8 ms·

The techlash that never happened

58 points by tim_sw 3y ago

gjsman-1000 3y ago
And the media learned a hard lesson: Success against tech requires long-term criticism; but they turned everything into clickbait and put many criticisms behind paywalls. Nobody was interested after more than a week, because nobody had the attention span or interest in paying for stories about a personal squabble.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  "in an alternate reality" (/s) some media conglomerate invented equivalents of YouTube, reddit, and Twitter, and they never have to ask for permission to use your content in their pieces because it's part of the TOS for those sites anyway. Kinda glad they didn't
majormajor 3y ago
The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak. E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. Same with Juicero. And the "economic attack" on Hollywood, for instance, is hardly so - the initial investor-money-burning decade of streaming talked about here was WONDERFUL for most of Hollywood. You get to make way more shows, and they aren't supposed to all be lowest-common-denominator reality stuff? That was a bonanza for actors, writers, directors. I'd also want to see media sentiment of TV, streaming; ad revenue comparisons of that, and all the other options in the world between a binary "newspaper" and "tech" in that one graph. Not to mention some research on consumer sentiment not just media sentiment. Does the author really believe the average Joe wasn't getting more negative about FB over that time span? Where was "Tech" on that "people think the president should do something about" list five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? 40% is lower than oil and airlines; what's the rate of change? (One might say "yes, the public got more negative because the media pushed the narrative" which would be a pretty interesting argument, but it's notably not what this article is saying - the author is saying that the public "Techlash" basically "never happened" outside the media. (But that's not really new, right - Tech criticizing the "media" [or slices of it] is also a decades-long well-established practice. This ain't a one-way street.) Yet spend a week on HN and you'll see that even in the industry, there's a LOT of organic negative sentiment against certain tech companies. I would agree with a claim that the media is oversimplifying that to "frustrating with tech," I don't agree that it's not a real trend with real causes independent of media reporting. We all use these products, we can all see the gradual shittification of them - FB, TikTok, Snap, Google Search...
- hikawaii 3y ago
  The bit about ad revenue was actually specifically called out here as probably not the story. The interesting part to me is the overall positive sentiment towards tech in general, because you are right - at least for specific companies, sentiment as reported by a local poll of people I play games with, Elon and FB are the literal devil.
- sergiomattei 3y ago
  I felt the same way about the article. Large amounts of conspiratorial conjecture presented, little to show for it.
- elefanten 3y ago
  Idk that economic “attack” is good phrasing but the bundling of video content combined with tools/platforms/monetization for user generated video content absolutely had a devastating effect on legacy video media. Maybe, in your words, the initial money-burning provided a lift, but now Hollywood writers are striking for more pay and Netflix is one of they key bogeymen.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Agreed - initially it was a windfall in the 2010s, now we're seeing a backlash because the cable residuals aren't there anymore and the streaming networks realized that lighting money on fire to out-compete each other was a zero-sum game.
- novok 3y ago
  If you dig in more into the techlash, you also see a lot of... biased behavior on the NYT. Other newspapers also have this demonstrated behavior too, but the NYT is the most well researched. It's not just FB article sentiment analysis, it's everything they've written. If you look at all sentiment & word usage of all articles you'll notice sudden shifts . The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative. And because people that work in these industries do not want to be informally blacklisted explaining this, in an industry where it's hard to get work, there isn't much in terms of good investigative journalism into the behavior of media itself, so it has to come from outsiders often. If you can get an NYT journalist drunk and talk about the right things, your eyes will start getting realllllllyyyy wide. The NYT explicitly decided to generate the techlash as their current narrative, it wasn't an emergent behavior because of events in the world.
ojbyrne 3y ago
The top graph (Gallup 2017 Business & Industry Ranking Net Positive Scores) is 6 years old. 2022 results can be found here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-ratings.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-... Computer Industry is now 3rd and the Net Positive has gone from 67 to 35. Internet Industry has gone from 5th to the bottom half of the list and the Net Positive has gone from 41 to -2. Perhaps the Techlash was just a little late.
- csallen 3y ago
  I don't disagree with the trend you're point out, but it also has to be put in perspective: 1. That chart lists 25 industries, and "computer industry" still ranks #3 in terms of how positive people feel about it. It's ahead of almost everything. "Internet industry" is right in the middle of the pack. So tech is scoring somewhere between average and wayyy-better-than-average. Doesn't sound like much of a techlash. 2. Net positive sentiment has dropped in pretty much every sector. The most popular industry, the restaurant industry, saw a drop from 65% to 45% net positive. The second most popular industry, agriculture, saw a drop from 58% to 43%. In 2017 there were only 4 industries with net negative scores, but in 2022 there were 12, a 3x increase. So a big part of tech's apparent decline in popularity is really just a universal decline.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    For the 2017 results I think it was disingenuous to ignore the "telephone industry" ranking when talking about "tech" in general. The "telephone industry" did improve its relative placement in the 2022 results. I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
      > I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not. That's the thing. They're all tech industries, at this point.
mnkv 3y ago
Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.
- jakelazaroff 3y ago
  Oh, for sure. Peter Thiel was an advisor to Donald Trump! Maciej Cegłowski (the person who operates Pinboard) has done a bunch of threads on Twitter cataloging the extensive donations of big tech companies to politicians on both sides of the aisle: https://twitter.com/search?q=donation%20from%3Apinboard https://twitter.com/search?q=donation%20from%3Apinboard I also love the tacit admission that Clarence Thomas is acting as a partisan, rather than an unbiased member of an ostensibly apolitical institution.
- blululu 3y ago
  What? Internet companies are up there with trade unions and Hollywood in donating to the left: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan-industries https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan... Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA? whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make dashboards to help visualize uptime metrics for cloud services. Nobody at Apple is ashamed to tell their friends that they can't talk about whatever they do for work.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    Depends on what you call the left. If you mean the modern Democratic Party then sure. If you mean the division of contemporary politics that is associated with advocacy for the rights of workers and diminished power for the managerial and capital owning classes then they most certainly do not do that at all.
    - deleted 3y ago
rcpt 3y ago
wrt to the NYT specifically, it was an intentional top down decision https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 Context: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104205605/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553 https://web.archive.org/web/20221104205605/https://twitter.c...
- comeonbro 3y ago
  I'm surprised that the article didn't mention this, given the company the author apparently keeps I would have thought he'd have been among the criminally few people who witnessed and is aware of it, and it's both narratively aligned and the single most important piece of background information.
  - rcpt 3y ago
    I left a comment on his post (I think, substack commenting is a bit confusing)
  - erikto 3y ago
    Oh I forgot that one. Good catch.
- tacticalturtle 3y ago
  Does anyone know why the original tweet was deleted by Matthew Yglesias? From some cursory searches, I haven’t been able to find a specific reason like a retraction, and it doesn’t look like he did a general wipe of his history around 2022.
Zetice 3y ago
Just off the top, I'm seeing a common logical misfire here, specifically: > If you asked the average American on the street about tech, they would tell you they like to use products like Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and many other supposedly maligned companies. It's actually a bit of a giveaway when you say "on the street". Most Americans aren't on the street at all. I dunno what the quality of this source is, but I found that Doordash delivers to 20 million consumers in a given month[0], which if true, accounts for 6% of Americans! 94% of Americans do not "like to use" Doordash. Even Uber, which according to the same random well-SEO'd source, has 93 million monthly platform consumers[1], which means only 28% of Americans use Uber. I'm not sure if there's really a larger point to make here, or if I'm just quibbling with terminology, but it's a giant mistake to presume "most Americans" do nearly anything. [0] https://backlinko.com/doordash-users https://backlinko.com/doordash-users [1] https://backlinko.com/uber-users https://backlinko.com/uber-users
- boondoggle16 3y ago
  Bubbles are super common, and even more common on the internet. I find this phenomenon fascinating. For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely cannot comprehend why people prefer single family housing, with a yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered writing an article from my perspective, about why I prefer low-density housing. The ratio of commenters to lurkers is super low, and (speaking from experience), commenters often have mental problems, which drives them to post excessively. The vast majority of Americans are absolutely nothing like the drivel we read online. I waffle between thinking this is caused by "terminally online" folks like myself, and bots aka astro-turfed corporatism. Either way, the opinions we read online do not reflect reality. Historians will have a hoot interpreting our society and describing it from the perspective of the Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal.
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    > For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely cannot comprehend why people prefer single family housing, with a yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered writing an article from my perspective, about why I prefer low-density housing. Personally, I've never seen a lack of understanding for the desire of SFHs, but rather the factual realization that SFH housing is not an economically sustainable path for the majority of Americans and the world.
cavisne 3y ago
A lot of this was manufactured, it came out recently that NYT has a top down editorial policy that tech cannot be portrayed in a positive light https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger story at the time. News orgs will obviously have a bias based on who they hire. But historically they always try and appear to be balanced at the editorial level, ie Fox News has a few token left wing people, CNN has/had a few conservative punching bags.
karaterobot 3y ago
I think I generally agree that the media often reports on its own feelings as though they represented the vox populi, when they don't. We all make that attribution error, but (good) journalists are expected to be more aware of it. Another thing I think is generally true is that, even if people hate tech, ultimately tech is just giving them what they want. Nothing will change until what people want changes, and any hypothetical Techlash would be mostly performative in practice: bad publicity without real consequences.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
unending_ 3y ago
Right, the founder of the biggest social media on earth pivoted to a company destroying hobby project because he is afraid of govt regulation of his platform. No tech lash lol.
wunderland 3y ago
It’s a good argument, but have they considered that tech companies are actually evil? There is a lot of evidence to support this and they don’t really explain that away very well.

