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Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
- kgwxd 3mo agoName an industry anyone likes, aside from the money they might be making off it. They're all now hated for the same reasons, caused by the same, scarily small, group of people.
- bananaflag 3mo agoSpace exploration.
- harimau777 3mo agoI think that's true of NASA. However, I've got a pretty negative view of SpaceX due to the whole "owned by a Nazi thing".
- speed_spread 3mo agoHahem, Wernher von Braun... What is it with nazis and rockets anyway?
- ymolodtsov 3mo agoTons of people believe it's a waste of money though (I disagree).
- worldsayshi 3mo agoAnd yet all this power in the hands of the very few are only there because the rest of us don't know any better than coordinating for their benefit rather than coordinating in any other way.
- vrganj 3mo agoThe problem is capitalism and the injustices it creates. The hated industries are just symptoms.
- automatic6131 3mo agoThe problem isn't capitalism, well it's not JUST capitalism. If you give any group of individuals that level of wealth control, the same pattern repeats. They can be shareholders, board directors, or commissars or general secretaries of the people's party, a prince or a duke, or the first citizen. It doesn't matter, all you need to replicate the same problems is concentration of wealth and power and the ability to direct it.
- vrganj 3mo agoIndeed. It's just that capitalism produces immense concentrations of wealth as a core feature of the system.
- automatic6131 3mo agoSure, so did the Roman Republic and Pharonic Egypt and Imperial China and Communist China So you're going to need a more accurate diagnosis than simply capitalism
- vrganj 3mo agoI have to tighten your earlier point a bit first: it is not just absolute concentration of wealth that causes this, it is high levels of inequality, e.g. lots of people in misery with a few folks that have ridiculous riches. I'm pretty sure the commoners (and even more so, the slaves!) in Rome, Egypt or Imperial China didn't love the system either. However, I think the average modern-day, communist Chinese person has seen such a rise in standards of living (one billion people pulled out from poverty!) that they don't really hate the system despite there also being high wealth concentration amongst party and business elites. The gap is the problem, not the peak.
- dsego 3mo agoDo you have any social accounts? By the username I'm guessing we're from the same country or region.
- luco17 3mo agoHairdressing/beauticians
- petcat 3mo agoIn the words of Hank Hill, "some people are meant to go to college, and some people are meant to go to beauty school."
- red-iron-pine 3mo agoThis specific quote actually belongs to Luanne Platter "I learned something really important at college today. I don't wanna be there! Some people are meant to go to college, and some people are meant to go to beauty school. And I'm in beauty school!" (who says AI is useless?)
- l337h4x0rz 3mo agoKindergartens
- ymolodtsov 3mo agoNobody enjoys paying for one though.
- jknoepfler 3mo agoI mean sure... but I vote for education tax levies whenever they come up and choose to live somewhere where they pass. I wouldn't call my emotions about it negative.
- YetAnotherNick 3mo agoIs this a sarcasm? I hate them trying to upsell their stuff or lie about the products(almost all of the product marketing in beauty industry is a lie) or oversell their services. If I were to guess, I think what you mean interacting with them not the money extraction part?
- Jtarii 3mo agoRestaurants, gyms, cinemas, Hollywood, sports leagues, book publishing, amazon. People will have some criticisms of each of these but the average person probably appreciates them more than dislikes them.
- windward 3mo agoI don't think we, as common engineers, can absolve ourselves of all blame. For a time we were in incredible demand and all we've made of it is: some people earned enough to retire early, buy nice cars, or start their own business. But that demand could have been turned into real power. Now it's too late.
- dsego 3mo agoSome of us even pledged to work ethically and practice integrity. Not sure what the original english version is. Found this online: https://order-of-the-engineer.org/about-the-order/obligation/ https://order-of-the-engineer.org/about-the-order/obligation...
- GuB-42 3mo agoI'd say farming. Not agriculture in general, Monsanto is one of the most hated companies, so is John Deere, and farmers hate them too, but the ones working on the field, preferably crops over livestock. I think that farmers are somehow immune despite having their fair share of evil because we all understand that without them, we would all die.
- bananaflag 3mo agoAgriculture is pretty much the antonym of industry.
