We used to get excited about technology. What happened? | Hacker News Reader

We used to get excited about technology. What happened?

technologyreview.com

48 pointsspking41 comments

It's the lack of control.

I used to feel excited about new screen technology and I used to upgrade my TV / monitor for watching movies pretty regularly. But now that all the newer models are "smart" which effectively means they limit my freedom, spy on me, and shove ads into my face, I'm trying to avoid upgrading as much as I can.

Similarly, I used to feel enthusiastic about all the cool new stuff Apple would put into MacBooks. But then they became more and more totalitarian and by now with Gatekeeper, Signing, mandatory App Store, and all that image scanning plans, I feel like I'm at best a tolerated visitor on MacOS, but I'm very far away from the power that root granted me when I was a kid.

Big Tech is about taking control from our hands and put it into stockholders' or whoever has money for ads. They're trying to sweeten the deal by making things ever 'easier' to use (which aligns in part with removing user control). In fact things have become harder to use, because using should mean understanding, adapting, repurposing. Some products can't even be resold anymore...

I agree with your starting expression a lot. I worry that this reflection on how we've been muddied though shades what is valuable.

Microsoft used to ask, in their ad campaigns, "Where do you want to go?" There was a semi-symbootic relationship, part machine, part man, working together, with users still expected to be prosumers, being invested in their tech, & working it, setting it up, customizing it, exploring it. The personal computer was a blank slate we got to push forward, each of us. And yes by huge contrast, the modern tech world is much more pre-set up, easier to adopt, and most of it runs on far off clouds we have no real control into.

We've arrived at a much stricter consumerism, with prebaked applications, with less ability to explore & push frontiers. A couple hours of poking around will probably expose almost all capabilities of an app or network today. Fewer & fewer systems enable maturation of the user into an expert.

There was a great submission today, Maggie Appleton talking about Programming Portals, ehich talks some to how we might start to open windows between the glossy, pre-baked GUIs that define modern consumer computing, and a more empowered realm that begins to let users Under the Hood[2]-- another fine submission today!

There's also the Malleable Systems Collective which very much is about reempowering users.

Im less concerned with the bad. It'll sort itself out, if we can reemerge a good. But weust envision & create new good computing, that befits this much more connected time we are arriving at.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/programming-portals https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33310344

[2] https://aeon.co/essays/computers-are-so-easy-that-we-ve-forg... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33310402

[3] https://malleable.systems/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857551

Brief excerpt from the article:

> It’s not enough for a refrigerator to keep food cold; today’s version offers cameras and sensors that can monitor how and what I’m eating, while the Roomba can now send a map of my house to Amazon.

I can only answer subjectively here. At some point in the past 20 years, the quality of products deteriorated. We have more options than ever before, but much of it is cheap, plastic garbage. It spies on us, or comes with terms and conditions where we actually own nothing, or is chock full of complexity.

We purchased a bathroom scale from Amazon during COVID. I can’t remember but either Wire cutter or Consumer reports gave it top scores.

The damn thing required installing a mobile app and wanted to connect to my Wi-Fi, and though it gave me an option to skip this step, I couldn’t get it to complete “setup” until I connected it. Once I connected it, there was no option to disconnect it. The scale works okay, but I had to go into my router settings to block it from connecting.

When you think about it, products and services today are drowning in complexity and outright stupidity. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the economics and the race for endless growth. It often feels like innovators are either out of ideas, or maybe because of the few companies who dominate specific industries, it’s just too damn impossible for any new innovative ideas to come to fruition.

planned obsolescence

It's more than that. It's the obsessive monetization of common products.

I was fine with the crappy plastic stuff we had 20 years. There was some expectation that a refrigerator works as a refrigerator, a toaster as a toaster, a bathroom scale as a bathroom scale. It might break after 3-5 years, but I could buy another for cheap while trying to remain ignorant of the environmental impact.

Fast forward to today. The core functionality is incidental to the real goal of these devices: Data collection and advertising.

A refrigerator might work as a refrigerator, but it's really there to spy on my eating habits and pump ads through the monitor. In many ways, it's a refrigerator in name only. The core functionality is secondary.

There could be a million updates to the refrigerator's firmware, but all in the mission of making sure the DC and adware software keeps working. Maybe there will be one relevant to actual refrigeration itself.