58 points by tim_sw 3y ago

And the media learned a hard lesson: Success against tech requires long-term criticism; but they turned everything into clickbait and put many criticisms behind paywalls. Nobody was interested after more than a week, because nobody had the attention span or interest in paying for stories about a personal squabble.

hughesjj 3y ago
"in an alternate reality" (/s) some media conglomerate invented equivalents of YouTube, reddit, and Twitter, and they never have to ask for permission to use your content in their pieces because it's part of the TOS for those sites anyway. Kinda glad they didn't

majormajor 3y ago

The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak. E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. Same with Juicero. And the "economic attack" on Hollywood, for instance, is hardly so - the initial investor-money-burning decade of streaming talked about here was WONDERFUL for most of Hollywood. You get to make way more shows, and they aren't supposed to all be lowest-common-denominator reality stuff? That was a bonanza for actors, writers, directors. I'd also want to see media sentiment of TV, streaming; ad revenue comparisons of that, and all the other options in the world between a binary "newspaper" and "tech" in that one graph. Not to mention some research on consumer sentiment not just media sentiment. Does the author really believe the average Joe wasn't getting more negative about FB over that time span? Where was "Tech" on that "people think the president should do something about" list five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? 40% is lower than oil and airlines; what's the rate of change? (One might say "yes, the public got more negative because the media pushed the narrative" which would be a pretty interesting argument, but it's notably not what this article is saying - the author is saying that the public "Techlash" basically "never happened" outside the media. (But that's not really new, right - Tech criticizing the "media" [or slices of it] is also a decades-long well-established practice. This ain't a one-way street.) Yet spend a week on HN and you'll see that even in the industry, there's a LOT of organic negative sentiment against certain tech companies. I would agree with a claim that the media is oversimplifying that to "frustrating with tech," I don't agree that it's not a real trend with real causes independent of media reporting. We all use these products, we can all see the gradual shittification of them - FB, TikTok, Snap, Google Search...

