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Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

181 points by Andrex 3y ago

tmccrary55 3y ago
Big Techbacco I don't think it's wrong. "Stupid" random information is addictive and has neurological effects and we're bombarded with it.
akomtu 3y ago
Oh, it's far more than that. Virtual technodrugs, or addiction, is one arm of the emerging new order. The second arm is control: fine grained and invasive censorship, history rewriting and so on. The third arm is a much faster discovery of knowledge to empower the few. All three arms will derive their power from AI. It could be used for good, but the current state of things in our society don't favor such application of AI.
- tmccrary55 3y ago
  Yep and the two big limitations are: 1) What content would be interesting to the mark 2) Generating the actual content for the mark to view And AI can easily do both.
- RyanAdamas 3y ago
  You have the GenX "Hack the planet" types to thank for that. They are the ones who helped these people build their panopticon of terror. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will go down as authors of a new kind of tyranny.
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    > GenX > Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Both of those two were born in 1955, making them solidly Boomers. Don't blame us for their shenanigans.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      Gen X bought the hype mostly uncritically and helped to justify and normalize the techniques that are now widespread today. Especially the end-of-history techno-utopianism of Clinton et al. Boomers were too late to the game but rode the wave once it was normalized. Millenials recognized the ills and tried to criticize to undo the justification. Gen Z never understood the world any differently and so are little more than victims.
    - RyanAdamas 3y ago
      >Gen X, the ones who helped /these people/ >Steve Jobs and Bill Gates You don't comprehend well.
UberFly 3y ago
I don't really think this is anything new in the corporate world, but the explosion of sources and easy access through devices is what's made this stuff so potent. It's tough enough as adults to resist the bombardment.
Thoeu388 3y ago
[flagged]
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
Been saying this for years, the only reason these companies' execs aren't in prison is because they grease all the right palms, and provide enough "studies" those greased palms can use to plausibly justify their behavior.
- pjscott 3y ago
  In prison on what charges? In the US it's illegal to imprison someone based purely on vibes, and you can't make things crimes retroactively. (See Article I, Section 9 of the constitution; in particular the parts concerning habeas corpus, bills of attainder, and ex post facto laws.)
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    Like... a lot of charges. Fraud, sexual assault... these are already crimes. I could try to write a novel here to go into it on all the different illegal things every tech exec has done and gotten away with, but if you were under the impression we'd need to make new laws from them to have committed crimes, we're so far apart from each other's understanding that it's not really worth going too deep into. But suffice to say, outright fraud about the ad business is pretty core to most of Google and Facebook's revenue, and the entire original C-suite of Google has at least some sort of sexual harassment or abuse story out there they never got held accountable for. The biggest problem is not making crimes, it's that our enforcement of our own laws involving executive misconduct has continued for so long, that the statute of limitations would be the biggest problem prosecuting a lot of people today.
danzer420 3y ago
can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago unimaginable. tech is like humanity's one hope.
- isodev 3y ago
  There is also Reddit, Google… I mean, do we really need to list all the companies that need perpetual increase of “engagement” to power their business model?
- troupo 3y ago
  > big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. Companies that actually do that are rarely big tech. And Big Tech as term colloquially refers to Facebook, Google etc.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    There are tons of educational videos on YouTube. And maybe Facebook too, or connections being made there, I don’t use it though. Either way, I have learned how to do many things from watching instructional YouTube videos, and it does not seem anyone else has been able to make the economics work like Google has. Sure, there’s bad too along with the good, and maybe the bad outweighs the good, although I would need convincing that is true.
- politelemon 3y ago
  Prosperity does not equate to betterment of humanity. The prosperity of concentrated to a small section of the population, at the expense of the majority. It is nowhere near the deliverer of hope you're making it out to be, it's an enabler of great negative paradigm shifts that is slowly starting to be recognised. Social media is starting to be recognised as a harm on society but slowly... It'll probably take a few decades for wide retrospective agreement (in other words when it's too late)
thefounder 3y ago
I'm more concerned about Big Food as the new Big Tabacco. You don't get cancer consuming tech products as much as you get from Big "food".
