Large parts of the tech community seem to not just be blind to the consequences of their work, but to openly embrace and nurture the destruction of the fabric of society.
This used to find voice in utopian visions of a sort of libertarian, meritocratic revival of democracy: bloggers replacing journalists, "makers", liquid democracy, etc.
There are two successful examples of this spirit I can think of: Wikipedia, and OSS.
Unfortunately, this movement also had/has a destructive streak. Partly because these new ideas had existing competitors that needed to be cut down to make room, and partly because they experienced opposition from existing players (sometimes only tangentially related) that quickly became branded as enemies.
Two sides of the same philosophy. Guess which one had more staying power? Just look at the fate of The Pirate Bay vs The Pirate Party to get an idea. Or take this quiz: (a) Name a website distributing scientific papers with no concern for copyright. (b) Name an Open Access journal.
With regard to the specific topic of the paper, namely information (and political news specifically) those ideas of the citizen-blogger have actually disappeared so thoroughly, you are likely to have no idea what I'm referencing if you are under 30 years of age. And while those ideas were initially coupled with a disdain for established institutions and the press because it was a storyline in need of a villain, the ideas died yet the rot feasting on our sources of shared truth survived.
The target of all this destructive energy is, as a first approximation, the very concept of trust. Trust cannot be trusted is a sort-of mantra, that not only gives sense to what would otherwise just be existential dread aimlessly seeking escape in vandalism (4chan). It also makes you appear cool & in the know: "I wonder who paid for this article", "everybody knows a study with n=20000 is underpowered", "<X> wouldn't do <Y> unless <convoluted way to reduce all human activity to a profit motive>".
On rare occasions, this destructive mindset still has the spark of creativity: Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is (was?) somewhat impressive. Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc.
In the realm of politics, the destruction is just about total. Nothing of value was created. Meanwhile, the community gleefully watches the destruction of the free press, fine-tuning their adblockers because "information wants to be free", or because that newspaper whose articles they desperately want to read nonetheless made the fateful error of using the wrong JS framework, or something, but in any case, it's their fault if they can't survive. Plus they are just part of Soros' campaign anyway. Everybody knows that.
It may not have destroyed society (yet), but it seems clear to me that what began as a way to make life simpler and more efficient and to solve previously unsolvable problems has morphed into a dystopia of surveillance capitalism and dark patterns.
The promise of tech was that we could bend it to our will to do what we want. Instead, over the last decade, we have aimed these tools at ourselves in order for companies to extract as much value from humans as possible. Then again, maybe that was the thing we were trying to do all along anyway.
But I find myself here in 2021, 15 years into an engineering career, looking at the amount of effort I have to spend just to get my devices to work for me and not let my life be absorbed by whatever company I decide to interact with.
I have to lock down my browsers, run pi-hole and out-bound application firewalls, use email forwarding services to mask my address, check my credit reports on a regular basis because a dozen of the services I have used have been breached. Change and manage passwords and TOTP tokens. I have to opt-out of mailing lists, set up burner accounts, answer phone calls as to why I tried to place an order online behind a VPN and how that was suspicious and my order is being cancelled. My car is on its last legs and I cringe at the prospect of even looking at a newer model-year vehicle, because it will almost certainly be connected to the internet and try and extract as much information about me, and the devices I interface with it, to be sold to who knows where.
What was wrong purchasing media and curating your own collection? How did we get from "Rip. Mix. Burn" to "Spotify wins patent to surveil users’ emotions to recommend music"? Why does my HP printer require an account to scan documents locally? Why does my f*king Philips S7000 razor need a smartphone app to change its sensitivity settings? Why does my goddamn fridge have an operating system?
Was it worth it? It seems the thing technology helps me do the most these days is avoid all the terrible things about technology.
There's a kind of collective paranoid delusion here (I mean, on the Internet in general). When you start from the idea that they are all about to get you, it's easy to interpret anything as a confirmation of your suspicions. It is not easy to be rational with this sort of siege mentality, which is reinforced by the fact that non-technophiles do not seem to get it or take it seriously.