hikawaii 3y ago
The bit about ad revenue was actually specifically called out here as probably not the story. The interesting part to me is the overall positive sentiment towards tech in general, because you are right - at least for specific companies, sentiment as reported by a local poll of people I play games with, Elon and FB are the literal devil.
sergiomattei 3y ago
I felt the same way about the article. Large amounts of conspiratorial conjecture presented, little to show for it.
elefanten 3y ago
Idk that economic “attack” is good phrasing but the bundling of video content combined with tools/platforms/monetization for user generated video content absolutely had a devastating effect on legacy video media. Maybe, in your words, the initial money-burning provided a lift, but now Hollywood writers are striking for more pay and Netflix is one of they key bogeymen.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Agreed - initially it was a windfall in the 2010s, now we're seeing a backlash because the cable residuals aren't there anymore and the streaming networks realized that lighting money on fire to out-compete each other was a zero-sum game.
novok 3y ago
If you dig in more into the techlash, you also see a lot of... biased behavior on the NYT. Other newspapers also have this demonstrated behavior too, but the NYT is the most well researched. It's not just FB article sentiment analysis, it's everything they've written. If you look at all sentiment & word usage of all articles you'll notice sudden shifts . The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative. And because people that work in these industries do not want to be informally blacklisted explaining this, in an industry where it's hard to get work, there isn't much in terms of good investigative journalism into the behavior of media itself, so it has to come from outsiders often. If you can get an NYT journalist drunk and talk about the right things, your eyes will start getting realllllllyyyy wide. The NYT explicitly decided to generate the techlash as their current narrative, it wasn't an emergent behavior because of events in the world.

ojbyrne 3y ago

The top graph (Gallup 2017 Business & Industry Ranking Net Positive Scores) is 6 years old. 2022 results can be found here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-ratings.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-... Computer Industry is now 3rd and the Net Positive has gone from 67 to 35. Internet Industry has gone from 5th to the bottom half of the list and the Net Positive has gone from 41 to -2. Perhaps the Techlash was just a little late.

csallen 3y ago
I don't disagree with the trend you're point out, but it also has to be put in perspective: 1. That chart lists 25 industries, and "computer industry" still ranks #3 in terms of how positive people feel about it. It's ahead of almost everything. "Internet industry" is right in the middle of the pack. So tech is scoring somewhere between average and wayyy-better-than-average. Doesn't sound like much of a techlash. 2. Net positive sentiment has dropped in pretty much every sector. The most popular industry, the restaurant industry, saw a drop from 65% to 45% net positive. The second most popular industry, agriculture, saw a drop from 58% to 43%. In 2017 there were only 4 industries with net negative scores, but in 2022 there were 12, a 3x increase. So a big part of tech's apparent decline in popularity is really just a universal decline.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  For the 2017 results I think it was disingenuous to ignore the "telephone industry" ranking when talking about "tech" in general. The "telephone industry" did improve its relative placement in the 2022 results. I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    > I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not. That's the thing. They're all tech industries, at this point.

mnkv 3y ago

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

jakelazaroff 3y ago
Oh, for sure. Peter Thiel was an advisor to Donald Trump! Maciej Cegłowski (the person who operates Pinboard) has done a bunch of threads on Twitter cataloging the extensive donations of big tech companies to politicians on both sides of the aisle: https://twitter.com/search?q=donation%20from%3Apinboard https://twitter.com/search?q=donation%20from%3Apinboard I also love the tacit admission that Clarence Thomas is acting as a partisan, rather than an unbiased member of an ostensibly apolitical institution.
blululu 3y ago
What? Internet companies are up there with trade unions and Hollywood in donating to the left: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan-industries https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan... Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA? whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make dashboards to help visualize uptime metrics for cloud services. Nobody at Apple is ashamed to tell their friends that they can't talk about whatever they do for work.
- CPLX 3y ago
  Depends on what you call the left. If you mean the modern Democratic Party then sure. If you mean the division of contemporary politics that is associated with advocacy for the rights of workers and diminished power for the managerial and capital owning classes then they most certainly do not do that at all.
  - deleted 3y ago

rcpt 3y ago

wrt to the NYT specifically, it was an intentional top down decision https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 Context: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104205605/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553 https://web.archive.org/web/20221104205605/https://twitter.c...

