How Evil Is Tech?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For as much as Silicon Valley professes that it wants to "make the world a better place", you can also find
- social media websites that feed on people's addictions, almost forcing them to post and share as much as they can instead of simply enjoying moments in their lives.
- the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks.
- big tech companies where employees are sold on "making the world a better place" but instead become completely dependent on attaining fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user.
- games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts
- the outright denial of many people in the tech industry that any of the above is a problem. Simply read through the comments on this HN page. Identifying that any of these things are problems is the first step in fixing them.
The news industry invented the 24 hour news cycle, and the exploiting people's fear and outrage to keep their attention fixed on all of the worst, link-baity events that happen every day. The article talks about Eighth Graders and how 10 hours a week online makes them less happy; what about people who spend that much time watching the news? I'd wager that a lot of the negative feelings people get from spending too much time online come from reading too much news (and social media reactions to news). This creates an unfounded feeling that the world is falling apart compared to how it was 10 or 20 years ago, when by most objective measures the world is getting better.
So I can acknowledge that there are problems, while simultaneously feeling a bit unwilling to be demonized in this way by the New York Times.
This is a good way to only hear opinions you like. Maybe try to work on feeling less personally demonized by people talking about an entire industry and it's effects on society?
Also, we in tech throw stones at literally every other industry all the time. We're out to disrupt everyone else's industries, remember? We can dish it out but can't take it?
To me, disruption is about trying to find better and more efficient ways of doing things. Not disparaging or scapegoating the people already in that industry.
This seems completely disconnected with reality. Disrupting an industry has real effects on peoples lives.
I think "evil" is certainly moralizing but I think it's fair given that companies like Google have made things like "do no evil" their unofficial motto. I invite you to stop taking headlines personally and to instead focus on the content of the article rather than the tone.
You really can't fix this by trying to build a better advert supported service. For the service to be worth running it has to hurt the consumer. If it doesn't the people paying for it will go bust.
The fix is to regulate away advertising supported. It will have to be done gradually or else the disruption will be unbearable. But if the service ain't worth paying for it shouldn't be worth having.
Perhaps agents can save us, if every bit of information you get and every transaction you carry out is mediated through your own decision making software then maybe you'll pay for your own journalism and avoid the traps of brand recognition and so on.
It seems to be the opposite to me. Such massive influence by advertisers means only those with the most money get heard in the media.
Or do you think it's the opposite?
It was enabled by technology. There was channel scarcity with broadcast. Cable, and all of its enabling technologies, added abundance allowing space for some channels to completely dedicated themselves to news.
I said "enabled" but we could even say it was "technologically determined." It's hard to imagine a world with abundant channels where that wouldn't have happened.
This is the most disillusioning thing about being a web developer, for me. I remember it was so recently that during the Arab Spring I thought Twitter was a meaningfully democratizing force. Now I just see it as a vehicle for brands, a source for lazy journalists to find poorly worded quotes for any sort of viewpoint they want to write about. And of course we know that Twitter is full of sock puppets, paid trolls and bots. We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors.
And honestly we should've seen it coming the whole time. People like Richard Stallman did. I've been a naive apologist. No more.
US based corporations are definitely guilty of astroturfing as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid
HBGary was not awarded that particular contract, but does create its own astroturfing software anyway. I have no doubt it's common among US companies and I find it incredibly grating when Americans call this a Russian or Chinese phenomenon.
From an attachment in an email by then HBGary CEO Aaron Barr:
> "Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
> To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile (satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts."
> Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas"
- Companies that flagrantly violate the law while claiming that it's OK because they're offering benefits to users - meanwhile trying to develop a monopoly in a previously regulated space.
Who did? Name one actual instance where one actual person did claim they're the first to ever do that.
The problem is the overly complex tax code that allows entities with deep pockets to find loopholes that don't exist for normal citizens. Solving the problem of big companies not paying the taxes you'd expect them to pay has to involve changing the law.
The biggest "loophole" is employer payed benefits are untaxed while the same benefits payed out of pocket by the employee are taxed. The political prospects for changing the law here seem bleak.
You can see this played out in the current tax reform debate. Most of the added/eliminated taxes fall in the "eliminating loopholes" category. Here on HN, the proposals have been criticized on the whole.
You can't say "it's the law that needs to be changed" while avoiding doing anything to change the law.
The big tech companies should have tax transparency reports explaining what they do and why it's legal.
Internet is still incredible learning tool. If you want to learn. Much better actually than it was 10 years ago. You have free university-level courses, you have Duolingo where you can learn two dozen languages or so, you have Wikipedia, you have SciHub, you have enormous quantity of scientific and scolarly content available absolutely free... But of course if you insist on going to sites with fake news, nobody can prevent it.
Same for games - which tech industry doesn't design, or careerism - which sure as heck tech industry did not invent, it existed way before Hero of Alexandria invented world's first steam engine.
Of course, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer and the internet was interneter when we're young. Everything was better when we're young. That has also been invented sometime between wheel and fire. But tech companies have nothing to do with all those faults of human nature - they are not free from them, of course, but they did not create them and did not change them in any substantial way. They did, however, make many things cheaper, faster, easier, more accessible and more affordable.
It's more like blaming Ford for the Pinto ("unsafe at any speed"). Deliberate design choices are what made fake news effective.
Think of Fake News as spam email: Gmail (and others) mostly solved spam email because they decided to. Apple made a deliberate decision to manually review apps in the AppStore. Twitter made the deliberate decision not to ban spam bots in its ToS(!). Facebook made a deliberate decision to reward engagement on links.
Spam is simply marketing emails that a user never asked to receive. If you ask users themselves for a definition of spam, you’ll get some variation on the above. If users were asked to mark emails they considered to be spam, they would generally mark the same kind of emails as spam. Some would mark more, some less, but all around a common center. Users and companies are basically in agreement about what spam is.
Compare with fake news. If you asked users to mark stories they considered fake, some would mark info wars and some would mark huff post. And those groups would rarely overlap. Given that users and companies fundamentally disagree on what fake news even is, I can’t see how any piece of technology can solve this.
I'm not arguing it is easy, but there are plenty of things which make it worse than it has to be.
The alt-right is already aware that scholars, scientists, and generally educated people believe their news sources to be bunk and that has not changed their opinion. So even if facebook or whoever makes perfect software that blocks crazy info wars articles or other news meeting the definition above, conservatives will cry censorship and find another platform because their chosen platform fundamentally disagrees with them on what is true. People don’t use Facebook to be told they are wrong.
