Tech entrepreneurship and shifting sentiment
kapwing.com
kapwing.com
Life could be simpler. It used to be simpler. And I believe it will go back to be simpler when our minds get rid of the haze this technology gold rush has created, and we simply as developers and users start valuing free software, simplicity and consistency. I'm just not confident it will happen soon, though. I think we still have at least a few tech bubbles and a few thousand startups before we reach that point.
We've actively made the world worse.
Nobody was aware of the extent of police criminality before everyone had a camera in their pocket, as just one example.
At the root of most evil in the western world is advertising, it is just hidden well because it is good at moving the blame to, e.g, tech.
Also those movements were there before tech.
If your life was cars you would soon find most of your problems in life come from cars.
- It's normal, I don't need to do anything. These people are the ones who were born 90s or later. They see computers as a simple fact of life.
- It's not a problem, at least we have something. These people will generally be older and I think fail to see the incredible potential benefits of tricking a rock into thinking for you.
These are all generalizations of course, not social facts but simply representations of how I experience reality. The thing that really ticks me in the wrong is that people in other industries don't always see the things they do as a net negative for humanity.
For instance, most types of engineering such as civil, eletrical, chemical, etc. have real net positive benefits in the way I and everyone around me experiences life. I've never seen a civil engineer say they hate how we built bridges. I've met very few computers scientists who were confident about the way we deal with computers.
Anyways, this is just a long way of saying I agree, but that I don't think it invalidates what I talked about tech companies not being a net positive.
They do _now_. During their exponential-growth phase I think there were lots of negative externalities? (Pollution, etc). And we still have to regulate them heavily to avoid societal problems.
Another post in this thread mentioned it's all the closed-platform/walled-garden/attention-grabbing/rent-seeking behavior which is the worst aspect of "tech"... honestly I have the feeling we just haven't gotten around to learning how to regulate these well yet, just like it took a while to figure out how to control (local) pollution (I mean, even this is still a huge problem with global carbon pollution).
You must not have spoken with any of the civil engineers I've spoken with. They all describe an absolute wasteland of arbitrary and capricious regulations, competing stakeholders, and last minute requirement changes that require extensive redesign and often very expensive rework.
Software engineering really isn't all that different from all engineering, for better and for worse.
I understand your point but take for examples:
1. 20 years ago I was never locked out of my car because my phone's battery was dead.
2. 20 years ago I never wasted 20 minutes going through a phone menu at a bank only to lose the connection or eventually talk to a human which is what I wanted in the first place.
3. 20 years ago I couldn't work while on vacation because I just couldn't.
4. 20 years ago lies didn't spread through the Earth's population so fast it that it was a political tactic to lie soon - lie often.
Sure there are a lot of advantages and good things that have come out of tech - much better medicines for example. We will likely cure most cancers in the next 50 years. But it has also caused a lot more wealth to be concentrated in fewer people. Not everyone can be an Entrepreneur but deserve to live decently. Just because something becomes cheaper for everyone doesn't mean it is better. Ask the plastic filled Ocean.
Only just barely true, the RAND report that identified the Russian “Firehose of Falsehoods” propaganda model which got picked up quite quickly by other actors noted that it began being used shortly after the initiation of the 2008 invasion of Georgia.
It has always been this way but it never use to be free and so rapid.
Don't get me wrong, I dislike social media just as much as anyone. But do I dislike tech? Would I give up the all innumerable ways that my life has gotten better thanks to Moore's Law, ubiquitous Internet, and the proliferation of tools and services that take advantage of the above two? Absolutely not.
Personally, I believe it does. It's even ironic to me that your comment was downvoted, like, why? Is this really how we think about the world nowadays? Dislike/like. No discussion.
Anyways, I have to say Hackers News has been the source of well spent evenings with this nice community, so there's at least one data point there that these changes in culture weren't caused by tech.
There's huge kindnesses enabled by tech and the internet, like organizing group support, and healthcare kickstarters and so on.
I think youve got rose coloured glasses about the past more than today being particularly worse
Only if you aren't a misfit. If you had some "weird" hobby or interest, like anime, or science fiction, or heck, even computers, you'd have maybe one, two other people in your life who were interested in that. If you openly talked about your "weird" hobby, you'd be as likely as not socially ostracized and made fun of.