comeonbro 3y ago
I'm surprised that the article didn't mention this, given the company the author apparently keeps I would have thought he'd have been among the criminally few people who witnessed and is aware of it, and it's both narratively aligned and the single most important piece of background information.
- rcpt 3y ago
  I left a comment on his post (I think, substack commenting is a bit confusing)
- erikto 3y ago
  Oh I forgot that one. Good catch.
tacticalturtle 3y ago
Does anyone know why the original tweet was deleted by Matthew Yglesias? From some cursory searches, I haven’t been able to find a specific reason like a retraction, and it doesn’t look like he did a general wipe of his history around 2022.

Zetice 3y ago

Just off the top, I'm seeing a common logical misfire here, specifically: > If you asked the average American on the street about tech, they would tell you they like to use products like Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and many other supposedly maligned companies. It's actually a bit of a giveaway when you say "on the street". Most Americans aren't on the street at all. I dunno what the quality of this source is, but I found that Doordash delivers to 20 million consumers in a given month[0], which if true, accounts for 6% of Americans! 94% of Americans do not "like to use" Doordash. Even Uber, which according to the same random well-SEO'd source, has 93 million monthly platform consumers[1], which means only 28% of Americans use Uber. I'm not sure if there's really a larger point to make here, or if I'm just quibbling with terminology, but it's a giant mistake to presume "most Americans" do nearly anything. [0] https://backlinko.com/doordash-users https://backlinko.com/doordash-users [1] https://backlinko.com/uber-users https://backlinko.com/uber-users

boondoggle16 3y ago
Bubbles are super common, and even more common on the internet. I find this phenomenon fascinating. For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely cannot comprehend why people prefer single family housing, with a yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered writing an article from my perspective, about why I prefer low-density housing. The ratio of commenters to lurkers is super low, and (speaking from experience), commenters often have mental problems, which drives them to post excessively. The vast majority of Americans are absolutely nothing like the drivel we read online. I waffle between thinking this is caused by "terminally online" folks like myself, and bots aka astro-turfed corporatism. Either way, the opinions we read online do not reflect reality. Historians will have a hoot interpreting our society and describing it from the perspective of the Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  > For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely cannot comprehend why people prefer single family housing, with a yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered writing an article from my perspective, about why I prefer low-density housing. Personally, I've never seen a lack of understanding for the desire of SFHs, but rather the factual realization that SFH housing is not an economically sustainable path for the majority of Americans and the world.

cavisne 3y ago

A lot of this was manufactured, it came out recently that NYT has a top down editorial policy that tech cannot be portrayed in a positive light https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger story at the time. News orgs will obviously have a bias based on who they hire. But historically they always try and appear to be balanced at the editorial level, ie Fox News has a few token left wing people, CNN has/had a few conservative punching bags.

karaterobot 3y ago

I think I generally agree that the media often reports on its own feelings as though they represented the vox populi, when they don't. We all make that attribution error, but (good) journalists are expected to be more aware of it. Another thing I think is generally true is that, even if people hate tech, ultimately tech is just giving them what they want. Nothing will change until what people want changes, and any hypothetical Techlash would be mostly performative in practice: bad publicity without real consequences.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

unending_ 3y ago

Right, the founder of the biggest social media on earth pivoted to a company destroying hobby project because he is afraid of govt regulation of his platform. No tech lash lol.

wunderland 3y ago

It’s a good argument, but have they considered that tech companies are actually evil? There is a lot of evidence to support this and they don’t really explain that away very well.