethically and happily.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I'm doing that now. For free. I've written infrastructure software that has, without a doubt, saved a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, for many years to come. I've been working on a client implementation that leverages that software, for the last couple of years. It's approaching ship (but still a ways off). One of the goals of that project, is to help train a few young friends in the ins and outs of what it takes to create shipping software. These projects would be worth a lot of dosh, if I were to hang a sticker on them. But I did them for no money. Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities. It's an issue, but one I have no ideas how to solve. I think that the right to spend money on what we want is an important one, and I won't gainsay anyone else's right to do that. If driving around in a Model X and having a model (of any gender identification) on your arm is your priority, and you have worked hard for that, then Godspeed and good luck. I have different priorities, and the story of how I got them is long and winding. Not so many folks have backgrounds like mine, and not many that do, have developed priorities like mine. I am grateful to be in the position I'm in.
helpfulmandrill 4y ago
I wish I could favourite this comment. So insightful.
- notamy 4y ago
  You can! If you click the timestamp next to the comment, there'll be a favourite button on the comment page.
  - helpfulmandrill 4y ago
    Thanks :)
throwaway894345 4y ago
> The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it. Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Or maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society).
- csande17 4y ago
  > Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Bold of you to assume office work involves "productivity".
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    I'm not saying that office work is a particularly productive form of work, but rather that there is some work product that gets done and it's difficult to increase the mental health aspects of office work without directly trading off on productivity.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society). You remember the Tom Sawyer story, where he gets the others to paint the fence for him? Work is very much "in the mind". You can have the work of Sisyphus and get to love the rock. In the best cases work is the making of some people. It can liberate you from boredom and self indulgence. An artist or poet talks about their "work" in an entirely different spirit. We must not equate indentured servitude, wage slavery, and pointless anxiety driven makework for "real work". > without foregoing the actual productivity Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology. Producing what? Productivity is a slippery word. Unless you're a farmer most of us can't point to anything tangible we produce. The best we can hope for is to help fellow human beings in whatever small way we can each day. Increasingly that is done by subverting the system. Worthwhile work occurs despite, not through the systems we inhabit.
spencerchubb 4y ago
I'm curious how you got the estimate of $100,000 cost to society to educate a graduate? Are you including undergrad or just grad programs? If we include undergrad and do ballpark math: government pays 40 billion in grants per year, there are 20 million students, so that's 2 thousand per student cost to society Whereas I'm paying upwards of 30k. The cost is on me, not on society. Although I'm just an anecdote so I'm curious to hear from others
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I literally pulled that number out of my arse based on some vague recollection of such a figure. It may be conservative, or grossly exaggerated, but I think it's ballpark for the "cost of creating a graduate". The costs are complex because, for example, a student at college is not (except by paying my salary as a professor) participating in the economy for three years.
winternett 4y ago
There is a huge cost to losing the most talented people in the workforce. Exit these days means that very talented people often lose track of their field and face a harder re-entry point with lower salary if they decide to return. What I'm most worried about in leaving my career as a solutions architect is that the ability to start and build a business of my own seems insurmountable when you consider the world's reliance on social media and popularity/wealth as a requirement for success. There are so many people doing absolutely the same thing these days, and so many people that present the image of success and popularity in being an entrepreneur in pretty much every field that valid/great ideas get drowned out so easily... If everyone is doing the same thing, and many people are faking their success, coupled with wealthy individuals that can easily copycat ideas, it creates massive barriers to organic success. There is usually only one page on most sites for publications, that's often a wild and crazy mashup of posts from all disciplines and fields of interest. Our attention spans are also shrinking because of short form content, that makes it very easy to view something important, but also forget it 5 seconds later, so even marketing is overwhelming to most of the people that would support independent business. Sites like Reddit started out great, but now subreddits are often run with other intentions than open communication... Many mods secretly steer business in their own directions because of the flood of competition, and it feeds deceptive marketing techniques and brigade culture. I don't want to be stuck in complaining, I think the world really needs to evaluate how much we are fostering "monopolistic dynasty" culture and nepotism on the Internet, and how it's destroying capitalism... We all really need to bring back a sense of distributing speaking time among wider ranges of audiences and speakers, and fostering discussions that aren't based on popularity and wealth as indicators of validity... The very same culture that has negatively infected the workplaces we might want to leave.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  There's a lot going on that's squeezing out real value and replacing it with a controllable facsimile of value. And yes, this is anti-social, and anti-capitalist, in the purest and best sense of both those terms. It's a bonfire of human value. In the face of so much disruptive potential, so much surplus of intellect, and so much human energy unleashed by automation and fossil fuels, the strategy of the incumbents has been to stifle it. I mean, isn't that what the entertainments business has been focused on for the past 40 years, with DRM etc? What some parts of the tech industry does is actually anti-technology. We have a kind of job creation scheme with one person digging a hole, while another fills it in. Some computer scientists working to create innovation, and others overtly set on stifling it. To ignore that adversarial aspect is to completely fail to understand modern technology.
joeman1000 4y ago
I’ve tried to talk to people about this for so long. This is the root of the problem with ‘office culture’ and just ‘work culture’ in general. Productivity is the goal, right? Increasing worker happiness and reducing stress should be the focus. I think this will produce the largest effect on productivity. Instead, we get sociopathic slave-driving at work: a narrow focus on KPIs, mandated hours of work and methods of working, prostration from micro-management (it can go on forever). Working environments are low-trust and hostile, with no focus on what truly makes a worker happy, and what actually makes them productive!
throw8383833jj 4y ago
I agree with everything you've said. But, as long as there is an endless line of engineers ready and willing to replace those lost workers, then industry and management in general has no incentive to change their ways. that's just what happens when you have a vast oversupply of labor.
lwhi 4y ago
How does society end up burdened with the cost, when education isn't free?