- drewcoo 3y ago
  I'm seeing religion that way. It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables, and even in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet. We have known for years that it's not good for anyone, but they have tough lobbyists, so getting rid of the problem just seems impossible. We all accept somehow that sports figures and celebrities endorse the product - they're adults. We accept that adults should be allowed to make their own decision. But just when we had religion-free zones for children, here comes the 10 commandments on the wall and creationism in biology class. No "this is your brain on religion" commercials yet that I know of. Etc. Just like there was never a "war on tobacco," there will never be a "war on religion." Just like tobacco, there's too much money in religion for that to work.
  - eindiran 3y ago
    I legitimately can't tell if this is satire or not. > [E]ven in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet No municipality in a region with a bill of rights providing freedom of religion is going to create no prayer zones. > It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables This makes me think this is satire...
    - ke88y 3y ago
      > I legitimately can't tell if this is satire or not. I mean... really? It's clearly satire. And fairly well constructed prose imo. What the author's actual point is, though, I have absolutely no idea. Maybe there is no point, and it's just pretty prose.
      - eindiran 3y ago
        > What the author's actual point is, though, I have absolutely no idea. This is what makes me unsure its satire; what is it poking fun at exactly? What is the metaphor? > It's clearly satire. I don't think it's "clearly" satire, though I lean in the direction that it probably is satire; I have heard plenty of SF rationalist types say similar things before, so on HN the probability that it isn't satire is much higher than in the outside world. > And fairly well constructed prose imo. Agreed. It is fun and well-constructed prose, which definitely earns it several points in the "probably satire" column.
bastardoperator 3y ago
We can draw parallels, but you've never developed lung cancer doom scrolling twitter.
- Andrex 3y ago
  Sharply increasing suicide rates among teens due to social media isn't something to just shrug off, either.
  - teej 3y ago
    Something also not caused by doom scrolling twitter.
    - nimbleplum40 3y ago
      Sure, Instagram though…
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ahahahahah 3y ago
    Do you know what had the largest impact on suicide rates of teens in recent years? Them returning to schools after covid. Could it be that things can, at the same time, have both positive and negative effects on people?
    - hext 3y ago
      Have you considered the impact social media has on in person dynamics amongst school age kids? Insanely naive take.
- bitwize 3y ago
  And big tobacco hasn't brought the Nazis back.
  - 3y ago
m1117 3y ago
Make us inhale all the toxic fake news and ads.... They should print pictures of exhausted ad consumers on google packages.
- WJW 3y ago
  Warning: consumption of social media can lead to jail time. <Picture of the Proud boys guy in court>
grammers 3y ago
There are similarities, just exchange lung cancer with suicides among teens. Big Tech must take its responsibility more seriously and not pretend it's not their fault.
- jachee 3y ago
  You and the author are both lumping all of Big Tech in together with Big Attention-Exploitation. The latter is the subset to which people’s ire should be directed.
  - losteric 3y ago
    Amazon and Google are hardly innocent players. One could go on to point at the effects of Uber, Yelp, AirBnb, Palantir, so on... all "Big Tech".
- elpool2 3y ago
  The difference is that smoking is clearly linked with lung cancer, established by heaps of clear scientific data. The link between social media and suicide is pretty weak by comparison.
paxys 3y ago
Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services. Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having nothing to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same. So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence that is suggested.
- gumby 3y ago
  That ship has sailed. “Tech” is simply a positioning or branding term. Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm. The term has become so denatured that a new term, “deep tech” has been coined to mean what “technology company” used to mean.
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    My personal test for this is: what percentage of the company's total value is comprised of the intellectual property their software source code holds. The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are. No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of value tied up in their brand or their sales book of business.
    - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
parentheses 3y ago
I "Big Tech" incorrectly categorizes the problem. The problem is social media products that monetize attention. Meta, Twitter and other companies that build deep social media products are in this group. Netflix is not. Microsoft is not. Google is not. I don't like that just because you're a large tech company you're immediately demonized. This is demonizing success in this field rather than "wrong" doing.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Netflix does not monetize attention?