We've gone from a (unwarranted) radical techno-optimism to (just as unwarranted) general hostility. A consequence of that is the pervasiveness of this cynical, nihilistic mood, which quickly corrupts most discussions every time some subjects pop up. To some extent, these companies brought this onto themselves with some objectively despicable behaviours, but we are not doing ourselves any favours.
Yeah, when I saw this the other day I figured most people are simply going to dismiss it — anarchists, ne'er-do-wells.
But it struck a kind chord with me that there is more to it then cowardly vandalism. I don't think all of the vented angst is toward Big Tech specifically but I think that is part of it. I think big tech have come to represent wealthy corporations that serve only themselves and their uber-rich patrons.
Society is in an upheaval, and in no small part due to changes brought on by the internet and now mobile (and soon AI). But in all the other ways the world is also changing for the worse I think people will quickly turn to scapegoating and rich tech is an easy target.
How has it come to that? The tech industry has declared that in turn privacy is dead, that labor contracts are dead, that tax obligations are dead and now that copyright is dead. Why is the most promising tool towards a better society appropriated in such a destructive manner?
People must separate their fascination with tech as such, from the predominant tech business models that are basically - you can't put lipstick on a pig - parasitic.
We (the software industry) have royally screwed up computers. Users used to be in control and now they are the ones being controlled or at least “influenced.”
I think we naively believed that an increase of human technical capability would lead to such abundance that we'd achieve post-scarcity (at which point, whether we call it socialism or pretend it is liberalized capitalism, it doesn't matter) and permanent democracy... not the corporatized nightmare we actually got. The capitalists are right about very little, but they got this right: human nature can be shit. Most people are decent or want to be, but the ones who gain power in human organizations, especially organizations without purpose such as private corporations, are cancerous. We thought that problem would magically solve itself if we just made the world (in aggregate terms) richer, and we were wrong.
It's like a martial arts instructor who earnestly but unaccountably believes he's teaching good kids how to fight back against bullies. He may be. Or, he may be teaching the bullies. In our case, though, we weren't training... we were arming... and we didn't always know we were building weapons, but that's absolutely what we were doing... all of our "data science" got turned into decisions that hurt workers and enriched executives.
I'm speaking in past tense because we, as technologists, are no longer relevant. We've sold our souls. Capitalist hogs and their managerial thugs have won. Our moral credibility is deep in the negative territory. Power will either stay with those who currently have it, who have evil intentions, or move toward the set of people who work up the courage to overthrow the current system, who may or may not--it's impossible to know, as it hasn't happened yet--have ugly intentions.
That's what gives me the crushing sadness. It's never going to rise to the level that individual consumers will care.
Only the "diehard techies" will care. Based on how many of my technical friends have knuckled-under and normalized these kinds of affronts to freedom apparently there are fewer "diehard techies" than I thought, too.
I wish that I could just "turn off" my love for computing and computers. Instead, I get to see my hobby and vocation die a long, painful death.
Yes, but there's a critical difference now. Now, the tech industry breaks many things at an unprecedented pace, and largely doesn't offer a reasonable replacement for the things that have been broken.
People can only handle a limited amount of loss within a given period of time before they start pushing back hard against further loss and consider those causing them harm to be forces of evil.
There's also another factor that the tech industry is largely blind to: tech people tend to think that "we know best" and that pushing our ideas on the general public against their will is a Good Thing. But it's not a Good Thing, it's a Bad Thing.
Another thing we need to be doing is allying with the general public rather than dictating to them.
This is why I'm completely disenchanted with tech companies. I've seen billion dollar companies fumble basic shit too many times due to infighting and too many cooks etc. Managers who prefer to destroy any good thing that's going on if it can't be observed by them and watermarked as their intiative. This in turn has made me less hopeful about government and human civilization in general. The progress we've made has been the work of a few, not the many
True that, but did anyone count how many tools created by hackers for hackers had enabled the furious growth of monstrosities like Google, Amazon, Facebook etc, which I guess can't be more opposite to ideals of hackers?
