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There is a pervasive hubris throughout tech that I’ve had trouble understanding: namely, that the mechanisms of human interaction between individuals and with the world are well understood, and are thus replicable.

Their reductive view of humans as manipulable minds in a mechanical sack of flesh has led us to nothing but isolation and disconnect.

But the truth is, we are integrated beings integrated in a world we do not and may never fully understand. Tech should thus help us deepen and enrich our sense of embodiment. Instead, it has done the exact opposite.

This strikes so near & dear to my big feels. Tech sees itself as the reasoned expert intermediary. We have personas and product to guide us to the ideal solution.

But the truth is, tech is better when it's not so pretentious. We don't know what will come and planning for that is what we miss.

We should be optimizing for humility, for our limited capacity as techies to forsee & envision. Gibson's maxim to the highest wonder computing could deliver - to what soft wares should be associated with - is "The street finds it's own use for things."

Softness. Humble & open futures. Banking on human spirit. Instead, the tyranny of pre-designed interface, talking down to us forever.

The hubris in tech comes in a variety of forms, but you've definitely hit on one of them. It meshes well with the view of humans you see from the self driving companies - "Humans process the world with a couple crappy cameras and some neural network stuff, we have HD cameras, how hard can it be?" Well, a decade or so later, "Really Hard" seems to be the answer.

There's also a consistent trend of "We know code, and are as like gods in the synthetic world of 99.95% reliable APIs and networks, therefore we can do anything we want in reality!" Reality, of course, disagrees, often entertainingly.

But these are the mentalities driving a lot of what runs our world, and it's quite frankly terrifying to watch in implementation.

And the kicker (for me at least): let's endanger a bunch of humans today who get no say in the experiment to possibly save lots of them tomorrow, which in reality is just more tech bros enriching themselves at the ultimate expense to others. It's disgusting beyond belief.

Their reductive view of humans as manipulable minds in a mechanical sack of flesh has led us to nothing but isolation and disconnect.

I couldn't agree more with this, it's the most stupid way of looking at living beings possible. As a separate, disconnected piece of "hardware" running "software"

Walk outside without shoes on, in the grass, breathe the air and take a swim in the ocean and you'll soon realize that you might be made of "meat", but you're also made of everything around you and you're part of it, just like everything else.

When people describe themselves or others in that way, they're describing their value in the context of this horrible economic machine we have built and they're trying their best to understand how they fit into this system.

Some technology has done that, others have done as you would hope. Intent is everything.

If it comes from a shareholder-driven biz floated on the stock exchange, expect profits over innovation and people. If it's FOSS and driven by problem-solving, passion and grants, you might be in for something nice for a time.

At this point, we seem to be making worse versions of everything with the goal of just having something new and different to show. So few technologies reach the maturity of what came before it as it'll end up replaced before it reaches that point, thus they don't appeal to power users, and most are just figuring out ways to milk the largest market demographic possible.

Sad state of affairs. It doesn't have to be this way.

> Intent is everything.

No, outcomes are everything. Intent is second to that when it comes to society rather than to a case of law.

We did know and there are many experts who could do a good long exposition of “I told you so.” , but they were pushed aside by CEOs and business peeps. Or “bozos” as Guy Kawasaki would say: “The higher up you go, the less air there is.”

I think a lot of this is lack of self-awareness and how much neurotypical behaviour happens with these leaders in tech.

Instead of empathy and understanding others worldview, they think everyone shares their view and should be happy.

Anti-monopoly legislation and strong unions would work. They worked the last time things got too centralized, the era of railroads and steel. As with railroads and steel mills, what we now call "tech" has a scaling property which pushes towards monopoly. So there needs to be some force pushing back hard against monopolies.

I would be concerned that globalization has changed the economics. Railroads and steel mills didn't have to seriously compete with other countries, so you could break them up and they'd still be viable.

Apple's value proposition is that fundamentally everything they make plays well with each other, and that investments in one product frequently pay off in other (often future) products. Break that into silos and they're individually less compelling.

Applies to empires in general.

That doesn't mean the empires are a good thing.

The Internet was always going to be a cultural amplifier. Those of us who grew up when culture wasn't just about greed, narcissism, and sociopathy assumed it would amplify all those old-fashioned values: intellectual curiosity, informed democracy, and public education.

It actually does that. Up to a point. It's far easier to get accurate information about almost everything than it used to be.

But it's been swamped by narcissistic garbage, automated exploitation and greed, and pathocracy.

That's not really the Internet's fault. It's just amplifying the culture it's a part of. The mistake the idealists (like me) made was underestimating just how toxic and self-destructive that culture is.

It is however, even easier to get inaccurate information. Most recently, see what happened to the Cochrane review on "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses". Mass media have readily interpreted it as "masks do not work" and even media which was not that hysterical https://www.health.com/cochrane-review-do-masks-work-7112631 had "A new Cochrane review, published last month, sought to answer how effective masks are at preventing COVID-19."

In reality, as https://www.cochranelibrary.com/web/cochrane/content?urlTitl... points out

> this review did not assess at the impact of wearing a mask in comparison with not wearing a mask.

Indeed the wording of the review was confusing but still.

> It is however, even easier to get inaccurate information.

True. And accurate information

Those of us who grew up when culture wasn't just about greed, narcissism, and sociopathy assumed it would amplify all those old-fashioned values: intellectual curiosity, informed democracy, and public education

Wait a sec, I'm pretty old, but totally missed this era before human greed and narcissism. When exactly are we talking about?