It's possible that's the right answer, and that there should be more scepticism of stories from both of those sources.
Fake news didn't start online, though. There have been many paper publications which lie outside of mainstream scientific and ideological orthodoxy, e.g: Fortean Times, Daily Worker, Sunday Sport, which today we might call "fake news". Some of these had quite wide circulations and were available in many shops, and yet didn't precipitate any kind of crisis.
It would seem that fake news is perhaps a symptom of something deeper. It's possible that the mainstream press has lost the authority to suppress the fringes as public figures have learned to control their image in the media more (i.e: spin), presenting at least the appearance of collusion.
EDIT: It would appear that Joseph Pulitzer, creator of the prestigious journalism prize, was deeply involved in the rise of "yellow journalism", the "fake news" of the 1890s. Perhaps in a century from now, journalists will covet the Bannon Prize?
Next time you hear an attack on "the mainstream media" remember that the attack is targeting organizations that do their own independent verification of stories (or at least try to) instead of regurgitating talking points. The people are angry that those organizations are making it harder to lie to you.
I have met lots of journalists. I have been interviewed for stories (on Bitcoin and blockchain stuff) many times. I have never met, heard of or encountered anyone whose job was to independently check facts or talking points provided by sources.
More likely explanation: people mistake personal bias for "common sense" or some kind of factual information, and then attack what they assume is "fake news" based on these faulty starting points.
TBH, those are not exactly shining examples of "objective truth". I've repeatedly seen different ratings given to different politicians on essentially the same statement, because in one case the reviewer felt sympathetic to the politician and went out of the way to explain why it could be considered accurate, and in the other case was hostile, and went out of the way to point out why it is not true. Neither was, strictly speaking, incorrect - almost with any statement that is interesting enough to discuss you could find, if you look thoroughly enough, something to confirm and something to reject, especially if you consider not only the bare statement, but the context and implications, as those sites frequently do. It's inherently subjective business.
> the attack is targeting organizations that do their own independent verification of stories (or at least try to)
Or sometimes not :) Yes, the MSM does reporting and verification, but also does irresponsible reporting, exaggeration, conjecture, moral panic, sensationalizing and distortion. And people that are angry at them for that are trying to keep them (a little bit more) honest.
TBH, it doesn't even have to be a different politician - here's Obama saying famous "77 cent on the dollar" and gets "mostly false" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/... here is essentially the same getting "mostly true" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/... Did women pay drop significantly in these two years? Probably not. If you read the conclusion, it's saying practically the same thing - yes, raw statistic is saying that, but it does not mean what people quoting it mean (that women are routinely discriminated in pay - i.e. maybe they are, but that specific statistic does not point to that conclusion and should not be used as an argument). But one time it gets "false", another time it gets "true". Why? Who knows. Certainly very short of "objective truth".
And then there's this: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/... Yes, the famous "if you like you health plan, you can keep it". Rated as True. Or is it "Lie of the Year"? http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/... You can read the whole evolution of this "objective truth" here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-200... I think this objective truth is a tad less than objective.
A very quick reading makes it pretty clear. The "True" one was in 2008, and based on the law as it was written. The second was in 2013, and based how it turned out after it met the real world.
The 2013 article outlines this process pretty well - the whole thing is worth reading. But a good pull quote: Yet Obama repeated "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" when seeking re-election last year. In 2009 and again in 2012, PolitiFact rated Obama’s statement Half True, which means the statement is partially correct and partially wrong.
This is exactly the problem. They made some predictions about the law (which turned to be completely wrong, but that's not even the point) and tried to pass it as "objective fact", not as their private conjecture, implying that those that disagreed with it (and turned out to be right) are just lying.
This is the exact opposite of objective fact. This time they got caught because their predictions didn't come true and their subjective opinion disagreed with the facts so obviously that they were forced to flip. But many other times they do not get caught because there's no such sharp contrast between their private opinion and facts, and you can always muddle the waters and spin the arguments to try and present why your opinion is "objective truth" and anybody who thinks otherwise is just "truth denier".
As a political propaganda, it's fine - everybody tried to prove their opinion is correct and the other guy's opinion is wrong. But it takes special kind of hutzpah to call one's opinion "objective fact" and try to paint all the other opinions as lying. Exactly the kind of hutzpah the "fact checker" sites are swimming in.
My point is not that fake news isn't real. It is that when Gmail marks a weird Nigerian prince style scam email as spam, there is nothing controversial to the user about that. The user and the spam filter share the same opinion of what is spam.
The problem with fake news is that many conservatives disagree with tech companies on what fake news means. So if a user wants to share a BS info wars article, and is told he or she can't because it's a load of crock, they are not going to like that. People don't use social media to be told they are wrong. From the perspective of these kinds of conservative users, the spam equivalent would be Gmail marking an email from your mother as spam.
It's a hard problem because, unlike spam, it requires companies to disagree with their users.
These choices are made by whoever makes the fake news site. They are (ab)users of technology and not its creators. It's like saying encyclopedias are evil because you can take a heavy tome of encyclopedia and hit somebody in the head with it.
I am not saying solving fake news problem (if it exists) would be a bad thing. I am saying just like email is not evil because spammers exist, no technology is evil because fake news exist.
These last 2 sentences seem contradictory.
While they may not have created the exploitation of human psychology, they have definitely amplified it like never before which seems substantial to me.
The internet still has plenty of amazing sites, but compare and contrast these two lists of sites and you'll see what people are talking about - not the whole internet, but the new Internet(tm):
Good Internet:
- Education sites (wikipedia, duolingo, coursera, khan academy, etc)
- Big-box or indie games
- Research sites (SciHub, Examine.com)
Bad Internet:
- Engagement-optimised social media (Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat)
- Bank-account-draining skinner boxes (Pay-to-win games, Mobile F2Ps, lootboxes and microtransactions)
- Fake news and hidden-bias politics (Facebook, Twitter, a growing number of other sites)
- Spying and unethical practices (Google, Amazon, Uber)
That's to say nothing of the Good/Bad SV dichotomy illustrated by some of the shadier companies that are often parodied on the TV show.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
I think it's nothing like that. It's more like blaming cars for decades of pollution. It seem like you are trying to make the "post office" argument, but I don't see the relevance in this case. "Fake news" type problems are nothing new and they have been discussed frequently, especially since the Internet became popular. It's just that it doesn't take much to not be aware or not understand the problem.