- peterashford 3mo agoI'm a New Zealander. Farmers here are disliked by a large percentage of the population
- l337h4x0rz 3mo agoIn my opinion tech used to be fun and we used to create products that actually empower people. Think MySpace, early-days Facebook, Soundcloud, Ableton Live etc. They exist to empower the masses to connect and to create. Today the business model has made every products and contents to be enshittified. We've optimised for the wrong thing and not only the common people hate the tech industry. Even I no longer feels the joy of working in tech.
- beached_whale 3mo agoWhen it comes to empowering, I am not sure much beats Excel. It lets non techy people codify amazing things and get real work done.
- red-iron-pine 3mo agoexcel runs the world
- FranzFerdiNaN 3mo agoAs always, capitalism can be counted on to destroy anything it touches.
- l337h4x0rz 3mo agoAt the start founders got the joy from making products that makes people happy. Then it inevitably evolves to chasing the dopamine of achieving larger and larger numbers based on some quantifiable metrics.
- purpleflame1257 3mo agoWithout the promise of return most promising technology would never have been created.
- l337h4x0rz 3mo agoAgreed. Such is the duality.
- luco17 3mo agoBankers had it bad for a long time. Now it's our turn!
- tonyedgecombe 3mo agoIt's the same people. Before 2008 they used to go into banking, now they entered tech instead.
- ben_w 3mo agoI'd say this explains why all the code is bad now, but I remember what it used to look like too.
- lopis 3mo agoIs that because Bankers have mostly disappeared as a profession people deal with in person?
- therobots927 3mo ago[flagged]
- nemomarx 3mo agoWith all the money floating around in tech you'd think PR would be solveable. But you still have AI founders going out in public and saying they want to get rid of jobs instead of some pitch about how easy work will get or you'll be happier or etc. Why?
- adaml_623 3mo agoBecause they are selfish and would prefer to make millions selling to big companies who want to pay less for labour.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo agoI mean, to be fair, basically the only way to raise the amount of capital required to keep growing LLMs was to sell a story at this scale. I think the real error was the notion that they could sell this story to investors without the rest of the population noticing.
- muvlon 3mo agoIs it an error though? The general public has noticed, everyone hates their guts but investment is still flowing.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo agoIf they end up getting heavily regulated, then it's definitely an error. The Fable export controls kerfuffle was definitely downstream of all the hype so it seems to be having some impact.
- ymolodtsov 3mo agoFew founders do this and the ones who do are solving their own problems. For Anthropic it's primarily hiring. But as a PR person I can guarantee you it's not possible to go around such perception shifts through money alone.
- api 3mo agoFor the people I know, the biggest things are: (1) Addiction engineering, and the fact that the tech industry found a way to transform what was supposed to be a machine to improve human education and cognition into a digital version of tobacco or a casino. I am personally disgusted by this. If you're working on a pop "social" app or a game and designing it to have a "compulsion loop," you are doing mind control and you suck. (2) The fact that a huge number of people in tech have been "pilled" with hyper-elitist fascist-adjacent ideology. This one was a huge shocker to me as I watched it happen, especially because I read the texts and blogs that seemed to be driving it and was like "you people are smart... why are you falling for this?" I am by no means a hard leftist either, used to self-describe as a libertarian back when that meant what it sounds like it means. ... Then I realized that tech is full of nerds who (like me) got picked on in school, and that wound makes "you are aCkTuAllY a member of a cognitive master race" a powerful hook. It's not unique to nerds -- all humans are vulnerable to this pattern. You see it in groups of people who have been mass-abused through genocide or persecution for instance. (3) A small number of people in tech have gotten rich to Gilded Age levels, and that burns in what I think is a stagflationary environment (we aren't calling it that, but for the "regular economy" we are basically in stagflation). If everyone was doing well and things like housing were affordable, I don't think people would care as much. I know personally I don't care if there are quintillinoaires out there somewhere as long as I am doing well and I can pursue my dreams... but if I'm not, it creates emotions of envy and hostility. This is natural hard-wired brain stem stuff. Those are all rational reasons IMO and they all make sense. I think the AI backlash builds mostly on #3, since AI threatens a lot of jobs in a stressed economic environment. The environmental stuff around AI (data center power etc.) is mostly exaggerated (except water in some areas), but its prevalence is driven by the fact that people want to find something to hate about this industry. As evidence I submit the fact that artists, in my experience, are the most visceral AI haters. I get it. I do not believe AI is a threat to "true art." Not at all. But it is absolutely decimating the boring "potboiler" work artists used to use to make a living while they worked on the former, and it's always been brutally hard to make a living as an artist. AI also threatens programmers, but in that case we're talking maybe being knocked down from upper middle class to middle class not from lower middle class to bankruptcy. (Total tangent -- I ran some numbers. If you telework 1-2 days a week, depending on your commute, you more than make up for using something like Claude Code heavily all day long. Same goes for skipping that DoorDash order. Cars use insane amounts of power if you really look, much more than data centers on an amortized per-user basis.)