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
https://publicknowledge.org/is-this-really-big-techs-big-tobacco-moment-only-congress-can-make-it-so/ https://publicknowledge.org/is-this-really-big-techs-big-tob... tldr; The testimony of one of the Facebook "whistleblowers" drew the analogy to Big Tobacco from Sen. Blumenthal back in 2021.^1 But in 1995 Congress took action after Wigand^2 testified. None of Big Tech's leakers so far have triggered action by Congress. Even more, in the 1990's there was at least 10 years of litigation before there was legislative action. Suing Big tech is more problematic. IMO, it's mainly because they can continue to hide behind Section 230. Was 230 was intended to protect corporations with trillion dollar market caps. Big Tobacco had nothing like Section 230. 1. Even earlier Salesforce guy was comparing Big Tech to cigarettes. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-facebook-is-the-new-cigarettes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigarettes-for-our-society-marc-benioff-says-calling-for-regulation-2019-12-29 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigare... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  Also, Wigand had the FDA. What is the equivalent federal agency tasked with regulating Big Tech. It does not exist. Yet. https://www.jeffreywigand.com/pascagoula.php https://www.jeffreywigand.com/pascagoula.php According to the Washington Post, Wigand was making $300,000 at the time he leaked. In today's dollars, that's $594,784. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-most-famous-whistleblower/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-most-famous-whistleb... Honestly, 60 Minutes today feels nothing it was in the days of Mike Wallace or even Andy Rooney. It mostly treats Big Tech with a sort of "awe". Sometimes the show feels like an agent of the US military-industrial complex. In retrospect Mike Wallace looks like a journalist one could only wish for today. 60 Minutes is soft.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
I think a better comparison would be to big oil, steel and manufacturing in the early 1900s. Big tech has its problems but provides significant tangible benefits to people and the world. Tobacco is purely a negative, not innovative, and relies on the chemical addictive properties of a plant to offer a needless service.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  Tobacco is not purely negative. Ask the native peoples.
- version_five 3y ago
  To first order maybe. Tobacco use obviously shortens life but tech is destroying society. In the grand scheme of things (which is where criticism of either industry really plays), shorter life expectancy is less of a big deal than having society ripped apart in the name of selling ads. Smoking didn't change the face of the planet the way tech has, even if it's acutely very bad.
lr4444lr 3y ago
Gonna risk the downvotes and qualify that I am a parent who keeps social media away from my kids: what big tech is peddling is IMHO not on the level of addiction, carcinogenicity and all cause mortality as smoking. It's up to me to raise a mentally resilient kid, part of which is limiting their screen time, but it is not something I cut out altogether. It's not like I have some special parenting power to protect their lung epithelia.
- tomcam 3y ago
  I made a terrible mistake with my children at the dawn of social media. I would love it if you contacted me because I think you’re generally on the right course.
  - lr4444lr 3y ago
    I really have no insight as to how to get the horse back into the barn, and suggest looking for professional help for yoyr kids. All I can tell you is that my kids do not ask for social media or even screens that much because I plan outings for them that are more interesting and exciting - and that isn't about spending a ton of money or going very far, just being creative about how to frame what we're doing. For example, when planning to go to the local pool, I make up a story about how at their age I was able to run across the pool in X seconds, and that if they can break my record 5 times, I'll take them out to a restaurant for dinner the next day. Then when we are there, I'll also break out some plastic water toys that I didn't tell them about. I just make family time more fun in terms of anticipation and surprises than being online.
    - tomcam 3y ago
      Too late for me. I just had some thoughts about how you might avoid some of the traps we didn’t.
      - forgetbook 3y ago
        Would you be willingto post them publicly/here?
speak_plainly 3y ago
It’s not a popular opinion, but I think the negative impacts of social media are overstated and unconvincing. You can get a big dopamine hit from meditation or as a response to stress but you don’t see kids running to Buddhist monasteries in droves or rushing to the stress of public speaking. It’s probably not healthy to live your entire life online, which is what youth are encouraged to do by everyone around them, and that alone is enough of a problem and I don’t think technology companies are to blame.
- acituan 3y ago