Today, thanks to the internet and social media, one can find forums and discussion groups for any hobby, no matter how weird or esoteric, and have fun conversations with people that have nothing to do with weather, politics, or sportsball.
Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.
And I don’t know, but it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse than it would have been otherwise. Connecting online may relieve stress the way alcohol relieves stress — genuinely useful in any moment, but easily problematic if you become too reliant on it.
Yes, let's go back and tell all the kids that were being bullied in high school merely for being different that their bullies are teaching them important life skills and that they shouldn't retreat into online spaces because that will make the "big picture" of their life worse.
Maybe we should think creating a world where everyone can move around and form the sorts of villages they like.
I also cherished photos and put more effort into taking them. Now I just spam the photo button and wait on Google to select the best one to automatically improve and remind me of later. Even then, I have so many that I never find myself flipping through them like I did with physical photos.
I read encyclopedias. The many volumes were an invitation to knowledge, dillineated by pages and sections. Online knowledge is an endless pit of knowledge of questionable value.
Really, it wasn't bad. I'd say peak value was around 98 or 99. Before XMLHTTPRequest became popular, when the web was still mostly documents and forms. NNTP still mattered, and Encarta was useful.
After that I've just felt like I am swimming upriver against an assault to my humanity.
You are extremely fortunate. It may not be apparent to you, but the advent of GPS, smartphones and Google Maps has been a game changer for so many people. My sense of direction is all right. I'm not a homing pigeon, but given a map, I can generally find my way around. But for other people such as my mom, every trip, outside of some well-traveled routes (like going to work, or going to the store) had to have detailed written directions, and be rehearsed ahead of time, because otherwise she'd get lost. For her, Google Maps has resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of her life, simply by enabling her to get around in the world without the constant background terror of not knowing how to get home.
My retirement will be spent isolated from society, although that's another matter for another day. But seriously, perhaps my perspective is warped by the fact that I'm used to all these things already. Kind of like how the best software is the one you never hear or think about since it doesn't get in your way.
The 1990’s weren’t some dreary hellscape. You worked, you talked to people, you went out for dinner, you did some chores, you traveled. You had some crises that sent your life reeling, and some magical moments that made you grateful for what you had.
It was quite fine.
And in the ways that it was characteristically different(not better or worse), people were more engaged with what was right in front of them, had more shared experiences of life and media to relate about, and were less flooded with constant stimulation.
All the things you mention as accumulating in the years since are about as meaningful as the aisles and aisles of plastic toys I longed for at Toys-r-us as a kid. I thought they mattered, but they really don’t.
You can totally still live a '90s lifestyle today. Cancel your high-speed Internet and tether to your phone for everything. Give up watching YouTube. Give up looking things up on Wikipedia. Film cameras are a dime-a-dozen on eBay, with even high-end SLRs from the '90s selling for less than a hundred dollars. Disable Google Maps and Google Search. Stop posting on Hacker News.
If you think the '90s were better than they were today, by all means, go back.
EDIT: For what it's worth, you can find people in the 1930s saying the same things about electricity and indoor plumbing. Every current generation's necessity is the previous generation's excess frivolity.
Would recommend.
I remember discovering gopher on university library computers in 1993, like I discovered the fun of CPM on my Dad's Osbourne in 1982. There was a nice mystery back then, things are definitely "better" now, except for prices and traffic.
I suspect you're not old enough to properly remember the '90s if you really think this would be the equivalent.
I'm not saying it was all sunshine and rainbows (people smoked everywhere, did tons of cocaine, and were probably more openly homophobic/misogynistic/racist, and if you got in an argument over a factual detail you couldn't look up the answer right away).
Tech is reaching a stage where the garbage/useful ratio is > 1. This is actually what I use to like about Musk when he pretended to run his companies and smoked cigars at the Playboy mansion. He actually tried to get truly innovative and useful technology worked on. Not anymore.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-warns-colleg...
Indeed, but capitalism does not care about society, but rather is there to make the person selling you the TV even richer.
> Or more cynically, "Industrial Society and Its Future".
edit: He studied at Harvard, not the MIT, memory failed me there. I don't condone any of his actions (i.e. bombing people).