- watwut 3mo agoGood article, but damm, the cat was annoying. I was really distracting, I had to edit the page to remove it.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo agoI just used the keyboard to navigate so the cat didn't move.
- grg0 3mo agoGet the cat back in the bag.
- fzeroracer 3mo agoThe article really sums it up perfectly. It's incredibly see to see topical reasons why people fucking hate everything tech touches. You can't buy a TV without it being an embedded advertising device that forces you to see ads every time you turn it on. You can't buy a car without needing a touchscreen that if it breaks you're SOL. People who actually like computers increasingly can't even afford to buy one If I could I'd toss my TV I bought a decade ago into the garbage can after all of the updates it keeps receiving making it more and more intrusive with advertising. But then I'd have to pay extra for a non-smart TV.
- nyeah 3mo agoYeah. "Hate": https://www.kapwing.com/blog/why-does-the-public-hate-the-tech-industry-now/ https://www.kapwing.com/blog/why-does-the-public-hate-the-te... Re the linked piece, I'm concerned about people saying "they hate us" when they really mean "they disagree with us" or "they seem skeptical of what we say." It can easily become click bait. The language changes, sure ... but equating disagreement with the emotion of hatred? Maybe that language change is a bad idea? Just spitballing here.
- therobots927 3mo agoI think hate is the perfect word.
- nyeah 3mo agoCan I ask for more info? Is it the perfect word for how some people feel about the tech industry? The perfect word to describe disagreement?
- therobots927 3mo agoI think when you couple extreme wealth inequality with extreme mis-allocation of capital (aka societal energy) with no buy in from the population, you (the Stanford educated elite - not you specifically) run the risk of getting your fucking head chopped off.
- nyeah 3mo agoSure, of course. I'm trying to draw a distinction between disagreement and hate. I'm not trying to eliminate either one.
- grg0 3mo agoWhen we are on the same level, we can disagree on things. When you have concentrated power and make a living out of fucking around with everybody else, you seed hatred.
- firmretention 3mo agoOn the list of extremely annoying things you can put on a webpage, a cat constantly running after my cursor is definitely a new one for me.
- lopis 3mo agoThis is probably showing both our ages that this is new to you and very old for me.
- firmretention 3mo agoI was on the web in the late 90s! I don't recall seeing anything like this, although it certainly may have existed. Animated cursors yes (CometCursor!), but not little animations chasing your cursor.
- dsego 3mo agoI remember copy/pasting scripts in dreamweaver to make leaves or snow fall on the webpage.
- grg0 3mo agoClearly you were not on the web in the 90s. But agree it's very annoying.
- firmretention 3mo agoI remember CometCursor and the like, but nothing that chased the cursor itself.
- simianwords 3mo agoHating the tech industry is mainly seen amongst the first world countries and the rich educate, high status people amongst them. I posit that the reasons are - the need for conservatism and slowing down progress is inherent in people. Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology. Its the same mode of opposition, people just don't like chaotic progress. - people who have good jobs and high status want to _conserve_ it and not lose position - tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again - for some reason cynicism is seen as signalling a more mature worldview while optimism is seen as childish when the historical trend points to optimism instead
- lopis 3mo agoThat's a weirdly optimistic view of technology. Specially the comparison to homophobia and racism. Yes, tech has solved people's basic but real needs for communication, banking, entertainment, etc. Then after a certain level, without aggressive dark patterns, people's needs for tech were basically met. No one needed social media, we needed social networks. No one needed inescapable "algorithms"¹ besides the ones trying to screw us over. What is this "status quo" you're talking about? And what is this technology progress that is threatening it? ¹ using the term "algorithms" here in its colloquial non-tech sense.
