It's pretty obvious why people hate the tech industry - perhaps not recognizing this is symptomatic of the problem. (As a partial participant in this industry, I'm personally ambivalent.)
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.
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.
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…
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."
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.
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.