And there isn't any way out of this. One could propose buying a fridge from the 1950s, but do I want to pay for the power consumption of that device?

It's just sad to see that in today's society, there isn't more outrage about core functionality not working as intended. At a minimum, I could turn a blind eye to DC/ads if that toaster actually toasted bread. But I can't even be guaranteed that anymore.

Peak tech.

This feels rather behind the curve, like the author is just figuring out what we've been saying here for many years now. But the difference is that it's now okay for an MIT professor of AI Ethics to say it.

That's the crucial change. People are saying it. At the school. At the hospital. Out in public amongst friends one used to "keep up appearances" for. I can discuss it with my boss. Even my aged but highly intelligent mother pesters me about it....

"Digital technology creeps me the fuck out and I just don't want it in my life any more".

The emotional, spiritual even social disadvantages now outweigh the purported advantages. For me, that's "peak-tech", which is not necessarily about demand or economics. It's the cultural turning point we're at.

We built this stuff. So we better start thinking about how we're going to fix it.

Traditionally, the government would simply write laws making the bad things illegal.

"Vacuum cleaners may not upload any information about a person's home to any server or through any network, else fines and prison." "Televisions and monitors may not, of their own volition, display advertisements, else fines and prison." Or at least very clear labeling rules.

I think that the underlying problem, as is often the case, is the Citizens United ruling. Fixing that doesn't solve everything; it doesn't solve disinformation challenges, but it does take care of a lot.

While I mostly agree I think this one is more about older people in government simply not understanding tech and data in the age of IoT. I know they do have some small understanding because I have recently read up on SOX, HIPAA and Graham Leach Baily act which all have to do with protecting data and securing IT in some way. What they mostly boil down to is, write stuff down, make sure consumers know it, and protect your computers, and then we will make another group of qualified people who oversee the enforcement usually under the FTC or FCC and make more recommendations.

Yes, and we only need to look at the banking and investment sector to see how well this sort of thing actually works. These are all employment bills, written by the consulting companies who are going to be the ones to take the call from the Fortune 1000 companies that have to implement the regulations, and precious little of what happens in all of this activity actually accomplishes the stated reasons for the law.

>We built this stuff.

I think a lot of engineers would prefer to not build this stuff, and are even ideologically opposed to its existence. But there is always another engineer struggling to make ends meet who will commit the code. There is little collective support within the professional engineering space to stand behind ethics in tech; moneyed interests are not just oblivious, but diametrically opposed to it.

Last week I cancelled Apple Music. I found that my previously large music collection, which I had before joining Apple Music and its convenient web upload, was in tatters. Most albums were gone, and of the few ones still there, many had missing songs. Is that progress? Luckily I found the missing music as part of the backup of a laptop I decommissioned in 2016.

Much technology is becoming too difficult to judge properly. There are too many side effects and circumstances involved. Technology likes to pretend it is smart, but it is usually anything but. It is pushed upon people nevertheless.

You don't even have to cancel Music to notice. My playlists and library albums are changing all the time. Even super-popular stuff just up and greys out. Tracks and entire albums disappear. Just like what's happening on Netflix, et. al., the copyright holders are going CRAZY, apparently working overtime juggling catalogs for some reason. If you really want to know that you have a copy of something, despite paying for it, piracy is the only solution. It's just sad. To me, consumers met in the middle with the copyright cartel and their DRM, and now they're just shining us on. Well, I guess, who could have seen that coming? Everyone.

In the 80s and 90s (when I grew up) there was still a sense that technology was capable and going to be empowering people and making lives better, healthier, more convenient. Even though in many ways this wasn’t really true at the time either, the rise of social media and digital advertising as the primary examples of “big tech” I think really changed how people internal and external to the industry think about how technology intersects our lives.

When you think about science fiction and the promises of technology and then look at what we actually got (mostly platforms to sell us things) I feel like it’s natural people are discouraged.

I blame venture capital for a lot of this. A bootstrapped tech company can keep making products for consumers at a modest profit. A vc backed startup has to grow and grow, so selling out their customers is just an expected part of that journey.

It sucks. I hate it.

Maybe we will see the rise of some label that companies might adopt, to signal that they are not trying to profit from what they know about you, they just want to sell you the product.