  > You can get a big dopamine hit from meditation or as a response to stress but you don’t see kids running to Buddhist monasteries in droves or rushing to the stress of public speaking. Dopamine obviously is a shorthand for a more complex psychological phenomena. While having their own failure modes, meditation or public speaking are not entirely ego-syntonic endeavors, there is a continuous contact with reality that puts your identity into question. Whereas social media has a near perfect psychological profile on its users and manufactures a purpose built personal “reality” that fits with their self concept - however dysfunctional it may be. There may be still frustration but it is still conforming to the user, because the challenge is optimized to drive engagement, not to make the person a better person through contact with reality.
sgammon 3y ago
big oil: yes we love this keep going
superkuh 3y ago
This is such a terrible take. Nicotine is physiologically addictive in the "directly screws with reward motivation" sense in addition to causing physiological dependence through adaptation. The stimuli we perceive through screens are in no way addictive. Conflating a normal stimuli with something that's actually addictive is more dangerous than the thing it intends to stop because it justifies the use of force in a situation where there's no force used. Not even implicitly like with cigarettes being addictive. If you look at the DSM5 you'll see the only behavioral addiction disorder is "gambling disorder" and that's grandfathered in. These modern memes about how screens are addictive being taken seriously are themselves the danger. Just like with "porn addiction" or "curing homosexuality" the people pushing it in serious contexts are generally ones running for-profit private "detox" centers or expensive "treatments". I'm no fan of "big tech" but I can easily chose not to use it. And if I have to use it for work, it in no way forces me to use it at home. Big tech is bad but this line of argument is nearly as bad.
api 3y ago
This is true for the parts of tech that run on addiction: most mobile gaming, most social media, cryptocurrency gambling, straight up gambling, etc.
tech_ken 3y ago
Many industries have massive negative externalities and a stranglehold on regulation through lobbying, loose campaign finance laws, and regulatory capture. I get that scrolling can become compulsive for some people, but I think comparing it to Big Tobacco or even like the firearms industry kind of overstates the case. Magazines and print media clearly led to high prevalence of eating disorders and other behavioral health problems in the pre-internet era, did the publishing industry ever have it's "Big Tobacco moment"? What about the auto industry, which has absolutely trashed the air quality in our cities and towns? The meat industry is a horrorshow of environmental destruction, negative health effects, and labor abus, where are it's big showy hearings and investigative committees? Instead we shower it with government support in the form of grain subsidies. Ad-tech is sleazy, and no doubt needs to be reined in, but the problem is that private corporations in general need to be better held accountable, not "Big Tech" specifically.
dsafdsalj 3y ago
Absurd. Any arbitrary industry has "bad" bits. Big tech does not cause fucking cancer, so don't pretend it does.
nologic01 3y ago
Big tech is much worse than big tobacco. To calibrate, imagine if government and all public sector entities would include in all their commumications with citizens prominent mention of specific tobacco products and brands and actually inviting people to use them. This incredible and abnormal capture of society is now the new normal. Check any public institution site and it explicitly advertises big tech services using links and invites people to engage using these specific, private, for-profit platforms. Picking winners, explicitly endorsing platforms that have turned users into products, track and model any and all behavior online etc. People just dont realize how degenerate and dangerous our predicament. The fact that there are no reflexes to violently expose and terminate this collusion means there is basically no meaningful democratic muscle left. Big tech is the tombstone of democratic society. 10x worse than big tobacco. Nobody will force you to smoke but increasingly it is impossible to be a normal member of society without conceding our agency to nefarious digital conglomerates.
moneywoes 3y ago
> Big Tech spent more on federal lobbying from 2010-202 than the nation’s largest banks from 2000-2010 or Big Tobacco from 1996-1999 Since 2000, the four largest Big Tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Alphabet/Google, and Facebook – have spent $465,026,307 on federal lobbying. $434,474,221 of that total has come since 2010. Additionally, nine groups that the four Big Tech companies fund have spent $98,061,827 on federal lobbying since 2000. $80,400,019 of that total has come since 2010. Big Tech’s federal lobbying total eclipses that of other major toxic industries: Since 2010, the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers have spent $282,292,834 on federal lobbying. America’s seven largest banks in the leadup to the financial crisis spent $194,193,858 on federal lobbying from 2000 to 2010. From 1996 to 1999, the nation’s largest tobacco companies spent $155,750,398 on federal lobbying, or $261,306,596 in 2021 dollars. Very interested, where does this money go?
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]