To all the "yeah but what about all the good it's done" comments: I would gladly give all that up if it meant going back to the standards we had before around 2007 (though for me the 90s was the best time, I don't know how much of that has to do with the rose tint that teenagerhood gives you).
Even some of the good it's done is questionable. I can now order exactly what I want from a range of online shops at 2am, instead of going to the single jeans shop in my town and having to settle for the wrong size in the wrong brand. The flip side is that local shops have gone out of business, resulting in a loss of community, with all the ills that brings. Besides which, psychologists would argue that getting what you want isn't a good thing (and after years of getting what I want, I can confirm).
The narrative from my perspective (admittedly supported only by anecdata) is that people in the industry felt like it was loved because they loved themselves and only listened to themselves and others like them. Much in the way a CEO in a room full of yes-men might think the whole world loves them.
Maybe what's happening now is the yes-men are gone and the hate is finally coming from inside the house?
A lot of stuff has happened since then. Among them, the increasing optimization and understanding of surveillance business models, and a long-term ultra-low interest rate phenomena moving the allowing some...very odd marginal uses of capital.
The culture changed a lot too: from 1999 to 2011, if you look at the number of college applicants to computer science and/or computer engineering was cruising along. At 2011 it really started to take off (here I use UC Berkeley as a proxy, because I happen to know that number). I don't mean to suggest things would be better if they were put back the way they were -- for one, people in the field made way, way less money back then -- but it was...different. And the way it was embedded in the culture was different, this sudden change in applicants is more effect than cause.
To relate a story:
As a young man, I was visiting family in New York. I speak briefly with another young person, who asks what I do. I say "I'm a software engineer" and she asks "what do they do?" (My description: it's a bit like being an accountant, for computer programs)
Technology's place in the consciousness was so much smaller, a fun little producer of shiny baubles from time to time, already through its silly season in 1999. Well.
>When I started Kapwing in 2017, it was cool to be a tech entrepreneur.
… to you. It was cool to you to (categorically) be a tech entrepreneur. I think it is possible that “tech entrepreneur” as a monolithic “cool” category only ever existed inside the minds of that same group.
>Why Do People Hate the Tech Industry Now?
Again… I think it’s possible that the author’s perception has shifted, and as such their perception of humanity has shifted with it.
I have a few questions for anybody here that feels like SVB/other recent events has unveiled some sort of new or previously hidden disdain for self-described tech entrepreneurs.
1. When was the first time you heard the term “tech bro”?
2. The TV show Silicon Valley was developed a decade ago by Mike Judge (the creator of the wildly popular comedy King of the Hill) and aired its first episode not long after. Who was the intended audience?
Was it: A. People that the show was about
B. A much larger group of people that had already found tech “culture” to be comical or absurd in their own life experience regardless of their involvement in the industry
(It’s B)
I think your comment is largely anecdotal and is actually guilty of the very thing you are accusing the author of.
For instance...
> I think it is possible that “tech entrepreneur” as a monolithic “cool” category only ever existed inside the minds of that same group.
So, in my very personal opinion, the Best Time Ever to be in tech was in the 2010-2015 era, peaking at around 2012-2013. And in my recollection, that time, being in tech (which I'm loosely interchanging with the author's "be[ing] a tech entrepreneur") was seen as in-vogue even by people outside the industry. My less-anecdotal proof to back this claim is that it was around this time when public figures---politicians, no less---would advocate learning how to code/integrating a bit more CS in basic education.
We were disruptors. We were supposed to change the world. Until we weren't. We are, apparently, the old guard in fancy new clothes. We aren't here to make the world more open and more connected but to capture consumer groups in walled gardens, so that the best buyer can set a price on their data.
> recent events has unveiled some sort of new or previously hidden disdain for self-described tech entrepreneurs.
I really don't think recent events are unveiling any kind of disdain so much as adding another black spot to a long laundry list. The bucket already has water and everyone is just watching for the drop that makes it overflow.
> (It's B)
Again, I don't think you can just make the claim without showing some kind of proof (and having used the term "intended audience" I think comes with word-of-Judge level burden of proof) or explaining how you came to that conclusion.