"While some may treat the news with certain degrees of skepticism, we as a nation depend on a free press to give us a dose of daily facts. We rely on their filters and verification processes to weed out the dubious (or at least label it as such) and blatantly false. That is why an Internet hoax that is picked up and disseminated as fact by reputable news sources should do more than raise an eyebrow. All media are vulnerable to unverified facts, something Internet users need to keep in mind when they evaluate news reports."
Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet (2002) https://books.google.se/books?id=uS3p9iDooc8C&lpg=PP1&dq=%22...
"The blogosphere resembles an interconnected set of nested circles. Much of the time bloggers on one site only talk with each other. The conversation often resembles an echo chamber with heavily biased information and misinformation simply reinforcing previous biases At times ideas and information spill over from one circle to another, and the audience gets broader and broader. [...]. 'The average blog isn't that widely read, but it is the ripple effect when a blog catches fire in one news outlet and another at a news outlet, and it sort of mushrooms from there'.
Citizen Democracy: Political Activists in a Cynical Age (2008) https://books.google.se/books?id=2Tji-v7u7O4C&lpg=PA73&pg=PA...
"If the web has opened up possibilities for communication and access to information, schools need to do so, too. They need to learn from the examples the internet sets, both good and bad: of the dangers of creating an environment where misinformation can triumph, of providing new venues that can be used for deceit as well as illumination, of allowng reduction of the level of discussion too often instead of enhancing it. they need ot learn that opening access to information does not itself lead to knowledge. The egalitarianism promoted by our new online environments is all well and good but it is not always sufficient."
Beyond the Blogosphere: Information and Its Children (2011) https://books.google.se/books?id=i02cd-CAIbEC&lpg=PA214&pg=P...
"Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work."
What Business Can Learn from Open Source (2005) http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html
It seems also that precisely the privacy-destroying centralizing ad-selling machine companies, are the ones that occupy all our mind-space and have the money and technically interesting challenges. (Oh, and there is also fintech!)
I now am doing ok freelancing (mostly for my previous employer and some other small music software companies from Berlin) and doing some open-source on the side. But it is often hard to motivate myself to get out there and network or find stuff to earn money. Sometimes I consider going back to academia, but my feeling is that over the last years the attempts at quantifying academic output have risen competition to completely unhealthy levels (as my academic friend says: if he has to think in 6-month/project/paper timelines, where is the "long-term" in publicly funded research?).
At least it is easy to find a job that pays decent, which is a very good position to be in compared most of my friends of my generation. And I love software engineering itself. Yet I often wish I could just go on UBI and do open-source stuff all day.
I'm now a freelancer because I can't stand the thought of contributing my expertise to an employer who only cares about his bottom line (99% of workplaces, as far as I can tell), but unfortunately it feels more like escapism than activism.
I wish there was a place for retro-techies to band together and try to figure out a way out of this mess. I know there are groups who are trying to create alternatives (for example, scuttlebutt is a nice community), but their interactions are mostly project-driven, and not necessarily pragmatic. I feel like if enough talented developers (and designers, managers, etc.) group together for a good cause, we can make a difference. More difference than just creating a better browser, or a better twitter.
Well, anyway, back to reality..
- Never read local news both online and offline because in my country, Serbia, all newspapers are so bad and just use click baits and target human emotions without real reporting. Fake news everywhere. I only open news when I hear from the social circle about something important and want to read more about it.
- Deleted facebook from the phone, use it once daily on the PC for a few minutes. There is still value in it if used sparingly. My wife also use it to promote her fitness business.
- Be very mindful of what you install on your phone or PC. Every app is potential time waster even if it seems useful at the beginning.
- I call my self just Software Engineer from the day one (have more than 10 years of experience now)
- Related to games, I do not have much time to play them now but when I do I only buy games with good single player story. Never buy games that just require too much grind/time wasting/money sinking. Only multiplayer games that I play are casual in person ones (PES, FIFA).
- I eat unprocessed food as much as I can, me and my wife prepare it. We both train regularly in the gym, go on occasional hike in the nature, party or whatever. Trying to enjoy life on our terms in general.
All in all. I know it is hard and I am far from perfect, just wanted to say that users can vote what they want by their actions. But I really can`t explain to myself why it seems to be so hard for many.
Those products are built to exploit human nature and it takes a lot of effort and mindset to withstand those. Most people don't have the ability or the focus to do that.
I was doing that too, but as soon as I realized that it was bad for me, I stopped. And yes, it was not 100% easy, they do provide dopamine fix or some other fake/empty entertainment for the brain that you need to fill with something else. But it is doable.
You should always remember that this says nothing about those people and says a lot about you. Your failure to understand them is your failure not theirs.
If you do actually want to understand why it is so hard for so many people, stop thinking of people as logical, rational agents, and instead think of them as complex biological systems.
I am baffled at how much people prefer a good story over an honest one. Gotta have everything simple (good, and evil, and no middle ground) and spectacular. It is compulsive and natural, and only fighting constantly against it slightly reduces your urges, and gives a moderate yet constant gain in my experience. Considering this, there's no shame in not wanting to dedicate ressources to this.
The thing I understand from all of this is that people don't think forward and that lazyness and immediate reward is an easier road.
If someone's genuinely interested in leading an healthier, happier, different life, there are plenty of resources out there now, social plans are a thing in most places plagued by depression and lack of fulfillment.
I have simply no advice for people who fall for it. I don't even know what these people goals in life are, if any (probably the latter). It doesn't matter what they do in the big scheme, it also doesn't prevent above poster or myself to live rather simple fullfilling lives. I just don't care if people fall for stupid things, why should I after all, and why is everyone so worried for them ?
Not like we can share luck or proficiency or logical reasoning and stick to "weaker" minds at all time to help them decide or whatever.
Let's talk about those users as well. They could be in poverty. According to contemporary research, poverty creates lower willpower, rather than the other way around. Could it be time poverty? We have people that drive several hours to work and home every day, again lowering willpower. You mention unprocessed food, training in the gym, access to nature. Do you know how lucky you are compared to most of the people who live under the constant stresses of American life? How few of these things are available to everyone?
No, I don't blame the users. When these companies have an army of PhD's working all week to find ways to subvert the willpower of their users, I assure you that many users simply don't have the willpower pool necessary to fight back.
My take on this is that the internet users who wish to learn need to learn how to learn, which sources to trust, which claims to discard. I do not have a clear understanding of what "fake news" is (the term is so derogatory and loosely applied), but I would imagine that it is in some respect similar to the infamous Nigerian spam, to which many internet users have been exposed and whom they learned to recognize and ignore (as they did with most of the spam).