And on the other hand, did those tools empower hackers themselves? Other than quick and dirty prototypes, did those result in any products to empower common people? Last open source GSM phone project I was subscribed to lingered for years, postponed release for lack of funding and finally, I guess, was abandoned. But at the same time I see shop shelves crammed with dirt-cheap locked-down surveillance contraptions from big known corporations who shamelessly use FOSS tools in their development.
Or is it just an inevitable vicious cycle of all opposition becoming exactly the entity it opposed?
Yup, the future is looking pretty sinister these days. It’s all about tech being used to surveil and control people and parasitic companies commodifying the data they produce.
The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.
Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.
The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.
We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.
I share much of your grim assessment. It is such a vast indignity that so much of use, so much amazing awesome potential, has no where to go, while the demands to support ourselves remain so persistent & challenging.
I do have some areas of hope.
> Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics.
The current status quo is that technology is a system for building products that consumers consume. Social media is another consumer device, another ready-made provided thing.
We don't have a very good established front for pro-humanistic technologism. Even though these social platforms are about content creation, they're through the narrow windows of what the tools provide, engagement is even more un-liberal, more constrained. The environments are artificial, we have only a small provided window of them that we can participate in, and our participation is prescriptive, via the defined channels of the software.
But that is not an inherent vice of technology nor information technology. This reliance upon adoption adoption adoption adoption, on onboarding as many as possible, as the means of measuring success has suppressed the other forms of technology that are available for us to explore: holistic technologies. Technologies that embrace all of our potential, that always leave the door open to examination & modification. Yes, this is a Free Software rant!! To quote Programming is Hard[1][2],
> No other science is as accessible as computer science, and most of its proceeds happen out in the open - computer science thrives on the internet, and although there are corners that do actual gatekeeping, most of content is freely accessible and thrives on this accessibility.
Science & code are replicable & experimental, always, it's just a question of how accessible science & creativity are. Software faces so few material constraints, so few connectivity limitations- software is malleable, and vast, and forever willing to let us explore our potential, to develop ourselves & grow ourselves. To ongoingly experiment with will & creation, all from a phone and bluetooth keyboard. If and when we are given access to participate, to find our potential!
The current facts on the ground are not nearly so sunny. The iron hold of big platform feels a prison, and virtually is, except that we can escape at any moment. Free Software missed the jump to the internet entirely. Instead Open Source became the underpinnings for great vast monoliths, huge corporate properties to emerge, that dictate digital spaces we might use, but which give us none of the libre liberty that software might so deeply let us enrich ourselves with.
So yeah, I think you're over-doing it, but sure, I think IT is playing a really crap role right now, and I think being trapped on these content-farms has made the natives do some really weird shit. Humankind can deploy none of their amazing perceptual skills, has only abstract potential on these limited, controlled, finite systems, and we never get to see the greater game as it's played: we only have what glimpses the platforms give us. "purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics" are not what trouble me, I am way way way more progressive, but I think there are all manners of cultural loops that society becomes bound up in, and our inability to see the knots stems from the consumeristic nature of these systems, from there not being an honest, potential-respecting, augmentative free technological basis from which to perceive, operate, & advance from, in a distributed decentralized pro-human manner.
It's not clear to me where we need to go to start changing things. Free software, not necessarily copyleft, but software made by people for people not for developers, needs to become internet relevant. It missed the connectivity revolution entirely. Social Media/Web Protocols[3] like ActivityPub give me hope, but there still feels like a great missing, that we're still on a too application-ized view of the world, trying to provide experiences, not seed the ground to allow us each to find & discover our own experiences, our own activities: too mechanistic, not computational enough. Systems like Yahoo Pipes were built more upon will & volition & watching & experimentation with computing itself, and I think that sort of componentry is key to starting to unravel some of the built up anti-humanity IT has become shrouded in.