gspr 4y ago

I think you're right. I'm just afraid that any solution here will be much more on the "stick" side than the "carrot" side that you propose.

CalRobert 4y ago

There's a great read on this at https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-people-nobody-cares https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/workplace-killing-peop... Unfortunately we're not good at handling externalities we can't easily measure. """ She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support. You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term. """ """ t’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases. Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress. And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs. """

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
Social pollution isn't a new concept. In the 1970s the, um, I'll be charitable here and say "well meaning but somewhat less than perfect", welfare efforts of the 1960s were often compared to factories that churned out some product and patted themselves on the back for great work while ignoring the havoc wreaked on the local environment. Industrial pollution was a big deal in the 1970s so it's unsurprising that people made this comparison back then. A key point of the comparison was that these messes take a long time to clean up. You screw a generation out of stable families and father figures and, well, we're still dealing with that, the same way that we're still dealing with industrial pollution of decades past.
jseban 4y ago
I agree about the criticism against long working hours, but it's unfortunate I think to use the nuclear family as an example of another superior example here, to shove people further into another old fashioned failing arbitrary power structure comes a bit short as a vision of a better alternative.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  What's arbitrary about a family? It's changed in size over the history of homo sapiens, but it has always existed and is pretty obviously a biological necessity and unavoidable natural law for us. The arguments against it are entirely abstract and ungrounded.
  - jseban 4y ago
    You assign an enormous amount of special status to certain people who you happen to be related to by blood, and that's arbitrary. It works when it works, and it doesn't work when it doesn't. What natural law says it's better to spend time with/live only with people who are related to by blood? The only necessity for reproduction is sexual intercourse. A family is susceptible to the same abuse and corruption as any other arbitrary power structure. The arguments against it are the divorce rates, and they are not abstract or ungrounded.

rainboOow9 4y ago

Do we have some tangible numbers on the long term situation of those "quitting tech" people? Like, ok, they open a wind-surfing school, but then what? Does that work, are they more fulfilled and able to work the next 10+ years in that situation without burning out? Or do they go back to tech after a while because grass is always greener, and a job is a job and there are not as much fulfilling jobs as we would like to be. Looking around me, I do know a fair amount of people quitting tech. To become a sport or management coach, a sound designer, a bar owner, a writer, etc. But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.