You are free to choose or ignore whatever sources of information (or misinformation) that you wish. For me, that's a glorious thing. Complaining about fake news is, to my ear, similar to complaining about religions or mysticism — it may be misinformation but some people like it for some reason.
Gamers will hate me for this, but I actually very much prefer some of the simple "Skinner box" puzzle and collection games that are out now to the shitty, twitchy, time-sink "hardcore" ones that came before that everyone loved so much.
Give me Tsum Tsum, Yokai Watch Wibble Wobble, and Puzzle and Dragons any day over Counterstrike, WoW (though I spent plenty of time on both of those), or any of the FPS crapshows on the market right now that are basically just Counterstrike with better graphics. I'll happily spend my $60 over time while enjoying casual bite-sized gameplay on my schedule, rather than the intensity and practice that "real gamer" games require.
I also fail to see WTF games have to do with the tech industry at all, it's a minuscule portion of the sector.
You can be smearing green goo over the launch pad in less than 4 minutes and basically everything after that is just an extension to "smear green goo over [thing in space]". Maybe even flying back home too.
It's about designing games primarily to empty your wallet with microtransactions rather than providing you with fun. Games that encourage addictive, even compulsive behavior that may seem fun for a while but will quickly turn you into a dopamine rat seeking for your next fix. If you're an addictive nature, which is whom the games industry are targeting with predatory practices. The whales that pay the bills.
Also, minuscule is perhaps not the word to use, with Activision, EA and others reporting revenue figures in the billions.
You lost me there. What about that title is "fake"? To be clear, people pursue titles because they come with raises. Or rather, the title change is used to justify the raise.
What does talking to a user have to do with anything? Is it important that a pharmaceutical chemist talk to prospective patients? Most software businesses have job functions that specifically deal with the user (design, UX, product, support, sales). As an engineer, nobody would oppose me pursuing interviews with users, it's just not a good use of my time when people I rely on (UX, etc.) already are doing it.
It was not created by the Internet, it will not go away. People communicate mostly gossip and propaganda, the only way out is changing people.
This tech backlash is a projection of people's larger frustrations onto big tech.
- Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic. Unfriend everyone on Facebook who isn't a close friend, family member and revel in a stream of baby pics and holiday greetings. Or if your family insists on talking politics, create a second account to serve as your primary. Or just don't use it.
- Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem.
- Out-of-Touch Tech Co's: No amount of user research will protect a company from groups who are determined to take offense. Google recently added a calorie counter to its walking maps feature and was presented as an attack on people with eating disorders (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/google-maps-ditches-automa...). They angered others by promoting civil rights pioneer, who happened to have complimented Osama Bin Laden supporter on their homepage (https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama). I don't know if these are examples of Google being out of touch, or just so large that any decision is likely to anger some subset of the user base.
- No-fun Games: Imagine a title from the golden age of gaming and you can probably find a free port on the App Store. There are orders of magnitudes more titles available today.
- Denial: I agree that tech as an industry could do many things better, but in my personal, humble estimation of the world's top problems it doesn't rank in the top 50. I don't think it's among the top ten most evil industries, but it seems I'm increasingly in the minority.
The "evil" part of this is that they encourage you to do exactly this. They'll go out of their way to find entities for you to subscribe to, regardless of how tangential the relationship is. Unlike your bartender or waitress, they never cut you off when you're in too deep-- they just keep shoving more down your throat.
An alcoholic should be able to call it quits after just one drink, too. Like the rhythm method, not everybody has the willpower to just pull out once engaged. This mechanism capitalizes on human frailty to keep users engaged.
> Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem.
Fantastic claims about lizards in politics are on the level with comic books-- recognizable as fiction without even needing to think about it, and diminished by the fact that nobody else but that single tabloid is making such claims. You can safely evaluate it based on number of claims alone. "If this were true, everybody would be reporting on it!"
Well, enter social media. Thanks to the algorithms and the circles you're part of, you're bombarded with variants of this story about lesbian leisure suit lizards from a virtually unlimited number of sources, legit or not. Suddenly, it looks like everybody is reporting on this lizard thing. "You should just know better" doesn't work when the more you're exposed to it, the more you're desensitized, and the more real it becomes. That is the corruptive influence of social media and fake news.
We've all had that one crazy relative who insists some crazy conspiracy is true, but these lies can only achieve this scale of influence because of tech.
In my view it isn't the technology that is "evil", it is the monetisation of the technology, or more specifically the people behind the monetisation of it.
I'm sure I'm not alone in saying how disappointed I am with how the internet has turned out, for example. From the initial optimism around things like "information want to be free" and "disintermediation" we have moved to "When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive" and the "reintermediation" of the big internet giants.
And I have a terrible feeling that in a decade or two we'll see something similar with some of the new technologies we're getting excited about now. For example, blockchain and cryptocurrrencies facilitate an "the internet of money" with e.g. frictionless cross border transactions, but could in future end up allowing authorities to track every transaction by every person.
So what can we do about it?
It has become clear to me as well that the web is no longer what it used to be and will probably never return to what it was, because of these monetization practices. I am interested in finding out what the "next" web will be. Maybe it will be built on existing protocols, and maybe something else entirely?
There are also certain web-focused techs and companies I see as being bastions of the "old way," such as Wordpress and Ruby on Rails, and I'd like to get more involved in preserving and promoting those techs in a professional setting.
I'm also interested in walking back some of these misguided monetization tactics you speak of. Programmatic CPM-based ad networks are one of those I'd like to see reversed.
I feel that we as developers often underestimate the collective influence we have as technology experts. We are the creators of tech; our culture is essentially tech culture. Do Google and Facebook have the power they have because we give them that power? If so, what do we get in return?
They have the power precisely because they have the capital. If all of the rich people who don't need to work banded together to work on open source and federated technologies that would be great. But the rest of us need to work and can't challenge our employers politics in any meaningful way.
1 - Working for and enabling makers of spyware and other privacy-defeating technologies (including companies like Google and Facebook who make it their business to spy on their users).
2 - Working for the military and "defense" contractors or on technology which is intended to kill or enable more efficient killing of people.
3 - Working for advertisers who lie and manipulate people in to buying shit they don't need.
4 - Working for or as spammers, malware purveyors, and various other blackhats.
5 - Exploiting people who work for them by underpaying them, overworking them, manipulating them, or lying to them.