In all, it's really down to Ursala Franklin's Prescriptive vs Holistic technologies[4]. The first, prescriptive, categorizes all technology which is definitive, which has well defined mechanisms that enact processes. These are used to control & process. For example, the control & process of gathering to a central place & then syndicating out posts people make to each other: that's a prescriptive technology. Holistic technologies are those in which the human has total control over means & materials to shape & create an outcome. In short, holistic technologies are technologies built with Free Software ethos, if not necessarily their hard copyleft politics. When humankind can share & exchange & experiment with the world about it, & learn, & form knowing exploring peers, humanity goes places: we explore our potentials, we find new things to get up to. Technology ought be a hotbed for this, for exploring our potentials, & it has gaps but it is already very far along de-pyramidizing the material/monetary order that pervades & so powerfully persists in our world, but this idea of free/pro-human software needs new initiatives & envigorated direction to maintain relevance amid our rising communicative capitalism.
Tech is so depressing. Our physical world is open and based on good intent. There's bad actors but the cost of being a bad actor is high: it's risky and doesn't scale.
Even if you live in a bad neighborhood, and make your walk to a grocery store, you wouldn't expect 50 people to try and rob you on the way there. When you then see a familiar face in the store, you don't expect this to be an impersonator. And when you pay for your groceries, you don't expect it to be a phishing attack or scam. When you then return home, your home isn't a fortress with military grade security. We live with the assumption that for the most part, we're safe and sound and most interactions are based on the social contract of good intent.
This optimism is the basis for lots of tech, every single part turning to shit.
Email was supposed to be this open, anonymous, non-authenticated and distributed way for anybody to communicate. Now 99.99% of volume is spam, scams, phishing attacks.
DNS assumes genuine usage of whichever name you claim, how naïve we were.
A web server is the ultimate self publication tool, setting us free from centralized media and giving everyone a voice. Now it's under attack in less than a minute after launching and almost impossible to keep secure unless you put it behind military grade protection.
Self publication was supposed to produce the sum of human knowledge, which would then surface in search. Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only.
Social networks assume genuine usage of account names, not impersonation.
Social networks were to give a voice to the non-tech savvy and connect the world. Now all attention is seized by the unreasonable ones, the extremists, the grifters.
Crypto has interesting ideas, but is an unusable mine field of scams.
We've sunk so low that now even information itself cannot be trusted anymore, not even from mainstream media.
As somebody whom has experienced a non-tech world (80s) and the optimism and beauty of early tech (90s), it's been very sour to see everything turn into shit. Nothing of the original vision has materialized and rather than improve humanity, it's made it worse in so many ways.
The cost of being a bad actor is just too low and it scales too well. Solving that may be worse than the actual problem.
our digital lives are now lived within black box straight-jacketing walled gardens, mediated by undemocratically wielded algorithms and protocols.
there is no hardware interoperability, modularity and repairability. it's just obfuscated single-use hardware with parasitic economic rents through and through.
"What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity." [1]
> Can you elaborate on how mobile and cloud destroyed your family and friends?
'cloud' SaaSS social media firms are soul-sucking culture-destroying black-boxes optimized for 'engagement' - i.e. highlighting the worst of humanity (while ignoring the magic). it exploits people's insecurities, their shame, their grief, their desire to belong. it's one of the most destructive homogenizing forces that exist today.
what i want to see is the abolishing of the intellectual property system and the abolishing of silicon valley [2]. what if we had a world wide web that was inherently dedicated to lifelong learning and growth for all? universal access to our techno-scientific inheritance? all i see today are walls instead of bridges. instead we need open protocols and open standards from the top to the bottom of the stack.
The collapse of the early high-minded era of tech is almost complete. The world envisioned by luminaries like Kay & Papert, where computers would be programmed by people as part of a process of developing individuals' potentials, has devolved to that of Facebook, Google and Twitter, where people are programmed by computers purely for the self-interested purposes of tiny financial elites.
It was perhaps predictable that a society with greed as its primary organising principle would end up deploying new tech like this. But the sheer speed and comprehensiveness of the takeover has been breathtaking.
