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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 p

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)
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  There are poor people in villages around the world that now have access to information they never would have been able to get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology. That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    Yes, I’m sure the poor people in villages watching the world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your notion of prosperity. That’s why they’re drowning en masse in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border, or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant detention facilities around the world. Because they’re so “prosperous” now.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      You can also refer to “they” as the ones who now have access to more accurate information about their health, or weather, sex education, math, science, etc. There are 8 billion people in this world, surely there are a wide spectrum of experiences being lived.
    - pjscott 3y ago
      Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here are some cheery graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief That doesn't mean that everyone is rich, but it is actually a really big deal. Next time you're tempted to write a phrase like "watching the world becoming ever more desperate" when talking about poverty, please take a moment first to remember that the opposite is true.
      - bugglebeetle 3y ago
        My point is exactly this misguided view of the world, that the global north can live lives of insane decadence, built on its history and continued plundering of the global south, while expecting them to find a reduction in extreme poverty as ameliorative. Your comment only reminds me that liberals are people who believe that luxury can exist without the suffering of others. There is no path in the current Capitalist world order that will allow for a rise in the global south to current, western levels of development. The resulting increase in labor and resource costs would face immediate armed confrontation from the global north, as already happened with the myriad US-backed military coups during the past century.
bufio 3y ago
Prosperity?
pyrale 3y ago
> tech is like humanity's one hope. It's funny, because despite constant warfare, plagues, nasty ideologies, etc. the last time at which mankind was basically guaranteed to endure was before the industrial use of tech. Since then we've had world wars, the atomic bomb and its scare, global warming, accelerated biodiversity collapse, and it seems we can't pass a new day without discovering a new things which we rely on that is endangered. Sure, I'm having lots of fun with tech, and I hope we can leverage it reasonably to improve our condition, but this technological religion that puts tech on a pedestal above critics really causes more harm than good. Many other technological advances that came before have required heavy regulation, and from the point of view of users, that evolution has been a progress rather than a regression.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Mankind will endure. Maybe in fewer numbers than today, but it's hard to imagine anything that would completely wipe out the human species worldwide, even if things collapse back to hunter-gatherer survival.
  - squirtlebonflow 3y ago
    That's not... a good thing. Who cares about "the preservation of the species". If 7 billion people die and the remaining survivors are happier than ever, that's a huge loss IMO.
- lclarkmichalek 3y ago
  Bronze age collapse wasn't exactly great though.

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)

lotsofpulp 3y ago
There are poor people in villages around the world that now have access to information they never would have been able to get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology. That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  Yes, I’m sure the poor people in villages watching the world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your notion of prosperity. That’s why they’re drowning en masse in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border, or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant detention facilities around the world. Because they’re so “prosperous” now.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    You can also refer to “they” as the ones who now have access to more accurate information about their health, or weather, sex education, math, science, etc. There are 8 billion people in this world, surely there are a wide spectrum of experiences being lived.
  - pjscott 3y ago
    Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here are some cheery graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief That doesn't mean that everyone is rich, but it is actually a really big deal. Next time you're tempted to write a phrase like "watching the world becoming ever more desperate" when talking about poverty, please take a moment first to remember that the opposite is true.
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      My point is exactly this misguided view of the world, that the global north can live lives of insane decadence, built on its history and continued plundering of the global south, while expecting them to find a reduction in extreme poverty as ameliorative. Your comment only reminds me that liberals are people who believe that luxury can exist without the suffering of others. There is no path in the current Capitalist world order that will allow for a rise in the global south to current, western levels of development. The resulting increase in labor and resource costs would face immediate armed confrontation from the global north, as already happened with the myriad US-backed military coups during the past century.

bufio 3y ago

Prosperity?

pyrale 3y ago

> tech is like humanity's one hope. It's funny, because despite constant warfare, plagues, nasty ideologies, etc. the last time at which mankind was basically guaranteed to endure was before the industrial use of tech. Since then we've had world wars, the atomic bomb and its scare, global warming, accelerated biodiversity collapse, and it seems we can't pass a new day without discovering a new things which we rely on that is endangered. Sure, I'm having lots of fun with tech, and I hope we can leverage it reasonably to improve our condition, but this technological religion that puts tech on a pedestal above critics really causes more harm than good. Many other technological advances that came before have required heavy regulation, and from the point of view of users, that evolution has been a progress rather than a regression.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Mankind will endure. Maybe in fewer numbers than today, but it's hard to imagine anything that would completely wipe out the human species worldwide, even if things collapse back to hunter-gatherer survival.
- squirtlebonflow 3y ago
  That's not... a good thing. Who cares about "the preservation of the species". If 7 billion people die and the remaining survivors are happier than ever, that's a huge loss IMO.
lclarkmichalek 3y ago
Bronze age collapse wasn't exactly great though.