181 points by Andrex 3y ago

Big Techbacco I don't think it's wrong. "Stupid" random information is addictive and has neurological effects and we're bombarded with it.

akomtu 3y ago

Oh, it's far more than that. Virtual technodrugs, or addiction, is one arm of the emerging new order. The second arm is control: fine grained and invasive censorship, history rewriting and so on. The third arm is a much faster discovery of knowledge to empower the few. All three arms will derive their power from AI. It could be used for good, but the current state of things in our society don't favor such application of AI.

tmccrary55 3y ago
Yep and the two big limitations are: 1) What content would be interesting to the mark 2) Generating the actual content for the mark to view And AI can easily do both.
RyanAdamas 3y ago
You have the GenX "Hack the planet" types to thank for that. They are the ones who helped these people build their panopticon of terror. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will go down as authors of a new kind of tyranny.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > GenX > Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Both of those two were born in 1955, making them solidly Boomers. Don't blame us for their shenanigans.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Gen X bought the hype mostly uncritically and helped to justify and normalize the techniques that are now widespread today. Especially the end-of-history techno-utopianism of Clinton et al. Boomers were too late to the game but rode the wave once it was normalized. Millenials recognized the ills and tried to criticize to undo the justification. Gen Z never understood the world any differently and so are little more than victims.
  - RyanAdamas 3y ago
    >Gen X, the ones who helped /these people/ >Steve Jobs and Bill Gates You don't comprehend well.

UberFly 3y ago

I don't really think this is anything new in the corporate world, but the explosion of sources and easy access through devices is what's made this stuff so potent. It's tough enough as adults to resist the bombardment.

Thoeu388 3y ago

[flagged]

ocdtrekkie 3y ago

Been saying this for years, the only reason these companies' execs aren't in prison is because they grease all the right palms, and provide enough "studies" those greased palms can use to plausibly justify their behavior.

pjscott 3y ago
In prison on what charges? In the US it's illegal to imprison someone based purely on vibes, and you can't make things crimes retroactively. (See Article I, Section 9 of the constitution; in particular the parts concerning habeas corpus, bills of attainder, and ex post facto laws.)
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  Like... a lot of charges. Fraud, sexual assault... these are already crimes. I could try to write a novel here to go into it on all the different illegal things every tech exec has done and gotten away with, but if you were under the impression we'd need to make new laws from them to have committed crimes, we're so far apart from each other's understanding that it's not really worth going too deep into. But suffice to say, outright fraud about the ad business is pretty core to most of Google and Facebook's revenue, and the entire original C-suite of Google has at least some sort of sexual harassment or abuse story out there they never got held accountable for. The biggest problem is not making crimes, it's that our enforcement of our own laws involving executive misconduct has continued for so long, that the statute of limitations would be the biggest problem prosecuting a lot of people today.

danzer420 3y ago

can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago unimaginable. tech is like humanity's one hope.

isodev 3y ago
There is also Reddit, Google… I mean, do we really need to list all the companies that need perpetual increase of “engagement” to power their business model?
troupo 3y ago
> big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. Companies that actually do that are rarely big tech. And Big Tech as term colloquially refers to Facebook, Google etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  There are tons of educational videos on YouTube. And maybe Facebook too, or connections being made there, I don’t use it though. Either way, I have learned how to do many things from watching instructional YouTube videos, and it does not seem anyone else has been able to make the economics work like Google has. Sure, there’s bad too along with the good, and maybe the bad outweighs the good, although I would need convincing that is true.
politelemon 3y ago
Prosperity does not equate to betterment of humanity. The prosperity of concentrated to a small section of the population, at the expense of the majority. It is nowhere near the deliverer of hope you're making it out to be, it's an enabler of great negative paradigm shifts that is slowly starting to be recognised. Social media is starting to be recognised as a harm on society but slowly... It'll probably take a few decades for wide retrospective agreement (in other words when it's too late)

thefounder 3y ago

I'm more concerned about Big Food as the new Big Tabacco. You don't get cancer consuming tech products as much as you get from Big "food".

