Yeah the big tech companies want to destroy the ecosystem of opportunity they benefited from, in order to protect their power. If it means a world with more needless bullshit for everyone, so be it
It is legitimately terrifying the power over our lives these tech companies are amassing. The ability for them to arbitrarily cut us off from our livelihood is terrible. I'm afraid that we are headed toward a world of corporate tyranny if this trend can't be reversed.
Just yet another reason to eradicate this cancerous, disgusting business model. It seems like the majority of the evils of tech in the past decade can be attributed to it.
This is one of the many reasons why I think society should slowly phase out big tech and shut it down, and put a hard limit on the size of corporations. They simply cannot be trusted.
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
Ugh, that's one thing I really hate about much of tech: supposedly everyone is in it to make the world a better place, somehow, by actually making it worse through advertisement and destroying privacy and getting people addicted to social media.
Big tech has been disintegrating the foundational principles on which our society is built in the name of our society. Every one of their moves is a deeper attack on personal freedom than the last. They need to be dealt with. Stop using their services, buying their products, defending them when they silence people.
I resonate with this -- I've noticed a pattern of big tech companies using their power (and prowess) to regulate in the tech space more, limit what users can do, advertise more, force dark patterns on their customers, and make puzzling decisions that rob the excitement they used to bring to the table of the past.
They still make great new / updated products in a few areas, but it also seems like they take just as much as they give, these days. Whether it's changes to pricing models (Amazon Prime Video ad-free extra charges), or Google's notorious penchant for killing their own products (or features), or Microsoft's continuous push to get Edge in front of Windows users at almost any cost.
Or Apple only offering their high-end MacBooks with Touch Bars, rather than physical function keys before they finally fixed everything with the M1 series almost 4 years later -- 4 years of Touch Bar hell, or else suffer using a low-end laptop that isn't capable of the demanding workflows your job requires along with the fact that you're a power user who needs real function keys and (gasp!) a physical escape key to work efficiently on the go, like me.
These companies really seem to be resting on their laurels and toying with customers now, to see how annoying they can be. And what's worse is, we've grown to rely on their products because they happen to build our operating systems and hardware in many cases. Bigger changes to these can have devastating effects and these companies don't seem to understand the responsibility they have to move towards creating a positive, exciting experience for customers while leaving alone the things that work really well. All rather than sowing doubt with a lot of side decisions that make people unhappy ultimately.
Death by a thousand cuts, it really starts to erode confidence in any of them, no matter what they release that should be exciting.
I mean we're acting like tech is just a net good with this kind of attitude. Monopolies and surveillance hurt people. Facebook caused a genocide in Myanmar. They wouldn't publish anything if it was all good.
Tech giants are running amok, destroying society and ownership alike. I am so glad we are finally standing up to their modern-day attempts at sharecropping; I want to be a digital landowner and not a digital peasant. Cloud everything and subscription models are downright medieval in their business models.
And that's to say nothing of social media, which is causing society to cannibalize itself
Consumers are already paying the price for the decades long anti-competitive, anti-consumer, anti-worker, monopolistic, and manipulative practices of the Big Tech firms.
We're very likely worse off. Google and Apple having absolute authority over digital lives is bad enough, but giving them the power to destroy your actual life would be sufficient reason alone.
Even when we repeatedly reject these technologies, tech companies just won't stop trying until we finally give in and the world is made a worse place permanently. I used to think I was truly blessed to live at this time, but I absolutely hate this moment in history, and having to live through it.
It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capable via top universities, to be just another cog in building a toxic monstrosity this industry is becoming just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich.
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