Being optimistic and positive on tech in the first place is the root issue here. This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient. Being overly optimistic about an industry or field is in my view a worldview error, and a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
> Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
This sounds like it's better to work within the system rather than try to overthrow it. You need more than a little angst to completely reset cultural norms. Maybe you're optimizing for a local maxima instead of realizing the true potential of saying "fuck everything" and replacing it.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, not saying the correct response to all adversity is to plot a revolution. But my point is sincere - sometimes it is the best thing to burn it to the ground and start over. Private healthcare seems like a pretty good example of a system that should be abolished rather than massaged (assuming your goal is better healthcare at a more affordable price) and we have decades of data from our own country and others to corroborate that.
I think what you are saying is orthogonal to what they are saying.
You can be positive and optimistic about big scale societal changes that throw out all the established notions. Likewise, you can also be cynical and jaded about small scale changes that just aim to incrementally improve things.
Aiming for big changes doesn't necessarily imply you have to be cynical. In fact I think you're more likely to be able to achieve big changes if you're optimistic about them.
If you're willing to accept small changes as a win in a fundamentally broken system (in the sense the incentives aren't aligned and there is no real accountability feedback mechanism) then the problem is you aren't cynical enough to attempt something drastic. I'd actually go even further and argue it's a form of being brainwashed, usually as a byproduct of effective propaganda. Going back to the example of private healthcare - I don't fucking care about small incremental changes when the system itself is still structurally broken. We need more cynicism about the status quo so people say "fuck this" and replace it with something better. And it's not even a complicated or abstract idea - literally every other 1st world country has solved this problem and laugh about how broken healthcare is in the USA.
I think people tend to think too much in terms of black and white. Jaded cynicism is sometimes a good response, and sometimes less so, and other times won't make too much of a difference or can go either way. The trick is to know how to balance it all.
Same story with "tear it all down" vs. "work within the system".
The point is: what are you going to do if single-payer healthcare does not materialize in the US? You have many options; plotting a revolution, working for reform inside the system or impotently complaining on social media. What is actually workable for you?
The same goes for the article's author. Sounds like they're shocked—SHOCKED—that private companies are just out to make money, and don't actually have our best interests at heart. The real issue is that they bought into the fantasy in the first place. But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world? If it will have no effect, why let it get you worked up at all? If it will have an effect, go out and do it.
> But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world?
As the author said:
> Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
It's not changing the world, but I just do what I can to not contribute to it. And if any alternatives do pop up I do try to support them, sometimes financially.
The internet's outskirts are emptier than ever with this centralization, but I have made the active choice to de-activate pretty much all the mainstream stuff and use extensions to minimize their ability to track me. So knowing this did change my behavior on how I interact with the internet.
> This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient.
That sounds like a story of its own. Would you care to share the story about the corruption she saw? We so often hear the stories about companies hiking prices for lifesaving medicine fo no apparent reason other than profit, but it would be interesting to hear what she saw from the inside?
Personal financial payments to physicians are a common marketing strategy used by the pharmaceutical industry. These payments include both cash (typically for consulting services or invited lectures) and in-kind gifts such as meals.
Tiny anecdote: I worked on the campus of a children's hospital. The pharma reps had parking right by the main entrance. The parents of sick children? Expensive, paid parking a mile away.
Someone who's in medical school (or finishes and goes into medicine) isn't really "inside" the pharmaceutical industry and typically has a very, very poor understanding of how pharmaceuticals are developed and brought to market.
The most substantial corruption in the health/life sciences/medicine world is simple profit motive at hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and insurers, and especially when those three entities combine into mega "pay-vidors" like UHG.
You've got to separate the tech from human nature. Penicillin, modern medicine, travel, communication etc. are good. Greed corruption and self interest are a human thing irrespective of whether you have high tech or not. We may make some progress there but it's not really a tech issue.
>a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.
I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.
It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.
> it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit
I continue to be fascinated by how easy people priorities profit over doing the right thing. Sometimes they don't even stand to personally gain all that much, they do it for the benefit of some soulless company.
If you aren't actively making things worse for the general public I'll even let the sole focus on profit slide, but how can you justify to yourself going out and actively causing suffering.
Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
It's easy for people who face no real threat themselves to pretend to take the moral high road by refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers. Not everyone has that luxury.
Technology is still a good thing. It's certain tech business models that are the problem.
Tech used to be a tool. I remember participating in product design conversations in the '00s, and the focus was all on "How can we make people's lives better? How do we create software that makes things more convenient for them, more enjoyable, frees up time and opens up new opportunities for them."
Tech is now a means to turn people into tools. I still sit in product design conversations. Now they are focused on how to manipulate people into clicking on more ads and opening up their wallet more. The applied psychology is very advanced, and is more of a focus than the technology now.
IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model, along with the provision of free products to get people hooked and then upsell them on expensive and (in the big picture, but customers can't see the big picture) insconsequential upgrades. The secret to success in the tech industry is "Demonstrate value. Nurture dependence. Threaten to take away features, unless large amounts of money are paid." In people terms, we call this an abusive relationship, or blackmail. In the tech industry, it's a very profitable business model.
The worst part is this is spreading to other industries like food production and transportation.
A sort of “second order” expression I see of these problems is the sheer quantity of SaaS tools that exist to “fix” a problem, not solve it. These companies have zero interest in actually making anything better. Instead, they exist to sell a “less sharp edges” version of the problem and leech all the money they can. An actual improvement is completely antithetical to their existence, and I suspect most of them would act to destroy a true solution if the opportunity arose.
This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which was inspired by the then-nascent F/OSS movement.
That F/OSS "gift culture" really keeps on giving, eh?
I think it's worth recalling why that optimism, at least in part.
Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.
They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.
Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.
Of course we were optimistic when the internet was young:
• All the world's people will effortlessly be able to communicate and collaborate together? Surely this will bring about an age of open-mindedness and harmony!
• The bulk of the world's information will go digital, and become accessible to anyone? Surely this will relegate ignorance and superstition to problems of the past!
I've never considered myself an optimist, but if someone back then had predicted the internet we have today, I would have written them off as a hopeless cynic.
This is important, the reproducibility of information made the potential for endless bounty seem so prominent at first. I also don't think the antithesis is discussed here; copyright law, the DMCA, and all the ways in which IP helped make tech the dystopia it has become.
I think most people think of themselves as not the problem but some guy will post some Show HN and it will be all middlebrow dismissals. All those people are the people involved here. Lots of guys who “yeah, my GitHub is only empty because I’m a professional and don’t make it public” blah blah. But you know they spend all their time aligning stakeholders and have never written a line of code but have opinions.
well, we're not in the best economy to just "make stuff for fun and share free information". One thing we forget is that such a position is a privilege in and of itself. Either for the young who have guardians to provide for them, the well off who don't need to worry about next months' rent, or the obsessive who give everything in their life as their own.
My GitHub is very rusty, but I'm delaying Open source plans until I have a fully time job. It's just not worth it for me otherwise to try and be this FOSS advocate while I can't keep things stable in my own backyard.
With all the negativity in TFA and in the comments, I just want to point out that objectively, the world's gotten a lot better in a lot of ways.
Extreme poverty is down to almost nothing.
Polio is all but eradicated.
Many types of cancer, death sentences just 20 years ago, are treatable. HIV is practically curable.
You can learn anything you want on YouTube, Wikipedia, and the wider web with time and effort, for free. (The TFA acknowledges this.)
I'm not saying there aren't huge problems. The benefit, to paraphrase, is not evenly distributed. But in nearly every sense it's better to have been born in the 90s than the 60s.
We can and should discuss lack of regulation, legal-but-wrong tax evasion, societal risks, there's plenty of bad to go around. But put it in context - there's a lot of good to go around too.
If you read the entire article you will get to the problem: the rapid information dissemination tech has provided ...
> there is a worrying trend of Tech veering strongly to the right and using the money they get from us and our data for questionable causes.
Tech may have ... not given the election outcome leftists wanted. Twice! It now appears tech will not lead to a communist/socialist utopia, and so they are now the enemy. And so, they will, read the paragraph after this statement:
> The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong. The companies themselves and the VC’s they take money from are supporting values and governments that do not act in your best interest and do not even align with their marketing image. Don’t be further misled. Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
This paragraph comes after more than a page of text pointing out that tech DID in fact, bring a lot of parts, some would say most, of tech utopia.
Frankly, I'm pretty damn sure that the actors responsible for the swing to the right are not FANGs, and not even Twitter. The fact that the world has changed and that China, Russia and Iran ... and "that" ideology's extremists ... have started cooperating and have become a real, serious threat to the lives of billions of people, and are actively killing millions ... I feel that has a lot more to do with the current situation than either Facebook or Amazon. Combined with the failure of governments to keep the economic growth of the past 10 years going (e.g. housing, ...)
The author seems very political along the lines that the majority of Americans who voted for the incoming government are evil.
Like saying YC "CEO, Garry Tan, is known to be vitriolic online, anti-progressive" who you can witness here saying "great outcome for San Francisco. A near clean sweep of moderate Dems" https://x.com/garrytan/status/1854048895162347672
I mean that's another reason for the "swing right" if people favouring moderate dems are denounced as anti-progressive.
Also re a big tech swing to the right, I don't recall the old big tech like IBM and Dow Chemical being a paradise of woke hippies.
I think the author was referring to vitriol such as
> “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew,” he wrote in a since-deleted post on X, formerly Twitter, to his 408,000 followers during the early morning hours of Saturday. “Die slow motherfuckers.”
> When a user noted that Tan seemed drunk, he responded he was. “You are right,” he replied, “and motherfuck our enemies.”
> Tan also posted a picture of a private liquor cabinet — containing two $350 bottles of Balvenie and Macallan whisky and two $32 bottles of Roederer Estate sparkling wine — above a plaque emblazoned with his name: “Garry Tan ‘SF Social Media Troll’ Twitter Menace.”[1]
Ask any historian of science: technology only briefly disrupts, and then reifies existing power structures. A few new people make it into the controlling class, but ultimately tech on its own cannot subvert the power structure in any durable way.
The only surprise is how many intelligent people still believe that utopia is just a few more lines of code away.
Looking at the history of science, technology actually seems pretty good at disrupting and replacing the controlling class. The Renaissance led to the general irrelevancy of the hereditary nobility across most of Europe; the industrial revolution led to the irrelevance of the landed plantation class in the U.S. and the landed gentry in Europe. This is not just a matter of the leaders of the technology revolution being accepted into the existing aristocracy; instead, there's often a series of wars and revolutions where the controlling class of the new technology replaces and then subverts the controlling class of the old order, usually bringing their particular culture and class markers with it.
What technology can't do is get rid of power structures entirely. There will still be a controlling class. It just will be made up with different people.
Society seems to be scale invariant over time. Locally it changes but the overall patterns remain the same, even as we reach unprecedented levels of population and everything it enables and entails.
Could you explain further? This seems pretty untrue on the surface to me; what’s the analogous structure to a corporation in a 1000 person nomad tribe?
I don't mind if you disagree completely, but I have been studying ancient history and archaeology for about two decades now and it's pretty glaring to me. Following this intuition has given me great insight in analysis, strategy and overall making sense of trends and data.
I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. My vision used to be more neutral, then around 2013 it shifted to expecting companies to actively be hostile to me, specially regarding software.
I do relate to seeing elders feeling a sense of bliss upon using WhatsApp to connect to relatives living far away, or friends/acquaintances they couldn't keep in touch with anymore (99% of the time due to age-related issues).
But otherwise, if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control how I use that program, then they likely never had my best interest as a priority in the first place. Sometimes, using such programs is not a choice, or it comes with significant personal/financial cost for the users. But deriving something actionable from this reasoning is hard - policy makers are either to detached from technical details, are actively working against your interest due to corruption, or cannot agree on what the right direction is. I don't have a solution, besides giving some of my time and money to organizations who have consistently acted on the best interests of users, such as the Free Software Foundation, EFF, the Tor Project, etc.
> I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place.
I think it depends what the "old days" are for each generation.
For me it is the early days of the Internet becoming widely available, late 80s to early 90s. Suddenly everyone I know has email, everyone is on usenet, I can talk (i.e. text chat) with anyone around the world.
Which of course we can today. But back then there were no corporations involved (commercial use of the Internet was prohibited), so no marketing involved, it was all real people.
And to me this is a key part:
> if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control
This wasn't a thing. All the communication protocols were open standard (RFCs), the implementations were open source. Every program I used (aside from the OS, which was the domain of proprietary software back then) was one I compiled myself and could modify or rewrite to taste. So it was just us, regular people, who owned and controlled how everything worked and the possibilities were unbounded and thus extremely exciting.
Today mostly we're stuck using proprietary software/apps, or even worse, the "cloud" where the companies control everything.
As much as I can, I still want to control my environment so I stick with open standards like email instead of proprietary chat apps, and I run Linux & FreeBSD, and I avoid phones like the plague since there is no way to own anything on a phone platform.
In 2013 Google Reader has been shut down, and Google defederated from XMPP. That has been the beginning of the end of "Web 2.0". Before that we were naively thinking all those APIs were free, and only the old enemy Microsoft wanted proprietary protocols and vendor lock-in.
At first, Google was very idealistic in its mission, perhaps even doe-eyed in the manner expressed in the article: no defensive patent portfolio to match their level of innovation (until Apple went "thermonuclear" on Android, and started an internecine patent war); open GTalk XMPP federation (until Facebook extracted GTalk users' "social graph[1]" without giving any data back). No internal data controls so that employees could to innovate quickly, trusting they'd do the right thing (until an engineer harassed SF Bay Area teenagers he knew IRL using their Google data), and so on. No technology can win against the human condition.
1. At a time when the hype for social graphs was a little higher than it is for AI now, and Google viewed its battle with Facebook as existential.
> Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
So we just need a nice all encompassing global conflict again that largely leaves the American industrial base alone and then when it is the only one standing there can be another growth in the American middle class.
In all of these cases real incomes grew enormously. Yes, a big part of that was starting from a low base after the destruction of WWII. But I'd argue it was also a strong consequence of the technology of the time: the was an explosion in consumer goods enabled by new tech, but companies still needed lots of employees to create these products. In the past ~25 years I believe tech has instead allowed more wealth to accrue to a smaller and smaller subset of people.
Yes, all fueled by ridiculously abundant/cheap oil. This is something that might not happen in Earth's history ever again, not to mention the climate change issues (which at least weren't clear until much later, 80s rather than 50s for oil depletion issues).
Yeah, I'm personally of the opinion that the 50s-60s economical benefits are not generally sustainable. Similar to China's rise up until now, it's the result of a one time boom often as a zero-sum game with other parts of the world. The humans on the planet are definitely getting a more comfortable life over time, but any individual state with our current political systems I don't feel ever leads to that 50s-60s level of purchasing power for a long time.
I'm not sure about that. Very little was digital back then. It was far easier to claim lack of earnings back then than it is now, even with the high rates
Kind of, yeah. I remember being a teenager in the 90's and it really felt like things were going to be radically different, and better. The cold war was over (well, we thought it was), anybody could talk to anybody else anywhere, anybody could publish anything, and surely this would mean regular people would be more empowered than ever before, right?
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
I don't know how much the internet changed or I changed. Finding some niche forums on Prodigy (so not even the internet) and talking to a small group of people felt a lot different than just going to reddit and finding a forum for whatever random thing I'm looking up.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
Everyone's different but I think I felt like the increasing polish and commercialization of the web killed it slowly. And that makes sense to an extent, as there was money to be made people would invest more (and have entire teams) in making ad-optimised content instead of just having one person cranking out homestarrunner or thebestpageintheuniverse or what have you.
Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.
Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.
Years before 2015 “the internet” for most people had been replaced by “social media” and its was pretty well understood that big tech companies now had a means and motivation to monetize our most toxic traits.
The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.
Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
For me and my cohort (I'm in my early 50s now), yes, absolutely. Again, from my point of view, things got even worse post 2008, with the rise of mobile and social media. The tech world specifically evolved in directions dramatically opposed to the pro-human mood of the 90's towards a much more predatory stance.
Interesting, based on the replies here, maybe it's a somewhat generational thing. I was born in 89, so I remember 9/11 when it happened and the wars that followed, but it wasn't something that I put that much thought into. Similarly, I was barely out of high school and into college in 2008. My main concern was playing video games with my friends and trying to come up with excuses to skip my Minnesota History class.
I'm sure generational differences are a big part of it. I was already in the workforce by the mid 90's, and honestly, it was such an optimistic time, for everyone. Lots of hope for the future. I wish I could share what it was like. It was a remarkable, special time, and even though we thought we knew it, we didn't really appreciate what the actual special aspects were until long after the fact.
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
90s scifi had some penetrating foresight tho... I feel like we're inching closer to Neuromancer's universe as the war festers on in Ukraine, Japan keeps on roboticizing and somehow a mixture of corporate and populist right wing captures the electorates worldwide.
Naive twenty something (back then) here. The latter half of the 1900s changed so drastically that yeah... a Star Trek like utopia seemed plausible, if not inevitable.
It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
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Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will.
For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction.
One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own.
"It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse"
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles).
Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
Ok, but I think the gravity of normal folks bends the industry whether we techies like it or not.
To further subdivide the techie contingent, lots of them have no problem using Windows even though Linux/FLOSS has been viable for a decade or two. So even most techies don't care about the problem.
>It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk
I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.
I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.
Well, maybe it's because I'm Californian. I don't think I'd call myself an insider, I never worked at Google and I'm from Sacramento (which felt painfully un-cool back then!). And the Google I'm talking about would be staffed by Gen X'ers/Xennials at the time mostly - Someone who's 25 in 2001 was born in 1976.
I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.
It definitely brought about a lot of positive changes. It's fair to be disappointed that some of the things we hoped for didn't materialize, and that a lot of negatives were even worse than expected.
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
If you were alive back then: yeah, pretty much? The expectation was that merely getting a tech education would seamlessly and immediately roll you into a six figure job no matter which industry you were interested in, because much like AI today, tech was literally seen as the magic ingredient that had been missing all this time.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
In the year 2000, Google was fresh, the Internet was becoming a normal thing for people to use and it was supposed to get rid of the old power structures and bring about a new age of egalitarianism and meritocracy. Plus I was younger and much more idealistic. And to be fair, it has caused revolutions and caused new power structures to be established, and torn down old ones. But as the old adage goes, it turns out that power corrupts. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'd like to pretend I'd do better with my money if I'd invented PageRank back in the 90's, but having seen how money corrupts people, I'm not convinced that I would.
> “ The companies themselves and the VC’s they take money from are supporting values and governments that do not act in your best interest and do not even align with their marketing image.”
Anyone who thinks ANY publicly traded company acts in YOUR best interest (unless YOU are serious shareholder) is in the words of my 11-year old kid - delulu :)
I'll ask my delulu question here but: where are the angel vestors who DO in fact what to help humanity. Do they exist and are just working "underground"? Or do you just get absorbed into the system once your net worth is past $X million dollars?
Maybe not in rich countries, but internet and smartphones in poorer countries were definitely viewed in a very positive light.
Specifically, "Digital Inclusion" was a term I remember from before smartphones became popular, and how important it was to get everyone on board. Well, smartphones were what brought internet to them, and this progress was celebrated.
With Social Media it was a bit more complicated, as it only became accessible to the general population of poorer countries at the same time it started receiving criticism internationally. They don't remember Myspace.
(EDIT: Maybe you're talking about the article in general, but the paragraph the text you quoted comes from is about smartphones, social media and internet)
In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends, and overwhelm the incumbent minority. Once you could use a sleek, trendy iPhone instead of a clunky desktop computer to get online, the writing was on the wall.
Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us.
I don't think that struggle is really the defining feature here. If anything, many of the most toxic people I can think of in geeky circles are precisely the people who still have a chip on their shoulder about something that happened in middle school.
I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
> Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable
For me it was tech in the 90’s and 00’s so I think the real explanation is even simpler: we grew up.
It’s very easy to be pure of intention and intellectual curiosity when mom fills the fridge.
My take while reading OP was that the author simply grew up. When young and idealistic it's easy to believe the utopian marketing. In reality, business is the same as it's always been.
I do think politics has gotten worse in the "post-truth era". And tech certainly enabled that. It's hard to blame anyone in particular, though. One thing we see in the show "Connections" is that it's always hard to predict the consequences of new technology. Even seeing it coming, it's not fair to believe tech workers should have saved us from the rightward swing.
I feel like "business is the same as it's always been [so things aren't getting worse]" is kind of like saying "I'm smoking exactly as much as I have for the past 20 years, how can I only just have cancer now?" It's not that the problem is new, it's that the disease is degenerative.
A lot of the people I recall interacting with on Usenet in the mid 1990s were very much grown up, graduated, far away from “mom”, and employed as developers or uni staff somewhere. However, they still enjoyed hacking, either out of pure fun or FOSS idealism, and without monetary reward very much in mind. I think that the OP is on to something when he says that the economic environment changed, and this led to nerd things being seen through a much more mercenary lens.
Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
> awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
I don't think it was a change. Both things existed in parallel, with a little bit of crossover. The startup/VC/megacorp thing just won out, that's all. And nobody ever really doubted that it would, once it was visible.
>Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
I don't think that was the case. Go and read the stories of the founders of companies like Apple, Atari, Adobe and others from that era and you will find they all took investments to get started.
The old Internet was definitely my support network, I met a lot of people I could relate to back then, totally different from "IRL people". The Internet is the opposite of that for me now. Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Do they all feel as lonely as I do?
1. Fear and embarrassment. Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous, today you constantly hear about doxxing. People were also less aware of the consequences.Even if it's unlikely for some random person, that doesn't help introverts.
2. Outnumbered. Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird. Today, "new" and "random" are filled with spam, and "popular" is filled with posts upvoted by "normies". Weird posts and posters are still here, but they're obscured by the noise.
3. Feedback. People imitate what they see, and feel more comfortable following trends. When "normal" people see weird posts, they become weird and make weird posts. When weird people see weird posts, they feel safer and make weird posts. When normal people see non-weird posts, they make non-weird posts. When weird people don't see weird posts, they feel embarrassed making weird posts, so post non-weird or not at all.
I think 3 is the biggest factor, caused by 2. As other people mentioned, "weird" people are still on servers that are private or otherwise hidden from the mainstream (preventing 2 and 3). 1 is probably not a big factor, instead it explains why less people show their face or post identifying details.
> Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous [...] Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird.
What years are you referring to when you say "back then"? In the early 90s, which was "the old Internet" for me, the best contributors to discussions on the newsgroups I followed (comp.lang.c, etc.) weren't anonymous; they were well-educated people who used their real names, including academics whose signatures included URLs like http://example.edu/~jsmith. And their posts weren't weird, at least not on the newsgroups I followed.
"weird" isn't a good description. Specifically, most people on the internet back then were well-educated computer nerds, so the typical post would be more relatable to those on HN and arguably (according to those on HN) "higher quality".
These people aren't "weird" in a bad way, but in a "different than the average (less-educated, less tech-oriented) person" way.
The anonymity part probably isn't correct. But I get the impression people back then were a lot more open, at least hearing about dating sites, chat-roulette, old YouTube channels, and internet friends who met IRL in the 90s/2000s. Although I know a lot of people post on Facebook and Twitter, so maybe that hasn't changed either.
The cohort immediately after you described - those geeks grew up along with growth of videogame market, IMs, and birth of multi-player gaming on the Internet. People who were still geeks, and learned from all those academics and realname adults, but who also had to come up with nicknames early on, and got used to pseudonymity this way.
My dad had a simpler take: The early Internet was filtered essentially by wealth and intelligence. You had to have a (relatively) expensive setup, and you had to be the type to be "on the bleeding edge" of technology. That didn't necessarily mean you were a "nerd" or "weird". This group included researchers at government labs, university professors, military, etc... Anywhere where the Internet had early adoption was over-represented. I remember NASA and CERN as significant fractions of the entire Internet in the earliest days!
I remember debates on the talk.origins usenet newsgroup with very highly educated priests, some at the highest levels of the church. These people wouldn't give me the time of day now!
In some sense it's the same filter that a University admissions process applies, and companies like Google try to reproduce.
As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets. I'm in a Fediverse community with a bunch of nerds, and many of us just met in person at this week's Handmade conference.
You can watch the entire conference here. I want to disclaim that not every attendee and talk is nerdy. It's more that this is a space where nerds are thriving.
Niche forums and gaming communities? HN? They've grown up, some have become braiwashed by corporate culture, some have wives, kids, dogs, cats, mortgages.
> adults don't have time for following a Discord per every topic they're interested in.
Funny, I do just that, despite having a bunch of pets and a full-time job - I follow at least 30 game-specific discords. You must be thinking of people compulsively checking notifications like a social media addict?
I feel sorry for anyone who uses Discord like that. Thankfully, you don't have to since many communities now have mini-wikis inside of the Discord to organize the FAQ/common knowledge.
I run a small network, but this might come across as advertising. It’s been running for 20 years now.
People come and go, but its wild how the community spirit largely remains, even with significant changes in the lifestyle of the people that have been frequenting the network for a large segment of that time.
They've needed support since antiquity. I recall Tycho Brahe getting into an argument with his serfs after he was made a lord that eventually went to court. What's changed is that it no longer requires extravagant wealth to produce one.
I mean, when there's enough financial incentive, all the gatekeeping in the world won't stop the wave of people hoping to get rich. They'll pay off many of the nerds who were thought to be resistant to such means.
The fact is, it not the Internet that failed us, but education. Education quality in the US has declined a lot since the 60s. Now education is only used to create bio-robots, not people who can still think critically.
In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything.
A slightly different take on this was a school I attended in Mississippi --- classes were divided between academic and social --- academic classes (science, math, languages) were attended at one's ability level (w/ a four grade cap for students through 4th grade, so a 4th grader couldn't take higher than 8th grade classes), while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were taken at one's grade level.
Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
Sounds like a great argument for someone with a special interest to make private schools more appealing (not that I think you have that. Just people who can tell public schools not to be too good).
It will be interesting to see (as someone without skin in the game 'cause I live in Sweden but having seen a similar type of downward development towards 'equity' here) whether the incoming government will make good on its promise to abolish the department of education which was put in place by Carter in 1979. While the press is doing its best to portray this as a terrible idea which will create mayhem and lead to the quality of education to fall even further it is a fact that the quality of education has markedly deteriorated since its inception while its mission is supposed to be the opposite [1]. Most of the news I've seen regarding education in the USA has trended towards the negative: programs for gifted pupils are shut down because they lead to a decrease in 'equity' where some pupils gain advantages over others, the debacle around extended school closures during the SARS2 unpleasantness, the oversized influence of the (extremely politically biased) teachers' unions, the lack of school choice in many places combined with the influence of districting - where you live decided which school you attend - and more. To me it seems clear the department has failed in its mission and with that needs to be either closed down or overhauled. Given that it is a relatively young department and that educational outcomes were better before it was created - keeping in mind that this does not necessarily indicate a causal relation - it makes sense to abolish this department and relegate essential tasks back to where they were before it was created.
> There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
> statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.
But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.
well, "cool" is too subjective to really say much, especially when only thinking on a micro level. I think a better phrasing of that is that "dumbness" is being more mainstream today (in the US) than before. Some states are back to banning more books than ever in schools, the country was split over something as basic as medicine ( a few choosing horse de-wormer over a professionally approved vaccine), etc.
There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".
The U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2022.
The top five math-scoring countries in 2022 were all in Asia.
U.S. students' math scores have remained steady since 2003.
Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.
The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 12th in its 2024 Competitiveness Report after ranking first in 2018.
I'd say 16th (<20th percentile) is really bad when the US is 2nd in spending (behind Luxemburg, apparently) per student in the world. especially if science is the best statistic to show to begin with.
falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.
If you removed the reference to the 70s, This comment could have been stated at any time from 1750 to today and only by grammar would you be able to pick out when it was made.
"In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends"
Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?
Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?
Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.
So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
It is indeed a human flaw, and a futuristic society would be designed to take this into account instead of blindly relying on faith and acting surprised, repeatedly, when it fails.
Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc.
An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent.
"An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available."
Total surveillance?
Or only all technical information?
But transparency of all the organisations, so all the police information as well?
So the murder suspects knows, where the police is looking for them? (Or won't there be a need for a police like organisations because murder is also somehow solved?)
My point is, devil is in the details. And Marx is not someone I would go for inspiration. Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Also, I really don't believe that the problem is a human flaw. I don't want to change humans. (It happens naturally anyway).
But I do believe, that we can create better societies, that serves us better, the way we are.
It is just hard, to create them from scratch for various reasons, but many people are trying and some quite succesful.
Crime would be a fraction of what it is now due to a massive shifting in incentives and societal landscape, and probably dealt with very differently when it does occur instead of turning it into its own for-profit industry (with some of the lowest paid labor among prisoners). Knee jerk reactionary notions of "justice" begin to look very primitive through a materialist lens.
> Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Marxism offers a timeless framework and does not require subscriptions or other grifts. That the latter exists does not invalidate the former. It's just example 100539 of what my previous reply was getting at.
> I don't want to change humans.
Humans deserve better opportunities than most presently have, and than most will seemingly have on our current trajectory into late stage capitalist madness. We should acknowledge/embrace our flaws to see commonality (which is different than being ashamed, proud of, or profiting off of them).
Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outside social factors, as well as internet-related developments like the rise of microblogging that doesn’t encourage nuance and rewards partisan performativity) can lead nerds to act harmfully.
In my opinion where this behavior really began to run rampant was with the popularization of quippy “dunk" quote-tweets (though this may have earlier precedent, perhaps on tumblr). It’s a deeply antisocial action that just about every internet connected demographic has come to partake in.
Also the nerds bully in the most lazy and untalented ways. They think they "own" somebody by writing lol or lmao with their takes.
Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.
Well we made it “idiot proof” didn’t we, and all the idiots came. We need a sort of Dark Web with low crime, and mostly that’s things like HN and people running private Slack instances.
In a way it kind of exists, you have Gopher and Gemini. The main links I know of.
gopher://sdf.org
gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org
I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
I was thinking about a Twitter clone where your account goes through an approval process where you provide a short essay and your Hacker News username. Client has no tracking, and uses no JavaScript.
So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Fidonet... Woe unto them, for they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind. Their troubles shall multiply as bugs and glitches in their software.
There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be:
1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and
2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys
We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
Personally I think the iPhone was the turning point for much of the dystopian era.
Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better.
But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device.
People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing.
Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.
I don’t think it was about stupidity it was about desire, they would not want to come here because it’s just talking to other nerds on bbs. But bandwidth increased and porn and flash games opened the floodgates.
I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
I do not think that porn and flash games were the reason the internet became trendy and stupid. I blame social media, like tuenti, facebook, fotolog, hi5, even myspace.
The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
I’m old enough to have been there, the internet became popular long before modern social media became a thing. Think Geocities -> MySpace —> Facebook etc.
Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.
Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.
I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.
Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.
Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture
These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
> Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.
You mean the guy who sells electric cars? I'm aware that he also bought and -- apparently deliberately -- sabotaged a social media platform that had itself been one of the main engines of this very problem for about a decade. Apart from that, what examples of his conduct are you considering?
I encourage you to listen to the 4 part series Elon Musk Unmasked [1] from Tech won't save us.
His motivations are definitely not for the betterment of the average person.
But I'm not sure I can relate to the criticism you're levying here, because I don't expect that anyone's motivations would ever be "for the betterment of the average person", nor trust anyone who pretended to be so motivated.
Society improves when people create positive externalities for others as they pursue their own benefit -- those who deliberately apply their own subjective notion of "benefit" onto strangers they don't know and to whom they aren't accountable will often do much more harm than good.
I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person." (Not really take offense, more like armchair take offense, but you know what I mean.)
My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.
Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.
One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
> I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person."
I'm afraid no offense is on offer (and it's rude to take things that aren't offered to you).
But to the point, anyone who said such a thing is either (a) lying, or (b) is projecting their own notion of what's better/best onto other people without those other people's involvement. Neither case reflects a trustworthy individual -- the first is motivated by malice, and the second is motivated by arrogance.
> My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people.
Would you stop working on those projects if you were convinced they wouldn't improve the world for the greatest number of people, but were still interesting and useful to you?
If the people who you thought they were going to benefit didn't agree with you, and didn't want to use what you were offering them, would you accept that, or would you resent them and begin contriving ways to get them using it anyway?
Do you acknowledge that there's at least a little bit of arrogance inherent in having any beliefs about what's better for other people without those other people's own input?
> Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Again meaning no offense, but I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I find all of these to be more than a little bit bizarre and creepy, and I think there's a great deal of hubris involved in presenting your LLM chatbot as unironically messianic.
> One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
A lot of us did that. The OP article is precisely about how those exact intentions of a couple of decades ago have had quite different outcomes to what was intended.
On a spectrum he is definitely in that direction. There are many examples but a few:
a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
b) Has constantly promoted false stories about immigrants, black people, trans people, women etc. The narrative being that the US is a zero sum game where in order for non-white males to succeed white-males must lose.
c) I run Twitter business accounts which are post-only and every single one shifted hard towards showing ultra-right wing political content in the For You feed. There is no doubt that the platform was used as a propaganda tool during the last election.
>a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
Hmm, you must have missed when the Department of Justice sent protestors to Florida to pressure a local district attorney into pressing charges against a very clearly innocent man. And if you disagree with the very clearly innocent part then you definitely didn't watch the trial and missed the eyewitness reports and the medical reports.
Just that they provided support to those protests which is part of their remit i.e. to reduce conflict by encouraging dialog, mediation as opposed to protesting etc: https://www.justice.gov/crs
Just wait and see what he'll do to the federal workers, before he gets to screw up Mars for good. Maybe replace them with AI, since that's the current hype train. Think of full self driving but for government.
I think the word for what is about to happen is not yet invented. It will be something else, something with dire consequences but of a different kind. Something that leaves everyone but a thin elite completely behind. Some may say it has been like this a long time, but I think it will evolve/level up to something we have never seen before.
Some call what they fear to come is fascism, but I think it will be inaccurate. Oligarchism maybe. Or something new.
Firing Federal workers so that ultra-rich people can do whatever they want without any oversight, while at the same time undermining the rule of law, and creating a scapegoat ("illegal immigrants") at the same time - that's literally fascism.
In 1944, before the actual universally agreed upon to be fascist powers were defeated in WW2, George Orwell wrote about how the word had been applied to just about every group imaginable and had already lost any real meaning it might have had:
"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
"Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come."
"But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."
What makes it the "best" in your opinion? Looking at the list, several of the points could be applied to just about every modern nation-state, several easily apply to communist states just as easily as fascist states, and there are several that don't apply to many states that most people would argue are fascist. For example, Salazar's Portugal is widely regarded as fascist but points 9, 10, 11, and 13 (and maybe more) don't really apply to it.
It strikes me more as someone trying to give fascism a formal definition as a way to use it as an ideological cudgel in arguments than any attempt to define it based pn observation of multiple actual fascist states and political movements.
Hmmmm, I can't quite put my finger on what it is but I suspect there are some fundamental differences between firing a bunch of bureaucrats from the federal government vs. Hitler's purge of the SA or Stalin's purge of the Soviet officer corps.
Except he can't be banned from TwitterX like Trump. Imagine Musk as a future Republican candidate with a social network. This DODGE thing is a political ramp for him. The other potential candidate is Zuckerberg with his fascination with ancient Rome. Both are hardly the types to retreat silently and open a charitable foundation like Bill Gates.
"Musk can't highlight specific examples of the federal government pissing our tax money down the drain because of how other people who see it might react."
It is completely legitimate to argue about the use of taxpayer money.
It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
>It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
Which Musk didn't do? Are all the people who said "Trump is a threat to democracy" and similar statements responsible for the multiple assassination attempts against him?
Yes, yes, we all know it - Elon Musk eats babies and Tesla batteries set Rome on fire.
Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.
"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.
Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.
For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).
> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.
My catchphrase for a while has been "business ruins everything it touches." And before someone swoops in to try and convince me otherwise, save your breath. I'm not interested in hearing the positives of business, I will ignore outright anything pointing to "you wouldn't have THIS without business!"-type replies, and I don't want to reduce this thought further.
From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.
I get your point, though to me, there's way too many babies per cubic meter of that bathwater of yours.
My own general explanation of why everything sucks is more like this: we don't know how to stop. The market can't stop itself from over-optimizing, over-exploiting.
The evolution of any product, service, company or technology, can be to a first approximation plotted as a bell curve:
total value provided to society
^
| ....
| .. ..
| ... ...
| .... ....
| ..... .....
------------------------------------> time
(Total value includes not just direct benefit to customers/users, but also how it enables others to build new products/science/businesses/etc. on it.)
The market always goes all the way to the right. What it should do, what we need it to do, is to stop at the peak of the bell curve. Alas, there is no mechanism that would get people to say, "yeah, this is the best it could be, let's go do something else"; the market demands they move to the right, all the way to diminishing returns.
I think back to all of those people talking breathlessly of really free speech and me nodding along just as convinced. Yikes.
I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
Clunky desktop computers connected to the internet in the 90s were already an easy mode. It's a weird point in time to pull the ladder up. I wonder if the people in the 70s shared the same sentiment.
I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
> to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends
This.
There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.
Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.
Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
I often joke that social media or even just the comments section is the great filter of the Fermi paradox. As time passes it feels depressingly less of a joke.
>Growing up, there was a more positive view of tech. The future looked awesome
I think that may be a bit biased. There was also Threads, Terminator 2, Blade Runner, Robocop, Planet of the Apes, Escape from New York, Brazil, Mad Max and the like.
From my experience mentoring junior designers Ive learned to set the utopian belief that "its all for the user" is a matter of perspective. A stakeholder is also a user and their utopia is different from any preconceived ideal user an upset designer might have. It can be more constructive to enable the continuation of and building up of new fantasies rather than see it as a doomsday scenario where the good times have ended. they never existed and they always existed its just how you look at it. solve problems and harmonize the multi-utopias :)
In this regard, I see a lot of projects aiming to "optimize user experience" that are actually optimizing for imaginary users at the expense of real ones.
GNOME is a great example of this -- they're constantly removing functionality over the objections of their actual userbase in order to implement features that fit the speculative needs they project onto people who don't -- and likely never will -- use the software.
The lead designer for Homegrocer (Amazon Fresh but too early) was in my social circle, friend of my friends, and the part he didn’t like about his job was that you still had to push the high margin items that the grocery stores put in easy reach to get your visit to be profitable to them. So there’s a moral hazard for things like search filters and sorting. As a customer I’d love to sort by price per unit. But they don’t want that (look at how many items are priced per pound in one size and per ounce in another).
I think this idea of “for the user” is a symptom of being trapped in a certain worldview. For some people, the only form of productive organization they can imagine is a company, which consists of an insular minority of producers, and a large majority of consumers. In such a structure, how can the minority of producers possibly know, anticipate, and retain concern for the interests of the consumers? They have to cross this huge gap between them and their users to do so. Eventually, the company grows larger and that gap between users and decision makers widens to the point where the company loses favor, and this process is inevitable so long as the structure of “company” is presumed necessary for the making of the product. I think open source communities demonstrate a potential alternative route.
I don't remember believing in any tech utopia for a very long time. On the other hand I regularly see people who still believe we are a few years away from AGI creating one for us. So while it's over for the author it's not so for others.
Personally I can name both areas where tech improved my life beyond expectations (not having to live near work for one) as well as huge disappointments (such as people willingly choosing to believe lies en masse despite truth becoming easily accessible).
I feel there was a time, the good time, when techies and nerds decided the direction of tech development, cause they did it out of curiosity, interested and fun for science and experiments.
But this time is long gone.
Now the direction of tech is dictated by management and marketing people which have little or no love for the tech itself as for the business model and money it can generate.
Optimism or techno-optimism is the idea that we can fix things with the right know-how. It's a psychological strategy to avoid noticing that there are dark forces which aim to control, destroy and sow despair, perhaps conveying temporary advantages to those who ally with them. Some take a religious or supernatural view of these things; others think they are facets of consciousness which spread virally from brain to brain.
Whatever you believe it seems clear that one's experience of life and the world is dominated by inner experience and mental well-being, not by luxuries or technological convenience. One could live in a palace, drive flying cars and so on but still suffer dreadfully.
Although my personal disposition is fairly sunny, verging on the manic, my model of how the world and how my life works is not one of optimism but rather a series of defeats occasionally punctuated by an unexpected victory. Sort of like the fall of the Berlin Wall or how Gollum accidentally destroyed the ring. Eucatastrophe was Tolkien's name for it.
But isn't know-how how you got to this world view of yours? If you could do it, so can others, and technology does improve the global know-how. Even if some also use it to "control, destroy and sow despair" as you say. There would be people doing that anyway, as history shows. The printing press was the same, but I think we can all agree that the net result is positive. So is, in my view, the modern "tech".
> It's a psychological strategy to avoid noticing that there are dark forces which aim to control, destroy and sow despair
I thought techno-optimists/technocrats fully acknowledge the inevitable presence of bad actors, but believe that with a proper design they would be unable to do any significant harm. Am I wrong?
Of course, whenever such designs are possible in reality is a whole different issue (and the reason for a lot of disappointment). I’m merely surprised by this idea that bad actors are somehow not noticed.
I personally don’t know what the author is talking about.
My whole family now works from home in their pajamas, gets anything they want delivered next day to their door, and has access to all the knowledge in the world literally in their pocket. Is that utopia? I don’t know. But it sure beats life in the 1990s.
My kids (10, 7, and 5) try going outside to play every day and all of the neighbor kids are tucked inside doing whatever the hell it is kids do nowadays.
I lived in a very similar suburb in the '90s and had many, many other kids to play with outside every day. Bicycling, sports, adventures, you name it…
For them, I am 100% positive that 2024 does not beat 1994. They all seem so ridiculously lonely.
I think you're both right, though in different ways.
GP is correct that life today "beats" that from the 90s -- as far as convenience/friction is concerned.
OTOH, just like how "sitting is the new smoking", a 100% frictionless life is not better in every way. It atrophies several important faculties like the ability to deal with boredom (or people who aren't exactly your type), focus for long periods of time on work, etc.
Viewed from this perspective (and as a parent myself), I agree that 2024 does not beat 1994.
Ah, I feel dirty for writing this, but — not everyone should’ve gotten a voice in the internet. Unfortunately, it’s a “loudest and proudest wins” scenario, which halts gradual progress. And yes, maybe I shouldn’t have gotten a venue to speak either.
There are instructive precedents in the history of communications technology, where early optimism by innovators was displaced by the interests of other stakeholders. From "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu, https://archive.is/4fKyt
> The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the only nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news.. Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively.. When the major channels for moving information are loyal to one party, its effects, while often invisible, can be profound.
It bothers me a bit that the author still buys some propaganda and whitewashing, as evidenced by footnote 42.
This is especially ironic when the author expresses skepticism of the social benefit of smartphones in paragraph 2, as if no company in particular made them.
I feel like you aren't reading this in context? It's important the author address the obvious reply, and they clearly state those efforts are not enough.
That's a strange interpretation of a citation of the last footnote, as if I hadn't read the entire article.
> those efforts are not enough
But I'm stating that those so-called "efforts" are mostly just propaganda to whitewash the vast amount of bad done by the perpetrators and can only naively be interpeted as using "their money for good".
My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.
Our actions certainly are, and if we think we have free will, we ought to be able to control those. And I think it is possible for us to do so.
But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about.
We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.
This is my sentiment too. It feels like the world is entering a dark period like it has many times before in history. I don't consider tech to be the cause, but it does seem to accelerate and amplify things.
> My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
Ok so I'm curious about this.
In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?
Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
None of this has anything to do with technology itself, though. All tools used by humans will be put to the purposes that those humans bear.
The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity.
After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean.
A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project.
Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.
I'm not genX but I felt the same. Even as late as the late 00s there was still widespread optimism about what the internet would bring. By the late 10s that feeling was completely gone.
I don’t fully disagree with what you say. I think social media also has some positives. The amount of transparency over government and exchange of knowledge and ability to learn is greater now than ever before. Hopefully we will swing back to a balanced lifestyle where phones and social media are just tools that people use in a limited way instead of being addicted to it.
My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
Mainly that people have a place to share things that are happening, spread them, etc. There is just far greater awareness. For example locally there are people who attend council meetings or other such events and report on things that the newspaper doesn’t. I don’t mean that the government itself is more transparent voluntarily - although I guess they do share some basic things like public notices via social media channels.