21723 4y ago
Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it. You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad. In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.
- rainboOow9 4y ago
  But is the system really responsible for all of this? I mean, if we go back to a more "natural" state, with simpler jobs and with more direct impacts, are we actually happier? Is cutting woods all day long more fulfilling that a tech job? Or being a mason and putting block on top of each other for other people that you do not know about? Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and to potentially take several years without working much thanks to our high salary?
  - SenHeng 4y ago
    As like many others here, I started writing code in my late teens. And experienced my first bout of burn out sometime in my mid 20s. I was sick of making all these 2D, non-real things and wanted to make real world products that I could hold in my hand. So I did. Then I learnt that the pay was often shit, the work was really difficult and the physical toil it took on my body was not something I could take for long. So I went back to writing code in a comfy, climate controlled office with all the snacks I can eat. And spend my weekends instead doing amateur carpentry. That's so much more fulfilling on all levels.

goodpoint 4y ago

> A chemical company pours toxins into a river ... a great many jobs make us sick [Developed] societies have been systematically failing at addressing externalities for the last hundred years. We do have many scientific methods to measure pollution, climate change, mental health, physical health, income inequality. The socioeconomical system is designed to prioritize economical growth [for large company owners] over everything else.

towaway15463 4y ago

It’s interesting that you don’t consider landscaping, juice bars, and wind surfing schools as beneficial to the economy. Could it be that these highly educated and intelligent people you are talking about see things differently? Perhaps after 5 years in tech they realize that none of the companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative. That realization is sure to produce instant burnout as the work you’re putting in is now meaningless or even harmful. At that point it becomes a rational choice to start a small business that provides some immediate benefit to people no matter how trivial. I don’t think there’s a damned thing you could change in the work environment to fix that, it’s the work itself that is the problem.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
> companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative Right? When I started out, 1/3 of my interviews were with gambling machine companies, another was with a company that only existed to arbitrage betting odds for their own profit, and one was some kind of quasi-AI surveillance thing. A lot of GDP is generated on completely parasitic activities, and you can do a lot worse for society than running a "soft" business ethically and happily.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I'm doing that now. For free. I've written infrastructure software that has, without a doubt, saved a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, for many years to come. I've been working on a client implementation that leverages that software, for the last couple of years. It's approaching ship (but still a ways off). One of the goals of that project, is to help train a few young friends in the ins and outs of what it takes to create shipping software. These projects would be worth a lot of dosh, if I were to hang a sticker on them. But I did them for no money. Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities. It's an issue, but one I have no ideas how to solve. I think that the right to spend money on what we want is an important one, and I won't gainsay anyone else's right to do that. If driving around in a Model X and having a model (of any gender identification) on your arm is your priority, and you have worked hard for that, then Godspeed and good luck. I have different priorities, and the story of how I got them is long and winding. Not so many folks have backgrounds like mine, and not many that do, have developed priorities like mine. I am grateful to be in the position I'm in.

helpfulmandrill 4y ago

I wish I could favourite this comment. So insightful.

notamy 4y ago
You can! If you click the timestamp next to the comment, there'll be a favourite button on the comment page.
- helpfulmandrill 4y ago
  Thanks :)

throwaway894345 4y ago

> The reality is, a great many jobs make us sick. Depression, anxiety, heightened aggression, sedentary atrophy, getting overweight because there's no time for the gym... the modern office workplace is no heath-farm. And Google throwing a few coloured bean bags around, or providing healthy food and gym equipment is only a sticking plaster if the foundational culture is toxic. What is the cost to society? I have no idea, or how to even measure it. Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Or maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society).

csande17 4y ago
> Are you positing that there are loads of healthier jobs or healthier ways to do office work (without foregoing the actual productivity)? Bold of you to assume office work involves "productivity".
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I'm not saying that office work is a particularly productive form of work, but rather that there is some work product that gets done and it's difficult to increase the mental health aspects of office work without directly trading off on productivity.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> maybe that work itself is inherently unhealthy (which I kind of believe, but at least until we have automation meeting our physical needs 'work' seems healthier for society). You remember the Tom Sawyer story, where he gets the others to paint the fence for him? Work is very much "in the mind". You can have the work of Sisyphus and get to love the rock. In the best cases work is the making of some people. It can liberate you from boredom and self indulgence. An artist or poet talks about their "work" in an entirely different spirit. We must not equate indentured servitude, wage slavery, and pointless anxiety driven makework for "real work". > without foregoing the actual productivity Please don't fall for that 18th century factory-owner terminology. Producing what? Productivity is a slippery word. Unless you're a farmer most of us can't point to anything tangible we produce. The best we can hope for is to help fellow human beings in whatever small way we can each day. Increasingly that is done by subverting the system. Worthwhile work occurs despite, not through the systems we inhabit.

