How Tech Companies Own Your Day | Hacker News Reader

How Tech Companies Own Your Day

bloomberg.com

90 pointskatiey22 comments

Imagine seeing an article titled "How furniture manufacturers own your day". It has graphs on how long on average you spend sitting on chairs from each company. How many companies make desks you use at work as well as beds you sleep on at night. How these companies make their products work better together so you have a chance of buying more, and then sell accessories on top of it. They even fight for your lunch and dinner time, providing dining tables and chairs and sometimes even utensils.

Probably sounds absurd, but that's essentially what this article is. Tech is as ubiquitous as furniture, perhaps even more for certain demographics, but for some reason there is a new article every day which sounds like the author looked around and was suddenly surprised to see everyone with smartphones and internet.

Well, which is it? Is software "eating the world," or is it basically a small accoutrement to the world as it existed, the way an office chair is?

Your analogy is so atrocious it's almost as if you do PR for Facebook. Furniture is passive and doesn't detract from wellbeing by absorbing a significant proportion of active attention.

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The difference seems blatantly obvious to me: once I purchase furniture, my interaction with the manufacturer is done. The manufacturer will not monitor how I use my furniture. My furniture will not suddenly stop working because the manufacturer does not want to manufacture it any more. My dining table will not change into an arbitrary different piece of furniture overnight. Manufacturers are not competing to see which of my chairs they can make me use most. Manufacturers compete up until the point of sale, then it's done.

"Tech" in general is probably the industry with which we interact most on a day-to-day basis. The change from 'no tech' to 'pervasive tech' has been extremely rapid, and we are starting to understand some of the implications of that. So it seems only natural to look around and say "hey, maybe this is different from furniture".

I fear we'll see this change soon enough, though. Given the rate at which IoT stupidity has been accelerating, a "smart" couch can't be too far off.

Who are these people that only work 3.8 hr per day and get 8.8 hr of sleep. I am lucky to get more than 5.5 hr of sleep and I work far more than 3.8 hr per day. Sounds like the average joe has it made. Oh where did I go wrong :-P

Maybe they live near the families which have 2.5 children, but the article does cite its sources such as:

https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm

This is pretty clearly a case of the mean conveying little useful information. Children, elderly, and the unemployed skew the data way too much for the average to be a meaningful summary.

I suspect that's an average of people who work full-time, people who work part-time, and people who don't work at all, such as unemployed, retirees, and children.

One of the big factors is actually weekends. 40hrs/7days = 5.7hrs/day.

They're on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290518

I beg to differ. YC owns most of my day. Thanks to HN!

I would say Azure is one of Microsoft's core products at this point (and maybe Bing as well)

I would also consider that Instagram additionally falls under the 'Travel' category. #placename is a good way to find photos of interesting things you should see in person.

I would say it’s becoming their core product.

Everything with a monthly recurring subscription revenue stream is now the MS core product. Office365, etc. This is why windows 10 is effectively free to license, so you will see it on $85 tablets and ultra low cost PCs.

They could have written the title as "How smartphone using idiots let themselves be drawn into mobile addiction machines" but that would be too close to the truth and scare people off. For my 2c i think the reality is people want to avoid their issues instead of solving them, and that is a basic human trait. So they dive into tech solutions mobile and web and desktop for gratification, importance, friendship, and so on because some clever people figured out how to take advantage of human weaknesses and embed that in software.

Am i cynical? Not at all. I just observe people using systems and their inability to walk away with a sense of ease. Any habitual consumption is bad - only aware consumption is good, regardless of what you are consuming.

Now, if someone could just write an app that redirected every social media tool on the planet to the home page of HN we could at least start opening some minds.

Signed #grumpyoldhackerinasia

I don't suppose you're a habitual user of HN?

“How finance companies own your money”

“How transportation companies own your commute”

“How food companies own your meals”

Uh, yeah. What would be weird or objectionable about any of those premises?

Only if you sell it to them, bub.

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