The key factor is that the success of the establishment breeds bureaucracy, while the disruptive growth has stalled. Case in point, who would think that the once most innovative company, Google, could become the most bureaucratic organization in merely 15 years.
People got excited when our tech solves their real problems. It looks we've been in a plateau since before the Covid with a couple of exceptions.
As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.
But I wonder how many people have had a change of heart, and how much is just the influx of younger people and others with different opinions. Now that tech went through a "glamorous" phase, and is still in a "lucrative" phase, it certainly has a much broader draw.
It's fine for people to update their beliefs with their experiences, I'm just curious if the cause is that vs new people with different beliefs. I haven't really been on social media (other than curated subreddits and HN, I suppose), and I have a lovely wife and children and lots of real life time, too, so I feel like I don't doom scroll or anything. I wonder how much that's colored people's opinions vs first hand experiences.
As a simple example, the tech ethics question du jour when I was coming of age was whether it was okay to pirate music. Of course it was, it's free to copy bits! "You wouldn't download a car" etc. But I don't see a ton of daylight between that and training those songs on an AI model, but now generative AI is destroying those industries and musicians, etc. And HN these days seems largely against the AI training, while it was for pirating back then.
Or another example, slightly before that was the Clipper Chip and the government trying to regulate encryption for the safety and security of citizens, and the PGP guys being folk heroes for printing their source code in a book to take advantage of free speech protections and get around it. Whereas these days a good chunk of HN wants the government to regulate AI models for our own safety. This one is a bit of a stretch, but it feels like the problems "rhyme" at least.
HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.
I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it.
Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?
So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?
that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments.
ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.
Not saying you are wrong, but let's not dismiss the need for good argumentation when you say something out of the norm. Dissidence with arguments does a great service to everyone involved.
Having said that, people here do downvote based on opinion allignment, which is very hurtful. I've seen perfectly legit comments (with sources) that are out of the norm being downvoted because people just don"t agree with them
if you turn showdead on in your profile, you'll see a lot of absolute crap that should be dead. But I've also started to notice more and more comments that don't deserve to be flagged dead. Just comments against the hivemind, which sucks. I asked dang if he'd be willing to give an endpoint that just surfaces dead items but he refused.
HN is useful for discussion on cutting edge stuff. It's a great place to overhear conversations about what's important to tech people. I've learned a lot from this community. But you're right -- certain insular, minority opinions seem to get unusual airtime here. They make the discussions unbalanced.
I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments. If enough users here used it, it would reverse these trends and force dissenting opinions to be taken seriously. This is not reddit, where the average greyed out comment is some nazi stuff. Here, most greyed out comments are just feather rustlers doing their duty. We are lucky to have them, else we surround ourselves with sycophants and yes-people.
> As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.
I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism.
Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.
I am one of those people who got into tech as a teen in the late 90s when Microsoft was the capitalist bad guy, Google was the underdog, and Linux was socialism. Things were largely contained to the tech ecosystem.
What I find interesting is as tech has grown and people enter it who are not that interested in tech is you see tech’s influence seems to have gone further and further away from our industry niche.
Do I think VCs should be making decisions for millions of Americans so they can get more rich? No. Do I think tech workers should push a progressive narrative that the rest of the country should ascribe to? No.
Tech has an undue influence on the world on both the left and right. All of us mistakenly ascribe our unique situation as how the world should work. Maybe we should just focus on what we are good at?
I'm an erstwhile techno-optimist who was disabused of his Panglossian views by the Utah Data Center, drone warfare (now advanced to the point of remotely piloted rifles gunning people down on the streets of Gaza), crypto ponzis, AI enclosing and monetizing decades of humanity's collective mental efforts, and the general indifference or even embrace by most of the tech community of all of the above. Technology has liberatory potential, but not in the hands currently wielding it.
I don't think this actually has anything to do with tech itself. Society in general is in a more pessimistic mood than a decade ago, driven on by all sorts of institutions pumping out content that everything is bad, so you should upend the world in their vision.
Maybe I was just too young and inattentive 16 years ago, but before the GFC and Occupy, I don't think there was such a pessimistic narrative overall, and it only got worse over time.
Same. What the author writes seems more of a consequence of economic anxiety and the resulting populism (e.g. "big corporations bad, profit bad") than tech itself.
A lot of people who criticize tech, like the author, would often excuse non-commercial or personal actors for doing the same thing (e.g. "regular people using LLMs are fine, big corporations using LLMs are bad"), which shows that they believe that "doing it for a profit" makes the moral difference. So it has nothing to do with tech at all, but rather whether or not the actor is doing it for a commercial purpose.
To help with your wonderings, I was a tech optimist who became pessimistic. I enjoy working on and thinking about technology problems, but it's so hard to keep my own creations from going on to become harmful. Perhaps my pessimism began with Jevons paradox. If I got a redo, I'd pick a different field.
In the Bay Area six figures ($100000) is poverty level even for a single person. Officially. An average software developer supporting a family on a single income in the Bay means a below median family income. No, it's not starvation. But I would hardly call living paycheck-to-paycheck "lucrative".
But you see the contrast between "you are a valuable and well-compensated knowledge worker" and "you have to move somewhere more appropriate for your working-class income"? And how can anyone continue to say this is lucrative with a straight face?
I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation.
It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.
Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.
Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.
We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.
If you're not on social media, you might be missing part of what has changed people's minds. Social media is the biggest consumer-facing technological innovation of the last two decades, and it's financially lucrative, but also net-bad for society. I have a sense that we should do something about it, but as you say, doing something would require repudiating the values I held when I was younger.
The two biggest advancements in tech in recent years: Crypto and AI have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable. And arguably have done far more harm than good.
Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world.
So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.
I love this website. It captures how people think they have unique opinions about <new_technology> being bad, but in reality, it's a tale as old as time.
No one wants to be the person resistant to change and progress. But the fact of the matter is that most people are, even technologists, even here on HN.
20 years from now, when AI-generated drugs are curing major diseases and scarcity is even less common, these comments will be just another entry in the Pessimists' Archive.
I really love the website too. Your last paragraph reminded me about this text from this excellent essay Misunderestimating Openness by James Boyle:
> Will we look back on today’s anguish over open content being mined to train neural networks and marvel at how blind we were to the importance of huge, open datasets for democratic, transparent AI? Will we say that the mining of open content is vital if we want models that are less biased than those trained on smaller proprietary datasets? Will we think that open datasets are also vital if we care about barriers to entry in the new world of the data-rich and data-poor?
Crypto has been one of the largest wealth transfers ever seen. With the level of criminality e.g insider trading, rug pulling, money laundering being unprecedented for a new technology i.e.
AI has seen the less well-off parts of society e.g. artists, customer service lose work in favour of making productivity higher for knowledge workers etc.
To be fair, whether or not this is "more harm than good" depends on your moral views.
> Crypto has been one of the largest wealth transfers ever seen.
Need a citation for this.
> With the level of criminality e.g insider trading, rug pulling, money laundering being unprecedented for a new technology
Not all crime is bad. I just so happen to belong to a marginalized group that requires crypto to do financial activities (e.g. commissions, donations for activist fronts). I am grateful for crypto's existence, even though like many (even in the crypto community), scams are disliked.
> artists, customer service lose work in favour of making productivity higher for knowledge workers etc
It is true that automation in general seems to increase inequality amongst education lines [1]. But the solution isn't to ban automation, it's to have equal-opportunity education (e.g. subsidies, retraining for obsoleted workers) and to financially support those that get left behind.
The energy consumption of both crypto and AI are way overstated. Total energy budget of crypto is less than a percent of world electricity consumption (not energy consumption, electricity). And a ton of that electricity is particularly no-carbon.
AI is harder to get numbers for and obviously is a moving target, but plausibly half of the consumption that crypto is.
I still love technology. It's only getting more amazing all the time. If you view just that, we're not just living in the future, but way beyond.
The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh.
So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.
I’m an old guy (older than you at least) who’s been working in and around tech since the 90s.
What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present.
The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways.
That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things.
But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.
So much this. I joined the web in ’97 and back then we had this optimism that the Internet would make the world a better place because it would act as fertilizer for ideas and critical thinking. Some three decades later it’s obvious that this didn’t happen and I’d dare say that social media made the world a worse place. And it’s something that I’m thinking quite frequently the last years trying to figure out what went wrong or if we were just naïve.
How is this different from previous periods in which technology companies harmed people and society as well? (Think coal mines, cars, television, what have you).
I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.
There are so many examples. Widespread ubiquity of pornography and gambling. Proliferation of unstable “gig” work. Flows of large amounts of cash into politics.
There’s a lot more. Like I said there are good effects too but it’s disingenuous to claim there aren’t immediately obvious negative consequences.
Writing like this makes me grateful that technology has essentially always been just another “thing” to me and that growing up it was never presented as a harbinger of liberation.
The plethora of gadgets, gizmos and sights and sounds that painted my perception of the 90s and 00s just felt like the way it was, until it wasn’t.
Most shocking of all is how almost every free-software, anti-big-government, anti-big-business, and libertarian advocate swallowed these allegedly "smart" alleged "telephones" -- which are obviously computers that someone else controls and utterly disempower the users -- to the utter disregard of every principle they said they believed.
Don't call it a "computer" (computers are scary), call it a "smart" "telephone." Or call it a "device" as if it were a can opener.
Don't call it a "program" (programmers are geeks), call it an (ugh) "app" [which is just short for "application program" of course]
Never had one of those nefarious handheld treacherous computers, never will, thanks.
The problem I see with free software advocates is they're basically trying to paddle upstream to a destination that is not particularly desirable. Most people don't care if they can go visit their local water treatment works and propose modifications – they really, really want their water to be drinkable and would prefer some regulation and oversight from the state.
Sorry to inform you that humans are just horny, aggressive and fear-driven chimpanzees with slightly more cognitive skills. If you thought technology was going to change that, you are mistaken.
What did you think you would obtain by giving technology to a bunch of horny, aggressive and fear-driven monkeys? Other than making monkeys more effective at making each other horny, aggressive and afraid?
> Educational content is still there, but everything is getting increasingly more paywalled. Scientific data is still harder to access and read21. The sensationalized rage bait articles are freely accessible, but the thorough analyses and takedowns are restricted22.
In a lot of ways, I feel like this author still believes in (a slightly modified version of) the tech utopian fantasy. Do we really think that a) research is HARDER to access today than in the 2000s, and b) that the thing keeping sensationalized rage bait popular is paywalls around research papers?
Utopias are always fantasies. All of them. There is no such thing and never will be. Solve problems and more problems present themselves, often harder ones since we are always swimming against entropy.
That’s life. Life is war against entropy and for the individual at least entropy always wins. We die.
The Internet made countless things better and a few things worse. We notice the things it made worse because humans have a powerful negativity bias, probably because this was adaptive. “Mistake a bush for a lion and you’re fine, but mistake a lion for a bush and you’re dead.” Your ancestors were paranoid enough to survive.
Edit: I do want to add one point on which I am sympathetic. Unfortunately it seems as if politics is a thing the Internet made worse. That’s dangerous because governments have a monopoly on force. Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse is probably an existential problem.
> Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse
I don't think it's just a systems problem. Sure, systems can help, but education is even more important. Recognizing it's terrible is valuable too (I hope most people have recognized that...).
I recommend Julia Galef's Scout Mindset[1] as an inspiration for the kind of change that I believe is needed. (perhaps the most book of the 3rd millenium? :P ) We need to boost our immunity against fake news and extreme discourse. Information now is what is decisive, and viral (and wrong, misleading, hateful, etc.) information can spread very quickly.
Apart from that, more compassion in general. We're very good at teaching kids about "productive" things they are interested in, but very poor about ethics and meta things, like compassion for fellow beings, the importance of a peaceful and kind discourse to the survival of civilization.
Historically utopia had this association. But I think if an utopia is impossible, then it's less interesting. There has to be something achievable that's worth striving for. It's not going to be perfect of course, but I'm confident it exists somehow.
I also think Utopia is as much as about the small as the big. Tolkien famously had his utopia in the Hobbit way of living, with a simple, relatively wealthy, relatively peaceful society -- but with great interpersonal relationships and all the little things (literally :) ).
People definitely latch on to the negatives, and that is in itself a big part of the problem of social media type platforms today.
Sure there's misinformation etc, but I'd much rather what we have today - it's not perfect, but it is so much easier to learn topics, so many more resources, and no not everything is free, but a lot of it is, and at least the paid resources exist!
I'm also glad that we do have people raging and seeing the negatives too. We need these people as a way of finding balance, and I'm sure as a system we'll regress to a mean and everything will be ok.
When there aren't many problems people seem to invent them. I think people in the US don't realize how unbelievably lucky they are. No- we need a shakeup!
Liberalism doesn’t try, and shouldn’t, because it takes the position that human beings should be free to seek their own goals rather than have them imposed.
The alternative is to have a vision imposed by the state. History has shown this usually doesn’t work very well and often results in horrors. The horrors come when reality inevitably conflicts with the vision and the political leadership grabs a mallet to bash that square peg into the hole. See: communism, fascism, theocratic regimes, imperial adventures, etc.
Star Trek is fantasy. In reality I’m not convinced that society would be so pleasant. Even in fiction trying to portray utopia you sometimes see glimpses. Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era. I wonder what happens if you try to deviate in that culture? Where are those people? It’s never discussed. Maybe all record of them is just deleted silently and everyone forgets.
> Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era.
That's an interesting read on it, but the most likely reason is simply because the writers had a high regard for classical music.
But nevertheless I'm reminded of the Zentraedi from Macross, who were created as a warrior underclass to protect the interests of the spacefaring Protoculture (ancient precursor beings; it's implied that humans are descendants of a stranded Protoculture colony). They are genetically engineered and raised with enough knowledge to fight interstellar battles, but not really do anything else. They know how to use their battleships and mechs and stuff, but not how to repair them. Even their language is a restricted, Newspeak-like version of Protoculture language with plenty of words suitable for battle but a dearth of words for other purposes (there is no word for "friendship" or "love"; there is only "ally" and "not-ally"). They have no culture to speak of.
So the first love song they hear causes them to utterly go to pieces. It's what wins the war for the humans, as sure as our germs did against the Martians in War of the Worlds.
This also calls to mind one of our real attempts at utopia -- the Soviet Union, whose citizens smuggled in Western music and fashion because their own culture had stagnated.
As someone who grew up poor the idea that tech would automate the unpleasant work carried with it the obvious point of who would pay me for the pleasant work and without money how would I survive. So a tech utopia like that described by the author would require at least a Star Trek level of communism which to me always seemed incredibly unrealistic. The post might as well be ‘I wanted techno communism and didn’t get it.’
Technology is treating me well and I hope that continues to be true for a long time. I mainly worry about the sociopolitical consequences of the mass disenfranchisement of the middle classes but the middle class is so folded in on itself that it’ll likely disappear in with a whimper and we’ll end up with a 3rd world level of inequality. While not as nice as more egalitarian societies they do largely continue to function with a surprising degree of stability.
For any of these advancements, it depends how they are used. Some people will use them for good, some for profit, some for their own personal advancement.
Let's just hope there are enough people out there using these things wisely that the future will be a better place.
Us humans do have noble goals which some literally willing to die for and we also produce world class villains and everything in between. Tech does nothing but amplifies what we can do to achieve our goals. It enable all the good things we have dreamed about and it also fucks everything up.
Well it also absorbs a lot of resources. We could have largely the same benefits from tech at a fraction of the cost. But that doesn't produce maximum growth! Or at least, not in terms of GDP.
This sort of thinking is what leads you down the “guns don't kill people” route. Each piece of technology has, in it's design, a set of biases. To someone with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The tools you have affect how you view the world.
It's not that simple. If all I have is a hammer, I don't view everything as a nail; I see first what other uses my hammer can have, then if a hammer won't do the job I seek or create another tool that will.
I am still really happy about what tech has brought us and how comfortable life is in this day. OP brought out all sorts of negative examples, but so could I bring out equal amount or more of positive examples on what the tech has brought us.
I'm excited for what the future brings, and I'm still amazed by how sudden jump there was of ability of LLMs. It's still crazy to me.
This is a great write up, and one that hits home for me.
When I was younger, in my teen years (~2014-2020), I imagined the future only to be better than it was right now. The technology would only keep getting better. People would use the internet (especially social media) and become cleverer, less xenophobic, and more open to all kinds of cultures. We all would be getting richer, quality of life would only increase, no more wars, yadda yadda. It was so obvious that liberal democracy is the only right way forward, the pinnacle.
(when I say "we" I refer to the collective West)
I'm quite disappointed with how so many things are turning to shit right now. I know, I know, what I wrote above probably sounds like "the end of history", which has been recalled even by its originator by now. Nostalgia probably also plays an important role – things are much simpler when you're not an adult.
It's probably because I'm just too young to have consciously used "the true early internet", i.e. what people often refer to as 2000-2010 era. Sometimes I get kind of sad I didn't get to experience it.
But at the same time, before covid, I was pretty optimistic about internet's overall impact on society.
1. Sees things from an excessively American point of view.
2. Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.
This is a global problem, and a lot of the problem is the concentration of power. The problem is not which side companies in a particular industry pick, but that which side they pick matters too much.
The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem. Disparate issues get labelled "left" or "right" and everyone agrees with all the opinions on their side.
It's an American POV because a lot of EU and Asia have safeguards against this stuff. America's been deregulating such things for decades now.
It is indeed an American POV that universal healthcare seems to come and go with the president, something unthinkable for other first world countries.
>The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem.
Following up on the other response: if you got or know a coalition that can push more ranked choice voting in some states, I'm all ears. That's the only real way to affect this as any reasonable level.
> Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.
Well, to be fair, the movement that seems to have largely infiltrated the Republican party in the US is (openly) against democracy and prefers a concentration of power and subjugation of "others".
And it's a two-party first-past-the-post voting system so a vote for any alternative between the two ruling parties is effectively a vote for whichever party is least like them.
So it's against your own interest not to take part in the tribalism in the US.
the best path forward would be for all nerds to stop fitting into the programmed stereotype of being incredibly imbalanced/high-strung as part of being talented and thus wasting the life-force away from those who capitalize on this
"Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you."
Boycott is a start, it's an easy demand to put forward. I doubt it's enough, so I'd suggest adding two classics once you've recruited and become regulars with some boycotters: mutual aid and direct action.
The real problem here is that people are incapable of weathering a disruption to their way of life for a long term benefit to humanity. Progress is never linear. It is a jagged line with an upward slope.
No major technological leap has been happened disrupting social structures, putting people out of jobs, or causing some sort of moral panic. https://pessimistsarchive.org/
Nearly all of them have dramatically benefited humanity in the long term. Your children will live healthier and longer, with fewer extremes of suffering.
The drama over AI, in my opinion, simply separates those who think long-term from those who don't. On a long enough timescale, issues like hallucination, theft of artistic IP, etc are a total non-issue.
I think it's arguable the anti-AI movement is much more selfish than the pro-AI one. I don't care if I lose my job to create AGI, because the benefit to humanity is worth much more than my job.
I can't remember exactly when, but like 8 or so years ago a british guy had a post on HN that questioned all of this and everyone, I mean EVERYONE here basically lambasted him. It was the first time I kinda turned my head and started saying that all this stuff is fake. All these "save the world" job posts, etc.. etc.. it was all bullshit. I think everyone knew that then - but were not willing to admit it outloud.
That's totally a human thing. Digital window dressing (or in this case, defensive tribalistic behavior) is just another projection of how human beings do social things.
Generally speaking, if you place anything under close scrutiny, you will catch yourself (assuming you're human) like the ouroboros - the serpent consuming its own tail. You can't escape the flaws of your own perception and your nature.
All other things, including praising technology and envisioning a better future, are just the tip of the iceberg. People will never find solace outwards unless they turn their focus in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this is impossible for society in our capitalist, highly materialistic world.
This pov is 2 decades late. If you worked on automation in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or witnessed first hand the rise of social media and smart phones, you already held this belief. As we continue to scale technology and lower its barrier of entry, we continue to expand all of the gaps that prevent us from reaching any "utopia".
I realize that my "lowering the barrier" statement comes off as if I think we should support inclusive technology or that I don't believe in democratization of tech- Im all for inclusivity, but we have not actually reached a state of democracy.
Capitalism works to extract value from technologies that create efficiency savings. As such, capitalists - and people who aspire to become capitalists (i.e. to live off returns on capital rather than money paid in exchange for their labour) - are fascinated by new technologies that promise efficiency savings.
This is not new. It is why a lot of people are interested in YC, and this forum as a result.
The problem with that system though is that it creates misaligned interests. As consumers, we want technologies that make our lives easier. But the people who are running the game - the people with money and therefore power - want to just make the extraction of value more efficient.
Social media exists to sell advertising against content you don't have to pay anyone to produce, and is therefore one of the greatest utopian ideas of capitalism. There is minimal material cost, labour costs are reasonable even when you pay 95th percentile compensation packages, and to boot you are seen as a media entity that powerful people want to influence, so you can help them influence others, thereby giving you access to all sorts of mechanisms to protect your value extraction machine.
The system is working as intended. This isn't a bug.
If you don't like it, you need to start supporting other economic systems within these industries. Technological utopia is still achievable, but not while the people building it are so absorbed by return on capital and extraction of value.
As a side point, Elon Musk borrowed money to pay $44bn for Twitter and seems intent on driving it into the ground, which we might all say is an example of the capitalist system self-correcting. Except since Trump got elected - the candidate he endorsed and heavily personally promoted on that platform - the value of Tesla has gone up over $200bn. That's not self-correction, that's the system working as designed. You need to decide for yourself if you think that's healthy for you and your descendants. I'm not convinced it is.
Twice a century, the humanity gets a push: an influx of ideas and visionaries, both good and evil, who give the people enough energy to roll for another 50 years. This was the case in late 70s and will be the case again in late 20s, that is now.
The Internet was among many things that came with the latest wave. Idealists believed they were so clever to snatch back their freedom. Govs believed they are so clever to pervert the Internet to their own ends. But it's a poison pill that takes a century to act.