6 - Lack education outside of STEM -- particularly lacking knowledge of history, ethics, literature, and art that makes for a myopic narrow-mindedness.
7 - When the above lack of education is combined with arrogance and a darwinian, survival of the fittest, might makes right, "look out for number one and fuck everybody else" attitude without any sort of social conscience or desire to improve the world beyond making it easier for the rich to get richer.
What bothers me the most about these tech giants is the complete about face on free speech. Companies that couldn't exist without it, that couldn't have been founded without the open web (Google) and belief in freedom of communication (Twitter), as bastions of free speech (Reddit) are now busy coming up with new ways to censor their users. This is part of their progressive culture mentioned in the OP but a very specific one.
I don't know how many people still care but this is how they lost all my goodwill towards them.
Facebook is doing the reverse, if anything. I keep in touch (of various degrees) on FB with people whom I would never keep in touch or even know anything about them without it. Yeah, of course, I could write letters. But who actually does it? Nobody would do it.
Facebook has no monopoly on social networking, fortunately.
Heck, HN is a social site and I see no ads.
Server costs are super low. The only problem is search engines ran by advertisers having major sway. While Google etc. are investing quite a bit into networking, that is boot strictly necessary even for sites of this magnitude. Nor very expensive, which is why they are profiting a lot.
"....estimating the decline of traffic generated by Google searches for 13 sites with substantial readerships. The results are as follows:
* wsws.org fell by 67 percent
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* socialistworker.org fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent
In the twelve months preceding the implementation of the new Google protocols, the WSWS had experienced a substantial increase in readership. A significant component of this increase was the product of Google search results. The rapid rise in search traffic reflected the well-documented growth in popular interest in socialist politics during 2016. The rate of growth accelerated following the November election, which led to large protests against the election of Trump.
Search traffic to the WSWS peaked in April 2017, precisely at the point when Google began the implementation of its censorship protocols.
Another site affected by Google’s action has provided information that confirms the findings of the WSWS: “In late May, changes to Google’s algorithm negatively impacted the volume of traffic to the Common Dreams website from organic Google searches,” said Aaron Kaufman, director of development at progressive news outlet Common Dreams. “Since May, traffic from Google Search as a percentage of total traffic to the Common Dreams website has decreased nearly 50 percent.”
The extent and impact of Google’s actions prove that a combination of techniques is being employed to block access to targeted sites. These involve the direct flagging and blackballing of the WSWS and the other 12 sites listed above by Google evaluators. These sites are assigned a highly negative rating that assures that their articles will be either demoted or entirely bypassed. In addition, new programming technology teaches the computers to think like the evaluators, that is, to emulate their preferences and prejudices.
Finally, the precision of this operation strongly suggests that there is an additional range of exclusion techniques involving the selection of terms, words, phrases and topics that are associated with socialist and left-wing websites."
If Google is indeed making an active effort to use its influence to stall our societal descent into Weimar Republic politics, it should be applauded.
Again, glancing through these site, there is very little reporting and mostly opinion pieces being published. In several cases, I also see quite a number of "re-blogged" pieces which are of little to no value in terms traffic. If I had to guess, most of these sites probably suffer from poor back-link profiles and are rarely cited by other sites with good page rank.
Other sites like The Intercept, which does indeed do very good original reporting, while criticising the hysteria over Russia, have also been hit.
The Intercept hasn't been removed from the SERPs or Google News[1]. Keep in mind that they compete with all other media organizations for positioning in Google Search and Google News. Google News alone is a highly competitive landscape and small newsrooms are at a severe disadvantage compared to larger orgs that operate at scale. Reporting on a topic doesn't guarantee an article will be the top hit when a thousand other organizations are reporting on the same topic.
True free speech will end up in a system being exploited by those who can make the most noise the most often. True free markets tend to end up as a series of oligopolies.
Small amounts of regulation can help both systems do better, but we need to find a way to reliably regulate regulation (as regulation also has a tendancy to destroy itself).
Free speech is great, but a bit of regulation on the obvious trolls goes a long way in making this a good place for the non-deranged to discuss things.
Do they have a choice in the matter. The elites have the government and old school media attacking and pressuring them every day now. I don't think any company or industry can withstand such intense pressure.
Everyday, we get a story from the nytimes, wapo or hundred of other media outlets attacking tech companies as being evil or russian stooges.
https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-appl...
If anything, there is probably a strong correlation between liking google and trusting old media.
It very much feels like this. I mean, maybe I live in a bit of a bubble as a techie, but I just don't see people (even among my very non-techie friends / acquaintances) saying "Wow, WTF is wrong with (Google|Facebook|Amazon|Microsoft|Instagram|Snapchat|Uber|$Whoever)?" OTOH, plenty of those same people are very critical of (CNN|MSNBC|Washington Post|NY Times|Fox News|ABC|NBC|CBS|etc).
Honestly, I am starting to feel like this "tech backlash" storyline is fabricated and phony. Dare I say... #FakeNews? :-)
GP fails to distinguish between news and editorial, which this article is.
That's probably another source for the trouble we've got with the so called fake news, because a lot of said "news" actually isn't news, but well written opinion pieces.
Or poorly written crap opinion pieces. In the end, it doesn't really matter if it's well-written or not, if something is opinion posing as news, it contributes to the problem.
In that regard, that this specific article is an op-ed is an insignificant detail.
Even more so when the author writes it as though he was reporting "news" and not just an opinion. I mean, you get stuff like this:
Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted.
Note how that's presented as an affirmative statement of an absolute fact.
and
Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.
OK, nice use of the weasel word "some", but still, this read like he's reporting facts, not an opinion.
And so on.
> Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.
I don't know about you, but I am totally ready to accept this "opinion" as fact. Smartphone/internet/social media addiction is a topic commonly discussed on HN.
Just because you don't agree with "some people" doesn't mean you can pretend that the things Brooks are talking about are just his opinion and not something that is objectively happening. Is your real problem with this that he used the word "some"? He does on to detail who "some" people are in the article.
I guess I'll just say this:
I never said I disagree with any specific point in the article, and what you quoted there was simply an example of how the author of TFA poses something (which might or might not be true) as "news", in a way that could blur the line between a "news piece" and an "opinion piece". I was just addressing an issue somebody else raised earlier about the blurring of news and opinion, by pointing out that the author directly contributes to this problem by the way he wrote his article.
Whether those statements are true or not isn't actually relevant to this specific point. They may be relevant to the broader issue of whether or not the "tech backlash" is real, but that isn't what I was commenting on there.