- simianwords 3mo agoI personally love social media because it brings different cultures together. Infinity immigration has been tried but not in a nice way. Next best thing is social media - bringing cultures together in a marketplace and having ideas beat eachother is important for a civilisation. Without social media you would have corners of culture getting stuck on whatever ideas they had from 2000 years ago. With social media these stale ideas get beaten by good ones.
- lopis 3mo agoThat's fine, if that's your choice. Reddit was awesome at first because it was a hot pot of cultures. But we lost that control. You don't see what you want unless you fight hard against the algo.
- CM30 3mo agoI think there are a few reasons to note here: 1. Tech is associated with a lot of the issues affecting society right now, while other business sectors often aren't. Data centres and the rising price of computer components, social media addiction, gambling apps, surveillance, etc. These are all things in the news or affecting people's daily lives, and the 'tech industry' tends to get the blame for them. 2. Many of the people involved tend to have a bad reputation, even compared to other industries. Musk is the obvious one, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and others like them don't exactly have a great reputation with the general public. 3. As much as I can't blame them sometimes, the media absolutely hates the tech industry and the companies operating in it. Thanks in part to the large social media platforms all but annihilating traditional journalism as a business, there's a lot of hatred aimed at the companies responsible as a result. If you see any news article about a tech related topic that isn't a product announcement (and maybe even then), it's probably going to be a negative one about the dangers and issues with tech.
- therobots927 3mo agoI beg to differ on point 3. The media has been extremely accommodating to the AI evangelists.
- Legend2440 3mo agoWe reading the same media here? All the major tech news publications like the Verge or ArsTechnica take a highly skeptical tone towards AI. Nearly every major newspaper company is actively suing AI companies over copyright infringement. They have been quite outspoken that they see Google's AI overviews as an existential threat to their business.
- Planktonne 3mo agoPeople hate the tech industry because it has negative effects on their lives, and these effects are deliberate rather than incidental. There are, of course, some good people/companies/projects in the tech industry, but think about the overall impression of the industry as a whole: careless and malevolent. The tech industry and its figureheads have - Lied consistently about their capabilities - Brazenly flouted the law - Shoved ads and planned obsolescence and surveillance into everything - Increased prices again and again - Supported oppressive governments and war crimes - Gleefully attempted to remove many people's livelihoods - Predicted that they would end the world, and then doubled down on the same path - Deployed bots everywhere, polluting online communities - Pushed technology with the primary aim of CSAM or deepfake pornography I could keep listing, and again, this isn't every single person in the tech industry. But if you group them all together, you have to take the bad with the good, and there's a lot of bad. Frankly, the real question is why don't more people hate the tech industry?
- glaslong 3mo ago(Dis)honorable mentions to the current waves of gleeful surveillance state enablement and gambling by any other name, the latter even directly preceded by desperately trying to get everyone's less techy relatives to bag-hold crypto pump n dumps
- mrweasel 3mo agoI can't actually think of a single piece of tech made in the past ten years that has improved my life, at least not without large downsides. There's some embedded stuff, like lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car, that I like, but the package as a whole... not really much of an improvement. It's not really bad as such that the tech industry want to attempt to make a smart home, or add software to a product, but it's increasingly being done without consideration for the users. People hate the tech industry, and that includes those who work in it, because it's pretty clear that the industry really doesn't give a shit about it's users, because the users are rarely the customers anymore.
- jordanb 3mo agoThis is it. The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product. Plus the monopolies..