It's not a secret that there's a joint effort from all sides to unite the humanity. Some of the powerful want to create a tyranny we cannot escape, others want to create a paradise. But in one thing they agree: the wars must end. The state structures disagree, of course, as wars is their lifeblood, and right now they believe they can prevent this united humanity utopia. So the states were given this shiny new thing - the Internet - generously peppered with the magic powder of survelliance, and the states, unable to resist the urge, swallowed this shiny thing and they are still busy chewing it. In the meantime, the Internet slowly grows inside them, driven by its spirit of connecting everything together.
The coming wave will radically empower the Internet and at the end of this half-century cycle the states will realise what the Internet really was.
We are in a transition phase. The centre cannot hold indefinitely. An ever more centralised web is putting walls around information but the web itself now is such a tiny corner of cyberspace now. It feels like there’s oceans of knowledge all around us now, but we just haven’t figured out how to release it.
Hardly. Tech is built into the future of every industry in the United States. We still have a runaway advantage with regard to innovation thanks to our tech industry - it impacts at the GDP level. Until that changes, the party is still going.
It's not the tech but the attention capitalism and the assault on general purpose computing who screwed up the tech. The people, their greed and their desire for controlling others got in the way, unsurprisingly. This is becoming increasingly like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil or PKD novels. It's like those books and movies were actually field manuals for company C suites and governments, totalitarian or otherwise. And in Russia it's like Vladimir Sorokin novels are the field manual for the Kremlin.
I am not the person you’re replying to, but I read their comment to be suggesting that earlier waves of technological development addressed those chores first—successfully! To the extent that the robots for both chores are utterly commoditized, and well within the economic means of pretty much all people living in modern economies (even if that means renting time on a machine via laundromat, it still beats a tub of water out back with a posser and a washing board).
Those mechanical techniques weren’t up to these more abstract tasks: why would it be reasonable to expect the new computational techniques to generalize immediately to these mechanical problems—much less that they’d immediately achieve better results than the time-tested incumbent techniques?
Although, of course, such work is very much underway, e.g. Physical Intelligence’s splashy promo ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098236 ; 14 days ago, 218 points, 189 comments)
Sadly there is an element of mass advantage in any commercial entity. Think of GE in the 1980's and 1990's. This is the effect of a less than perfect capitalism, but it is what we have and requires huge investment to solve humanities problems - who else can do that? Today's armchair philosophers, especially those on LinkedIn and Twitter who spout doom about techno-optimism without looking at the evidence around them?
The point is distinguish the baby from the dirt water. Bit tech is the dirt water, IT is the baby. The fact that most developments these days and since some decades is purely commercial by giants does not means IT is distopic.
The fact giants push modern and worse mainframes (the cloud/mainframe + mobile/dumb terminal) to retain control, "you'll own nothing", and to sell fast-tech crap instead of long lasting, partially upgradable desktops, does not meas that's the tech, it's just a commercial choice.
The main issue is not even technical but political: on one side giants needs slaves to prosper, so people who depend on them, who own nothing, who consume the 100% of what they earn in services and so on, while nature and the civil society needs Distributism. From the '900s -ism we have dropped most of such "giant-centric" way of thinking, it's about time do drop a bit more.
This seems very negative and pessimistic to me. My tech utopia fantasies are alive and well.
One key mistake the author makes is misjudging the average person
>They are people who need to game the attention economy by increasingly disrespectful and shocking content, gore, rage bait, dehumanizing pranks17, extreme consumerism like huge shopping hauls, sloppy large mukbangs, shredding lamborghinis18, gambling streams and websites19, game shows20 and more
If your tastes are more sophisticated, you may see the profusion of relatively puerile content on the internet as "gaming the attention economy" - but how do you know the average person doesn't just like watching mukbangs? And why shouldn't they?
In my view - you should get comfortable with the fact that people have different preferences to yours and judge based on outcomes rather than aesthetics.
The author complains about racism. Maybe it's easier to be racist nowadays. On the other hand, in the decades before the internet we had more race related shootings, bombings, etc. Maybe, net net, it's a good thing if the people who would've been forming a militia in the woods 30 years ago are instead posting racist memes on X.
Likewise it's harder to make a blog or your own website today. But, much easier to blow up on X, TikTok, YouTube etc. I just don't see the issue here. We have far more content creators and similar now than in the past.
None of the complaints seem that meaningful to me. Technology improves. Things aren't perfect (yet) - but they might be in the future. We have greater access to information, communication, and intelligence every year. If these trends persist we will use the improvements to enhance all other aspects of life (as we are already doing). The future where power comes from solar, nuclear, or fusion, physical labor comes from machines, cognitive labor comes from AI, material comes from space travel, advances in biology/physics/chemistry radically extend our life and health spans is not only possible, it is visibly approaching.
I hope the stuff you talk about at the end of your comment come to fruition, but I think you’re very wrong about the attention economy. The issue is simply that these platforms are companies that need to optimize their user retention, so their algorithms have learned to prioritize the most gutturally stimulating material, whether mukbangs or drama, implicitly at the expense of everything else.
I think it's simply evolution - things that get attention will have the most attention, by definition. People copy and vary the things that get attention and hit upon new and better attention getting strategies. Mukbangs and prank videos are the natural state of social media - in other words. Social media companies could do work to suppress intellectually unstimulating content - and then they would be replaced by social media companies that did not.
I just don't see what the issue is. If you turn off mukbangs it's not like the viewers are going to read Dostoevsky or invent a cure for cancer or something. They are going to do their next most preferred activity - watch reality TV until you turn that off, gossip with their friends, etc.
Some people like to do the class of activity that mukbangs are a member of. Rather than try to "cure" them we should make sure they have access to an unlimited stream of mukbangs - cause why not? In the short term they'll be satisfied, we'll be rich, and technological advancement will continue - until we're all in a VR heaven on a server in the Dyson Sphere in the sky.
Look I would love for that to be true, but that’s not how it works. The “natural state” of social media would be that observed without any interference, but things on social media get attention because they get recommended by algorithms. This constitutes interference in that “natural evolution,” interference which selects the thing being optimized for by the process of evolution. It’s not just attention grabbing, it’s attention holding, engagement maximizing, etc. That’s why tiktok slop is both highly stimulating and not highly stimulating enough to drive users off the platform. It has evolved to maximize what the company wants. There’s nothing natural about this process.
I understand the sentiment, but why does every discussion that liberals have about the state of the world have to revolve around Donald Trump? Donald Trump was president for 4 weak years, during which his entire intelligence apparatus was sabotaging him, the administrative state was ignoring him, and people who worked in his administration were lying to him and intentionally distorting his orders, then writing op-eds about it in the NYT. Meanwhile, the same people who ran the country before him ran it during him, and he's basically appointing them again because he's a dimwit and doesn't know anyone else.
This constant casting off of blame onto celebrity enemies is insidious. It's an acknowledgement that the Western upper-middle class will never change their lifestyles or values, just spend all of their "political" time looking for scapegoats, ceremonially killing them, and patting themselves on the back for it (want a Pulitzer? A Nobel?)
That's why Trump was at first revitalizing, because he was a sacrifice that refused to die, immunizing them from the fact that their invested wealth doubled during his presidency and the one that followed. The fact that he overcame their frowny faced disapproval and their willingness to abuse the legal system has left them in complete disarray: could it be that the problem is that they've become ridiculously wealthy while working increasingly parasitic jobs, rather than that tech billionaires are assholes? You work for them.
And none of them deregulated telecommunications, none of them deregulated the banks, none of them made at-will employment the standard. They're not the reason that I had three educational tv channels as a child, and now, for the past couple decades, the only one left in PBS has been fundraising with Deepak Chopra lectures. You've all become libertarians unless your lifestyle or aesthetic is bothered in any way, then you become authoritarians. Or in other words, you're narcissists.
The outsourcing of morality to voting and donating to Democrats is over. The elevation of that private group to a moral authority based on the fact that they were vaguely nice to black people from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, and that being drilled into every school age kid, has to be overcome. The party hasn't broken with Reagan, via that likely rapist, definitely sexual harasser that they platform at every convention, one that took a break from campaigning to execute a retarded black man. You shouldn't have ever left it to them, you did it because it was easy. It's not morality if it doesn't involve sacrifice.
Also, ask yourself the question: what do you do? Are you contributing to anything net positive in the world, or are you simply a facilitator for a middleman who lives through extracting value from the defenseless? Are you double-dipping by spending the cash of the people you make social capital out of publicly whining about?
The issue of morality and character wasn't just raised by Democrats and the "fake news" media. It was also raised by Republicans who directly served in the administration. When your former VP, chief of staff, military leaders and scores of former cabinet officials say issues of character made him unfit for command, I think people should and ought to have taken that very seriously in both the primaries and general election. This is before you even get to his numerous legal issues both civil and criminal. It is unfortunate that so many still choose to see this through only a political lens.
I'll echo what others have said, utopias aren't real. What this author is describing was futurism informed by science fiction. Also most of the things they complain about and their list are ridiculous.
- They both criticize ByteDance for pushing Russian propaganda, and Google for not pushing Russian propaganda (sorry, "censoring").
- Also criticizing people for having the "wrong" political persuasion is telling. I'm not American so I can only look in from the outside but if Donald Trump won so decisively, maybe the left needs to look inward at what they did wrong instead of blaming big tech for not supporting "their side" enough.
- Criticizing tech for being anti-regulation and anti-deceleration... If we regulate our own technology all that'll happen is that bad actors will leapfrog us. Maintaining technological superiority is a matter of survival for liberal democracies. Friendly reminder that 70% of the world population lives under dictatorships today and it's ever rising...
- The idea that social networks accelerate xenophobia is ridiculous. All it does it expose it. Also left-leaning westerners have this ridiculous idea that we're not the most progressive culture on earth. We are and it's not even close. There's literally race wars and modern day slavery all over the world.
- Labour conditions... It's obvious the author has never worked in a truly bad work environment. While their criticisms aren't unfounded, perspective is needed. The past was worse, things have gotten better.
IMO tech is still an overall net positive. It's what's enabled the earth to support so many people, even if power generation is higher and less efficient than we want, it's more efficient than it used to be. Even if the current geopolitical situation is getting spicy, most of human history was still worse...
This reads to me as a leftist having a meltdown over the current political state. The truth is, leftist governments brought this upon themselves. They thought that QE wouldn't lead to inflation because it didn't during the 2010s... However the economy then was otherwise deflationary. When those conditions ended, QE did what economists always knew it would, add inflationary pressure. And let's be real, most people vote based on economics. Left-leaning governments tried to gloss over the poor state of their economies with social issues that most people are ambivalent about at best and lost. Also millennials are the next largest cohort after boomers now. Even if the birth rate is lower than ever, a majority of millennial women have had at least 1 child. This changes voting demographics dramatically... The US left needs a bit of introspection instead of blaming everyone for their loss.
Maybe this person should try using tech for something positive. Or go outside and touch grass.
While I'm slightly ambivalent about LLMs, I do think that the promise of AGI has awakened something in the tech world... AI could usher in a new age, supercharge the economy, bring about a lot of positive change. Instead of whinging about the current state of politics, maybe think of positive uses for it. I'm personally using AI to build an app in the domain of finance and economics. I think AI could bring about a lot of economic benefits and change a lot of the things OP is complaining about.
And final thought. Depression is real. Currently it's -20 degrees celcius outside, there's a foot of snow on the ground and the wind is blowing. We lost our home to a wildfire this summer and spent much of the summer homeless (well, bouncing around various places anyway) with a toddler. My SO is East European, have lots of family within 1000km of Ukraine, have Ukrainian friends and family (even my own family, although they immigrated to the west long ago)... It's not like my life is without stress. But I'm still optimistic that tech can produce good in the world.
I so very much agree with you...
I was first baffled by how unintelligent some parts of the OP managed to come through - while it's still a very nice collection of woes and unethical lies, which is very valuable in itself.
But then, I've read the linked CNN post about Jeff Bezos prohibiting presidential endorsement in Washington Posts and the outrage that has generated. No, this is surely not the author's folly - there must be a more generic problem there...
Why do so many people considered intelligent think it's normal practice that newspapers give such a very direct and simple political message, like vote for X. And have been doing it for 40 years.
It's normal for newspapers and editors to have clear and mostly stable political views and voice that, but I feel it very weird that they publish something as direct as this one. Just like it's very weird for celebrities (who normally work outside politics) to publicly endorse X or Y.
By doing this, you lose focus on what you really want to say, and just simplify politics and communication into a binary question. Is it really needed to ELI3 everything even in politics, even to such a binary degree, and if we don't THAT is the "betrayal of responsibility"?
While I'm not a great friend of using the usual left-right distinctions, especially in global settings, but that's not really important (people will see whatever enemies where they want to see, but it's still much better than naming your global enemies after a more specific group/country/religion).
Technology can give us hope for new opportunities, that we can receive some "outside help" to change our social constraints. But we shouldn't blame yet another group of people for specific technology failing to solve or address some important issues of society.
I wholeheartedly believe it is inevitable to convince as many people of the 8 billion to feel compassion for each other, to save the planet, to give better education and equal chances to live a full life for those who can make use of that and social care to those who need it, and, to work together for such important and clear goals... But business-as-usual will not do that, current recipes of "pluralistic democracies led by wise citizen journalists telling us what to do and think" will not get us there.
And that's also a problem for LLMs: mandating guardrails will not make them more useful, and as long as LLM safety and "bias" is about how many people will be offended by their responses, then we're clearly just heading in the same wrong direction of blinding ourselves.
(My condolences with you! But having a toddler is a wonderful thing, it gives you hope and a good reason to expect many joy from the future ... even if it doesn't look bright now, cheer up!)
> But having a toddler is a wonderful thing, it gives you hope and a good reason to expect many joy from the future
For sure. The lack of sleep is more than made up by the fact he's incredibly happy, cheerful, fun, and learns things everyday, all the time. And there is definitely more focus in my life knowing I need to provide a future for him... We're optimistic about the future.
The author is a 14yo complaining that the world is more complex that her land of rainbow ponies. "Those who fly on their fantasies, end up hitting concrete walls".
They have absolutely no theory of power. It's just bad men trying to hurt everyone for fun, and the poor upper-middle class elites (who work for them) not being listened to enough when they speak in the name of black people. Life through the lens of superhero movies.
I mean, "bad men trying to hurt everyone for fun" absolutely does describe a large number of people like Peter Thiel, there is nothing else that would explain their actions otherwise.
There are several classes of problems that corporations are not well-designed to solve. Corporations couldn't and didn't end slavery, they couldn't and didn't end child labor, they couldn't and didn't create the 40 hour work week, they couldn't and didn't prevent our rivers from turning into toxic sludge, they couldn't and didn't prevent our air from turning into unbreathable smog, etc. etc.
After having read about some arrests relating to an underground network of people who purchase and view videos of monkeys being tortured and killed, for pleasure, and those who shoot and provide these videos... I'm beginning to wonder whether the internet itself was a good idea.
It would still happen with or without the internet, so long as there are video cameras. First is back-alley vhs or cd's then dvd's. Take video cameras aways and you have secret handshake underground viewing parties. I've finally come to terms with the idea that: humans are gonna human. And it allows me to focus on the more positive things that have also come from the internet, because then you get to find the positive, kind ways that humans are gonna human.
One of the unpleasant side effects of the Second Amendment is that it has put firearms within easy reach of... well, just about everybody. Despite tighter controls over gun purchases, the gun used in the Sandy Hook shooting, for instance, was legally purchased, and not through some gun-show loophole. It belonged to the shooter's mother. She never suffered from any mental-health issues and, except for autism and anxiety, neither did he, nor did he have a criminal record.
He just... snapped, and there were guns within reach, so he used them. Were the guns not so easy to acquire and use, he might not have committed so many murders (or any at all), simply because they would have been too much work and risk. This, by the way, is why I'm in favor of repealing the Second and enacting comprehensive gun bans and mandatory licensing and registration of firearms -- you know, like civilized countries do.
Now as to how this relates to the monkey torture videos. Yes, there might have been people who sought this material out in the past, but the internet put it within easy reach. The videos were shot in Indonesia and made available to Western clients through brokers in the UK (two of whose arrest was described in the article I read). Before the internet, this kind of international coordination in order to satisfy someone's sick deranged urge would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult. Only very wealthy, dedicated perverts would have been able to even contemplate arranging it. And maybe some of those would have been dissuaded because the slow, risky communications put them at greater risk of getting caught. Maybe monkey-torture fetish was such a niche interest before the internet that it would have been difficult to find other monkey-torture fetishists, and hence put together a large enough market to justify producing these videos in the first place. But with the internet, it's easier than ever to find like-minded monkey-torture fetishists, form discussion groups and the like, and associate with each other in sufficient density that there's a market large enough to justify going into business producing and selling monkey-torture videos into that market.
It would be important to know what they would be doing without the Internet. Are those desires as such that if they don't get outlet, they explode and so something worse in real life, or does being able to consume it on the Internet normalize it for them, pushing to seek for more.
Being optimistic and positive on tech in the first place is the root issue here. This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient. Being overly optimistic about an industry or field is in my view a worldview error, and a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
> Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
This sounds like it's better to work within the system rather than try to overthrow it. You need more than a little angst to completely reset cultural norms. Maybe you're optimizing for a local maxima instead of realizing the true potential of saying "fuck everything" and replacing it.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, not saying the correct response to all adversity is to plot a revolution. But my point is sincere - sometimes it is the best thing to burn it to the ground and start over. Private healthcare seems like a pretty good example of a system that should be abolished rather than massaged (assuming your goal is better healthcare at a more affordable price) and we have decades of data from our own country and others to corroborate that.
I think what you are saying is orthogonal to what they are saying.
You can be positive and optimistic about big scale societal changes that throw out all the established notions. Likewise, you can also be cynical and jaded about small scale changes that just aim to incrementally improve things.
Aiming for big changes doesn't necessarily imply you have to be cynical. In fact I think you're more likely to be able to achieve big changes if you're optimistic about them.
If you're willing to accept small changes as a win in a fundamentally broken system (in the sense the incentives aren't aligned and there is no real accountability feedback mechanism) then the problem is you aren't cynical enough to attempt something drastic. I'd actually go even further and argue it's a form of being brainwashed, usually as a byproduct of effective propaganda. Going back to the example of private healthcare - I don't fucking care about small incremental changes when the system itself is still structurally broken. We need more cynicism about the status quo so people say "fuck this" and replace it with something better. And it's not even a complicated or abstract idea - literally every other 1st world country has solved this problem and laugh about how broken healthcare is in the USA.
Most third world countries too.
I think people tend to think too much in terms of black and white. Jaded cynicism is sometimes a good response, and sometimes less so, and other times won't make too much of a difference or can go either way. The trick is to know how to balance it all.
Same story with "tear it all down" vs. "work within the system".
The point is: what are you going to do if single-payer healthcare does not materialize in the US? You have many options; plotting a revolution, working for reform inside the system or impotently complaining on social media. What is actually workable for you?
The same goes for the article's author. Sounds like they're shocked—SHOCKED—that private companies are just out to make money, and don't actually have our best interests at heart. The real issue is that they bought into the fantasy in the first place. But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world? If it will have no effect, why let it get you worked up at all? If it will have an effect, go out and do it.
> But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world?
As the author said:
> Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
It's not changing the world, but I just do what I can to not contribute to it. And if any alternatives do pop up I do try to support them, sometimes financially.
The internet's outskirts are emptier than ever with this centralization, but I have made the active choice to de-activate pretty much all the mainstream stuff and use extensions to minimize their ability to track me. So knowing this did change my behavior on how I interact with the internet.
> This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient.
That sounds like a story of its own. Would you care to share the story about the corruption she saw? We so often hear the stories about companies hiking prices for lifesaving medicine fo no apparent reason other than profit, but it would be interesting to hear what she saw from the inside?
Personal financial payments to physicians are a common marketing strategy used by the pharmaceutical industry. These payments include both cash (typically for consulting services or invited lectures) and in-kind gifts such as meals.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8315858/#:~:text=Pe....
The pharma and medical device companies sponsor the conferences that all our doctors attend every year.
Also trips to medical conferences abroad, at least in Europe.
Tiny anecdote: I worked on the campus of a children's hospital. The pharma reps had parking right by the main entrance. The parents of sick children? Expensive, paid parking a mile away.
Someone who's in medical school (or finishes and goes into medicine) isn't really "inside" the pharmaceutical industry and typically has a very, very poor understanding of how pharmaceuticals are developed and brought to market.
The most substantial corruption in the health/life sciences/medicine world is simple profit motive at hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and insurers, and especially when those three entities combine into mega "pay-vidors" like UHG.
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You've got to separate the tech from human nature. Penicillin, modern medicine, travel, communication etc. are good. Greed corruption and self interest are a human thing irrespective of whether you have high tech or not. We may make some progress there but it's not really a tech issue.
>a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.
I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.
It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.
> it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit
I continue to be fascinated by how easy people priorities profit over doing the right thing. Sometimes they don't even stand to personally gain all that much, they do it for the benefit of some soulless company.
If you aren't actively making things worse for the general public I'll even let the sole focus on profit slide, but how can you justify to yourself going out and actively causing suffering.
Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
It's easy for people who face no real threat themselves to pretend to take the moral high road by refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers. Not everyone has that luxury.
Technology is still a good thing. It's certain tech business models that are the problem.
Tech used to be a tool. I remember participating in product design conversations in the '00s, and the focus was all on "How can we make people's lives better? How do we create software that makes things more convenient for them, more enjoyable, frees up time and opens up new opportunities for them."
Tech is now a means to turn people into tools. I still sit in product design conversations. Now they are focused on how to manipulate people into clicking on more ads and opening up their wallet more. The applied psychology is very advanced, and is more of a focus than the technology now.
IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model, along with the provision of free products to get people hooked and then upsell them on expensive and (in the big picture, but customers can't see the big picture) insconsequential upgrades. The secret to success in the tech industry is "Demonstrate value. Nurture dependence. Threaten to take away features, unless large amounts of money are paid." In people terms, we call this an abusive relationship, or blackmail. In the tech industry, it's a very profitable business model.
The worst part is this is spreading to other industries like food production and transportation.
Fully agree.
A sort of “second order” expression I see of these problems is the sheer quantity of SaaS tools that exist to “fix” a problem, not solve it. These companies have zero interest in actually making anything better. Instead, they exist to sell a “less sharp edges” version of the problem and leech all the money they can. An actual improvement is completely antithetical to their existence, and I suspect most of them would act to destroy a true solution if the opportunity arose.