How user hostile technology has become killed the magic for me.
I constantly have to think about not being tracked on the web, manipulated by an ad or astroturfed, scammed by companies with fake reviews, exploited by "algorithms", dodging dark patterns, fighting my OS to do what I want, protecting my data and privacy, hackers stealing my data from companies I entrusted it with, cryptoscams, IoT devices leaking my data, malicious libraries (npm, etc.), hardware exploits (Meltdown/Spectre), obscure firmware, PC in my PC (Intel ME), etc. etc. etc.
The worry about viruses and trojans in the 90s pales in comparison.
I still enjoy tinkering with technology, but most days it feels like a chore, and I do it less in my spare time.
Since this i s HN, I can be this boomer and say: We survived with blogs, forums and IRC. Without a problem.
Dear, friends, your "convenience" and "dopamine" habits created monopolies which normalized surveillance to the point of no return, and literally are giving away data and your future to the algorithm overlords.
The results of this immature behavior are the pillar on which WEF and other billionaires are building "the fourth industrial revolution" where you will have literally zero value in the production chain, you will eat whatever they tell you and play it "safe" in the name of your "positive" social score.
So I say it again: Find the way to decentralize, create new habits, throw away your phones and fancy toys and start working for humanity and against the dark patterns of today's pharaohs.
Outside the tech bubble, the real world is waiting patiently and asking for your help. Transhumanism is not the future of humankind.
You've nailed it. Back when tech was the underdog, it was trying to make things more open, accessible, free-as-in-speech. I remember when the internet was very pro Ron Paul, and against government regulating technology (remember the losing battle against DMCA and DRM and the PATRIOT act?). Now that tech has become successful, the losers (those who want the control) are trying their hardest to create new narratives about tech companies' abuse / monopoly. Can tech be improved? Or course, but with small iterations, not complete overhauls.
Large parts of the tech community seem to not just be blind to the consequences of their work, but to openly embrace and nurture the destruction of the fabric of society.
This used to find voice in utopian visions of a sort of libertarian, meritocratic revival of democracy: bloggers replacing journalists, "makers", liquid democracy, etc.
There are two successful examples of this spirit I can think of: Wikipedia, and OSS.
Unfortunately, this movement also had/has a destructive streak. Partly because these new ideas had existing competitors that needed to be cut down to make room, and partly because they experienced opposition from existing players (sometimes only tangentially related) that quickly became branded as enemies.
Two sides of the same philosophy. Guess which one had more staying power? Just look at the fate of The Pirate Bay vs The Pirate Party to get an idea. Or take this quiz: (a) Name a website distributing scientific papers with no concern for copyright. (b) Name an Open Access journal.
With regard to the specific topic of the paper, namely information (and political news specifically) those ideas of the citizen-blogger have actually disappeared so thoroughly, you are likely to have no idea what I'm referencing if you are under 30 years of age. And while those ideas were initially coupled with a disdain for established institutions and the press because it was a storyline in need of a villain, the ideas died yet the rot feasting on our sources of shared truth survived.
The target of all this destructive energy is, as a first approximation, the very concept of trust. Trust cannot be trusted is a sort-of mantra, that not only gives sense to what would otherwise just be existential dread aimlessly seeking escape in vandalism (4chan). It also makes you appear cool & in the know: "I wonder who paid for this article", "everybody knows a study with n=20000 is underpowered", "<X> wouldn't do <Y> unless <convoluted way to reduce all human activity to a profit motive>".
On rare occasions, this destructive mindset still has the spark of creativity: Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is (was?) somewhat impressive. Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc.
In the realm of politics, the destruction is just about total. Nothing of value was created. Meanwhile, the community gleefully watches the destruction of the free press, fine-tuning their adblockers because "information wants to be free", or because that newspaper whose articles they desperately want to read nonetheless made the fateful error of using the wrong JS framework, or something, but in any case, it's their fault if they can't survive. Plus they are just part of Soros' campaign anyway. Everybody knows that.
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