For starters, I find it disingenuous to divide people like this. Even in my 2010-2015 era (which was also the show's heyday), A and B had a considerable intersection. There's nothing ever stopping you from participating in an industry you are critical about.
In my experience, even people squarely in the A category enjoyed the show just as much as people in the B category, some maybe for the wrong reasons. Arguably, not all in the A category found it amusing but I think that has more to do with whether you can joke about yourself than any sentiment you harbor about the tech industry and SV culture.
Ok, sure! Let’s see what non-anec
>So, in my very personal opinion, the Best Time Ever to be in tech was in the 2010-2015 era
-dotal bit of data are you going to use
>We were disruptors. We were supposed to change the world.
to disagree with my
>I really don't think recent events are unveiling any kind of disdain so much as adding another black spot to a long laundry list.
point?
As for
>explaining how you came to that conclusion.
Group B is a superset that includes group A! If you are certain that you’ve proven otherwise, I won’t personally be reaching out to Mr. Judge, but anecdotally I suspect that more people watched it than were in the tech industry.
2014: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/226287-largest-school-...
2015: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/256385-chicago-mayor-c...
> Group B is a superset that includes group A!
Come on now, you can't make that claim without clown make-up on. If B is a superset of A, what's the point of your distinction then? ~You just made a stronger claim than mine; now you are also saying _everyone_ in A liked the show too.~
(EDIT: OK, as @defrost pointed out below, your claim is about intended audience rather than people liking the show. But doesn't change my view that asserting B is a superset of A makes your distinction pointless. Nor that using the term intended audience actually carries some burden of proof with it.)
Here's a picture of a superset to aid comprehension:
+-------------------+
| Set B |
| +---------------+ |
| | Set A | |
| +---------------+ |
+-------------------+There was no assertation that anybody in A even liked the show let alone watched it.
( Although judging by the /r/SiliconValley subreddit (or whatever it was called) at least a few tech workers enjoyed the show )
Hell, most of my friends don't care about privacy or being tracked online, or having their information shared amongst other entities.
How many other devs here have had conversations with others about Net Neutrality (back in the day) or Privacy/Security and had people pat you on the head and said okay but let's move on? I recall people just not giving a shit when I talked about the ideal of Diaspora. Or choosing Open Source products that gravitate towards being transparent about what is actually being put into the software, including the type of telemetry being recorded.
If I sound jaded, it's because I am. The community chooses what it chooses. At some point the onus is on us, even if it means abstaining (hence why I stopped using Facebook over a decade ago).
The "owner" of what shade blue a button is makes 500k while someone doing elderly care or construction is making a fraction of it. (exaggerating ofc)
For anyone outside of the bubble of proud button owners club that looks like something has gone horribly wrong. It's not unlike the dislike towards bankers and lawyers: High comp, low or negative perceived societal value.
Of course there are still plenty areas where there is innovation and value add but as the industry matures it gets closer and closer to the above.
Facebook alone will damn us all.
The article lists some good causes, and they are fairly recent (Juicero was where I started to see real mockery of Silicon Valley startups). There are others that the author does not list, perhaps out of discretion:
* Tech profits concentrated in one geographic region have contributed to a high cost of living that makes life very hard for non-tech workers in the area, fostering resentment
* A lot of tech companies have ad- and engagement- based business models that are... not necessary healthy for their users, or for society
* Predatory data harvesting has led to a justified mistrust of new products and services
* New technology has always "disrupted" careers (farewell, ETAOIN SHRDLU), but advances in AI are threatening to do so in a way that most people thought would not be possible in their working lifetime, with these changes happening in the timescale between the time where you enroll in a particular major and graduate to an obsolete profession.
Startups did a really job of branding themselves as “not corporate.” It’s like Trump—claim to be populist and revolutionary but secretly replicate all the self-serving rubbish practices of the establishment you say you are fighting.
I don't think it's just tech though - this seems symptomatic of a larger societal issue and trust across everything is broken.
I like my job, I've made a lot of really great friends, and I love hacking on software, but I've grown incredibly frustrated with how every tech company tries to convince me that I am saving the world by making the rich executives even richer. I hate that there's this bizarre culty loyalty expected of you at all times at FAANGs. I despise the double standard of "taking responsibility" that workers are supposed to have that executives simply lack.