> free products to get people hooked
This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which was inspired by the then-nascent F/OSS movement.
That F/OSS "gift culture" really keeps on giving, eh?
I think it's worth recalling why that optimism, at least in part.
Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.
They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.
Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.
Of course we were optimistic when the internet was young:
• All the world's people will effortlessly be able to communicate and collaborate together? Surely this will bring about an age of open-mindedness and harmony!
• The bulk of the world's information will go digital, and become accessible to anyone? Surely this will relegate ignorance and superstition to problems of the past!
I've never considered myself an optimist, but if someone back then had predicted the internet we have today, I would have written them off as a hopeless cynic.
This is important, the reproducibility of information made the potential for endless bounty seem so prominent at first. I also don't think the antithesis is discussed here; copyright law, the DMCA, and all the ways in which IP helped make tech the dystopia it has become.
I think most people think of themselves as not the problem but some guy will post some Show HN and it will be all middlebrow dismissals. All those people are the people involved here. Lots of guys who “yeah, my GitHub is only empty because I’m a professional and don’t make it public” blah blah. But you know they spend all their time aligning stakeholders and have never written a line of code but have opinions.
well, we're not in the best economy to just "make stuff for fun and share free information". One thing we forget is that such a position is a privilege in and of itself. Either for the young who have guardians to provide for them, the well off who don't need to worry about next months' rent, or the obsessive who give everything in their life as their own.
My GitHub is very rusty, but I'm delaying Open source plans until I have a fully time job. It's just not worth it for me otherwise to try and be this FOSS advocate while I can't keep things stable in my own backyard.
What if your GitHub is empty because you philosophically don't believe in the F/OSS movement?
What if it's empty because you don't want to feed even more code into the deep learning grinder?
Hell, what if it's empty simply because you're selfish and you don't like sharing?
If you still have a Github account in 2024 then you are obviously part of the problem.
With all the negativity in TFA and in the comments, I just want to point out that objectively, the world's gotten a lot better in a lot of ways.
Extreme poverty is down to almost nothing.
Polio is all but eradicated.
Many types of cancer, death sentences just 20 years ago, are treatable. HIV is practically curable.
You can learn anything you want on YouTube, Wikipedia, and the wider web with time and effort, for free. (The TFA acknowledges this.)
I'm not saying there aren't huge problems. The benefit, to paraphrase, is not evenly distributed. But in nearly every sense it's better to have been born in the 90s than the 60s.
We can and should discuss lack of regulation, legal-but-wrong tax evasion, societal risks, there's plenty of bad to go around. But put it in context - there's a lot of good to go around too.
If you read the entire article you will get to the problem: the rapid information dissemination tech has provided ...
> there is a worrying trend of Tech veering strongly to the right and using the money they get from us and our data for questionable causes.
Tech may have ... not given the election outcome leftists wanted. Twice! It now appears tech will not lead to a communist/socialist utopia, and so they are now the enemy. And so, they will, read the paragraph after this statement:
> The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong. The companies themselves and the VC’s they take money from are supporting values and governments that do not act in your best interest and do not even align with their marketing image. Don’t be further misled. Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
This paragraph comes after more than a page of text pointing out that tech DID in fact, bring a lot of parts, some would say most, of tech utopia.
Frankly, I'm pretty damn sure that the actors responsible for the swing to the right are not FANGs, and not even Twitter. The fact that the world has changed and that China, Russia and Iran ... and "that" ideology's extremists ... have started cooperating and have become a real, serious threat to the lives of billions of people, and are actively killing millions ... I feel that has a lot more to do with the current situation than either Facebook or Amazon. Combined with the failure of governments to keep the economic growth of the past 10 years going (e.g. housing, ...)
The author seems very political along the lines that the majority of Americans who voted for the incoming government are evil.
Like saying YC "CEO, Garry Tan, is known to be vitriolic online, anti-progressive" who you can witness here saying "great outcome for San Francisco. A near clean sweep of moderate Dems" https://x.com/garrytan/status/1854048895162347672
I mean that's another reason for the "swing right" if people favouring moderate dems are denounced as anti-progressive.
Also re a big tech swing to the right, I don't recall the old big tech like IBM and Dow Chemical being a paradise of woke hippies.
I think the author was referring to vitriol such as
> “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew,” he wrote in a since-deleted post on X, formerly Twitter, to his 408,000 followers during the early morning hours of Saturday. “Die slow motherfuckers.”
> When a user noted that Tan seemed drunk, he responded he was. “You are right,” he replied, “and motherfuck our enemies.”
> Tan also posted a picture of a private liquor cabinet — containing two $350 bottles of Balvenie and Macallan whisky and two $32 bottles of Roederer Estate sparkling wine — above a plaque emblazoned with his name: “Garry Tan ‘SF Social Media Troll’ Twitter Menace.”[1]
[1] https://missionlocal.org/2024/01/garry-tan-death-wish-sf-sup...
painfully obvious you get your “information” from this “big tech” :)
Ask any historian of science: technology only briefly disrupts, and then reifies existing power structures. A few new people make it into the controlling class, but ultimately tech on its own cannot subvert the power structure in any durable way.
The only surprise is how many intelligent people still believe that utopia is just a few more lines of code away.
Looking at the history of science, technology actually seems pretty good at disrupting and replacing the controlling class. The Renaissance led to the general irrelevancy of the hereditary nobility across most of Europe; the industrial revolution led to the irrelevance of the landed plantation class in the U.S. and the landed gentry in Europe. This is not just a matter of the leaders of the technology revolution being accepted into the existing aristocracy; instead, there's often a series of wars and revolutions where the controlling class of the new technology replaces and then subverts the controlling class of the old order, usually bringing their particular culture and class markers with it.
What technology can't do is get rid of power structures entirely. There will still be a controlling class. It just will be made up with different people.
Society seems to be scale invariant over time. Locally it changes but the overall patterns remain the same, even as we reach unprecedented levels of population and everything it enables and entails.
Could you explain further? This seems pretty untrue on the surface to me; what’s the analogous structure to a corporation in a 1000 person nomad tribe?
I don't mind if you disagree completely, but I have been studying ancient history and archaeology for about two decades now and it's pretty glaring to me. Following this intuition has given me great insight in analysis, strategy and overall making sense of trends and data.
I’d be happy to admit I’m wrong, it’s a neat idea. What are some examples you could point to?
I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place. My vision used to be more neutral, then around 2013 it shifted to expecting companies to actively be hostile to me, specially regarding software.
I do relate to seeing elders feeling a sense of bliss upon using WhatsApp to connect to relatives living far away, or friends/acquaintances they couldn't keep in touch with anymore (99% of the time due to age-related issues).
But otherwise, if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control how I use that program, then they likely never had my best interest as a priority in the first place. Sometimes, using such programs is not a choice, or it comes with significant personal/financial cost for the users. But deriving something actionable from this reasoning is hard - policy makers are either to detached from technical details, are actively working against your interest due to corruption, or cannot agree on what the right direction is. I don't have a solution, besides giving some of my time and money to organizations who have consistently acted on the best interests of users, such as the Free Software Foundation, EFF, the Tor Project, etc.
> I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place.
I think it depends what the "old days" are for each generation.
For me it is the early days of the Internet becoming widely available, late 80s to early 90s. Suddenly everyone I know has email, everyone is on usenet, I can talk (i.e. text chat) with anyone around the world.
Which of course we can today. But back then there were no corporations involved (commercial use of the Internet was prohibited), so no marketing involved, it was all real people.
And to me this is a key part:
> if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control
This wasn't a thing. All the communication protocols were open standard (RFCs), the implementations were open source. Every program I used (aside from the OS, which was the domain of proprietary software back then) was one I compiled myself and could modify or rewrite to taste. So it was just us, regular people, who owned and controlled how everything worked and the possibilities were unbounded and thus extremely exciting.
Today mostly we're stuck using proprietary software/apps, or even worse, the "cloud" where the companies control everything.
As much as I can, I still want to control my environment so I stick with open standards like email instead of proprietary chat apps, and I run Linux & FreeBSD, and I avoid phones like the plague since there is no way to own anything on a phone platform.
In 2013 Google Reader has been shut down, and Google defederated from XMPP. That has been the beginning of the end of "Web 2.0". Before that we were naively thinking all those APIs were free, and only the old enemy Microsoft wanted proprietary protocols and vendor lock-in.
Nobody talks about why Google defederated GTalk.
At first, Google was very idealistic in its mission, perhaps even doe-eyed in the manner expressed in the article: no defensive patent portfolio to match their level of innovation (until Apple went "thermonuclear" on Android, and started an internecine patent war); open GTalk XMPP federation (until Facebook extracted GTalk users' "social graph[1]" without giving any data back). No internal data controls so that employees could to innovate quickly, trusting they'd do the right thing (until an engineer harassed SF Bay Area teenagers he knew IRL using their Google data), and so on. No technology can win against the human condition.
1. At a time when the hype for social graphs was a little higher than it is for AI now, and Google viewed its battle with Facebook as existential.
This is one of the better 'techlash' posts I've read here. Good job to the author on listing specific examples and including footnotes.
Agreed. The thought isn't particularly new, but it's nice to see the myriad examples compiled like this.
“Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.”
What did we expect? That the year 2000 was magically going to bring about a golden age?
> Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
So we just need a nice all encompassing global conflict again that largely leaves the American industrial base alone and then when it is the only one standing there can be another growth in the American middle class.
This isn't an accurate take, because it wasn't just America. There are lots of post-war "miracle" stories:
Italian Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_economic_miracle
Japanese Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle
Spanish Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_miracle
Miracle on the Rhine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
In all of these cases real incomes grew enormously. Yes, a big part of that was starting from a low base after the destruction of WWII. But I'd argue it was also a strong consequence of the technology of the time: the was an explosion in consumer goods enabled by new tech, but companies still needed lots of employees to create these products. In the past ~25 years I believe tech has instead allowed more wealth to accrue to a smaller and smaller subset of people.
Yes, all fueled by ridiculously abundant/cheap oil. This is something that might not happen in Earth's history ever again, not to mention the climate change issues (which at least weren't clear until much later, 80s rather than 50s for oil depletion issues).
Pretty much. I'm unsure if even American can escape WW3 unscathed though.
Yeah, I'm personally of the opinion that the 50s-60s economical benefits are not generally sustainable. Similar to China's rise up until now, it's the result of a one time boom often as a zero-sum game with other parts of the world. The humans on the planet are definitely getting a more comfortable life over time, but any individual state with our current political systems I don't feel ever leads to that 50s-60s level of purchasing power for a long time.
Something to be said for those 70-80% marginal tax rates
I'm not sure about that. Very little was digital back then. It was far easier to claim lack of earnings back then than it is now, even with the high rates
Many things to be said for sure, but most of them inappropriate in polite company.
Or something against neoliberalism.
Define neoliberalism.
Kind of, yeah. I remember being a teenager in the 90's and it really felt like things were going to be radically different, and better. The cold war was over (well, we thought it was), anybody could talk to anybody else anywhere, anybody could publish anything, and surely this would mean regular people would be more empowered than ever before, right?
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
was not meant ironically.
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
Nah man. That kind of pervasive optimism truly was part of the zeitgeist. Adults felt it as well.
Unfortunately, that worldview died with 9/11.
I kinda miss when the internet was a small part of my life and felt big, instead of being a big part of my life and feeling small.
As a 90s teenager myself your comments struck a chord. Very well articulated.
Thanks.
I don't know how much the internet changed or I changed. Finding some niche forums on Prodigy (so not even the internet) and talking to a small group of people felt a lot different than just going to reddit and finding a forum for whatever random thing I'm looking up.
> Unfortunately, that worldview died with 9/11.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
Everyone's different but I think I felt like the increasing polish and commercialization of the web killed it slowly. And that makes sense to an extent, as there was money to be made people would invest more (and have entire teams) in making ad-optimised content instead of just having one person cranking out homestarrunner or thebestpageintheuniverse or what have you.
Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.
We still have https://search.marginalia.nu/ at least.
Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.
Years before 2015 “the internet” for most people had been replaced by “social media” and its was pretty well understood that big tech companies now had a means and motivation to monetize our most toxic traits.
The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.
Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
The dream of the 90's is alive in Portland....
For me and my cohort (I'm in my early 50s now), yes, absolutely. Again, from my point of view, things got even worse post 2008, with the rise of mobile and social media. The tech world specifically evolved in directions dramatically opposed to the pro-human mood of the 90's towards a much more predatory stance.
Interesting, based on the replies here, maybe it's a somewhat generational thing. I was born in 89, so I remember 9/11 when it happened and the wars that followed, but it wasn't something that I put that much thought into. Similarly, I was barely out of high school and into college in 2008. My main concern was playing video games with my friends and trying to come up with excuses to skip my Minnesota History class.
I'm sure generational differences are a big part of it. I was already in the workforce by the mid 90's, and honestly, it was such an optimistic time, for everyone. Lots of hope for the future. I wish I could share what it was like. It was a remarkable, special time, and even though we thought we knew it, we didn't really appreciate what the actual special aspects were until long after the fact.
>that worldview died with 9/11
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
Funny, I thought it continued a while and died with social media.
Social media was a very strong nail in the coffin, no argument there. But the 90's optimism absolutely died that day.
90s scifi had some penetrating foresight tho... I feel like we're inching closer to Neuromancer's universe as the war festers on in Ukraine, Japan keeps on roboticizing and somehow a mixture of corporate and populist right wing captures the electorates worldwide.
Naive twenty something (back then) here. The latter half of the 1900s changed so drastically that yeah... a Star Trek like utopia seemed plausible, if not inevitable.
It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
---- Reply to below, I can no longer post for the next hour: ----
Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will.
For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction.
One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own.
"It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse"
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles). Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
Ok, but I think the gravity of normal folks bends the industry whether we techies like it or not.
To further subdivide the techie contingent, lots of them have no problem using Windows even though Linux/FLOSS has been viable for a decade or two. So even most techies don't care about the problem.
Where do I sign up? (Sadly I still need to be able to pay rent)
I replied above due to a post limit.
>It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk
I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.
I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.
Well, maybe it's because I'm Californian. I don't think I'd call myself an insider, I never worked at Google and I'm from Sacramento (which felt painfully un-cool back then!). And the Google I'm talking about would be staffed by Gen X'ers/Xennials at the time mostly - Someone who's 25 in 2001 was born in 1976.
I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.
It definitely brought about a lot of positive changes. It's fair to be disappointed that some of the things we hoped for didn't materialize, and that a lot of negatives were even worse than expected.
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
> The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls
And regressions to the mean. Wealth inequality and fascism come to mind.
If you were alive back then: yeah, pretty much? The expectation was that merely getting a tech education would seamlessly and immediately roll you into a six figure job no matter which industry you were interested in, because much like AI today, tech was literally seen as the magic ingredient that had been missing all this time.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
In the year 2000, Google was fresh, the Internet was becoming a normal thing for people to use and it was supposed to get rid of the old power structures and bring about a new age of egalitarianism and meritocracy. Plus I was younger and much more idealistic. And to be fair, it has caused revolutions and caused new power structures to be established, and torn down old ones. But as the old adage goes, it turns out that power corrupts. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'd like to pretend I'd do better with my money if I'd invented PageRank back in the 90's, but having seen how money corrupts people, I'm not convinced that I would.
> “ The companies themselves and the VC’s they take money from are supporting values and governments that do not act in your best interest and do not even align with their marketing image.”
Anyone who thinks ANY publicly traded company acts in YOUR best interest (unless YOU are serious shareholder) is in the words of my 11-year old kid - delulu :)
I'll ask my delulu question here but: where are the angel vestors who DO in fact what to help humanity. Do they exist and are just working "underground"? Or do you just get absorbed into the system once your net worth is past $X million dollars?
the first thing that came to mind after I read your words - Google started as “do no evil…”
It was 1998, the world was much different then…
the world is always much different 26 years ago :)
> I distinctly remember this view that this would make society better, that it would be a big step forward for humankind.
Never had this. Maybe a little bit about GNU and Linux; that's about it. Good to see someone sobering up.
People forget that the vocal majority of FOSS people back then thought Microsoft was a danger and were engaging to counter them.
OSS is founded as much on what it rejects as what it embraces.
Maybe not in rich countries, but internet and smartphones in poorer countries were definitely viewed in a very positive light.
Specifically, "Digital Inclusion" was a term I remember from before smartphones became popular, and how important it was to get everyone on board. Well, smartphones were what brought internet to them, and this progress was celebrated.
With Social Media it was a bit more complicated, as it only became accessible to the general population of poorer countries at the same time it started receiving criticism internationally. They don't remember Myspace.
(EDIT: Maybe you're talking about the article in general, but the paragraph the text you quoted comes from is about smartphones, social media and internet)
In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends, and overwhelm the incumbent minority. Once you could use a sleek, trendy iPhone instead of a clunky desktop computer to get online, the writing was on the wall.
Technology changes, people don't.
Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us.
Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556
I don't think that struggle is really the defining feature here. If anything, many of the most toxic people I can think of in geeky circles are precisely the people who still have a chip on their shoulder about something that happened in middle school.
I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
> I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
> Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable
For me it was tech in the 90’s and 00’s so I think the real explanation is even simpler: we grew up.
It’s very easy to be pure of intention and intellectual curiosity when mom fills the fridge.
My take while reading OP was that the author simply grew up. When young and idealistic it's easy to believe the utopian marketing. In reality, business is the same as it's always been.
I do think politics has gotten worse in the "post-truth era". And tech certainly enabled that. It's hard to blame anyone in particular, though. One thing we see in the show "Connections" is that it's always hard to predict the consequences of new technology. Even seeing it coming, it's not fair to believe tech workers should have saved us from the rightward swing.
I feel like "business is the same as it's always been [so things aren't getting worse]" is kind of like saying "I'm smoking exactly as much as I have for the past 20 years, how can I only just have cancer now?" It's not that the problem is new, it's that the disease is degenerative.
A lot of the people I recall interacting with on Usenet in the mid 1990s were very much grown up, graduated, far away from “mom”, and employed as developers or uni staff somewhere. However, they still enjoyed hacking, either out of pure fun or FOSS idealism, and without monetary reward very much in mind. I think that the OP is on to something when he says that the economic environment changed, and this led to nerd things being seen through a much more mercenary lens.
Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
> awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
I don't think it was a change. Both things existed in parallel, with a little bit of crossover. The startup/VC/megacorp thing just won out, that's all. And nobody ever really doubted that it would, once it was visible.
>Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
I don't think that was the case. Go and read the stories of the founders of companies like Apple, Atari, Adobe and others from that era and you will find they all took investments to get started.
I think the GP was talking about tech in a more general sense, not just "companies".
The old Internet was definitely my support network, I met a lot of people I could relate to back then, totally different from "IRL people". The Internet is the opposite of that for me now. Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Do they all feel as lonely as I do?
Most likely
1. Fear and embarrassment. Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous, today you constantly hear about doxxing. People were also less aware of the consequences.Even if it's unlikely for some random person, that doesn't help introverts.
2. Outnumbered. Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird. Today, "new" and "random" are filled with spam, and "popular" is filled with posts upvoted by "normies". Weird posts and posters are still here, but they're obscured by the noise.
3. Feedback. People imitate what they see, and feel more comfortable following trends. When "normal" people see weird posts, they become weird and make weird posts. When weird people see weird posts, they feel safer and make weird posts. When normal people see non-weird posts, they make non-weird posts. When weird people don't see weird posts, they feel embarrassed making weird posts, so post non-weird or not at all.
I think 3 is the biggest factor, caused by 2. As other people mentioned, "weird" people are still on servers that are private or otherwise hidden from the mainstream (preventing 2 and 3). 1 is probably not a big factor, instead it explains why less people show their face or post identifying details.
> Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous [...] Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird.
What years are you referring to when you say "back then"? In the early 90s, which was "the old Internet" for me, the best contributors to discussions on the newsgroups I followed (comp.lang.c, etc.) weren't anonymous; they were well-educated people who used their real names, including academics whose signatures included URLs like http://example.edu/~jsmith. And their posts weren't weird, at least not on the newsgroups I followed.
"weird" isn't a good description. Specifically, most people on the internet back then were well-educated computer nerds, so the typical post would be more relatable to those on HN and arguably (according to those on HN) "higher quality".
These people aren't "weird" in a bad way, but in a "different than the average (less-educated, less tech-oriented) person" way.
The anonymity part probably isn't correct. But I get the impression people back then were a lot more open, at least hearing about dating sites, chat-roulette, old YouTube channels, and internet friends who met IRL in the 90s/2000s. Although I know a lot of people post on Facebook and Twitter, so maybe that hasn't changed either.
The cohort immediately after you described - those geeks grew up along with growth of videogame market, IMs, and birth of multi-player gaming on the Internet. People who were still geeks, and learned from all those academics and realname adults, but who also had to come up with nicknames early on, and got used to pseudonymity this way.
My dad had a simpler take: The early Internet was filtered essentially by wealth and intelligence. You had to have a (relatively) expensive setup, and you had to be the type to be "on the bleeding edge" of technology. That didn't necessarily mean you were a "nerd" or "weird". This group included researchers at government labs, university professors, military, etc... Anywhere where the Internet had early adoption was over-represented. I remember NASA and CERN as significant fractions of the entire Internet in the earliest days!
I remember debates on the talk.origins usenet newsgroup with very highly educated priests, some at the highest levels of the church. These people wouldn't give me the time of day now!
In some sense it's the same filter that a University admissions process applies, and companies like Google try to reproduce.
As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets. I'm in a Fediverse community with a bunch of nerds, and many of us just met in person at this week's Handmade conference.
You can watch the entire conference here. I want to disclaim that not every attendee and talk is nerdy. It's more that this is a space where nerds are thriving.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2306676590 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2307512869
> As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets.
Ah, discord, the proprietary service that demands a phone number just to be able to read anything (so I've never been able to).
Basically the exact opposite of IRC.
Niche forums and gaming communities? HN? They've grown up, some have become braiwashed by corporate culture, some have wives, kids, dogs, cats, mortgages.
The grand irony of remote work is I have way more time and money than I did back then, except the net is 'dead' now.
> Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go?
Private discords, away from the normies.
Nah, that's just kids; adults don't have time for following a Discord per every topic they're interested in.