Growth for the sake of growth has a (in)famous equivalent in biology: cancer.

While I think VC is a culprit of this phenomenon, look at established institutions like Microsoft, Lenovo... still injecting ads and bloatware for decades and laughing all the way to the bank. I think this transcends any recent trends in startup funding.

Huh? I still am excited about technology. Technologies I'm awaiting keenly:-

  * Electrolysed hydrogen for iron smelting and fertilizer making
  * Reverse osmosis fresh water production
  * Cell-cultured meat
  * Robots in pedestrian spaces / robots around people (hospital and university delivery bots, fruit picking bots, re-taskable robots in factories, etc.)
  * Bio-inspired textiles like artificial spider silk and vegan leather
  * Much better and cheaper assistive technologies (hearing and vision aids, movement aids, cognitive and memory compensation)

Oh, you mean social media and cloudy stuff? Yeah, never was into that.

> Electrolysed hydrogen for iron smelting and fertilizer making

Yes! Will be fascinating to watch the inventors & scientists in hydrogen & energy make this happen

> Robots in pedestrian spaces / robots around people

I guess we haven't had enough with shitty bike/scooter sharing services cluttering sidewalks, now we'll have shitty food delivery services doing that too. Obviously none of them will even interoperate across different providers (how will the founders achieve their monopoly vision otherwise?) so it'll be wasteful both in terms of money, hardware, energy and sidewalk space. Can't wait!

I'm waiting for small scale nuclear energy to become more prevalent. That will probably be the big technological change that will get us off fossil fuels once and for all. Right now, if you don't live somewhere where hydroelectric or solar are options, you are pretty much stuck on coal fuel power plants.

Even hydroelectric has negative impacts on the environment, particular salmon habitat.

I think it's not just social media and cloudy stuff, I also don't use those things, but if I want to buy a TV I have to look on how to avoid ads in it, if I install the new Windows I have to look up how to make it stop spying on me. The worst part is that all apps on smartphones now require subscriptions, which makes them virtually useless for me, I was willing to pay for a useful program, but I'm not gonna subscribe to one, so I just use my phone for the most basic stuff now.

From my perspectives 20 years ago, the context was passion and excitement. Those are the only ones who had an idea of the future. And, people thought they were weird. Nothing has changed. There’s still passion and excitement out there. Just like back then, these people are in the fringe, with exciting predictions of the future, and called weird. VR, blockchain, etc.

Related, the growing majority of people I work with choose tech because it pays well. In the beginning of my career, nearly everyone was in tech because it was their passion.

The mainstream commercialisation of tech may be tedious, but life on the tinkering fringes is about as exciting and engaging as ever.

There's a lot more noise to filter out, of course. Perhaps that falls under "careful what you wish for" - that is, as 80's/90's youngsters we all wished that the world was more tech and computer -centric. Well, we got our wish.

Eternal techtember

In so many wayswe don't own the technology we buy anymore, and playing with someone else's toys doesn't invite the same enthusiasm, especially long term where ecosystems are involved.

We thought the future was gonna look like a movie, or something like The Jetsons. The future like actually much more mundane, and predictable. It's curved tv screens and smaller phones. That's kind of cool, but nothing special. I think part of it is people had very big expectations for the future and those are only rarely met.

I also think we already got a lot of the low hanging fruit. Growing up, I used to dream of being able to use my computer anywhere. Now I can, as a modern phone is even more capable than my computer back then. Phones used to regularly come out with cool new features that put it in front of competitors. Now most phones are identical-- they have all the features and apparently no one has any ideas for any new ones. I can run doom on my fridge and I don't care, but Dall-e impresses me.

Phones are much more than most fiction ever dreamed. I feel like they're one of the few fulfilled promises of tech.

Everything comes with a catch these days.

Our relationship with brands used to be closed-end. Widget Mark II is 30% faster than my old Widget Mark I? Here is a stack of dollars for it, and we're done until five years from now when I'm ready to consider Widget Mark III+ with Chili and Lime.

Now everyone's all about the back-end relationship. It's gotta come with some subscription service, account, or back-end drip revenue from harvesting data. Half the time it's deliberately crippled to serve some business interest.