I guess I just really strongly disagree that the sentence you quoted constitutes "blurring the line." It says that some people think something and then went on to detail who these people were. Further more, David Brooks is possibly one of the most well known columnists for one of the most well read newspapers in the world. It's labeled "Opinion" and "Op-ed Columnist" at the top. It has an editorialized title, "How Evil is Tech?" It's so clearly NOT news. Nitpicking this one sentence to say that somehow David Brooks is masquerading as news is absurd.
That was just one example. If anyone is nitpicking here, I'd argue it's you. And I still have no idea what point you're trying to make.
Of course not. How would that even make sense?
Note that w/r/t the parent of my post above, and my subsequent response, we've clearly moved beyond talking solely about the currently linked article, and are talking about something broader.
I didn't say they were, and I'm not making any such claim. But that's irrelevant to the point I was getting at, which is simply that this currently popular narrative - that there's some widespread popular angst directed at AmaGoogFaceGramSoftHoo - strikes me as incorrect and possibly fabricated.
The answer to those two questions will hopefully illuminate why your friends are less critical of "the new school". :)
(My personal opinion is that they are both bad).
Your post takes the "new media" vs "old media" narrative at face value, and it looks like you identify with one of the teams.
I might be in this world too, but I came in before Facebook was created, and out of happenstance never wound up working at the current school of popular but criticized companies. For this fight, I don't have the kind of connection that sets my position before I know what the arguments are.
This editorial is just another point in the slow process of the rest of the world starting to notice the things that - just a few years ago - they used to brand people as paranoid conspiracy theorists for caring about.
I just don't see people (even among my very non-techie friends / acquaintances) saying "Wow, WTF is wrong with (Google|Facebook|Amazon|Microsoft|Instagram|Snapchat|Uber|$Whoever)?
Most people are ill-equipped to understand that they've been owned inside out. We've been watching it in slow motion for a decade, regular people don't understand what is happening. This article is an attempt by one editorial board to spread their assessment of what is happening to us.
Secondly, Like most things in the status quo that people are powerless to change, but are ill-informed about and/or don't have their political team teaching them to dislike it, their assessment is "I guess it couldn't be that bad."
Not really. It's clear the the world is shades of grey without there always being a bright line distinction between things. But this is a random HN post, not an essay. I'm not always going to spend the time and the number of words it would take to dig into every subtlely that could be pointed out. Sometimes it's enough to deal with the surface aspect of something.
As for being on a team... hah, I don't trust any of those motherfuckers. The mainstream / old media is quite clearly corrupt as fuck, no question about that. And AmaGoogFaceSoftHooGramChat clearly have their own agenda which isn't about benefitting the common man.
I'm close to "trust no one" than anything. Or maybe it would be better to say I believe in "bounded trust" or "sketpical trust". That is, trust an entity to behave as it would within the bounds of it's (position|incentives|etc).
Really? All the article says is that "some" people have developed more critical views of tech. Is that not true? It's not just the NYT. Look at HBO's Silicon Valley. Did you see the way that tech companies were criticized in the Senate over Russian election interference? It's everywhere.
Also, if you're going to call into question the motivation behind this article without actually criticizing any of their points, I hope you won't mind me pointing out that your bio says you're the founder of Parse and of course worked at Facebook.
No no, they are the children, not the piper in this case.
There’s finally been a perfect storm of disasters that even the most tone deaf optimist has to give up and acknowledge what the nay sayers have been saying.
Even hacker news, generally one of the more advanced edges of the tech sphere only recently turned on the old narrative.
Edit: And this is an op ed, so they’re still behind imo.
Edit 2: an actual example is Murdoch - he has repeatedly attacked google etc as destroyers of his revenue.
It’s not necessarily journalists’ fault; that’s the term these companies have used to market themselves for years.
We (the engineering classes / actual technologists) need to do more to brighten the line between the technology and the motivations and incentives of the people putting up the capital (and the executives/lawyers/lobbyists they control).
And, possibly, to recognize our latent power to influence certain decisions.
I’d argue that the answer is yes. The key is organizing collectively.
I previously thought this was extremely unlikely. But a lot of the happy-clappy veneer seems to be coming off on the inside. Even this week with net neutrality, (within my tech-monopoly) the number of people who want to do something and are pissed off with:
”you don’t understand technology policy, monkeys; we have lobbyists, do anything and get fired”
... coming down from the top, is much larger than I’d expected.
The key is collectively agreeing on something. After that, everything else is an implementation detail.
If you look at the balance sheets of many very profitable software/service companies, particularly those that use the cloud but do not provide the cloud, you will see that the concept of 'capital' is not what most think it is. There are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system 'capitalist.' The rate of return (free cash flow) on assets is astronomical. For example, I have recently worked for a firm in which the assets and annual return to shareholders were each equal to about 2 months of revenue. And most of the assets are either cash equivalents that the 'capitalists' have simply squirreled away out of past earnings, or agreed-upon fictions like deferred costs or goodwill, or monopoly rights (intellectual property) created by the government for the corporations.
This is not to say that successful entrepreneurs do not have extraordinary talents at what Barnum called "money-getting." But it is hard to call someone who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his garage and sells it for 10 figures, or someone controlling a similar firm who has already recovered his initial investment 100,000 times over, or a hired-gun employee slash-and-burn CEO who is given a few million in shares to motivate more money-getting, a 'capitalist.' Especially since the $1,000.00 probably went for things like telephone and answering services, stationary, advertising, legal fees of getting set-up, or finding a first customer, which are expenses, not capital, and none of which are recorded in the firms capital accounts. Our respect for capitalism is so overblown that we take it as given that any making of unimaginable amounts of money by means that no one understands is an example of 'capitalism,' because if it were not, the reverence for capitalism would be called into question.
> There are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system 'capitalist.'
Why do there need to be physical assets? I know the classic Marx-ish "seize the means of production" stuff is written in this way, but it doesn't make much sense to me outside of the factory labor of the industrial revolution.
I use 'capital' to mean investable money, or assets that can be traded or exploited; e.g. accumulated wealth, as opposed to income. And I generally use 'capitalist' to mean someone who invests 'capital' seeking a return on investment, without producing much productive labor themselves. Often this means maintaining the capability to partially or fully control the product and the nature of production, in exchange for the investment. E.g. a venture capitalist.
> But it is hard to call someone who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his garage and sells it for 10 figures, or someone controlling a similar firm who has already recovered his initial investment 100,000 times over...