Then again, adult life has a way of sucking nerdiness out of people, so maybe OP's right in a way.
> adults don't have time for following a Discord per every topic they're interested in.
Funny, I do just that, despite having a bunch of pets and a full-time job - I follow at least 30 game-specific discords. You must be thinking of people compulsively checking notifications like a social media addict?
I feel sorry for anyone who uses Discord like that. Thankfully, you don't have to since many communities now have mini-wikis inside of the Discord to organize the FAQ/common knowledge.
some nerds have private slack or zulip instances
lol not discord. we are in IRC.
Where? I miss IRC so badly, but don't know where to go there.
I run a small network, but this might come across as advertising. It’s been running for 20 years now.
People come and go, but its wild how the community spirit largely remains, even with significant changes in the lifestyle of the people that have been frequenting the network for a large segment of that time.
anyway, the network is:
* ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/darkscience
* https://darkscience.net
* https://www.darkscience.net/webirc/
Same. I'm just 'floating around' now. Good times in #startups ages ago.
Liberal chat. We're also on discord and Mastodon.
They've needed support since antiquity. I recall Tycho Brahe getting into an argument with his serfs after he was made a lord that eventually went to court. What's changed is that it no longer requires extravagant wealth to produce one.
I mean, when there's enough financial incentive, all the gatekeeping in the world won't stop the wave of people hoping to get rich. They'll pay off many of the nerds who were thought to be resistant to such means.
The fact is, it not the Internet that failed us, but education. Education quality in the US has declined a lot since the 60s. Now education is only used to create bio-robots, not people who can still think critically.
In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything.
So here we are.
A slightly different take on this was a school I attended in Mississippi --- classes were divided between academic and social --- academic classes (science, math, languages) were attended at one's ability level (w/ a four grade cap for students through 4th grade, so a 4th grader couldn't take higher than 8th grade classes), while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were taken at one's grade level.
Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
> it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
Waiting for them to go after the entire private school system. Any day now...
The private school system (absent vouchers) is not subject to the legal entanglements and requirements of a public education system.
Sounds like a great argument for someone with a special interest to make private schools more appealing (not that I think you have that. Just people who can tell public schools not to be too good).
It will be interesting to see (as someone without skin in the game 'cause I live in Sweden but having seen a similar type of downward development towards 'equity' here) whether the incoming government will make good on its promise to abolish the department of education which was put in place by Carter in 1979. While the press is doing its best to portray this as a terrible idea which will create mayhem and lead to the quality of education to fall even further it is a fact that the quality of education has markedly deteriorated since its inception while its mission is supposed to be the opposite [1]. Most of the news I've seen regarding education in the USA has trended towards the negative: programs for gifted pupils are shut down because they lead to a decrease in 'equity' where some pupils gain advantages over others, the debacle around extended school closures during the SARS2 unpleasantness, the oversized influence of the (extremely politically biased) teachers' unions, the lack of school choice in many places combined with the influence of districting - where you live decided which school you attend - and more. To me it seems clear the department has failed in its mission and with that needs to be either closed down or overhauled. Given that it is a relatively young department and that educational outcomes were better before it was created - keeping in mind that this does not necessarily indicate a causal relation - it makes sense to abolish this department and relegate essential tasks back to where they were before it was created.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/US-Department-of-Education
> There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
> statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.
But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.
well, "cool" is too subjective to really say much, especially when only thinking on a micro level. I think a better phrasing of that is that "dumbness" is being more mainstream today (in the US) than before. Some states are back to banning more books than ever in schools, the country was split over something as basic as medicine ( a few choosing horse de-wormer over a professionally approved vaccine), etc.
There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".
When you look at data, it is not as bad as you paint it to be.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/the-u-s-is-losing-its-compet...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/most-amer...I'd say 16th (<20th percentile) is really bad when the US is 2nd in spending (behind Luxemburg, apparently) per student in the world. especially if science is the best statistic to show to begin with.
falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.
If you removed the reference to the 70s, This comment could have been stated at any time from 1750 to today and only by grammar would you be able to pick out when it was made.
"In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends"
Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?
Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?
Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.
So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
It is indeed a human flaw, and a futuristic society would be designed to take this into account instead of blindly relying on faith and acting surprised, repeatedly, when it fails.
Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc.
An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent.
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
"An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available."
Total surveillance?
Or only all technical information?
But transparency of all the organisations, so all the police information as well?
So the murder suspects knows, where the police is looking for them? (Or won't there be a need for a police like organisations because murder is also somehow solved?)
My point is, devil is in the details. And Marx is not someone I would go for inspiration. Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Also, I really don't believe that the problem is a human flaw. I don't want to change humans. (It happens naturally anyway).
But I do believe, that we can create better societies, that serves us better, the way we are.
It is just hard, to create them from scratch for various reasons, but many people are trying and some quite succesful.
Crime would be a fraction of what it is now due to a massive shifting in incentives and societal landscape, and probably dealt with very differently when it does occur instead of turning it into its own for-profit industry (with some of the lowest paid labor among prisoners). Knee jerk reactionary notions of "justice" begin to look very primitive through a materialist lens.
> Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Marxism offers a timeless framework and does not require subscriptions or other grifts. That the latter exists does not invalidate the former. It's just example 100539 of what my previous reply was getting at.
> I don't want to change humans.
Humans deserve better opportunities than most presently have, and than most will seemingly have on our current trajectory into late stage capitalist madness. We should acknowledge/embrace our flaws to see commonality (which is different than being ashamed, proud of, or profiting off of them).
Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outside social factors, as well as internet-related developments like the rise of microblogging that doesn’t encourage nuance and rewards partisan performativity) can lead nerds to act harmfully.
In my opinion where this behavior really began to run rampant was with the popularization of quippy “dunk" quote-tweets (though this may have earlier precedent, perhaps on tumblr). It’s a deeply antisocial action that just about every internet connected demographic has come to partake in.
Bullies with social skills are much worse than those without.
Also the nerds bully in the most lazy and untalented ways. They think they "own" somebody by writing lol or lmao with their takes.
Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.
Well we made it “idiot proof” didn’t we, and all the idiots came. We need a sort of Dark Web with low crime, and mostly that’s things like HN and people running private Slack instances.
In a way it kind of exists, you have Gopher and Gemini. The main links I know of.
gopher://sdf.org
gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org
I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
I don’t believe the Dead Internet theory, but I can see how people got there.
I was thinking about a Twitter clone where your account goes through an approval process where you provide a short essay and your Hacker News username. Client has no tracking, and uses no JavaScript.
Lemmy has a few like that. But it uses Javascript, heavily. (Or is it wasm? I never looked.)
I still think someone should make a job application for FE developers that doesn’t work and you have to edit the page source to submit your resume.
Put a comment in the source to say you did it on purpose so you don’t scare them off immediately.
This is the rough social media equivalent of Mensa - not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
Some nerds got it. See Richard Stallman. The GPL is based on the inherent badness of mankind and finding ways to protect against it.
Some nerds were autocrats and sleazebags but they just needed to gain dominance for those traits to appear.
In contrast, the four essential freedoms were based on the inherent goodness of mankind.
The internet we fell in love with doesn’t exist anymore. It was replaced by the walled garden of smartphone apps.
This is the biggest casualty.
So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Fidonet... Woe unto them, for they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind. Their troubles shall multiply as bugs and glitches in their software.
There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be: 1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and 2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys
We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
Personally I think the iPhone was the turning point for much of the dystopian era.
Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better.
But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device.
People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing.
Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.
Is it that the nerds became the bullies and autocrats?
I don’t think it was about stupidity it was about desire, they would not want to come here because it’s just talking to other nerds on bbs. But bandwidth increased and porn and flash games opened the floodgates.
I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
I do not think that porn and flash games were the reason the internet became trendy and stupid. I blame social media, like tuenti, facebook, fotolog, hi5, even myspace.
The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
I’m old enough to have been there, the internet became popular long before modern social media became a thing. Think Geocities -> MySpace —> Facebook etc.
Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.
Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.
I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.
Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.
Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture
These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
> Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.
You mean the guy who sells electric cars? I'm aware that he also bought and -- apparently deliberately -- sabotaged a social media platform that had itself been one of the main engines of this very problem for about a decade. Apart from that, what examples of his conduct are you considering?
I encourage you to listen to the 4 part series Elon Musk Unmasked [1] from Tech won't save us. His motivations are definitely not for the betterment of the average person.
[1] - https://techwontsave.us/episode/189_elon_musk_unmasked_origi...
I'll listen to that, thanks.
But I'm not sure I can relate to the criticism you're levying here, because I don't expect that anyone's motivations would ever be "for the betterment of the average person", nor trust anyone who pretended to be so motivated.
Society improves when people create positive externalities for others as they pursue their own benefit -- those who deliberately apply their own subjective notion of "benefit" onto strangers they don't know and to whom they aren't accountable will often do much more harm than good.
I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person." (Not really take offense, more like armchair take offense, but you know what I mean.)
My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.
Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.
One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
> I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person."
I'm afraid no offense is on offer (and it's rude to take things that aren't offered to you).
But to the point, anyone who said such a thing is either (a) lying, or (b) is projecting their own notion of what's better/best onto other people without those other people's involvement. Neither case reflects a trustworthy individual -- the first is motivated by malice, and the second is motivated by arrogance.
> My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people.
Would you stop working on those projects if you were convinced they wouldn't improve the world for the greatest number of people, but were still interesting and useful to you?
If the people who you thought they were going to benefit didn't agree with you, and didn't want to use what you were offering them, would you accept that, or would you resent them and begin contriving ways to get them using it anyway?
Do you acknowledge that there's at least a little bit of arrogance inherent in having any beliefs about what's better for other people without those other people's own input?
> Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Again meaning no offense, but I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I find all of these to be more than a little bit bizarre and creepy, and I think there's a great deal of hubris involved in presenting your LLM chatbot as unironically messianic.
> One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
A lot of us did that. The OP article is precisely about how those exact intentions of a couple of decades ago have had quite different outcomes to what was intended.
The downvoting on this is shameful. This is exactly what has happened.
The 90s nerds were fucking malevolent. They’re the ones that built the dystopia we are currently experiencing.
I know, I was one of them and I had a first row seat for a lot of this stuff.
The comment was edited after the down votes started pouring in.
Elon Musk is an example of a fascist? That is outrageous nonsense.
On a spectrum he is definitely in that direction. There are many examples but a few:
a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
b) Has constantly promoted false stories about immigrants, black people, trans people, women etc. The narrative being that the US is a zero sum game where in order for non-white males to succeed white-males must lose.
c) I run Twitter business accounts which are post-only and every single one shifted hard towards showing ultra-right wing political content in the For You feed. There is no doubt that the platform was used as a propaganda tool during the last election.
>a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
Hmm, you must have missed when the Department of Justice sent protestors to Florida to pressure a local district attorney into pressing charges against a very clearly innocent man. And if you disagree with the very clearly innocent part then you definitely didn't watch the trial and missed the eyewitness reports and the medical reports.
https://theweek.com/articles/462236/did-justice-department-i...
That article never says that DOJ sent protestors.
Just that they provided support to those protests which is part of their remit i.e. to reduce conflict by encouraging dialog, mediation as opposed to protesting etc: https://www.justice.gov/crs
Just wait and see what he'll do to the federal workers, before he gets to screw up Mars for good. Maybe replace them with AI, since that's the current hype train. Think of full self driving but for government.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
I think the word for what is about to happen is not yet invented. It will be something else, something with dire consequences but of a different kind. Something that leaves everyone but a thin elite completely behind. Some may say it has been like this a long time, but I think it will evolve/level up to something we have never seen before.
Some call what they fear to come is fascism, but I think it will be inaccurate. Oligarchism maybe. Or something new.
Firing federal workers and going to Mars is what fascism is?
Firing Federal workers so that ultra-rich people can do whatever they want without any oversight, while at the same time undermining the rule of law, and creating a scapegoat ("illegal immigrants") at the same time - that's literally fascism.
In 1944, before the actual universally agreed upon to be fascist powers were defeated in WW2, George Orwell wrote about how the word had been applied to just about every group imaginable and had already lost any real meaning it might have had:
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
"Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come."
"But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."
Try Umberto Eco's "On Fascism," it's the best definition of the term I've ever come across
What makes it the "best" in your opinion? Looking at the list, several of the points could be applied to just about every modern nation-state, several easily apply to communist states just as easily as fascist states, and there are several that don't apply to many states that most people would argue are fascist. For example, Salazar's Portugal is widely regarded as fascist but points 9, 10, 11, and 13 (and maybe more) don't really apply to it.
It strikes me more as someone trying to give fascism a formal definition as a way to use it as an ideological cudgel in arguments than any attempt to define it based pn observation of multiple actual fascist states and political movements.
I said wait. Every fascist regime begins with a purge. Then it was the communists, now it might be federal workers? I guess we shall see.
Hmmmm, I can't quite put my finger on what it is but I suspect there are some fundamental differences between firing a bunch of bureaucrats from the federal government vs. Hitler's purge of the SA or Stalin's purge of the Soviet officer corps.
Musk doesn't need to do the heavy lifting himself.
He can just direct his supporters to violently attack opposition:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
Except he can't be banned from TwitterX like Trump. Imagine Musk as a future Republican candidate with a social network. This DODGE thing is a political ramp for him. The other potential candidate is Zuckerberg with his fascination with ancient Rome. Both are hardly the types to retreat silently and open a charitable foundation like Bill Gates.
"Musk can't highlight specific examples of the federal government pissing our tax money down the drain because of how other people who see it might react."
You ever heard of a Heckler's Veto?
It is completely legitimate to argue about the use of taxpayer money.
It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
>It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
Which Musk didn't do? Are all the people who said "Trump is a threat to democracy" and similar statements responsible for the multiple assassination attempts against him?
By that definition, communist are also fascist?
Yes, yes, we all know it - Elon Musk eats babies and Tesla batteries set Rome on fire.
Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.
"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.
Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.
For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).
> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.
My catchphrase for a while has been "business ruins everything it touches." And before someone swoops in to try and convince me otherwise, save your breath. I'm not interested in hearing the positives of business, I will ignore outright anything pointing to "you wouldn't have THIS without business!"-type replies, and I don't want to reduce this thought further.
From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.
I get your point, though to me, there's way too many babies per cubic meter of that bathwater of yours.
My own general explanation of why everything sucks is more like this: we don't know how to stop. The market can't stop itself from over-optimizing, over-exploiting.
The evolution of any product, service, company or technology, can be to a first approximation plotted as a bell curve:
(Total value includes not just direct benefit to customers/users, but also how it enables others to build new products/science/businesses/etc. on it.)The market always goes all the way to the right. What it should do, what we need it to do, is to stop at the peak of the bell curve. Alas, there is no mechanism that would get people to say, "yeah, this is the best it could be, let's go do something else"; the market demands they move to the right, all the way to diminishing returns.
I'd replace "business" with "capitalism".
It was extremely arrogant to think that money wouldn’t change nerds.
Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today.
Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.
Yes, though I'd characterize it as more naive than arrogant.
I think back to all of those people talking breathlessly of really free speech and me nodding along just as convinced. Yikes.
I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
Yes, 90's me was definitely naive, and 00's me too. The "do no evil" years.
Clunky desktop computers connected to the internet in the 90s were already an easy mode. It's a weird point in time to pull the ladder up. I wonder if the people in the 70s shared the same sentiment.
I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
> to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends
This.
There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.
Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.
Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
Your theory is that the nerds are the good guys in this story?
I often joke that social media or even just the comments section is the great filter of the Fermi paradox. As time passes it feels depressingly less of a joke.
>Growing up, there was a more positive view of tech. The future looked awesome
I think that may be a bit biased. There was also Threads, Terminator 2, Blade Runner, Robocop, Planet of the Apes, Escape from New York, Brazil, Mad Max and the like.
Reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
From my experience mentoring junior designers Ive learned to set the utopian belief that "its all for the user" is a matter of perspective. A stakeholder is also a user and their utopia is different from any preconceived ideal user an upset designer might have. It can be more constructive to enable the continuation of and building up of new fantasies rather than see it as a doomsday scenario where the good times have ended. they never existed and they always existed its just how you look at it. solve problems and harmonize the multi-utopias :)
In this regard, I see a lot of projects aiming to "optimize user experience" that are actually optimizing for imaginary users at the expense of real ones.
GNOME is a great example of this -- they're constantly removing functionality over the objections of their actual userbase in order to implement features that fit the speculative needs they project onto people who don't -- and likely never will -- use the software.
The lead designer for Homegrocer (Amazon Fresh but too early) was in my social circle, friend of my friends, and the part he didn’t like about his job was that you still had to push the high margin items that the grocery stores put in easy reach to get your visit to be profitable to them. So there’s a moral hazard for things like search filters and sorting. As a customer I’d love to sort by price per unit. But they don’t want that (look at how many items are priced per pound in one size and per ounce in another).
I think this idea of “for the user” is a symptom of being trapped in a certain worldview. For some people, the only form of productive organization they can imagine is a company, which consists of an insular minority of producers, and a large majority of consumers. In such a structure, how can the minority of producers possibly know, anticipate, and retain concern for the interests of the consumers? They have to cross this huge gap between them and their users to do so. Eventually, the company grows larger and that gap between users and decision makers widens to the point where the company loses favor, and this process is inevitable so long as the structure of “company” is presumed necessary for the making of the product. I think open source communities demonstrate a potential alternative route.
I don't remember believing in any tech utopia for a very long time. On the other hand I regularly see people who still believe we are a few years away from AGI creating one for us. So while it's over for the author it's not so for others.
Personally I can name both areas where tech improved my life beyond expectations (not having to live near work for one) as well as huge disappointments (such as people willingly choosing to believe lies en masse despite truth becoming easily accessible).
I feel there was a time, the good time, when techies and nerds decided the direction of tech development, cause they did it out of curiosity, interested and fun for science and experiments. But this time is long gone. Now the direction of tech is dictated by management and marketing people which have little or no love for the tech itself as for the business model and money it can generate.
Optimism or techno-optimism is the idea that we can fix things with the right know-how. It's a psychological strategy to avoid noticing that there are dark forces which aim to control, destroy and sow despair, perhaps conveying temporary advantages to those who ally with them. Some take a religious or supernatural view of these things; others think they are facets of consciousness which spread virally from brain to brain.
Whatever you believe it seems clear that one's experience of life and the world is dominated by inner experience and mental well-being, not by luxuries or technological convenience. One could live in a palace, drive flying cars and so on but still suffer dreadfully.
Although my personal disposition is fairly sunny, verging on the manic, my model of how the world and how my life works is not one of optimism but rather a series of defeats occasionally punctuated by an unexpected victory. Sort of like the fall of the Berlin Wall or how Gollum accidentally destroyed the ring. Eucatastrophe was Tolkien's name for it.
But isn't know-how how you got to this world view of yours? If you could do it, so can others, and technology does improve the global know-how. Even if some also use it to "control, destroy and sow despair" as you say. There would be people doing that anyway, as history shows. The printing press was the same, but I think we can all agree that the net result is positive. So is, in my view, the modern "tech".
> It's a psychological strategy to avoid noticing that there are dark forces which aim to control, destroy and sow despair
I thought techno-optimists/technocrats fully acknowledge the inevitable presence of bad actors, but believe that with a proper design they would be unable to do any significant harm. Am I wrong?
Of course, whenever such designs are possible in reality is a whole different issue (and the reason for a lot of disappointment). I’m merely surprised by this idea that bad actors are somehow not noticed.
I personally don’t know what the author is talking about.
My whole family now works from home in their pajamas, gets anything they want delivered next day to their door, and has access to all the knowledge in the world literally in their pocket. Is that utopia? I don’t know. But it sure beats life in the 1990s.
My kids (10, 7, and 5) try going outside to play every day and all of the neighbor kids are tucked inside doing whatever the hell it is kids do nowadays.
I lived in a very similar suburb in the '90s and had many, many other kids to play with outside every day. Bicycling, sports, adventures, you name it…
For them, I am 100% positive that 2024 does not beat 1994. They all seem so ridiculously lonely.
I think you're both right, though in different ways.
GP is correct that life today "beats" that from the 90s -- as far as convenience/friction is concerned.
OTOH, just like how "sitting is the new smoking", a 100% frictionless life is not better in every way. It atrophies several important faculties like the ability to deal with boredom (or people who aren't exactly your type), focus for long periods of time on work, etc.
Viewed from this perspective (and as a parent myself), I agree that 2024 does not beat 1994.
Tech in early 2000s..
Let's all build Internet services on open standards and join all sorts of things together.
Tech in 2024:
Guess what suckers!
Ah, I feel dirty for writing this, but — not everyone should’ve gotten a voice in the internet. Unfortunately, it’s a “loudest and proudest wins” scenario, which halts gradual progress. And yes, maybe I shouldn’t have gotten a venue to speak either.
Before social media, you needed some web development skills to have a voice. Maybe that was a beneficial speed bump.
There are instructive precedents in the history of communications technology, where early optimism by innovators was displaced by the interests of other stakeholders. From "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu, https://archive.is/4fKyt
> The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the only nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news.. Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively.. When the major channels for moving information are loyal to one party, its effects, while often invisible, can be profound.
It bothers me a bit that the author still buys some propaganda and whitewashing, as evidenced by footnote 42.
This is especially ironic when the author expresses skepticism of the social benefit of smartphones in paragraph 2, as if no company in particular made them.
I feel like you aren't reading this in context? It's important the author address the obvious reply, and they clearly state those efforts are not enough.
> I feel like you aren't reading this in context?
That's a strange interpretation of a citation of the last footnote, as if I hadn't read the entire article.
> those efforts are not enough
But I'm stating that those so-called "efforts" are mostly just propaganda to whitewash the vast amount of bad done by the perpetrators and can only naively be interpeted as using "their money for good".
My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.
> Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism.
I think this is blaming the outgroup. 'We' are the problem, too.
Our actions certainly are, and if we think we have free will, we ought to be able to control those. And I think it is possible for us to do so.
But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about.
We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.
https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767...
to be fair, was there anything you didn't feel optimistic about in the 90s?
From what I remember everything about that decade was full of unrealistic optimism (end of history etc)
I mean, we did read Snow Crash and other near-future tech dystopias, but we still thought it was cool.
This is my sentiment too. It feels like the world is entering a dark period like it has many times before in history. I don't consider tech to be the cause, but it does seem to accelerate and amplify things.