It's hard to be as wide-eyed when you have to be reading the fine print to see exactly how you're being screwed.

For me, Intel Management Engine was the Rubicon where computing lost its luster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

It's the consumption of our limited attention, and how our social life has become mediated by tech. It's how is it not solving our problems and overloading us with undesirable crap like forms and checks.

I think the problem is that too many critics have a voice. There’s a cadre of dedicated naysayers for every new piece of technology that comes out that creates too much noise to get too excited about. Couple this with technology being used for environmental destruction, racist pursuits and job displacement and you have a generation that’s too jaded to get excited.

The way I understand it, job displacement is the main driving factor behind economic growth. Some jobs have been automated, but most have simply become more efficient to the point that the demand curve no longer warrants most workers.

I have this vivid memory of walking through a market in a Peruvian town. All off those sounds, smells and impressions would probably disappear I thought, to be sterilized and concentrated into a supermarket, and most of the labor lost. There were skillfully painted murals on the walls. "Vota por John Doe para Alcalde". Labor being cheap, it might make sense to enlist a veritable army of specialized painters for each and every election cycle, but they should just have posters printed for much less effort, I thought.

This is when the realization hit me. I knew now what capitalism meant and I felt so wrong for romanticizing life in less developed countries. If we want an increase in wealth, we need an increase in productivity. If we want an increase in productivity, we need continuous job displacement, for ever.

Simply: most everything got overrun with ads. Also, IP law is stifling innovation.

Because we no longer own it. We are licensed it.

because we don't really need anything else?

Disagreed. There's a lot of things we need, just that they're against corporate interests, and in some cases those corporate interests have successfully lobbied our governments to make those things illegal.

When I want a car for example, I want to have a single client application that will automatically get quotes & availability from Uber, Bolt, the local taxi service, etc and pick me the fastest/cheapest option. This is technically possible - the official clients talk to their server via an API that can be reverse-engineered and implemented by the third-party client. It's not possible because it would be a breach of ToS, breach of App Store rules (they forbid apps talking to third-party APIs without their explicit authorization) and potentially even a breach of copyright law.

When I want to order groceries, I'd like software that has a cache of all the local supermarkets' prices so that it can come up with the most cost-efficient strategy of reordering whatever I've ran out of (sometimes choosing to split it across different vendors if the cost ends up better). Yet, making a database of all products & their prices would be a breach of ToS and will get you sued (turns out pictures of products on UK grocery stores' websites are copyrighted and actually owned by a third-party).

All of this is something that computers can trivially do and there's no technical reason why we don't have it. Computers were meant to empower humans and eliminate unnecessary busywork. Instead, they've created more of it.

That’s a great point.

It’s the same thing with social networks. I’ve long said that the way to break FB is to just demand a compatible open API for everything - text messaging, social graph, and potentially even feed. This would allow interoperable social networks and aggregators where you could see multiple feeds collated. You should also be able to have control over your feed.

But of course we can’t because like you said FB will claim this violates their ToS or it’s impossible or anything.

It’s nonsense but like others said - technology has made it so we don’t have any control over what we “buy” anymore. The tech is there to control us, not for us to control it. It’s there to track our choices and mind fuck us using that technology to buy more, consume more, choose the politician that has collated more data to manipulate you. Nothing is made for “us” anymore.

It’s insanity.

I was most impressed by random security cameras and video doorbells. Its just wifi, a video module, a plastic box and some components to glue it all together. Before buying one nothing is disclosed about monthly fees for limited cloud storage. Desktop clients are missing.

Some how the sum of technology +1000 euro phone +Gbit internet adds up to a doorbell so slow the visitor is long gone before you get to respond verbally or in person. That is, if the notification is audible at all.

The old vintage video doorbell displays the video feed pretty much instantly. The old vintage intercom allows you to talk to the visitor immediately after picking up the horn.

If you lower the volume or mute my stereo or my tv, should that action also mute the doorbell???

People can say what they want about RMS being a creep. But we continue to piss and moan about these things restricting our freedom and take over our lives.

Tada, the writings on the wall

This all depends on your perspective. If you want to believe tech has gone to the doldrums, that reality will manifest for you. Meanwhile people will be creating Raspberry Pi server clusters in their bedroom and hacking the planet regardless of surveillance capitalism.

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