Honestly, despite having worked in the industry full time for 12 years at the time, it took me being fully laid off last year to truly realize that it's ok for me to roll my eyes when given the typical bullshit; it's not a problem with me, and I suspect most professionals in most other industries have been doing that for forever.
Ding, ding, ding! Why would it be?
Nearly every tech job I've had has constantly reinforced that what we're doing is fundamentally saving the world; either by being more progressive than <industry X>, or by working on a solution to something that coincidentally also happens to be the cause of all of life's problems.
I don't know how much of the above is actually tech's fault, but it definitely feels that way to me, and I'm pretty certain these are commom beliefs.
A positive social impact — that is, a net positive externality — is created value that hasn’t been captured. From a corporate perspective, that is waste. A negative social impact — a net negative externality — is a cost that has been passed off to other people. Eliminating the former in favor of the latter is the natural incentive of any business.
There is a wide range of tech that has nothing to do with consumers or anything social: manufacturing, medical, hardware drivers, command & control, finance, safety systems, etc…
I mean, all of those modern technologies actually affect a large fraction of everything you do when you're not in front of a screen... (Maybe such technology has existed in a similar form your whole life, though, so you don't notice, but over a longer timespan we are are talking about the majority of modern society).
If you hear the word tech and just think of websites, apps, social networks, ads, you have a very simple world view.
So yea, consumer tech sucks, but consumers also fucking suck, and get harder and harder to extract some kind of value from as time goes on.
The "consumers suck" attitude probably goes a long way towards explaining the problem.
Someone said it better below
"You know why people hate the tech industry? Because they've wedged themselves into everything, and made it suck more, in pursuit of glorious advertising profits."
And you can only pull "Yeah, I know you liked that show, but it wasn't as profitable as we hoped, so we're not renewing it for another season!" so many times before people get irritated.
> ...since people are much more content to sit on ass instead of engaging each other and enjoying each other's company.
I've been trying to aggressively create opportunities for people to interact in person, usually around a firepit, and it's far, far better than any amount of hours spent in front of screens.
This is a good thing, because people were under the mistaken impression that tech talent in SF was uniquely special or good. My theory is that the money and, more vaguely, the inspiration, of the region was infectious to those that were able to come and work there. A sort of mild self-selection but also a privilege open to only a few.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is stuffed full of people who are just as capable of making it at any "cut throat" startup, or starting such companies on their own, but don't live in such an environment where they can make the kinds of connections they need to make to get funding, or aren't getting a huge salary that lets the live comfortably while building personal projects, or the other things that make silicon valley such a hub for this sort of thing.
Hopefully now those effects disperse across the world and we get access to all the wildly different kinds of ideas all across the world. Maybe it'll mean less uber for x, CRM for y, CMS for z type products.
It's always irresponsible to put all your investments into one location.
I once asked my dad where our family record player came from (it was a nice machine). He said it was what he got when a bank went bust.
You've heard the advice - diversify, diversify, diversify. It's the responsible thing to do.
I have a friend who uses a password manager, so he only has to remember one password. I tell him if that password gets compromised, or the manager gets compromised, he loses everything. He's unfazed by that risk - "can't happen", he says.
SVB put all their assets into T-bills. Then the Fed raised interest rates, the value of the old T-bills sank, and SVB couldn't cover its liabilities. It's just as irresponsible of SVB to put all in one as it is depositors to put all in one.
What a sweet, innocent child.
People loved tech because it fulfilled its promises.
Now?
Tech is intrusive, deceptive, and outright predatory.
Tech is the constant harassment to sign up for a newsletter, that you're running out of your free articles.
Tech is convenience fees, cleaning fees, venue fees, existence fees.
Tech is my television interface changing every few months.
Tech is not having a way to opt-out.
Tech is having less control over the objects I own now compared to what I bought ten years ago.
Tech is paying subscription fees for everything now.
Tech is destroying mass public transportation so they can sell me an idiotic car tunnel.
Tech is reducing my existence to a set of data points to be milked for revenue.
Tech is spending $$$ on electronics only to have them bricked remotely when the company goes under.
Tech is filling up my trash can because I'm blocked from fixing anything myself.
Tech is the new paywall on the old website that built it's value on open access and user contributions.