> My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
Ok so I'm curious about this.
In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?
Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
None of this has anything to do with technology itself, though. All tools used by humans will be put to the purposes that those humans bear.
The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity.
After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean.
A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project.
Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.
I'm not genX but I felt the same. Even as late as the late 00s there was still widespread optimism about what the internet would bring. By the late 10s that feeling was completely gone.
I don’t fully disagree with what you say. I think social media also has some positives. The amount of transparency over government and exchange of knowledge and ability to learn is greater now than ever before. Hopefully we will swing back to a balanced lifestyle where phones and social media are just tools that people use in a limited way instead of being addicted to it.
My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
> The amount of transparency over government
Can you describe how transparency over government has increased (by social media)?
Mainly that people have a place to share things that are happening, spread them, etc. There is just far greater awareness. For example locally there are people who attend council meetings or other such events and report on things that the newspaper doesn’t. I don’t mean that the government itself is more transparent voluntarily - although I guess they do share some basic things like public notices via social media channels.
This cycle is coming to an end, yes. Just like IBM's reign came to an end.
Maybe projects like Framework, Mastodon, et al are showing us what the next cycle may be and can be a more positive way of moving forward?
The key factor is that the success of the establishment breeds bureaucracy, while the disruptive growth has stalled. Case in point, who would think that the once most innovative company, Google, could become the most bureaucratic organization in merely 15 years.
People got excited when our tech solves their real problems. It looks we've been in a plateau since before the Covid with a couple of exceptions.
As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.
But I wonder how many people have had a change of heart, and how much is just the influx of younger people and others with different opinions. Now that tech went through a "glamorous" phase, and is still in a "lucrative" phase, it certainly has a much broader draw.
It's fine for people to update their beliefs with their experiences, I'm just curious if the cause is that vs new people with different beliefs. I haven't really been on social media (other than curated subreddits and HN, I suppose), and I have a lovely wife and children and lots of real life time, too, so I feel like I don't doom scroll or anything. I wonder how much that's colored people's opinions vs first hand experiences.
As a simple example, the tech ethics question du jour when I was coming of age was whether it was okay to pirate music. Of course it was, it's free to copy bits! "You wouldn't download a car" etc. But I don't see a ton of daylight between that and training those songs on an AI model, but now generative AI is destroying those industries and musicians, etc. And HN these days seems largely against the AI training, while it was for pirating back then.
Or another example, slightly before that was the Clipper Chip and the government trying to regulate encryption for the safety and security of citizens, and the PGP guys being folk heroes for printing their source code in a book to take advantage of free speech protections and get around it. Whereas these days a good chunk of HN wants the government to regulate AI models for our own safety. This one is a bit of a stretch, but it feels like the problems "rhyme" at least.
HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.
Welcome green commenter!
I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it.
Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?
So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?
> what are you really saying here?
that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments.
ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.
Not saying you are wrong, but let's not dismiss the need for good argumentation when you say something out of the norm. Dissidence with arguments does a great service to everyone involved.
Having said that, people here do downvote based on opinion allignment, which is very hurtful. I've seen perfectly legit comments (with sources) that are out of the norm being downvoted because people just don"t agree with them
if you turn showdead on in your profile, you'll see a lot of absolute crap that should be dead. But I've also started to notice more and more comments that don't deserve to be flagged dead. Just comments against the hivemind, which sucks. I asked dang if he'd be willing to give an endpoint that just surfaces dead items but he refused.
[dead]
HN is useful for discussion on cutting edge stuff. It's a great place to overhear conversations about what's important to tech people. I've learned a lot from this community. But you're right -- certain insular, minority opinions seem to get unusual airtime here. They make the discussions unbalanced.
I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments. If enough users here used it, it would reverse these trends and force dissenting opinions to be taken seriously. This is not reddit, where the average greyed out comment is some nazi stuff. Here, most greyed out comments are just feather rustlers doing their duty. We are lucky to have them, else we surround ourselves with sycophants and yes-people.
Pro-AI comments regularly get downvoted. I find this amusing or sad. Or maybe both.
>I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments.
You'll just get banned.
> As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.
I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism.
Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.
I am one of those people who got into tech as a teen in the late 90s when Microsoft was the capitalist bad guy, Google was the underdog, and Linux was socialism. Things were largely contained to the tech ecosystem.
What I find interesting is as tech has grown and people enter it who are not that interested in tech is you see tech’s influence seems to have gone further and further away from our industry niche.
Do I think VCs should be making decisions for millions of Americans so they can get more rich? No. Do I think tech workers should push a progressive narrative that the rest of the country should ascribe to? No.
Tech has an undue influence on the world on both the left and right. All of us mistakenly ascribe our unique situation as how the world should work. Maybe we should just focus on what we are good at?
I'm an erstwhile techno-optimist who was disabused of his Panglossian views by the Utah Data Center, drone warfare (now advanced to the point of remotely piloted rifles gunning people down on the streets of Gaza), crypto ponzis, AI enclosing and monetizing decades of humanity's collective mental efforts, and the general indifference or even embrace by most of the tech community of all of the above. Technology has liberatory potential, but not in the hands currently wielding it.
I don't think this actually has anything to do with tech itself. Society in general is in a more pessimistic mood than a decade ago, driven on by all sorts of institutions pumping out content that everything is bad, so you should upend the world in their vision.
Maybe I was just too young and inattentive 16 years ago, but before the GFC and Occupy, I don't think there was such a pessimistic narrative overall, and it only got worse over time.
Same. What the author writes seems more of a consequence of economic anxiety and the resulting populism (e.g. "big corporations bad, profit bad") than tech itself.
A lot of people who criticize tech, like the author, would often excuse non-commercial or personal actors for doing the same thing (e.g. "regular people using LLMs are fine, big corporations using LLMs are bad"), which shows that they believe that "doing it for a profit" makes the moral difference. So it has nothing to do with tech at all, but rather whether or not the actor is doing it for a commercial purpose.
To help with your wonderings, I was a tech optimist who became pessimistic. I enjoy working on and thinking about technology problems, but it's so hard to keep my own creations from going on to become harmful. Perhaps my pessimism began with Jevons paradox. If I got a redo, I'd pick a different field.
One cause of the mismatch is that tech did not turn out to be "lucrative" for the vast majority of techies.
Didn't lots of us get six figure salaries?
In the Bay Area six figures ($100000) is poverty level even for a single person. Officially. An average software developer supporting a family on a single income in the Bay means a below median family income. No, it's not starvation. But I would hardly call living paycheck-to-paycheck "lucrative".
There's a lot of 6-figure salaries in tech outside of the Bay Area, and even outside the US.
But you see the contrast between "you are a valuable and well-compensated knowledge worker" and "you have to move somewhere more appropriate for your working-class income"? And how can anyone continue to say this is lucrative with a straight face?
I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation.
It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.
Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.
Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.
We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.
If you're not on social media, you might be missing part of what has changed people's minds. Social media is the biggest consumer-facing technological innovation of the last two decades, and it's financially lucrative, but also net-bad for society. I have a sense that we should do something about it, but as you say, doing something would require repudiating the values I held when I was younger.
The two biggest advancements in tech in recent years: Crypto and AI have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable. And arguably have done far more harm than good.
Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world.
So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.
People have always thought this about new tech.
https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/computer "Technology is making us uncivil", 1990
https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/television "Television addiction", 1977
https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/recorded-sound "A profit without honor", 1930 (https://external-preview.redd.it/Js-HSYL7H4FuXSQ-ZmSDXZ6uYZq...)
I love this website. It captures how people think they have unique opinions about <new_technology> being bad, but in reality, it's a tale as old as time.
No one wants to be the person resistant to change and progress. But the fact of the matter is that most people are, even technologists, even here on HN.
20 years from now, when AI-generated drugs are curing major diseases and scarcity is even less common, these comments will be just another entry in the Pessimists' Archive.
I really love the website too. Your last paragraph reminded me about this text from this excellent essay Misunderestimating Openness by James Boyle:
> Will we look back on today’s anguish over open content being mined to train neural networks and marvel at how blind we were to the importance of huge, open datasets for democratic, transparent AI? Will we say that the mining of open content is vital if we want models that are less biased than those trained on smaller proprietary datasets? Will we think that open datasets are also vital if we care about barriers to entry in the new world of the data-rich and data-poor?
Source: https://openfuture.eu/paradox-of-open-responses/misunderesti...
> have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable
such as?
Crypto has been one of the largest wealth transfers ever seen. With the level of criminality e.g insider trading, rug pulling, money laundering being unprecedented for a new technology i.e.
https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-crypto-money-launderin...
AI has seen the less well-off parts of society e.g. artists, customer service lose work in favour of making productivity higher for knowledge workers etc.
To be fair, whether or not this is "more harm than good" depends on your moral views.
> Crypto has been one of the largest wealth transfers ever seen.
Need a citation for this.
> With the level of criminality e.g insider trading, rug pulling, money laundering being unprecedented for a new technology
Not all crime is bad. I just so happen to belong to a marginalized group that requires crypto to do financial activities (e.g. commissions, donations for activist fronts). I am grateful for crypto's existence, even though like many (even in the crypto community), scams are disliked.
> artists, customer service lose work in favour of making productivity higher for knowledge workers etc
It is true that automation in general seems to increase inequality amongst education lines [1]. But the solution isn't to ban automation, it's to have equal-opportunity education (e.g. subsidies, retraining for obsoleted workers) and to financially support those that get left behind.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_automation/#wiki...
The deep irony is that your critique of AI is exactly Trump’s critique of globalization, just with different people impacted.
I don't see any real evidence that either AI or crypto have had "major negative impacts for society."
That was addressed to those that do not deny climate change.
The energy consumption of both crypto and AI are way overstated. Total energy budget of crypto is less than a percent of world electricity consumption (not energy consumption, electricity). And a ton of that electricity is particularly no-carbon.
AI is harder to get numbers for and obviously is a moving target, but plausibly half of the consumption that crypto is.
For more information: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
I still love technology. It's only getting more amazing all the time. If you view just that, we're not just living in the future, but way beyond.
The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh.
So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.
I’m an old guy (older than you at least) who’s been working in and around tech since the 90s.
What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present.
The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways.
That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things.
But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.
So much this. I joined the web in ’97 and back then we had this optimism that the Internet would make the world a better place because it would act as fertilizer for ideas and critical thinking. Some three decades later it’s obvious that this didn’t happen and I’d dare say that social media made the world a worse place. And it’s something that I’m thinking quite frequently the last years trying to figure out what went wrong or if we were just naïve.
How is this different from previous periods in which technology companies harmed people and society as well? (Think coal mines, cars, television, what have you).
I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.
Nothing? Do you expect people to be coal mine optimistic too?
Relevant question for this thread is if let say those coal mines promoted Utopia.
> profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways
such as?
Here's a nice article exploring some of the ways tech is visibly negative: https://blog.avas.space/tech-utopia-fantasy/
This article is so bias and slanted it can’t stand up straight.
There are so many examples. Widespread ubiquity of pornography and gambling. Proliferation of unstable “gig” work. Flows of large amounts of cash into politics.
There’s a lot more. Like I said there are good effects too but it’s disingenuous to claim there aren’t immediately obvious negative consequences.
You can't solve people problems with technology.
Writing like this makes me grateful that technology has essentially always been just another “thing” to me and that growing up it was never presented as a harbinger of liberation.
The plethora of gadgets, gizmos and sights and sounds that painted my perception of the 90s and 00s just felt like the way it was, until it wasn’t.
I used to think iPhone revolutionized the World. Now think it ruined it.
Internet is a TV form the 80s/90s. Mindless, soulless engagement machine we all stare into.
Tech is a tool, and people should never forget that. It will be used for both good and bad, but it won't change the soul or morals of its users
What a sad, negative (and highly biased) way to view the world.
Most shocking of all is how almost every free-software, anti-big-government, anti-big-business, and libertarian advocate swallowed these allegedly "smart" alleged "telephones" -- which are obviously computers that someone else controls and utterly disempower the users -- to the utter disregard of every principle they said they believed.
Don't call it a "computer" (computers are scary), call it a "smart" "telephone." Or call it a "device" as if it were a can opener.
Don't call it a "program" (programmers are geeks), call it an (ugh) "app" [which is just short for "application program" of course]
Never had one of those nefarious handheld treacherous computers, never will, thanks.
The problem I see with free software advocates is they're basically trying to paddle upstream to a destination that is not particularly desirable. Most people don't care if they can go visit their local water treatment works and propose modifications – they really, really want their water to be drinkable and would prefer some regulation and oversight from the state.
Sorry to inform you that humans are just horny, aggressive and fear-driven chimpanzees with slightly more cognitive skills. If you thought technology was going to change that, you are mistaken.
What did you think you would obtain by giving technology to a bunch of horny, aggressive and fear-driven monkeys? Other than making monkeys more effective at making each other horny, aggressive and afraid?
> Educational content is still there, but everything is getting increasingly more paywalled. Scientific data is still harder to access and read21. The sensationalized rage bait articles are freely accessible, but the thorough analyses and takedowns are restricted22.
In a lot of ways, I feel like this author still believes in (a slightly modified version of) the tech utopian fantasy. Do we really think that a) research is HARDER to access today than in the 2000s, and b) that the thing keeping sensationalized rage bait popular is paywalls around research papers?
Utopias are always fantasies. All of them. There is no such thing and never will be. Solve problems and more problems present themselves, often harder ones since we are always swimming against entropy.
That’s life. Life is war against entropy and for the individual at least entropy always wins. We die.
The Internet made countless things better and a few things worse. We notice the things it made worse because humans have a powerful negativity bias, probably because this was adaptive. “Mistake a bush for a lion and you’re fine, but mistake a lion for a bush and you’re dead.” Your ancestors were paranoid enough to survive.
Edit: I do want to add one point on which I am sympathetic. Unfortunately it seems as if politics is a thing the Internet made worse. That’s dangerous because governments have a monopoly on force. Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse is probably an existential problem.
> Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse
I don't think it's just a systems problem. Sure, systems can help, but education is even more important. Recognizing it's terrible is valuable too (I hope most people have recognized that...).
I recommend Julia Galef's Scout Mindset[1] as an inspiration for the kind of change that I believe is needed. (perhaps the most book of the 3rd millenium? :P ) We need to boost our immunity against fake news and extreme discourse. Information now is what is decisive, and viral (and wrong, misleading, hateful, etc.) information can spread very quickly.
Apart from that, more compassion in general. We're very good at teaching kids about "productive" things they are interested in, but very poor about ethics and meta things, like compassion for fellow beings, the importance of a peaceful and kind discourse to the survival of civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scout_Mindset
> Utopias are always fantasies. All of them.
Historically utopia had this association. But I think if an utopia is impossible, then it's less interesting. There has to be something achievable that's worth striving for. It's not going to be perfect of course, but I'm confident it exists somehow.
I also think Utopia is as much as about the small as the big. Tolkien famously had his utopia in the Hobbit way of living, with a simple, relatively wealthy, relatively peaceful society -- but with great interpersonal relationships and all the little things (literally :) ).
Well said.
People definitely latch on to the negatives, and that is in itself a big part of the problem of social media type platforms today.
Sure there's misinformation etc, but I'd much rather what we have today - it's not perfect, but it is so much easier to learn topics, so many more resources, and no not everything is free, but a lot of it is, and at least the paid resources exist!
I'm also glad that we do have people raging and seeing the negatives too. We need these people as a way of finding balance, and I'm sure as a system we'll regress to a mean and everything will be ok.
omg that bush is a lion! I'm just gonna jump over here... argh snake!
Ohhh, it's a snake! It's a badger badger badger badger...
> sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse
Polarization (as the word implies) is not outcome of the tech but side-effect of two-party system.
When there aren't many problems people seem to invent them. I think people in the US don't realize how unbelievably lucky they are. No- we need a shakeup!
[flagged]
Liberalism doesn’t try, and shouldn’t, because it takes the position that human beings should be free to seek their own goals rather than have them imposed.
The alternative is to have a vision imposed by the state. History has shown this usually doesn’t work very well and often results in horrors. The horrors come when reality inevitably conflicts with the vision and the political leadership grabs a mallet to bash that square peg into the hole. See: communism, fascism, theocratic regimes, imperial adventures, etc.
Star Trek is fantasy. In reality I’m not convinced that society would be so pleasant. Even in fiction trying to portray utopia you sometimes see glimpses. Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era. I wonder what happens if you try to deviate in that culture? Where are those people? It’s never discussed. Maybe all record of them is just deleted silently and everyone forgets.
> Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era.
That's an interesting read on it, but the most likely reason is simply because the writers had a high regard for classical music.
But nevertheless I'm reminded of the Zentraedi from Macross, who were created as a warrior underclass to protect the interests of the spacefaring Protoculture (ancient precursor beings; it's implied that humans are descendants of a stranded Protoculture colony). They are genetically engineered and raised with enough knowledge to fight interstellar battles, but not really do anything else. They know how to use their battleships and mechs and stuff, but not how to repair them. Even their language is a restricted, Newspeak-like version of Protoculture language with plenty of words suitable for battle but a dearth of words for other purposes (there is no word for "friendship" or "love"; there is only "ally" and "not-ally"). They have no culture to speak of.
So the first love song they hear causes them to utterly go to pieces. It's what wins the war for the humans, as sure as our germs did against the Martians in War of the Worlds.
This also calls to mind one of our real attempts at utopia -- the Soviet Union, whose citizens smuggled in Western music and fashion because their own culture had stagnated.
Yeah AI will make the missinformation and garbage content flood even better until we all drown in it so enjoy the show and play it smart.
Good! That means we're maturing.
The Hype Train for tech is finally pulling into Disillusionment Station again. See also Silent Spring, which turns 65 in a couple years.
As someone who grew up poor the idea that tech would automate the unpleasant work carried with it the obvious point of who would pay me for the pleasant work and without money how would I survive. So a tech utopia like that described by the author would require at least a Star Trek level of communism which to me always seemed incredibly unrealistic. The post might as well be ‘I wanted techno communism and didn’t get it.’
Technology is treating me well and I hope that continues to be true for a long time. I mainly worry about the sociopolitical consequences of the mass disenfranchisement of the middle classes but the middle class is so folded in on itself that it’ll likely disappear in with a whimper and we’ll end up with a 3rd world level of inequality. While not as nice as more egalitarian societies they do largely continue to function with a surprising degree of stability.
For any of these advancements, it depends how they are used. Some people will use them for good, some for profit, some for their own personal advancement.
Let's just hope there are enough people out there using these things wisely that the future will be a better place.
Has no one here read Harari's s latest book, Nexus?
Us humans do have noble goals which some literally willing to die for and we also produce world class villains and everything in between. Tech does nothing but amplifies what we can do to achieve our goals. It enable all the good things we have dreamed about and it also fucks everything up.
Well it also absorbs a lot of resources. We could have largely the same benefits from tech at a fraction of the cost. But that doesn't produce maximum growth! Or at least, not in terms of GDP.
So fix the real rulers.
This sort of thinking is what leads you down the “guns don't kill people” route. Each piece of technology has, in it's design, a set of biases. To someone with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The tools you have affect how you view the world.
It's not that simple. If all I have is a hammer, I don't view everything as a nail; I see first what other uses my hammer can have, then if a hammer won't do the job I seek or create another tool that will.
would you reckon majority of the people would act the same or that you are an intelligent outlier?
>"This sort of thinking is what leads you down the..."
Please spare me from this bullshit. You are free to go back to that cave.
I think the point of the article is that while tech may in theory enable all the good things we have dreamed about, in practice it mostly doesn’t.
I am still really happy about what tech has brought us and how comfortable life is in this day. OP brought out all sorts of negative examples, but so could I bring out equal amount or more of positive examples on what the tech has brought us.
I'm excited for what the future brings, and I'm still amazed by how sudden jump there was of ability of LLMs. It's still crazy to me.
This is a great write up, and one that hits home for me.
When I was younger, in my teen years (~2014-2020), I imagined the future only to be better than it was right now. The technology would only keep getting better. People would use the internet (especially social media) and become cleverer, less xenophobic, and more open to all kinds of cultures. We all would be getting richer, quality of life would only increase, no more wars, yadda yadda. It was so obvious that liberal democracy is the only right way forward, the pinnacle.
(when I say "we" I refer to the collective West)
I'm quite disappointed with how so many things are turning to shit right now. I know, I know, what I wrote above probably sounds like "the end of history", which has been recalled even by its originator by now. Nostalgia probably also plays an important role – things are much simpler when you're not an adult.
But still, we had a good thing. We had it all.
I keep hoping we will get back on track.
Interesting, ~2014-2020 seemed to me already past the best date. I mean that was the time of Cambridge Analytics scandals and rage-baits on Facebook.
It's probably because I'm just too young to have consciously used "the true early internet", i.e. what people often refer to as 2000-2010 era. Sometimes I get kind of sad I didn't get to experience it. But at the same time, before covid, I was pretty optimistic about internet's overall impact on society.
The title seems oddly objective for a matter of opinion
One of the problems with this is that the author:
1. Sees things from an excessively American point of view. 2. Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.
This is a global problem, and a lot of the problem is the concentration of power. The problem is not which side companies in a particular industry pick, but that which side they pick matters too much.
The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem. Disparate issues get labelled "left" or "right" and everyone agrees with all the opinions on their side.
It's an American POV because a lot of EU and Asia have safeguards against this stuff. America's been deregulating such things for decades now.
It is indeed an American POV that universal healthcare seems to come and go with the president, something unthinkable for other first world countries.
>The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem.
Following up on the other response: if you got or know a coalition that can push more ranked choice voting in some states, I'm all ears. That's the only real way to affect this as any reasonable level.
> Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.
Well, to be fair, the movement that seems to have largely infiltrated the Republican party in the US is (openly) against democracy and prefers a concentration of power and subjugation of "others".
And it's a two-party first-past-the-post voting system so a vote for any alternative between the two ruling parties is effectively a vote for whichever party is least like them.
So it's against your own interest not to take part in the tribalism in the US.
Yeah totally-
Don't confuse hate for the republicans as support for the democrats
the best path forward would be for all nerds to stop fitting into the programmed stereotype of being incredibly imbalanced/high-strung as part of being talented and thus wasting the life-force away from those who capitalize on this
"Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you."