drewcoo 3y ago
I'm seeing religion that way. It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables, and even in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet. We have known for years that it's not good for anyone, but they have tough lobbyists, so getting rid of the problem just seems impossible. We all accept somehow that sports figures and celebrities endorse the product - they're adults. We accept that adults should be allowed to make their own decision. But just when we had religion-free zones for children, here comes the 10 commandments on the wall and creationism in biology class. No "this is your brain on religion" commercials yet that I know of. Etc. Just like there was never a "war on tobacco," there will never be a "war on religion." Just like tobacco, there's too much money in religion for that to work.
- eindiran 3y ago
  I legitimately can't tell if this is satire or not. > [E]ven in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet No municipality in a region with a bill of rights providing freedom of religion is going to create no prayer zones. > It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables This makes me think this is satire...
  - ke88y 3y ago
    > I legitimately can't tell if this is satire or not. I mean... really? It's clearly satire. And fairly well constructed prose imo. What the author's actual point is, though, I have absolutely no idea. Maybe there is no point, and it's just pretty prose.
    - eindiran 3y ago
      > What the author's actual point is, though, I have absolutely no idea. This is what makes me unsure its satire; what is it poking fun at exactly? What is the metaphor? > It's clearly satire. I don't think it's "clearly" satire, though I lean in the direction that it probably is satire; I have heard plenty of SF rationalist types say similar things before, so on HN the probability that it isn't satire is much higher than in the outside world. > And fairly well constructed prose imo. Agreed. It is fun and well-constructed prose, which definitely earns it several points in the "probably satire" column.

bastardoperator 3y ago

We can draw parallels, but you've never developed lung cancer doom scrolling twitter.

Andrex 3y ago
Sharply increasing suicide rates among teens due to social media isn't something to just shrug off, either.
- teej 3y ago
  Something also not caused by doom scrolling twitter.
  - nimbleplum40 3y ago
    Sure, Instagram though…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  Do you know what had the largest impact on suicide rates of teens in recent years? Them returning to schools after covid. Could it be that things can, at the same time, have both positive and negative effects on people?
  - hext 3y ago
    Have you considered the impact social media has on in person dynamics amongst school age kids? Insanely naive take.
bitwize 3y ago
And big tobacco hasn't brought the Nazis back.
- 3y ago

m1117 3y ago

Make us inhale all the toxic fake news and ads.... They should print pictures of exhausted ad consumers on google packages.

WJW 3y ago
Warning: consumption of social media can lead to jail time. <Picture of the Proud boys guy in court>

grammers 3y ago

There are similarities, just exchange lung cancer with suicides among teens. Big Tech must take its responsibility more seriously and not pretend it's not their fault.

jachee 3y ago
You and the author are both lumping all of Big Tech in together with Big Attention-Exploitation. The latter is the subset to which people’s ire should be directed.
- losteric 3y ago
  Amazon and Google are hardly innocent players. One could go on to point at the effects of Uber, Yelp, AirBnb, Palantir, so on... all "Big Tech".
elpool2 3y ago
The difference is that smoking is clearly linked with lung cancer, established by heaps of clear scientific data. The link between social media and suicide is pretty weak by comparison.

paxys 3y ago

Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services. Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having nothing to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same. So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence that is suggested.

gumby 3y ago
That ship has sailed. “Tech” is simply a positioning or branding term. Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm. The term has become so denatured that a new term, “deep tech” has been coined to mean what “technology company” used to mean.
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  My personal test for this is: what percentage of the company's total value is comprised of the intellectual property their software source code holds. The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are. No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of value tied up in their brand or their sales book of business.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago

parentheses 3y ago

I "Big Tech" incorrectly categorizes the problem. The problem is social media products that monetize attention. Meta, Twitter and other companies that build deep social media products are in this group. Netflix is not. Microsoft is not. Google is not. I don't like that just because you're a large tech company you're immediately demonized. This is demonizing success in this field rather than "wrong" doing.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Netflix does not monetize attention?