Tech is the faceless extractive hostility that is relentlessly turning everything to absolute fucking garbage.
People hate tech because tech doesn't give a single fuck about people.
The reasons listed in the article apply for people who watch very closely—for most people who are not very tuned in it's a result of public opinion being swayed in the other direction by political figures. Whether it's due to wariness of a increasingly consolidated and powerful sector, collection of personal data, or because of perceived censorship, it adds up.
by 2017 Shark Tank was eight years old and Gwyneth Paltrow was a judge on apple’s short lived startup show that flopped. I really don’t know how much more obvious it could be that the trend had already jumped the shark in 2017.
Unnamed, hypothetical people may have said this.
But this wasn't what the twitter post that that snippet linked to actually said.
There are always some people who have hated whatever new people have moved into the SF Bay Area and taken over things since before written history. It's a perennial Gold Rush. Each round of new arrivals thinks that they're coming here to be a part of something new and exciting and that they care deeply about the area and making sure it doesn't lose its special qualities. The reality is that there was all this amazing stuff that happened 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 etc years ago, and in a way nothing is new.
The "tech" industry of various flavors has had very mixed reactions at least back until the Luddites. Certainly in 2017 some people hated everything the "techies" were doing and wished they would stop. People were literally protesting Google Buses starting in 2013 as an embodiment of what tech was doing to destroy SF. [0]
(I'm not saying I don't like "tech" - whatever that is. I moved to SF in '94 to be part of whatever zeitgeist was happening back then - the web, whatever Wired Magazine was hyping at the time, cyberpunk, raves, etc.... I'm sure the generation before me was not all happy about that, and I know people my age or even younger who would prefer not to have so many people with insane tech salaries and techno-libertarian ideals distorting the economy.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_tech_bus_protest...
Tech was always inauthentic and transactional, it just masked that not having ridiculous layoffs. Now that mask is gone.
Wow now. That's an interesting and a very good way to describe the problem that plagues SV in general...
> Clintonesque
Eye-roll.
I'll be generous and not kick back on that statistic, but even if its true, that last 1% is pretty vocally pro-FOSS.
>Eye-roll.
OK fair, you don't like the comparison. Can you provide a different way to say it then, instead of just dismissing the point?
These guys are all billionaires. There is serious animosity toward billionaires right now. I think it is more their being the .1% than their marriages failing.
Most are concerned with locking in customers, force feeding them ads, and caving to their worst instincts in the process. Crypto, as mentioned in the article, is a great example of all these. That “industry” has nothing to do with the tech.
The quote about "It's hard to force a man to understand something when his salary is dependent on him not understanding it" is relevant here. If you're in the tech bubble (and I use that term broadly to include "Most tech companies and surrounding companies/cities"), and don't regularly interact with people outside it, or pull back out of it and analyze it, you miss it.
> Startup fraud genre. ... The media frenzied around Elizabeth Holmes’ trial and sentencing.
No. Most people outside the tech industry don't care. If they know anything about Holmes, it's probably that the company outright lied about it was doing, repeatedly, over and over, across the board, and are pleasantly surprised to see that they actually faced consequences, because the normal tech industry path is that you lie to everyone, defraud investors, and still come away clean with your golden parachute. Which is utterly unlike the rest of the world, in which there tend to be consequences for actions that most people would consider "criminal."
You can only hear about how some new startup is going to "disrupt" some industry, based on what are pretty clearly absurdities to every normal person, before you expect the next one to go down in flames too. Most people have the good sense to recognize that "I'm going to sell you $10 of services for $8, but I'll make it up in volume!" either means you're going to try for monopoly and raise prices, or you're full of crap.
> The crazy rise and fall of crypto.
Again... what percentage of people were actually invested in crypto enough to even know or care? Go do one of the "Man on the street" surveys and ask people what Bitcoin is worth, +/- 10%, and you'll go through a lot of people before you find anyone even close. But, yes, a lot of people have heard the breathless hype about how Crypto Will Change Everything, and... it turns out to have been nothing much more than speedrunning the history of why we have various financial regulations.
> Past technology waves – mobile in the late 2000s, social in the early 2010s, and cloud in the mid-2010s – brought time and money savings to the average consumer and office worker.