These wouldn't really be 'capitalists' per my working definition above, just extraordinarily successful founders of bootstrapped-small-business. I think we're aligned, except on whether examples like these are in any way representative of anything that's likely to happen to anyone, or what's meant by "tech" in the article. Google raised 36MM pre-IPO, Facebook 2.3B pre-IPO. This money came from venture capitalists, who would have exchanged it for boards-seats, strong influence on executive appointments, and ultimately the direction of the company.
I can't tell if you're an accountant or a Marxist (or a Marxist accountant!), but I'm keen to know more about your perspective.
I've been following these fashions for some time (I can trace my skepticism to reading Parkinson's Law when it was fairly new and I was 11 years old). When I was taking my degree in economics, the theory of the firm said that the firm exists to cooperatively advance the combined interests of its suppliers of capital, its suppliers of labor, and its customers. Later, that was expanded to also recognize the reasonable expectations of other 'stakeholders.' The apotheosis of wealth has changed that so much that deciding how much we have gained or lost is much like the index-number problem in economics -- unresolvable. We cannot value what we have today by standards that we used to embrace, nor can we value what we used to have according to today's standards. We cannot not change, but changes over time confound the problem of evaluating change.
I might suggest that the single biggest cause of the runaway worship of vast wealth was the arrival of the New Hampshire lottery, the first modern lottery in the 50 states, subsequently imitated by almost all the others, in 1964. Now the man in the street can identify and sympathize with the millionaire because it is only a matter of time until the right numbers come out (lottery investments in the USA are now around $1.00 per capita per day). Belief in American capitalism runs on optimism; optimism and denial sustain each other.
This too shall pass.
I don't really agree with the article, but this is an awful defense. Abdicating responsibility and shifting blame is what gives the tech sector a bad name.
A quote comes to mind, and seems to fit quite well: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds[1]. It's hard to know what Oppenheimer should have done differently in this circumstances, but at least he faced up to his part of the responsibility for what he had done.
[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/manhattan-project-robert-oppe...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/31/coders-of-the-w...
By formulating is like this, NYT implies that everybody agrees that "tech" is evil to some extent, and that the only discussion is about exactly how evil "tech" is. Don't forget that NYT is in pretty direct competition with some companies they call "tech". This article is not unlike Coca-Cola publishing a press release titled "How evil is Pepsi?".
(Note, I did not share any opinion about whether "tech" is evil and I don't necessarily disagree with the premise of the article. I'm just trying to highlight that this kind of writing appears to be the new baseline and it's not just fake news and the alt right who do it anymore and that bothers the crap out of me because I feel like I can't trust anyone anymore)
What makes you think it needed to catch up at all? Look, press/media, tech, and any industry out there are there to "Make world a better place... for themselves".
Under capitalism, at least. :)
Tech is the greediest industry at this point, even comparing with Wall Street, all under the philosophy of GROWTH. Too many pretentious people get into this industry to chase the hot money, it slowly degrades to this toxic, selfish, out of touch culture, that benefits no one except the tech people and their pocket. Worst of all, they lack the blessing of self-consciousness to see it.
Tech is changing the world, but it probably not making the world a better place.
Apparently this is not quick buck enough.
Information revolution can only go so far. Many of the alleged tech companies are not innovative at all.
The "destroying the young" thing is especially tiresome. Every new thing has been destroying the young. That's true at least as far back as the novel [1], and probably back to prehistory when elders complained that fire was making kids soft, what with their "cooking" and their "warmth".
It's also deeply self-defeating of him to be complaining about the lack of "cohesion" and "focused attention" in a sub-1000-word opinion piece that tries to make a half-dozen points, none particularly well. And all that in a daily newspaper, which is built to contain small amount of a great variety of things, and which makes a lot of its money from distracting its readers with ads. [2]
[1] e.g, point 4 of http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaint... and https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...
Which leads to the question: how evil is David Brooks? How much of our time has he wasted? How many minds has he warped? How many Evil Empire agenda items has he helped to push? I'd say very few in tech have done as much harm as he has.
I think the author missed a really good opportunity to explore the developing relationship between the human psyche and the overflow of information that this age has provided us with, and instead made it political and blamey.
There’s nothing about the technology behind the Internet that means that ad-surveillance needs to be its default business model, for example.
Information is cheap and fast. This makes it difficult to charge for most content. The only way to do this and profit is to advertise. Competition among ad networks leads to ad tracking because it results in higher revenue for publishers.
Likewise with common services. Social chat app number 1001 has little value. Highly integrated with your business? Now you pay.
Unfortunately for news sites, their information is commonly available. Apps are fungible and it is easy to develop "good enough" nowadays.
Too often, people get "a bee in their bonnets" over some form of technology when it is abused and misused by other people. They don't separate the tool from the tool user and associate evil with the tool.
Sometimes there is a case for not developing some form of technology because the development requires the destruction and damage to people and the environment. Here the problem is still people not the technology itself.
Why is it ok to design and build algorithms that make people unhappy?
Take World of Warcraft, for instance: no one will dispute that the game was designed to keep you playing a very long time, and that many players were (are) addicted and wasted an excessive amount of time on the game, many people lost jobs, got kicked out of school, even ended marriages. That's real damage. But, many people also simply enjoyed the game, spent time with friends, one of my old school buddies even found his wife playing the game.
So, was creating WoW an unethical move on the developers' part?
Humans have a long history of killing each other, and typically over time (with a few exceptions such as the electric chair) the methods have generally gotten more humane (if state sanctioned punishment resulting in death can ever be considered humane) and when those methods failed to be available, no human government has ever held off on using a more barbaric act of killing in it's place.
Technology will either evolve without us, or less humane methods will continue to be used. Progress is both a promise and a threat.
That doesn't answer any of the questions posed.
Even if the Gas Chamber had never been designed, those people would of still been marched outside and shot by firing squad.
Hear hear.
Boy that's a hell of a label to stick on all the technology produced by Google, Facebook and Apple. How do you even get all three of those companies into one bucket without just making it a stupidly big bucket? One is a search and advertising company with a bunch of side business, another is an innovative hardware company with a bunch of side businesses, and the third is an addictive social network. They're all "tech" and they're destroying our deeper consciousness? Ok.
Seems like you’re getting hung up on a relatively minor detail.