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

https://publicknowledge.org/is-this-really-big-techs-big-tobacco-moment-only-congress-can-make-it-so/ https://publicknowledge.org/is-this-really-big-techs-big-tob... tldr; The testimony of one of the Facebook "whistleblowers" drew the analogy to Big Tobacco from Sen. Blumenthal back in 2021.^1 But in 1995 Congress took action after Wigand^2 testified. None of Big Tech's leakers so far have triggered action by Congress. Even more, in the 1990's there was at least 10 years of litigation before there was legislative action. Suing Big tech is more problematic. IMO, it's mainly because they can continue to hide behind Section 230. Was 230 was intended to protect corporations with trillion dollar market caps. Big Tobacco had nothing like Section 230. 1. Even earlier Salesforce guy was comparing Big Tech to cigarettes. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-facebook-is-the-new-cigarettes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigarettes-for-our-society-marc-benioff-says-calling-for-regulation-2019-12-29 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigare... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Also, Wigand had the FDA. What is the equivalent federal agency tasked with regulating Big Tech. It does not exist. Yet. https://www.jeffreywigand.com/pascagoula.php https://www.jeffreywigand.com/pascagoula.php According to the Washington Post, Wigand was making $300,000 at the time he leaked. In today's dollars, that's $594,784. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-most-famous-whistleblower/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-most-famous-whistleb... Honestly, 60 Minutes today feels nothing it was in the days of Mike Wallace or even Andy Rooney. It mostly treats Big Tech with a sort of "awe". Sometimes the show feels like an agent of the US military-industrial complex. In retrospect Mike Wallace looks like a journalist one could only wish for today. 60 Minutes is soft.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

I think a better comparison would be to big oil, steel and manufacturing in the early 1900s. Big tech has its problems but provides significant tangible benefits to people and the world. Tobacco is purely a negative, not innovative, and relies on the chemical addictive properties of a plant to offer a needless service.

onetokeoverthe 3y ago
Tobacco is not purely negative. Ask the native peoples.
version_five 3y ago
To first order maybe. Tobacco use obviously shortens life but tech is destroying society. In the grand scheme of things (which is where criticism of either industry really plays), shorter life expectancy is less of a big deal than having society ripped apart in the name of selling ads. Smoking didn't change the face of the planet the way tech has, even if it's acutely very bad.

lr4444lr 3y ago

Gonna risk the downvotes and qualify that I am a parent who keeps social media away from my kids: what big tech is peddling is IMHO not on the level of addiction, carcinogenicity and all cause mortality as smoking. It's up to me to raise a mentally resilient kid, part of which is limiting their screen time, but it is not something I cut out altogether. It's not like I have some special parenting power to protect their lung epithelia.

tomcam 3y ago
I made a terrible mistake with my children at the dawn of social media. I would love it if you contacted me because I think you’re generally on the right course.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  I really have no insight as to how to get the horse back into the barn, and suggest looking for professional help for yoyr kids. All I can tell you is that my kids do not ask for social media or even screens that much because I plan outings for them that are more interesting and exciting - and that isn't about spending a ton of money or going very far, just being creative about how to frame what we're doing. For example, when planning to go to the local pool, I make up a story about how at their age I was able to run across the pool in X seconds, and that if they can break my record 5 times, I'll take them out to a restaurant for dinner the next day. Then when we are there, I'll also break out some plastic water toys that I didn't tell them about. I just make family time more fun in terms of anticipation and surprises than being online.
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Too late for me. I just had some thoughts about how you might avoid some of the traps we didn’t.
    - forgetbook 3y ago
      Would you be willingto post them publicly/here?

speak_plainly 3y ago

It’s not a popular opinion, but I think the negative impacts of social media are overstated and unconvincing. You can get a big dopamine hit from meditation or as a response to stress but you don’t see kids running to Buddhist monasteries in droves or rushing to the stress of public speaking. It’s probably not healthy to live your entire life online, which is what youth are encouraged to do by everyone around them, and that alone is enough of a problem and I don’t think technology companies are to blame.

acituan 3y ago
> You can get a big dopamine hit from meditation or as a response to stress but you don’t see kids running to Buddhist monasteries in droves or rushing to the stress of public speaking. Dopamine obviously is a shorthand for a more complex psychological phenomena. While having their own failure modes, meditation or public speaking are not entirely ego-syntonic endeavors, there is a continuous contact with reality that puts your identity into question. Whereas social media has a near perfect psychological profile on its users and manufactures a purpose built personal “reality” that fits with their self concept - however dysfunctional it may be. There may be still frustration but it is still conforming to the user, because the challenge is optimized to drive engagement, not to make the person a better person through contact with reality.

