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.
Facebook, google, all these other giant technology firms... They will be looked back on in the future as ruthless opportunists doing their best to take advantage of the public with technology before anyone can figure out what they're doing and stop them.
The world is not some cute friendly little place. It is equally as barbarous today as it was in the dark ages. The TVs have convinced everyone otherwise it seems. Evil people are using machines to take over the world.
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.
I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital.
Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.
It is probably a good description of what society has become, there are a lot of people who go on repeating that these big tech are just corporations for profit and don’t have to signal any good intention, because it doesn’t make them any profit, and being bad doesn’t make them lose any profit, because we’ve become just a bunch of ignoring consumers going after the next gadget blindly, these companies are shit, because it doesn’t cost them anything anymore
What I keep wondering is why iSheeps don’t complain, like they’re the ones who are buying these overpriced crap, then being squeezed of 30% every time they get an app, who they think is going to pay for the apple tax at the end of the day
I don't quite know how so many people in the tech industry seem so entirely disconnected from the rest of humanity, but this seems to be firmly in the "Just because we can, we should!" category that doesn't really sit well with "not people involved in creating it."
Stuff like this is why I'm more and more certain we'll see a divergence in years to come (extending current trends, really) between those who are more or less puppets of the tech industry (consume what's in their feeds, buy what's advertised, generally behave as Very Profitable Eyeballs), and those who want less and less to do with the current state of consumer tech.
I'm reminded of some quip about how the tighter the Empire squeezes, the more systems (people) squeeze through the cracks... and it sure feels like the tech industry has been trying to squeeze all the profits out lately, even as they're actively driving people away with rubbish like this.
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.
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
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.
It’s not just you, it’s a lot of the country that’s rapidly going from concerned to pissed. If they read more threads like this, they’d probably already be coming for us with torches and bad intentions. They’re worried that tech is full of disconnected, vaguely autistic (and they don’t know what that means beyond iRobot), too-smart-for-their-own-good people who care more about making money than poeple. In my experience that’s incredibly unfair, but it only takes a small percentage of loud and callous voices to make us all look bad.
We need to start cleaning our own house, or it’s going to be cleaned for us by people with agendas and little understanding of what they’re cleaning!
imo the blame needs to be placed on platforms that enslave people's attention and dopamine cycles. Even it's just micro-profits that get skimmed from the individual (which compound thanks to numbers of users), the actual costs and damage done to people's mental health, their increased isolation and lonlieness etc is unprecedented. My prediction is that the future belongs to terrorism simply because there is no other escape for that energy to go, and our response to it will be more surveillance/control of the individual. This sounds much more realistic than a movement that will turn people away from their devices to spend time outside or with real-life friends.
I agree that the barrier of entry yields a low signal to noise ratio and there is no "realistic" solution to it that wouldn't be considered either ultra-capitalist or fascist depending which camp you ask. There is a hypothetical solution which could reduce this which is to regulate the shit out of targeted advertising and create a watchdog that places limits on dark patterns and companies that hi-jack cognitive faculty of their users. It would immediately outlaw these business models. Secondly I'd make individuals (not companies) accountable so it's impossible for a CEO to hide behind their corporate facade.
I feel like the tech in general is getting user-hostile... Everyone (websites, apps, cars, tvs, etc.) wants to track you and collect as much data as possible, websites nag you to install app on your phone, dark patterns everywhere, "smart" devices that won't work without an internet connection or become bricks after a while, smartphone manufacturers forcing you to buy new phone by making apps slower on older devices, more closed protocols and walled gardens - the list goes on and on...
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
And it will be taking an even bigger dump on us all.
Tech isn't the issue. Tech is neither good nor bad - it all comes down to who has access and control of the tech and that's always rich people and that's always good for rich people and usually no-one else.
It's so strange--I never would have expected the boot of tyranny to come from private corporations, but here we are. And what all this proves is that technology is value-neutral and can wipe us all out, or just make us incredibly miserable, if we let it.
Hopefully there will be a way to opt out. Otherwise, I should start selling faraday bags for devices. Probably should anyways.
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.
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.
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