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I agree, except for one potentially huge negative: they might be eroding our ability to have functional democracies.

The tech giants' business models strongly incentivize maximizing the time a user spends within their app. To do that, their algorithms try to find the most engaging content to show you.

The most engaging political content is often hyper-partisan, outrage-driven, and unconcerned with truth. These algorithms encourage bad faith participation by all players: media outlets, individuals, and politicians. Political ideas are often shared not out of deep seated belief, but in hopes of distribution.

Democracy seems predicated on the idea that most participants will engage in good faith. Whether we like it or not, our civic discourse has moved over to platforms that seem to incentivize bad faith participation. I think that's cause for alarm.

Look up the history of "political machines", "yellow journalism", "fascism". Democracy has always been corrupted because people are inherently not very good.

Sure, but smart phones & social networks see far more user adoption and time spent than any newspaper during the era of yellow journalism. The scale is just incomparable, and potential consequences far greater.

So what would you replace it with?

They never claimed democracy wasn't the best we have right now.

You mean what to replace the democracy with, or the corruption?

It's interesting that you've done the calculus on these same issues, and come up with a completely different answer than me. I weighed free email etc. against giving up personal data etc. and I came down decidedly on the side that it's not worth it. And because there aren't alternatives, I just don't don't do some things anymore, wherever I can. That means no facebook. No smartphone. No twitter. Not IG. No googling as much as I can. Sometimes I just have to be fine with not knowing things that I could easily look up.

Maybe it's age? How old are you? Not to be that old guy (I'm not even old) but I'm old enough to remember a time when I didn't have the internet, and I didn't have a smart phone, and I didn't even have a computer. And life was... well actually okay. It was fine. I got by day to day and I lived. Today, anyone under 25, all they know is life with the Internet and smartphones. I can't even begin to comprehend that worldview.

Mid 20s. The only social media I have is IG but I only follow people I know in real life. I don't find FB worthwhile because it made me dislike many people I know after seeing how they express some of their political opinions (on both the left and right). The other ones just seem like wastes of time.

I still use Google regularly and I have a smartphone, but I would give up a smartphone if there were a decent phone with email and google maps as built in applications.

I agree that giving up personal data can be concerning for many people, but at the same time, people don't want to pay for the services, so it's a catch-22.

I find this view as outdated as I find an ultra religious and conservative person's views towards modern accomplishments in gender equality.

Are there some downsides to being connected in the modern digital age? Of course! But on a personal level they are miniscule and the gains outweigh the losses by a huge margin.

Somehow we did get by. And we weren’t living in ignorance either. We were well informed and engaged.

> free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy.

> giving up your personal data

You just described precisely why it's not free.

>The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is.

You forgot about the elephant in the room: the imminent danger of cyberwarfare.

The reason the Holocaust was so efficient at mass murder was because of "giving up your personal data".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

These tech companies have aggregated the most detailed demographical and psychological profiles in history on billions of people.

Let's not pretend they're impervious to hackers.

The "weapons of mass destruction" of the future will be algorithms loaded with the dual-use munitions we call "big data".

Holocaust only needed personal data because of the weird racism. You don't need personal data if you want to just invent "communist" or "counter-revolutionary" victims to persecute or to murder everyone with a different nose shape from the group in power.

Would my life be that much worse if I paid 10 bucks a month for google search?

No but googles would