- ubermonkey 3mo agoYeah, this. In terms of consumer benefit in tech we've been at stasis for a long time. My computing experience isn't that much different now than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Sure, my computer and connectivity are far faster now, and thanks to Apple Silicon I can go whole days at conferences without plugging my laptop in, but those are incremental improvements not sea changes. We did fine with 4-hour laptops in 1999. Also a number of "improvements" just aren't, like smart home devices and IoT crap. Virtually none of those things have made good on the marketers' promises, and 100% of them require some tech family member to end up sysadmining the TV or the thermostat or the light switch, and having to do that kind of crap for things that used to Just Work in the most basic sense is insane. There's been a lot of heavy lifting in the smart speaker space, and it IS true that my 86 year old mother enjoys being able to ask Siri to play any song she wants, but that kind of thing seems picayune compared to what middle-aged nerds thought the second quarter of the 21st century would bring us. The only area that comes immediately to mind for ME that includes staggering advances is medical care. I had a hip replacement a few years ago that was an OUTPATIENT procedure. A dear friend of mine ignored symptoms and therefore only "caught" his colon cancer well into stage 4 -- and yet still lived 6 years with pretty high quality of life. Time was, a stage 4 diagnosis meant "uh, maybe don't renew your cable this month." Another pal has progressive MS; 15 years ago, there were no therapies AT ALL for it. Now there is one, and it's making a difference for him and his family. Nothing on that scale has shown up from "the tech industry" in a long time.
- nekusar 3mo agoBecause its... 1. All about lock in. Trap customers and their data. 2. No purchases, only rentals. You never own anything. 3. Agreements are worth nothing. Today's feature is tomorrows premium feature. 4. Gamification adds an extra edge of badness on the hopes that you'll get what you want. 5. "Updates" rarely help, but almost always harm, in the name of "security" 6. Mergers and acquisitions means nothing is ever safe. Purchasing BigCo (exit) can mean operations cease tomorrow. 7. Enshittification rules always rule how the service will degrade, but not at what speed 8. Easy click to subscribe, but show up in person wearing all black clothing to the basement hidden office behind the no-trespassing sign to the cigarette man to unsubscribe. 9. And even if you THINK you own hardware in your physical possession, firmware updates maintain the real owner and cripple functionality. (PS3 OtherOS, etc)
- deepvibrations 3mo agoSo could it be Capitalism? Linear growth is a failure; only infinite, exponential growth is acceptable.
- nekusar 3mo agoYes, yes it is. Or rather, every economist reads the first 20 pages of Smith's Wealth Of Nations, and basically skips everything afterwards. Like... This gem: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
- dasil003 3mo agoSome good points, but I think it still treats “tech” as too monolithic. It’s not simply that tech leaders made bad choices or that products are inevitably enshittified. If I had to summarize the root cause I’d say it’s that the scaling properties of tech have enabled capitalist and political excesses with a velocity and power never before seen, and it happened so quickly that we really haven’t had time to even understand what’s happening systematically, let alone update societal norms and governance to address the problems.
- Cyclone_ 3mo agoI think this article overestimates how much the average person knows about tech. People know who Musk, Bezos, and Gates are, but hardly anyone outside of tech knows who Collison is. Most don't know much about VC funding either, but they certainly can see when products have become too smart to the point where they get needlessly complicated.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- watwut 3mo agoIt literally says average person does not know who Collison is? It is literally one of its arguments.
- reformd 3mo ago> Most people outside the tech industry don’t care This is and always will be incorrect and just the go-to excuse and/or justification. People do care but their brains are too muddy from stress, lies, ambiguous information and the lack of time to separate truth from campaigns/propaganda/proprietary agendas. This can be interpreted as people not actively caring, as in the infamous "nobody cares" and "nobody can do anything about that anyway" but it's actually passive carelessness that has it's origin in a conspiratorial kind of treatment of lower classes by upper classes. But that's boring. What's exciting is that it holds true upwards. Top 10% earners "don't care" if they "loose" 50000 dollars due to fraud by people "above their pay grade". Hop, hop, hop ... people hate the tech industry because they somewhat expect that skilled and/or smart people with resources, opportunity and time do things the right way ... because they can, because they say "we can" and "we will" and "the people" a lot in various ways. It causes at least a little nausea to suddenly realize that young or middle aged or seasoned engineers and business people behave like aging placeholder representatives that were picked because they are "representative enough". This, of course, partially stems from several cognitive fallacies about the things that evolution and expertise seem to imply but don't. In the end, it's not hate but recurring disillusionment and disappointment ... that the tech industry is no better than 13 year old drug dealers getting the teens next door hooked on punched bullshit or violent pimps and malpracticing doctors. "It's a shame, really." That said, the tech industry is doing it's job and delivers and it's human nature to expect "more" from capable people as well as to be disappointed when they don't--especially when patterns of malicious intent emerge and become systematic and systemic ... which has been halpening over and over again ...