However, aside from their own dark-UI patterns and walled garden strategy, Facebook and Google provide the killer apps for Apple’s highest margin product. And Apple absolutely do care about engagement on the iPhone; it’s highly predictive of buying a new one every year.
it is amazing how similar those "respectable" metropolitan left-wing newspapers are to their populist-right counterparts:
for the latter "immigrants are gonna take your jobs and globalists are evil" and the former "robots are gonna take your jobs and techies are evil".
+Tech is destroying the young via social media
+Tech is causing the social media addiction deliberately to profit off of it
+Tech giants are monopolies (Apple/Google/Microsoft) that invade privacy and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors.
Then at the end the author proposes a rebranding of tech:
> Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life.
> Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would be an amazing show of realism and, especially, humility, which these days is the ultimate and most disruptive technology.
So rebranding is going to make everything right? Who is he writing to, the public or the tech companies? Is he trying to give them advice on how rebrand themselves to appear to be less evil? I can understand his critiques of tech, but his proposed solution falls quite short of the mark!
Seems quite naive, though, and considering the source, it strikes me as disingenuous.
2)Of course monopolies exist in tech and are bad, but that's the nature of the protectionist state capitalism in the US over the last few decades, and is not restricted to technology alone. Unfortunately corporations have more influence on the working of the government than the people, and we're now into an era of unprecedented corporate mergers and monopolies.
3)"Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life."
That's what a lot of companies do. Apple and Microsoft market themselves as selling productivity devices that help you get work done quicker. Jony Ive is on record saying that people use iPhones too much.
It's also not reasonable to sweep in hardware companies like Apple, who don't particularly care how much time you spend using their products as long as you buy them regularly, to facebook, who very much care about how long you spend on their site, since this is inherently linked to their profitability. What are facebook going to do, encourage people to log off so that they can live happy lives while facebook's profits decline? The purpose of a corporation is to maximise profits, you cannot expect companies which compete in the attention economy to compromise on that even if their services are addictive and not useful to the people who use them or productive to society.
If you really think monopolies and corporations like facebook are harming humans without offering any competing benefits, you'd have to question the whole system of corporate capitalism and whether we should allow corporations freedom to function without public influence over their activities.
We don’t.
Nah. Even people in the industry are starting to wake up to the ethical questions that come with making addictive products. E.g., this thoughtful piece from a game company on why they're abandoning the free-to-play model:
Also, the two aren't as far apart as they seem at first. There are a variety of groups for helping people quit games. [1] I've had friends say it was easier to quit smoking than it was to quite Warcraft. And when doctors say, "sitting is the new smoking", they aren't just whistling dixie. [2]
[1] E.g.: https://gamequitters.com/ or http://www.olganon.org/ or http://cgaa.info/
[2] http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/11/health/sitting-increases-risk-...
Addiction can be horribly destructive without causing physical harm.
I don't know how bad these apps are. Gambling apps can be as bad as a slot machine or a roulette wheel, but we have no idea what kind of psychological damage the more insidious ones cause.
And there is physical harm. Obesity is a public health crisis. I don't know to what extent these apps contribute to it, but it's not zero.
>The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing [...] addiction on purpose, to make money
>The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near monopolies that use their market power to invade the private lives of their users and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors
I agree with all three of these, though I think this is fixable. They obvious and easy solution is to pick apart the giants. The EU's ePrivacy Law and GDPR make this possible, in addition to Germany's NdG making it difficult for large social network to operate compared to small ones.
The solution, in my opinions, is federated networks like Mastodon. Mastodon Server Operators have little incentive to abuse their users since the users will happily just swarm to another instance. Once they have figured out portable profiles, this becomes even easier.
Federation solves these problems by detaching the user from a specific operator.
All it takes is for one of them to succeed.
It feels like executives are slowly turning the knobs and making companies more and more evil over time but doing so at a slow enough rate that nobody pays attention to it.
The hypocrisy of some big companies is that they promote themselves as being against any form of violence, aggression or discrimination but a large part of their business is about mentally abusing people and creating inequality.
Edit: Microtransaction-based games that are essentially gambling simulators are highly problematic as well.
1. The drumbeat of criticism against major information-technology-centric, largely media-based firms, has been palpably increasing. As a long-term critic, this is oddly disconcerting. Calls for regulation are increasing in the US and elsewhere. Critics include numerous former (and some current) employees, or executives, of major tech companies, including Sean Parker, former president of Facebook.
2. The dynamics and interactions of media, the public, tribalistic impulses, and politics (as well as other phenomena) are an ancient study, though one apparently not much focused on by many working in information technology: programmers, system architects, sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers, designers, UI/UX specialists, product managers, etc. Which is ironic because that really is our melieu.
There's a very large literature on this topic and I very much recommend getting up to speed on the topic.
MOOC ICS has a good, fast-paced introduction. I've been commenting on HN and elsewhere of my own explorations: Robert McChesny, Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone, Marshall McLuhan, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Gustav la Bon, Davic MacKay, Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato are among the authors I'd recommend.
First video (apologies, I cannot find the playlist link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8
3. "Technology" is a tremendously unsatisfactory term for the many meanings and connotations we give it. It's become synonymous in large part with "inforamtion technology" (though writ broadly it concerns far more). But if you do look at information technology, that field can largely be divided in two: media, directed at collecting and directing information from and to people, and cybernetics, directed at monitoring and managing non-human systems (including technical, engineering, financial, and governmental systems). Looking at each of these more closely even those distinctions start disappearing over the underlying similarities.
But the upshot is that a tremendous amount of what "technology" is is really the new "media". And yes, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Wordpress, Spotify, Snapchat, and similar companies are largely media or communications companies in the same sense that Western Union, AT&T, RCA, CNN, or Time-Life Publishing, are. But bigger, faster, and with orders of magnitude more audience.
And the less-directly-media-oriented companies -- Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft -- still have media-like components, though they play in other spaces as well.
4. The current tech giants didn't invent disinformation, misinformation, distraction, propaganda, and manipulation. But they've made it vastly more powerful, targeted, sophisticated, large, and rapidly-evolving. They've also denied this up and down and blue for years, with all the credibility of the lead, asbestos, tobacco, automobile, CFC, coal, and oil industries. Which is to say: nil.
Not inventing a problem doesn't mean you're not embodying or exacerbating it.
If you are an engineer, you can help by respecting the people who use what you build. Show people the content they want to see, not the content that maximizes revenue. Refuse to experiment and collect data without the informed consent of the people you target. Build systems with the knowledge that every centralized service will eventually be compromised. Even if it's harder to build, harder to debug, and harder to monetize, build technology that is "good" instead of "evil" and the world will be better off.