I honestly find "tech" to be way too broad of a label and only really see major problems with social media and fintech. Juciero-type companies are stupid, sure, but they're not hurting anyone. Instagram and Twitter, on the other hand, are likely strong net negatives for society.
Edit: Microtransaction-based games that are essentially gambling simulators are highly problematic as well.
I find it doubtful that tech is worse than, for example, the finance industry (with its rich history of decadence and debauchery). I also find it "interesting" that the tech industry seems to have replaced the finance industry (whose shenanigans put the West into recession) as the focus of media critique.
Or anything in manufacturing or food/beverage (see Nestle and water rights) production. I think most of tech has it pretty good. Tech has the potential for incredible amounts of bad, but this is limited to the handful that dominate social media (see Facebook and the civil war in Ethiopia) or, I don't know, the ones selling surveillance software to governments and law enforcement.
I "Big Tech" incorrectly categorizes the problem. The problem is social media products that monetize attention.
Meta, Twitter and other companies that build deep social media products are in this group.
Netflix is not. Microsoft is not. Google is not.
I don't like that just because you're a large tech company you're immediately demonized. This is demonizing success in this field rather than "wrong" doing.
You don't think that those others are solving problems for people? If they weren't, they'd be easy to unseat, or more likely would collapse under their own weight. Are there all sorts of undesirable consequences of their success? Of course! But tech isn't exempt from that. And even if, for the sake of argument, the undesirable side effects of tech's businesses was magically orders of magnitude less than any other segment, it's not unreasonable to talk about it in addition to the others.
The thing about "Big Tech" is that you think the word "Tech" has anything to do with technology. It doesn't. It's just how the companies in question managed to get into a position of power. At the level of business this article deals in, it's just an identifier for a market segment.
Tech business is no longer the scrappy young underdog doing good and fighting the good fight. Sometimes their interests align with the people's and we benefit when they fight to protect their interests. But they also fight to protect their interests when they're at odds with the end user's best interests.
I don't think it is anti-tech, so much as anti big money.
Tech isn't as sexy when you realize how it is funded. Tech use to be about people working in their garages and striking rich on hard work, perseverance.
I think there is nothing special about tech. Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft are big companies with a lot of market power. They use their market power to maximize their profits (as they probably should) and perpetuate that market power (as they probably also should since they are not charities).
This has negative effects on many others in the economy. For example, Amazon bleeding out small retailers by capturing their supply chains and treating its own workers badly. Or Facebook manipulating teenagers into using its product despite the known negative effects on their mental health because engagement = money.
In such situations, something needs to counteract these companies' market power in order to reduce the negative effects on others. This can be consumer protections, labor laws, unions, antitrust litigation, or other types of regulation.
We've lived with a ton of such regulation that we don't even think about because it seems common sense. For example, we are not allowed to smoke inside a hospital, send our 10-year-olds to work in coal mines, or (supposedly) be forced to work 70-hour workweeks without overtime pay. It is only that the tech sector is too recent and we haven't figured out how to dampen its negative effects.
I don’t necessarily think that’s true for all tech companies but it is true that a lot of tech companies may be working on problems that generate money instead of social good. We work on conservation technology for wildlife and environment and there are so many areas that can benefit from tech. However it’s a vastly underpopulated industry because there’s so little money involved. Conservation doesn’t usually generate an ROI so a lot of the money comes from grants and donations. Hence it might be more true to say that the “real” issues don’t have enough perceived monetary value to be addressed by many tech companies.
You're describing commercial tech companies in a capitalist economy. If you were familiar with other industries I'm sure you'd see similar themes, it's just you're exposed to techs evils by your proximity to the field (my assumption ofc!).
To add some hope, work backwards and think of a field that needs technology. Do those companies seem so bad as well?
It's definitely a concern in tech and there are definitely problems to fix. However it's just that tech's problems with this type of behavior pales in comparison to finance's problems with it (as well as others such as Hollywood and the music industry). This whole article is about finance; about a financial firm that happens to specialize in investing in the tech sector. It's unfair to pin this one entirely on us when it's not even really our industry but the people financing us.
The tech industry has long, long, long been a rapacious pump and dump scheme where the tech is barely relevant and most of the industry has been harvesting violations of social norms and regulations (tracking and ad tech, Uber, etc.).
The only reason any of us defend it is that's how we make money. Honestly a lot of people in tech should be a little ashamed.
We do have tech companies but we don't let them grow beyond reason and extend their tentacular grip on almost all areas of society. Are you implying it's a bad thing?
I think the backlash against tech comes from many years of tech celebrating themselves and being celebrated as “disrupters” for a lot of bullshit startups. And the amounts of money made with companies hat have no real business is just astonishing. It would be nice if it went back to focusing on creating sustainable businesses that make useful products that benefit their users and aren’t just another vehicle for mass surveillance.
That's a really important point. "Technology" is an almost uselessly broad term, which would logically include things like medical- or energy-related tech but in casual (especially Silicon Valley) conversation usually means things that are strongly computer-related. As it's very dependent on the finance industry for support, that kind of tech has been increasingly infected by finance-industry perspectives, politics, and cultural standards. Sand Hill Road is not a rival of Wall Street; it's a subsidiary. The "tech bro" CEOs that most of us hands-on-the-keyboard folks hate are just finance bros in different clothing. We - the ones who actuall do the work - are just the investments they prefer this year. It's not like real techies are all perfect or anything, but the reason we end up in the "bad guy" column is that we've chosen to ally ourselves with the guys who were always bad.
I hate tech becoming special to be honest. I think it summons many bad associations in people not in tech. And many of them are justified, as with notoriety came a lot of opportunism. And the normal scammer is just the most superficial example here but overall the advertising industry comes close. Maybe it will shrink if some societies notice that there is no potential if people are too poor to buy some luxury crap.
VC certainly did drive innovation, capital that was just available for others to make something of it. But that had a lot of bad sides to it. Aside maybe from Google big tech companies try to fortify their market dominance. I heard from some that Microsoft has changed, but I believe this to be a naive illusion.
Tech is the new wall street. Between privacy concerns, screwing of small businesses, blindly supporting mega corps with copyright... sometimes I feel even wall street is better :(
To some degree, I agree. The problematic business models and practices enabled by tech are not unique to big tech. Their profitability helped grow some tech to big.
Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services.
Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having nothing to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same.
So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence that is suggested.
They're undoubtedly technologies, but I don't think that in practice people would call those industries part of "tech".
The whole "tech" label needs to die as it's overstayed its welcome and now just funnels engineers towards narrower and narrower segments of the economy where the benefits are less and less clear.
If you estimate the "tech-iness" of a domain by the depth of the tech tree or the "height" of the leaves people are working on, most "tech" work these days is working on CRUD apps based on a 20-ish (?) year old paradigm. It's hardly cutting edge, and probably isn't the most deserving of the label.
Edit: Microtransaction-based games that are essentially gambling simulators are highly problematic as well.
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