- zetsurin 3mo agoFucking duh... 1 it seems like every successful company is headed by self centered assholes 2 enshittification
- pluralmonad 3mo agoWhy wouldn't they? It patronizes and infantilizes most of them. You can see the father knows best attitude all over this very forum. Calls for locking users out of their phones for their own good are seen here daily and that is just one example. When something big acts continually to disempower a group of people, of course some of them will resent it.
- deepvibrations 3mo agoFunnily enough, I ran across an article this morning titled "What you hate about AI is the capitalism." and I feel like you can basically apply that to all tech! It’s probably naive to assume a different system would cure all our ills. But I do wonder - if humanity acted for the collective good instead of individual self-interest, how different would our technology be? And how different would we be because of it? Link to the article for those interested: https://graceblakeley.substack.com/p/what-you-hate-about-ai-is-the-capitalism https://graceblakeley.substack.com/p/what-you-hate-about-ai-...
- imaginationra 3mo agoThe tech industry took essential human things away from regular people and sold it back to them as metered services. Social skills, friends, short term memory, dating, sex, intelligence etc Tech intentionally exploits regular people for its own gain, intentionally breaking peoples brains for techs profit. In short "tech" doesn't care about anything but the "bottom line" its the same as the military industrial complex- people break, people die, genocide happens and we empower it... who cares we're getting rich. No one sees the faces of the military industrial complex but tech CEO's(the faces of the industry) proudly smile for the camera's and rub their billionaire lifestyles in the publics faces. In short people hate the "tech industry" because it has taken everything away from everyone while enriching a few- and its all public.
- josefritzishere 3mo agoA handful of sociopath CEOs get way too much press exposure and make themselves into the worst possible mascots for the industry.
- slibhb 3mo agoTo the extent that people hate tech, it's because: 1. Tech is our "new money". New money is always hated, by every generation 2. Tech represents change and the human animal dislikes change. Most people are okay with everything that exists when they turn 25 and dislike everything that appears after 3. Tech represents capitalism in a pure form. Creative destruction reigns; companies and apps can rise and fall overnight. Ways of life are precarious and the constant churn bothers people All three really come down to people disliking change. Instead of hating/fearinf change and dynamism, people should look inward. Establish a routine. Exercise. Garden. Read. Cook. It's more within your power than ever before to decide what you like and pursue it at your own pace. But don't expect the external world to meet your desire for stasis.
- palmotea 3mo ago> And it goes on, and on, and on. Modern “tech companies” haven’t come up with any aspect of life they haven’t tried to “disrupt,” for the purposes of addicting you and then enshitifying the service by shoving ads in front of your eyes. Woohoo, the future! Also: 1. Tech is full or arrogant assholes who thing they know better than everyone. That leads to things like ham-handed attempts at gaslighting. It's especially grating when it's coming from some 25 year old kid. 2. The whole "making the world better" facade has fallen away. It's pretty clear a lot of them are selfish, greedy fucks. See: jamming AI and everyone's face and all the variations of "stop hiring humans."
- insane_dreamer 3mo agoI think one reason it's because many prominent tech leaders act like assholes or scammers: Zuck, Altman, Kalanick, Musk, and even "do no evil" Google has changed to "do no evil, unless you can make a lot of money doing it". so it doesn't give people confidence that the tech industry is doing anything that benefits the average person; mostly they're just looking to make as much $$ as possible and screw everything else, including our planet's future. basically Gordon Gekko's of the 21st Century.
