Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

If someone predicted 10 years ago what Big Tech did in the last years, they would have been labeled conspiracy theorist.

View on HN

Where did you live 10 years ago that wasn't run by corporate greed and corruption, or were you just too young to remember it?

If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that. One reason that things are getting better is that more people are paying attention, which makes that fun paradox where a bunch of people who are new to this whole thing perceive the world as getting worse.

Very curious what specifically makes you see things as less corrupt or people as paying more attention. The CARES Act was as bad as anything passed during the financial crisis and sailed through Congress with nary a word of objection or media scrutiny.

Is there a specific metric you're thinking of? My understanding is that income inequality is at an all-time high, and I'd be very surprised if it were worse 10 and 20 years ago.

Examples: https://equitablegrowth.org/eight-graphs-that-tell-the-story...

I was mostly speaking in terms of corporate crime/greed and the general public's willingness to let it slide, which is admittedly a pretty hard thing to quantify.

But why do you believe that it was worse 10-20 years ago? How can you tell?

> If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that

While things are truly better in certain aspects, the percentage of people relying on these companies now - as opposed to then - makes up for the less bad-ness.

I think the general attitude was not that these people are conspiracy theorists and making these things up but that there response would be something like "Why does it matter, how does it affect me?" and the answer would have been some theoretical bad thing that the average person can't imagine happening to themselves. Now its happening which makes it real for people.

"Morality police" was once a 80's or 90's trope or meme against the religious right coming from the left. Now, those with interest in policing morality from a leftward slant and those with special interests at other entrenched mega-corps have both found nearly unlimited use of puppet strings at SV firms to wield their power with frightening alacrity.

R. Stallman did talk about all of that.

You are both correct. Richard Stallmann was always treated a bit like a conspiracy theorist.

However, there was no conspiracy. This is just the result of human greed at a massive scale.

Stallman predicted this for decades and was labeled as such until Edward Snowden came about and showed the evidence right in our faces.

As usual, Big Tech strikes again with a lesser role this time. It won't be the last until some 'action' is done to keep them in check.

People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.

>People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.

The fact that he remained in his position for so long and the degree to which people melted down and swore bloody vengeance against the "cancel culture mob" when he finally faced any consequences at all demonstrates how little his behavior actually mattered within the free software community.

If anything has undermined Stallman's message, it's been the failure of free software to adequately compete in terms of quality and UX to proprietary offerings in the marketplace. Their answer to Photoshop is Gimp, FFS.

I think you're right but I also think the recent Parler/Q stuff is relatively small fry. It was bad already, twitter finally getting the bottle to ban someone who'd been clearly violating their rules for half a decade is pretty minor.

If anyone thought that big tech wouldn't do this 10 years ago they were naive.

Big is they key word. Big everything does the same thing. Which is why we need to not let anything get big.

Things are slowly shifting and decentralizing with gab, parler(when they return). Now maybe new startups in the Robinhood space.

You can draw that line of reasoning all the way back to the dawn of agriculture.

Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing.

I wish I could find it, but 10 years ago, probably longer now, there was a prescient video where there turned out to be only 4 tech companies left. Something like amazgooglesoft or something. The narrator had a deep voice and I think it was funded by a media company.

Edit: Found it through the keywords, "old prediction video where amazon microsoft google buy everything" lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s&feature=emb_titl...

When all the tech companies merge, they will in turn be bought by Taco Bell.

A short squeeze is how Taco Bell won the fast food wars

Maybe a 30 Rock bit (or just coincidence):

GE. Proud to be one of America’s 6 companies

Cyberpunk is a thing since 80s, FYI.

Yeah, I was. Multiple times. On this site in particular.

It's the same if you talk about it today.

Modern surveillance capitalism is far beyond the wildest fever dreams of 90s shortwave radio conspiracy nuts.

agreed, at least jack-booted thugs are visible to those they oppress

If anyone predicted Trump becoming president 10 years ago, they would've been labelled a lunatic.

Reality is stranger than the fiction we all live within, because fiction has the constraints of being something we can comprehend and live with. It has to be redeeming and hopeful, reality doesn't.

Doc: Tell me, Future Boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?

Marty: Ronald Reagan.

Doc: Ronald Reagan? The actor? [rolls his eyes] Ha! Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis?

Well, Reagan became president back in 1981, which wasn't much different. If anything he was just an actor (before getting into politics, which is even less qualification that a salesman/real estate guy.

And, aside from spending on BS like "Star Wars" and escalating things with USSR, Reagan also established the neoliberal greedy nightmare we live in since.

> If anything he was just an actor

Well, he was also a union big shot for over two decades, eventually elected as president of SAG.

Then, he was governor of California for nearly a decade.

So, quite a bit more qualification than "just an actor."

>Then, he was governor of California for nearly a decade.

Yeah, so like Schwarzenegger.

You could make that argument for every President since Woodrow Wilson at least...

> If anything he was just an actor

He had a longer political career (and one more directly relevant to being the chief executive of a government) than Obama before each became president.

Kind of like right now, how Simpsons predicted a global recession after President Trump's term is being jokingly brushed off even as it seems like we are in a bubble.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

A throwaway joke in a Simpsons episode does not "predict" a recession to any degree of reasonableness.

just like Trump's presidency right?

Seriously, reason from first principles. The incentives are the outcome. It was predicted in mainstream media (granted as a pessimistic joke):

https://www.joe.ie/movies-tv/simpsons-writer-reveals-how-he-...

They're just ahead of the curve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com