spencerchubb 4y ago

I'm curious how you got the estimate of $100,000 cost to society to educate a graduate? Are you including undergrad or just grad programs? If we include undergrad and do ballpark math: government pays 40 billion in grants per year, there are 20 million students, so that's 2 thousand per student cost to society Whereas I'm paying upwards of 30k. The cost is on me, not on society. Although I'm just an anecdote so I'm curious to hear from others

nonrandomstring 4y ago
I literally pulled that number out of my arse based on some vague recollection of such a figure. It may be conservative, or grossly exaggerated, but I think it's ballpark for the "cost of creating a graduate". The costs are complex because, for example, a student at college is not (except by paying my salary as a professor) participating in the economy for three years.

winternett 4y ago

There is a huge cost to losing the most talented people in the workforce. Exit these days means that very talented people often lose track of their field and face a harder re-entry point with lower salary if they decide to return. What I'm most worried about in leaving my career as a solutions architect is that the ability to start and build a business of my own seems insurmountable when you consider the world's reliance on social media and popularity/wealth as a requirement for success. There are so many people doing absolutely the same thing these days, and so many people that present the image of success and popularity in being an entrepreneur in pretty much every field that valid/great ideas get drowned out so easily... If everyone is doing the same thing, and many people are faking their success, coupled with wealthy individuals that can easily copycat ideas, it creates massive barriers to organic success. There is usually only one page on most sites for publications, that's often a wild and crazy mashup of posts from all disciplines and fields of interest. Our attention spans are also shrinking because of short form content, that makes it very easy to view something important, but also forget it 5 seconds later, so even marketing is overwhelming to most of the people that would support independent business. Sites like Reddit started out great, but now subreddits are often run with other intentions than open communication... Many mods secretly steer business in their own directions because of the flood of competition, and it feeds deceptive marketing techniques and brigade culture. I don't want to be stuck in complaining, I think the world really needs to evaluate how much we are fostering "monopolistic dynasty" culture and nepotism on the Internet, and how it's destroying capitalism... We all really need to bring back a sense of distributing speaking time among wider ranges of audiences and speakers, and fostering discussions that aren't based on popularity and wealth as indicators of validity... The very same culture that has negatively infected the workplaces we might want to leave.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
There's a lot going on that's squeezing out real value and replacing it with a controllable facsimile of value. And yes, this is anti-social, and anti-capitalist, in the purest and best sense of both those terms. It's a bonfire of human value. In the face of so much disruptive potential, so much surplus of intellect, and so much human energy unleashed by automation and fossil fuels, the strategy of the incumbents has been to stifle it. I mean, isn't that what the entertainments business has been focused on for the past 40 years, with DRM etc? What some parts of the tech industry does is actually anti-technology. We have a kind of job creation scheme with one person digging a hole, while another fills it in. Some computer scientists working to create innovation, and others overtly set on stifling it. To ignore that adversarial aspect is to completely fail to understand modern technology.

joeman1000 4y ago

I’ve tried to talk to people about this for so long. This is the root of the problem with ‘office culture’ and just ‘work culture’ in general. Productivity is the goal, right? Increasing worker happiness and reducing stress should be the focus. I think this will produce the largest effect on productivity. Instead, we get sociopathic slave-driving at work: a narrow focus on KPIs, mandated hours of work and methods of working, prostration from micro-management (it can go on forever). Working environments are low-trust and hostile, with no focus on what truly makes a worker happy, and what actually makes them productive!

throw8383833jj 4y ago

I agree with everything you've said. But, as long as there is an endless line of engineers ready and willing to replace those lost workers, then industry and management in general has no incentive to change their ways. that's just what happens when you have a vast oversupply of labor.

lwhi 4y ago

How does society end up burdened with the cost, when education isn't free?