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- AIorNot 3mo agoAs someone who has worked in tech for over 20 years, I think the backlash against modern technology is not hard to understand. A few things stand out: The social isolation of the digital age. We spend more time staring into phones than looking each other in the eye. The polarization created and amplified by social media platforms. The spread of disinformation, radicalization, and algorithmically optimized outrage. A developer and founder culture that is still heavily male-coded, often morally shallow, and too quick to treat empathy as weakness or inefficiency. The hype-and-hustle economy that startup culture has helped normalize inside American hyper-capitalism. The robber barons of earlier generations have been replaced by tech bros, growth hackers, and social media personalities who are often rewarded more for manipulation than for building anything durable. The erosion of the middle class and the normalization of unstable gig work, especially for Gen Z and millennials, leading to a lower standard of living for many younger Americans. Crypto, and the amount of fraud, speculation, and wasted energy that came with it. Now AI: not just the technology itself, but the way it is being funded, marketed, and deployed, often with little regard for human creativity, labor, consent, or meaning. Yes, this is a negative list. Technology has obviously produced enormous good as well. But it says something important that many younger people increasingly experience modern tech not as liberation, but as addiction, surveillance, manipulation, and spiritual exhaustion.
- nancyminusone 3mo agoPeople might not care about those generes, but I can tell you with certainty that where I live, people are well aware of the datacenter being constructed on the other end of town, how the town commission rejected the proposal, how the big tech company sued them and said "this case is going to cost you so much money that you dont have and we do, so youd better settle quickly". And they did settle, and the construction began, and as part of the settlement the datacenter also forces the hand of the council to allow the datacenter to get a tax break for the next decade.
- binary132 3mo ago1. Tech abuses its users on purpose and everyone knows it. 2. Tech companies are built on eating someone else’s lunch, mostly, and it’s not usually a fair redistribution of value.
- arjie 3mo agoOne property is that some obsessive people have always hated some kind of outracing successful industry of some period. Going backwards it's AI, general tech, bankers. Everyone always has a cover story but eventually it comes down to "these people are coming here and driving up housing prices / restaurant costs" etc. And besides, the hate isn't even universal. Normal people like Google and Apple and Amazon and Netflix. These brands have high favourability. In fact, what I've noticed is that people with all these strong opinions about what are mundane realities to most people have a tenuous grasp on reality. As an example: > ...even if data centers look at you really funny when you want to colo a box as a random individual these days... This is and has always been nonsense. Monkeybrains will let you do it at $75/1A at 110V (expensive but no one is looking at you funny) and Hurricane Electric has deals for people who are using very little (half-cabinet even). I myself have hardware in a colo. When I went there, I had trouble with some rails and just asked one of those guys for help. It was like the old days. My wife helped me and we picked up my mum and daughter at the playground after. And really, "what we've done in the last 10 years"? Dude, the usual suspects were protesting that tech companies provided buses for their employees over 10 years ago. One guy puked on a bus in protest. The whole post has taken a false premise (tech is generally hated), layered on some bad history (in the last 10 years something happened), and added some other bogus facts (colo facilities will look at you funny for going in by yourself). The whole thing has the taint of "lives entirely in a tech bubble and thinks that HN/Reddit is the real world". This entire genre of content that is purely created from Internet interaction with nearly zero real-world grounding is strange, and oddly it is consumed almost exclusively by all these other people who also have near zero real-world grounding. Just total nonsense.
- grg0 3mo agoIt's run by MBAs and sociopaths who want to make a quick buck and have no interest in or respect for building anything durable, and executed by yes-men (and some women) who don't have a single neuron to question what they're doing.
- peterashford 3mo agoBecause its dominated more by businessmen than engineers c.f. early days of IT
- tqi 3mo agoBecause journalists and their employers view tech as a competitor for ad dollars and threat to their professions.
- bad_username 3mo agoTech companies possess immense resources and huge potential to shape public discourse. Activists (that often includes journalists today) wish to exert power over tech companies for that reason. In the era of social media, weaponized complaining and astroturfed rage/hate is a very effective method of exerting actual power and inluence. When you see sentences like "Why do people hate X?", understand that this may be a statement pursuing a goal (we need you to believe that people hate X, so you should too), not a genuine quesion. I am not a fan of tech companies _at all_, BTW. But the enemy of an enemy is not always a friend.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]