Boycott is a start, it's an easy demand to put forward. I doubt it's enough, so I'd suggest adding two classics once you've recruited and become regulars with some boycotters: mutual aid and direct action.
The real problem here is that people are incapable of weathering a disruption to their way of life for a long term benefit to humanity. Progress is never linear. It is a jagged line with an upward slope.
No major technological leap has been happened disrupting social structures, putting people out of jobs, or causing some sort of moral panic. https://pessimistsarchive.org/
Nearly all of them have dramatically benefited humanity in the long term. Your children will live healthier and longer, with fewer extremes of suffering.
The drama over AI, in my opinion, simply separates those who think long-term from those who don't. On a long enough timescale, issues like hallucination, theft of artistic IP, etc are a total non-issue.
I think it's arguable the anti-AI movement is much more selfish than the pro-AI one. I don't care if I lose my job to create AGI, because the benefit to humanity is worth much more than my job.
I can't remember exactly when, but like 8 or so years ago a british guy had a post on HN that questioned all of this and everyone, I mean EVERYONE here basically lambasted him. It was the first time I kinda turned my head and started saying that all this stuff is fake. All these "save the world" job posts, etc.. etc.. it was all bullshit. I think everyone knew that then - but were not willing to admit it outloud.
That's totally a human thing. Digital window dressing (or in this case, defensive tribalistic behavior) is just another projection of how human beings do social things.
Generally speaking, if you place anything under close scrutiny, you will catch yourself (assuming you're human) like the ouroboros - the serpent consuming its own tail. You can't escape the flaws of your own perception and your nature.
All other things, including praising technology and envisioning a better future, are just the tip of the iceberg. People will never find solace outwards unless they turn their focus in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this is impossible for society in our capitalist, highly materialistic world.
This pov is 2 decades late. If you worked on automation in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or witnessed first hand the rise of social media and smart phones, you already held this belief. As we continue to scale technology and lower its barrier of entry, we continue to expand all of the gaps that prevent us from reaching any "utopia".
I realize that my "lowering the barrier" statement comes off as if I think we should support inclusive technology or that I don't believe in democratization of tech- Im all for inclusivity, but we have not actually reached a state of democracy.
Capitalism works to extract value from technologies that create efficiency savings. As such, capitalists - and people who aspire to become capitalists (i.e. to live off returns on capital rather than money paid in exchange for their labour) - are fascinated by new technologies that promise efficiency savings.
This is not new. It is why a lot of people are interested in YC, and this forum as a result.
The problem with that system though is that it creates misaligned interests. As consumers, we want technologies that make our lives easier. But the people who are running the game - the people with money and therefore power - want to just make the extraction of value more efficient.
Social media exists to sell advertising against content you don't have to pay anyone to produce, and is therefore one of the greatest utopian ideas of capitalism. There is minimal material cost, labour costs are reasonable even when you pay 95th percentile compensation packages, and to boot you are seen as a media entity that powerful people want to influence, so you can help them influence others, thereby giving you access to all sorts of mechanisms to protect your value extraction machine.
The system is working as intended. This isn't a bug.
If you don't like it, you need to start supporting other economic systems within these industries. Technological utopia is still achievable, but not while the people building it are so absorbed by return on capital and extraction of value.
As a side point, Elon Musk borrowed money to pay $44bn for Twitter and seems intent on driving it into the ground, which we might all say is an example of the capitalist system self-correcting. Except since Trump got elected - the candidate he endorsed and heavily personally promoted on that platform - the value of Tesla has gone up over $200bn. That's not self-correction, that's the system working as designed. You need to decide for yourself if you think that's healthy for you and your descendants. I'm not convinced it is.
Even before the internet there were many of the problems he list.
Radio "shock jocks" etc.
Twice a century, the humanity gets a push: an influx of ideas and visionaries, both good and evil, who give the people enough energy to roll for another 50 years. This was the case in late 70s and will be the case again in late 20s, that is now.
The Internet was among many things that came with the latest wave. Idealists believed they were so clever to snatch back their freedom. Govs believed they are so clever to pervert the Internet to their own ends. But it's a poison pill that takes a century to act.
It's not a secret that there's a joint effort from all sides to unite the humanity. Some of the powerful want to create a tyranny we cannot escape, others want to create a paradise. But in one thing they agree: the wars must end. The state structures disagree, of course, as wars is their lifeblood, and right now they believe they can prevent this united humanity utopia. So the states were given this shiny new thing - the Internet - generously peppered with the magic powder of survelliance, and the states, unable to resist the urge, swallowed this shiny thing and they are still busy chewing it. In the meantime, the Internet slowly grows inside them, driven by its spirit of connecting everything together.
The coming wave will radically empower the Internet and at the end of this half-century cycle the states will realise what the Internet really was.
Why do people keep trying to create Utopian visions?
The luddites eventually come. This is just Eternal September come alive for all of society. No matter, honestly. It’s going to be okay.
> The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong.
As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, this image confuses me.
Haha yeah, more like "look - it's a bunch of dorks playing on their computers"
We are in a transition phase. The centre cannot hold indefinitely. An ever more centralised web is putting walls around information but the web itself now is such a tiny corner of cyberspace now. It feels like there’s oceans of knowledge all around us now, but we just haven’t figured out how to release it.
Hardly. Tech is built into the future of every industry in the United States. We still have a runaway advantage with regard to innovation thanks to our tech industry - it impacts at the GDP level. Until that changes, the party is still going.
It's not the tech but the attention capitalism and the assault on general purpose computing who screwed up the tech. The people, their greed and their desire for controlling others got in the way, unsurprisingly. This is becoming increasingly like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil or PKD novels. It's like those books and movies were actually field manuals for company C suites and governments, totalitarian or otherwise. And in Russia it's like Vladimir Sorokin novels are the field manual for the Kremlin.
>I want AI to do my dishes and laundry
Buy a dishwasher and a washing machine.
Those are not AI, or am I missing something and you are asking a dish washer to assist you with your code?
I am not the person you’re replying to, but I read their comment to be suggesting that earlier waves of technological development addressed those chores first—successfully! To the extent that the robots for both chores are utterly commoditized, and well within the economic means of pretty much all people living in modern economies (even if that means renting time on a machine via laundromat, it still beats a tub of water out back with a posser and a washing board).
Those mechanical techniques weren’t up to these more abstract tasks: why would it be reasonable to expect the new computational techniques to generalize immediately to these mechanical problems—much less that they’d immediately achieve better results than the time-tested incumbent techniques?
Although, of course, such work is very much underway, e.g. Physical Intelligence’s splashy promo ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098236 ; 14 days ago, 218 points, 189 comments)
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a lemon bar cake recipe.
Sadly there is an element of mass advantage in any commercial entity. Think of GE in the 1980's and 1990's. This is the effect of a less than perfect capitalism, but it is what we have and requires huge investment to solve humanities problems - who else can do that? Today's armchair philosophers, especially those on LinkedIn and Twitter who spout doom about techno-optimism without looking at the evidence around them?
> The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong.
It was never real.
Anybody in any of the tech companies mentioned (and many others) has always known.
You can buy groceries and social status with a fat paycheque and stocks. You can’t do the same with “just” a clean conscience.
The point is distinguish the baby from the dirt water. Bit tech is the dirt water, IT is the baby. The fact that most developments these days and since some decades is purely commercial by giants does not means IT is distopic.
The fact giants push modern and worse mainframes (the cloud/mainframe + mobile/dumb terminal) to retain control, "you'll own nothing", and to sell fast-tech crap instead of long lasting, partially upgradable desktops, does not meas that's the tech, it's just a commercial choice.
The main issue is not even technical but political: on one side giants needs slaves to prosper, so people who depend on them, who own nothing, who consume the 100% of what they earn in services and so on, while nature and the civil society needs Distributism. From the '900s -ism we have dropped most of such "giant-centric" way of thinking, it's about time do drop a bit more.
This seems very negative and pessimistic to me. My tech utopia fantasies are alive and well.
One key mistake the author makes is misjudging the average person
>They are people who need to game the attention economy by increasingly disrespectful and shocking content, gore, rage bait, dehumanizing pranks17, extreme consumerism like huge shopping hauls, sloppy large mukbangs, shredding lamborghinis18, gambling streams and websites19, game shows20 and more
If your tastes are more sophisticated, you may see the profusion of relatively puerile content on the internet as "gaming the attention economy" - but how do you know the average person doesn't just like watching mukbangs? And why shouldn't they?
In my view - you should get comfortable with the fact that people have different preferences to yours and judge based on outcomes rather than aesthetics.
The author complains about racism. Maybe it's easier to be racist nowadays. On the other hand, in the decades before the internet we had more race related shootings, bombings, etc. Maybe, net net, it's a good thing if the people who would've been forming a militia in the woods 30 years ago are instead posting racist memes on X.
Likewise it's harder to make a blog or your own website today. But, much easier to blow up on X, TikTok, YouTube etc. I just don't see the issue here. We have far more content creators and similar now than in the past.
None of the complaints seem that meaningful to me. Technology improves. Things aren't perfect (yet) - but they might be in the future. We have greater access to information, communication, and intelligence every year. If these trends persist we will use the improvements to enhance all other aspects of life (as we are already doing). The future where power comes from solar, nuclear, or fusion, physical labor comes from machines, cognitive labor comes from AI, material comes from space travel, advances in biology/physics/chemistry radically extend our life and health spans is not only possible, it is visibly approaching.
I hope the stuff you talk about at the end of your comment come to fruition, but I think you’re very wrong about the attention economy. The issue is simply that these platforms are companies that need to optimize their user retention, so their algorithms have learned to prioritize the most gutturally stimulating material, whether mukbangs or drama, implicitly at the expense of everything else.
I think it's simply evolution - things that get attention will have the most attention, by definition. People copy and vary the things that get attention and hit upon new and better attention getting strategies. Mukbangs and prank videos are the natural state of social media - in other words. Social media companies could do work to suppress intellectually unstimulating content - and then they would be replaced by social media companies that did not.
I just don't see what the issue is. If you turn off mukbangs it's not like the viewers are going to read Dostoevsky or invent a cure for cancer or something. They are going to do their next most preferred activity - watch reality TV until you turn that off, gossip with their friends, etc.
Some people like to do the class of activity that mukbangs are a member of. Rather than try to "cure" them we should make sure they have access to an unlimited stream of mukbangs - cause why not? In the short term they'll be satisfied, we'll be rich, and technological advancement will continue - until we're all in a VR heaven on a server in the Dyson Sphere in the sky.
Look I would love for that to be true, but that’s not how it works. The “natural state” of social media would be that observed without any interference, but things on social media get attention because they get recommended by algorithms. This constitutes interference in that “natural evolution,” interference which selects the thing being optimized for by the process of evolution. It’s not just attention grabbing, it’s attention holding, engagement maximizing, etc. That’s why tiktok slop is both highly stimulating and not highly stimulating enough to drive users off the platform. It has evolved to maximize what the company wants. There’s nothing natural about this process.
I understand the sentiment, but why does every discussion that liberals have about the state of the world have to revolve around Donald Trump? Donald Trump was president for 4 weak years, during which his entire intelligence apparatus was sabotaging him, the administrative state was ignoring him, and people who worked in his administration were lying to him and intentionally distorting his orders, then writing op-eds about it in the NYT. Meanwhile, the same people who ran the country before him ran it during him, and he's basically appointing them again because he's a dimwit and doesn't know anyone else.
This constant casting off of blame onto celebrity enemies is insidious. It's an acknowledgement that the Western upper-middle class will never change their lifestyles or values, just spend all of their "political" time looking for scapegoats, ceremonially killing them, and patting themselves on the back for it (want a Pulitzer? A Nobel?)
That's why Trump was at first revitalizing, because he was a sacrifice that refused to die, immunizing them from the fact that their invested wealth doubled during his presidency and the one that followed. The fact that he overcame their frowny faced disapproval and their willingness to abuse the legal system has left them in complete disarray: could it be that the problem is that they've become ridiculously wealthy while working increasingly parasitic jobs, rather than that tech billionaires are assholes? You work for them.
And none of them deregulated telecommunications, none of them deregulated the banks, none of them made at-will employment the standard. They're not the reason that I had three educational tv channels as a child, and now, for the past couple decades, the only one left in PBS has been fundraising with Deepak Chopra lectures. You've all become libertarians unless your lifestyle or aesthetic is bothered in any way, then you become authoritarians. Or in other words, you're narcissists.
The outsourcing of morality to voting and donating to Democrats is over. The elevation of that private group to a moral authority based on the fact that they were vaguely nice to black people from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, and that being drilled into every school age kid, has to be overcome. The party hasn't broken with Reagan, via that likely rapist, definitely sexual harasser that they platform at every convention, one that took a break from campaigning to execute a retarded black man. You shouldn't have ever left it to them, you did it because it was easy. It's not morality if it doesn't involve sacrifice.
Also, ask yourself the question: what do you do? Are you contributing to anything net positive in the world, or are you simply a facilitator for a middleman who lives through extracting value from the defenseless? Are you double-dipping by spending the cash of the people you make social capital out of publicly whining about?
The issue of morality and character wasn't just raised by Democrats and the "fake news" media. It was also raised by Republicans who directly served in the administration. When your former VP, chief of staff, military leaders and scores of former cabinet officials say issues of character made him unfit for command, I think people should and ought to have taken that very seriously in both the primaries and general election. This is before you even get to his numerous legal issues both civil and criminal. It is unfortunate that so many still choose to see this through only a political lens.
I'll echo what others have said, utopias aren't real. What this author is describing was futurism informed by science fiction. Also most of the things they complain about and their list are ridiculous.
- They both criticize ByteDance for pushing Russian propaganda, and Google for not pushing Russian propaganda (sorry, "censoring").
- Also criticizing people for having the "wrong" political persuasion is telling. I'm not American so I can only look in from the outside but if Donald Trump won so decisively, maybe the left needs to look inward at what they did wrong instead of blaming big tech for not supporting "their side" enough.
- Criticizing tech for being anti-regulation and anti-deceleration... If we regulate our own technology all that'll happen is that bad actors will leapfrog us. Maintaining technological superiority is a matter of survival for liberal democracies. Friendly reminder that 70% of the world population lives under dictatorships today and it's ever rising...
- The idea that social networks accelerate xenophobia is ridiculous. All it does it expose it. Also left-leaning westerners have this ridiculous idea that we're not the most progressive culture on earth. We are and it's not even close. There's literally race wars and modern day slavery all over the world.
- Labour conditions... It's obvious the author has never worked in a truly bad work environment. While their criticisms aren't unfounded, perspective is needed. The past was worse, things have gotten better.
IMO tech is still an overall net positive. It's what's enabled the earth to support so many people, even if power generation is higher and less efficient than we want, it's more efficient than it used to be. Even if the current geopolitical situation is getting spicy, most of human history was still worse...
This reads to me as a leftist having a meltdown over the current political state. The truth is, leftist governments brought this upon themselves. They thought that QE wouldn't lead to inflation because it didn't during the 2010s... However the economy then was otherwise deflationary. When those conditions ended, QE did what economists always knew it would, add inflationary pressure. And let's be real, most people vote based on economics. Left-leaning governments tried to gloss over the poor state of their economies with social issues that most people are ambivalent about at best and lost. Also millennials are the next largest cohort after boomers now. Even if the birth rate is lower than ever, a majority of millennial women have had at least 1 child. This changes voting demographics dramatically... The US left needs a bit of introspection instead of blaming everyone for their loss.
Maybe this person should try using tech for something positive. Or go outside and touch grass.
While I'm slightly ambivalent about LLMs, I do think that the promise of AGI has awakened something in the tech world... AI could usher in a new age, supercharge the economy, bring about a lot of positive change. Instead of whinging about the current state of politics, maybe think of positive uses for it. I'm personally using AI to build an app in the domain of finance and economics. I think AI could bring about a lot of economic benefits and change a lot of the things OP is complaining about.
And final thought. Depression is real. Currently it's -20 degrees celcius outside, there's a foot of snow on the ground and the wind is blowing. We lost our home to a wildfire this summer and spent much of the summer homeless (well, bouncing around various places anyway) with a toddler. My SO is East European, have lots of family within 1000km of Ukraine, have Ukrainian friends and family (even my own family, although they immigrated to the west long ago)... It's not like my life is without stress. But I'm still optimistic that tech can produce good in the world.
I so very much agree with you... I was first baffled by how unintelligent some parts of the OP managed to come through - while it's still a very nice collection of woes and unethical lies, which is very valuable in itself. But then, I've read the linked CNN post about Jeff Bezos prohibiting presidential endorsement in Washington Posts and the outrage that has generated. No, this is surely not the author's folly - there must be a more generic problem there... Why do so many people considered intelligent think it's normal practice that newspapers give such a very direct and simple political message, like vote for X. And have been doing it for 40 years. It's normal for newspapers and editors to have clear and mostly stable political views and voice that, but I feel it very weird that they publish something as direct as this one. Just like it's very weird for celebrities (who normally work outside politics) to publicly endorse X or Y. By doing this, you lose focus on what you really want to say, and just simplify politics and communication into a binary question. Is it really needed to ELI3 everything even in politics, even to such a binary degree, and if we don't THAT is the "betrayal of responsibility"? While I'm not a great friend of using the usual left-right distinctions, especially in global settings, but that's not really important (people will see whatever enemies where they want to see, but it's still much better than naming your global enemies after a more specific group/country/religion). Technology can give us hope for new opportunities, that we can receive some "outside help" to change our social constraints. But we shouldn't blame yet another group of people for specific technology failing to solve or address some important issues of society. I wholeheartedly believe it is inevitable to convince as many people of the 8 billion to feel compassion for each other, to save the planet, to give better education and equal chances to live a full life for those who can make use of that and social care to those who need it, and, to work together for such important and clear goals... But business-as-usual will not do that, current recipes of "pluralistic democracies led by wise citizen journalists telling us what to do and think" will not get us there. And that's also a problem for LLMs: mandating guardrails will not make them more useful, and as long as LLM safety and "bias" is about how many people will be offended by their responses, then we're clearly just heading in the same wrong direction of blinding ourselves. (My condolences with you! But having a toddler is a wonderful thing, it gives you hope and a good reason to expect many joy from the future ... even if it doesn't look bright now, cheer up!)
> But having a toddler is a wonderful thing, it gives you hope and a good reason to expect many joy from the future
For sure. The lack of sleep is more than made up by the fact he's incredibly happy, cheerful, fun, and learns things everyday, all the time. And there is definitely more focus in my life knowing I need to provide a future for him... We're optimistic about the future.
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Wow, what an intelligent and even-minded way to respond to the blog post. Very nice!
Certainly more intelligent and even-minded than the post itself.
Having read the post, I disagree.
I'd still recommend it, the Trump mentions are pretty marginal. I think the core message is pretty apolitical.
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The author is a 14yo complaining that the world is more complex that her land of rainbow ponies. "Those who fly on their fantasies, end up hitting concrete walls".
They have absolutely no theory of power. It's just bad men trying to hurt everyone for fun, and the poor upper-middle class elites (who work for them) not being listened to enough when they speak in the name of black people. Life through the lens of superhero movies.
I mean, "bad men trying to hurt everyone for fun" absolutely does describe a large number of people like Peter Thiel, there is nothing else that would explain their actions otherwise.
What's stopping you from starting your own company to make whatever you think the world needs?
Besides excuses.
There are several classes of problems that corporations are not well-designed to solve. Corporations couldn't and didn't end slavery, they couldn't and didn't end child labor, they couldn't and didn't create the 40 hour work week, they couldn't and didn't prevent our rivers from turning into toxic sludge, they couldn't and didn't prevent our air from turning into unbreathable smog, etc. etc.
It's not really
Nah.
The pieces are in place, it's just nobody has put them together.
AI /will/ be a net-benefit for humanity, even if it stopped progress as it currently is.
Seems it is easy to confuse humanity with few corpos and their productive bees.
AI (particularly LLMs) is a net-benefit for PRODUCTIVITY - it remains to be seen if it will genuinely benefit humanity as a whole.
Really depends on how you measure the success of humanity?
After having read about some arrests relating to an underground network of people who purchase and view videos of monkeys being tortured and killed, for pleasure, and those who shoot and provide these videos... I'm beginning to wonder whether the internet itself was a good idea.
It would still happen with or without the internet, so long as there are video cameras. First is back-alley vhs or cd's then dvd's. Take video cameras aways and you have secret handshake underground viewing parties. I've finally come to terms with the idea that: humans are gonna human. And it allows me to focus on the more positive things that have also come from the internet, because then you get to find the positive, kind ways that humans are gonna human.
One of the unpleasant side effects of the Second Amendment is that it has put firearms within easy reach of... well, just about everybody. Despite tighter controls over gun purchases, the gun used in the Sandy Hook shooting, for instance, was legally purchased, and not through some gun-show loophole. It belonged to the shooter's mother. She never suffered from any mental-health issues and, except for autism and anxiety, neither did he, nor did he have a criminal record.
He just... snapped, and there were guns within reach, so he used them. Were the guns not so easy to acquire and use, he might not have committed so many murders (or any at all), simply because they would have been too much work and risk. This, by the way, is why I'm in favor of repealing the Second and enacting comprehensive gun bans and mandatory licensing and registration of firearms -- you know, like civilized countries do.
Now as to how this relates to the monkey torture videos. Yes, there might have been people who sought this material out in the past, but the internet put it within easy reach. The videos were shot in Indonesia and made available to Western clients through brokers in the UK (two of whose arrest was described in the article I read). Before the internet, this kind of international coordination in order to satisfy someone's sick deranged urge would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult. Only very wealthy, dedicated perverts would have been able to even contemplate arranging it. And maybe some of those would have been dissuaded because the slow, risky communications put them at greater risk of getting caught. Maybe monkey-torture fetish was such a niche interest before the internet that it would have been difficult to find other monkey-torture fetishists, and hence put together a large enough market to justify producing these videos in the first place. But with the internet, it's easier than ever to find like-minded monkey-torture fetishists, form discussion groups and the like, and associate with each other in sufficient density that there's a market large enough to justify going into business producing and selling monkey-torture videos into that market.
It would be important to know what they would be doing without the Internet. Are those desires as such that if they don't get outlet, they explode and so something worse in real life, or does being able to consume it on the Internet normalize it for them, pushing to seek for more.
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