They... sorry, what? Having to buy a new phone every couple years and pay $100/mo for a cell connection sure as hell wasn't saving money vs the previous, and having your attention weaponized against you didn't really win much goodwill, even as it was very profitable for a short period of time. "Cloud" is, similarly, something that most people don't know or care about. And I'll suggest that if you want to do anything serious, especially if you need a lot of disk or RAM, "colo your own boxes" is a far cheaper solution than cloud for quite a few companies. Also harder to compromise than cloud boxes.
> Some of tech’s heros have fallen. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates’s marriages fell apart. Elon Musk did some weird stuff and got into the Twitter debacle. Even beloved founders like Jack Conte and Patrick Collison got some bad press.
Nobody cares about Bezos and his marriage. Bill Gates is quite past many people caring about him. Elon Musk, though... yeah, he's gone from savior of the planet (through his companies that will be very profitable to him) to "Loose cannon on deck." And I guarantee most people outside tech circles have no idea who Jack Conte and Patrick Collision are. I'm in tech, and I had to look them up.
> VCs funding unsustainable business models.
Yeah, when they go about "disrupting" things and leaving a hot mess behind themselves, people get a bit annoyed. When "E-Scooters" get dumped by the thousands and end up broken and blocking sidewalks, or rusting in ponds, yeah. You annoy people. When the "tech solution" to something means that the old methods that work get ripped up, and then you're left with something that half works, but is worse than old stuff, people might be annoyed. And, as I mentioned earlier, most people outside tech have the good sense to recognize that while selling a $1 bill for $0.80 may rack up the "unique eyeballs," the path to profit with that business model is pretty iffy.
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You know why people hate the tech industry? Because they've wedged themselves into everything, and made it suck more, in pursuit of glorious advertising profits.
Because everything is now trying to be a "smart device" that has a short service life, that you can't easily repair, and that exists to collect data on your behavior and shovel it into the mill that tries to influence your thinking so you {vote right, buy right, think right, etc}. For someone else's paid value of "right."
Because they've shoved their noses into every part of life, trying to intermediate every single human interaction. It's not enough to be a useful tool. You have to collect all the attention for your ads. Ping. Beep. Check me! Look at ME! A modern phone, in the sort of "default configuration," is horrible to use, because everything is constantly vying for your attention and streaming your behavior upstream, on a device you paid for, with a data plan you pay for. Good deal, for someone. Not the end user, though.
And then all the stuff about the ties with the government, with Twitter more or less jumping to service at the whims of various three letter agencies, the data flows to police, etc... doesn't make a lot of people very happy.
I grew up with the promises of the internet, and I'm pretty well over the whole thing at this point. I lurk in my niches, occasionally venture out, but... overall? The experiment has been an utter disaster. "Social" media as a concept is fine, but as an implementation, every single version seems to have ended up in the same "Drive outrage, anger, and division, to stoke more time on the site, to drive more ad views!" sort of sewer. We've replaced old, rugged phones with smartphones that are an utter pain to use in a lot of ways, expensive to buy, expensive to service, expensive to repair, that are, as much as they possibly can, just spying on our activities to sell us more things.
That's before looking at the security of our systems, which can't keep secrets, because they're too complex for even the people who make them to reason about them. If you'd told someone in 2010 that within a few years, processors wouldn't keep secrets at all if you knew how to speculate your answers, you'd have been thought a loon. Yet, that was the state of things. Apple gave up, because even with their sandboxing, zero-click attacks were a thing (Lockdown is nothing more than an acknowledgement that complex software cannot be verified to not be a trainwreck). And it goes on.
It's not a utopia. It's a dystopa. And the people driving it have no clue.
...keep shoveling more of it down our throats with no end in sight.
This is how we get to the world of Neuromancer
The grocery industry absolutely lives and dies on capitalism, for example, but it isn't destroying teenage mental health.
I've read a lot more into anti-tech and philosophy of tech stuff recently, even some anarcho-primitivism (though I realise that's unrealistic). I actually should read Ted K.'s works to see his thought, even though I don't condone his methods.
That said, I do wonder if we can make more human-oriented tech if it wasn't for capitalist incentives. Probably, but it'd look like nothing that we have now I feel.