sgammon 3y ago

big oil: yes we love this keep going

superkuh 3y ago

This is such a terrible take. Nicotine is physiologically addictive in the "directly screws with reward motivation" sense in addition to causing physiological dependence through adaptation. The stimuli we perceive through screens are in no way addictive. Conflating a normal stimuli with something that's actually addictive is more dangerous than the thing it intends to stop because it justifies the use of force in a situation where there's no force used. Not even implicitly like with cigarettes being addictive. If you look at the DSM5 you'll see the only behavioral addiction disorder is "gambling disorder" and that's grandfathered in. These modern memes about how screens are addictive being taken seriously are themselves the danger. Just like with "porn addiction" or "curing homosexuality" the people pushing it in serious contexts are generally ones running for-profit private "detox" centers or expensive "treatments". I'm no fan of "big tech" but I can easily chose not to use it. And if I have to use it for work, it in no way forces me to use it at home. Big tech is bad but this line of argument is nearly as bad.

api 3y ago

This is true for the parts of tech that run on addiction: most mobile gaming, most social media, cryptocurrency gambling, straight up gambling, etc.

tech_ken 3y ago

Many industries have massive negative externalities and a stranglehold on regulation through lobbying, loose campaign finance laws, and regulatory capture. I get that scrolling can become compulsive for some people, but I think comparing it to Big Tobacco or even like the firearms industry kind of overstates the case. Magazines and print media clearly led to high prevalence of eating disorders and other behavioral health problems in the pre-internet era, did the publishing industry ever have it's "Big Tobacco moment"? What about the auto industry, which has absolutely trashed the air quality in our cities and towns? The meat industry is a horrorshow of environmental destruction, negative health effects, and labor abus, where are it's big showy hearings and investigative committees? Instead we shower it with government support in the form of grain subsidies. Ad-tech is sleazy, and no doubt needs to be reined in, but the problem is that private corporations in general need to be better held accountable, not "Big Tech" specifically.

dsafdsalj 3y ago

Absurd. Any arbitrary industry has "bad" bits. Big tech does not cause fucking cancer, so don't pretend it does.

nologic01 3y ago

Big tech is much worse than big tobacco. To calibrate, imagine if government and all public sector entities would include in all their commumications with citizens prominent mention of specific tobacco products and brands and actually inviting people to use them. This incredible and abnormal capture of society is now the new normal. Check any public institution site and it explicitly advertises big tech services using links and invites people to engage using these specific, private, for-profit platforms. Picking winners, explicitly endorsing platforms that have turned users into products, track and model any and all behavior online etc. People just dont realize how degenerate and dangerous our predicament. The fact that there are no reflexes to violently expose and terminate this collusion means there is basically no meaningful democratic muscle left. Big tech is the tombstone of democratic society. 10x worse than big tobacco. Nobody will force you to smoke but increasingly it is impossible to be a normal member of society without conceding our agency to nefarious digital conglomerates.

moneywoes 3y ago

> Big Tech spent more on federal lobbying from 2010-202 than the nation’s largest banks from 2000-2010 or Big Tobacco from 1996-1999 Since 2000, the four largest Big Tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Alphabet/Google, and Facebook – have spent $465,026,307 on federal lobbying. $434,474,221 of that total has come since 2010. Additionally, nine groups that the four Big Tech companies fund have spent $98,061,827 on federal lobbying since 2000. $80,400,019 of that total has come since 2010. Big Tech’s federal lobbying total eclipses that of other major toxic industries: Since 2010, the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers have spent $282,292,834 on federal lobbying. America’s seven largest banks in the leadup to the financial crisis spent $194,193,858 on federal lobbying from 2000 to 2010. From 1996 to 1999, the nation’s largest tobacco companies spent $155,750,398 on federal lobbying, or $261,306,596 in 2021 dollars. Very interested, where does this money go?

DueDilligence 3y ago

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