It can't be an issue of reading comprehension -- the parent post actually quotes the grandparent, but then pretends the grandparent wrote of an "era before human greed and narcissism" instead of a time "when culture wasn't just about greed, [and] narcissism" (emphasis mine).

I get that it's easier to engage with what one wants someone to have said, rather than what they actually said, but why quote the relevant part just to ignore it? Fiendish!

When it comes to tech, it doesn't have to be about breaking up companies. Most tech monopolies can be mitigated by technical solutions that are currently made illegal using a combination of the CFAA as well as copyright law.

Make reverse-engineering and emulating official clients legal and suddenly the monopoly problem goes away, because even if Apple only wants their iStuff to work with other iStuff, it will work fine with Android now that it can (legally) reverse-engineer and reimplement the protocol the iStuff uses and pretend to be an iStuff.

Break that into interoperable silos, and they can be just as compelling.

"Protocols, not platforms."

It is a shame there isn't more creative discussion around ideas for regulation. Perhaps something as simple as "corporate tax rate should scale with revenue" might have prevented the walmarts of the world from eating the mom-and-pops.

It's a great idea, the only issue is, politicians would be bought and it would be reversed.

You'd need some good old fashioned real world statesmen to make something like that happen.

How do you solve corporations moving overseas to dodge your tax rate with your strategy?

Peg taxes to the region of revenue, and end the "all my revenue is in the US but my HQ is in the Netherlands" BS

Forbid them from selling to US customers or hiring US employees. Can't have your pie and eat it too.

> might have prevented the walmarts of the world from eating the mom-and-pops.

Be careful what you wish for.

Perhaps as a shopper there is a certain charm to the "mom and pops". Uneven, some good, some bad. Definitely more character

But as a worker, or as a poor consumer, Walmat is better.

The pay is regular. If mom and pop had a bad week, so might you

The hours are regular. Mom and pop work so hard, and their employees are "just like family"

The goods are a reliable price and quality. Walmat gets criticised for selling bad products, but they are reliably bad products, and cheap. You know what you are getting.

I am no cheer leader for capitalism, nor big box retail, but do not get foolishly romantic about the small scale capitalism they have pushed aside.

The problem is not the just the participants, the problem is the system itself.

You might not want to eliminate supermarkets but having one supplier like Walmart become so dominant isn't good either.

Didnt walmart make the mom n pop so much shittier to begin with though. One could expect numerous local options for the thing you want to purchase in absence of the walmart, so one or two of them having a bad week isn't necessarily passed onto you. I wasn't alive when something like this would have existed in my part of america but it really seems like the monopoly stores made local shopping bad. I really don't need 6 breeds of apple to choose from anyway. Whatever fruit is in season would be fine.

What amounted to the destruction and ultimate government subsidization of these industries?

Americans are too busy being preoccupied on whats woke, whether teachers should say gay to kids under a certain age, and whether the same kids should be allowed to see… drag shows? Also what books can be allowed in libraries, what textbooks should say, and whether people should be able to wear guns visibly in holsters.

Cheers!

All that noise comes from a small number of people at the extremes. The average person is not paying any attention to any of that.

It seems challenging to avoid the noise if you want to consume news and know whats going on in the world. Even turning on 1010 WINS in the car I have to hear about some Texas college president arguing that Drag Shows are like Minstrel Shows.

Maybe I should change the radio out and put in something with an audio input or whatever the norm is to connect old car speakers to an iDevice :)

>if you want to consume news and know whats going on in the world

The thing is if you are consuming that sort of media then you aren't really going to know what is going on in the world.

It's that old dilemma. Don't read the news and you will be uninformed, read the news and you will be misinformed.

No, more government almost always makes everything worse.

Except healthcare. That's loads better when the government does it.

Roads too. And water supply? Realistically all things that are natural monopolies seem to do better under democratic governance.

No. Healthcare is generally worse when the government does it.

'What have the Romans ever done for us?!'

We don’t have that kind of government

Strong unions just create a second centralised power structure. The antidote to centralisation is competition.

I'm not sure any of this is exclusive to tech and so abandoning tech in hopes of something else isn't going to change much.

For instance, you bring up how much of it is about ads and how pervasive they are, this exists outside of tech as well. Billboards everywhere, posters on apartments and buses, this is what happens without strict regulations.

Another point you bring up is not trusting computers because of their complexity, but that's everything. We don't trust car engines because we understand them, we instead have regulations in which when things do fuck up (and then inevitably do), creators are punished for them and learn not to do it again. You might say car engines are tech, in which case let's talk food! You trust eating some place not because the chef is some talent blessed by god or your sixth sense, but because the restaurant would have shut down when health inspectors came around.

I don't have to talk about slave labor here, it's obvious.

Rushkoff doesn't even agree with the idea tech is rotted and we should try something different, but rather the primary focus of each innovation should be humans and not money. Which isn't happening currently in a majority of fields, tech is just one of these where it's exacerbated due to how little it's been regulated. Again something Rushkoff brings up in his potential solutions.

Advertising is as old as humans, certainly. But there's also a general difference, as I see it, between "the same for everyone" sort of broad advertising (billboards and the like), vs the "customized for each person, to the benefit of the payer" sort of thing we see on the internet - and have seen regularly abused for all sorts of nasty ends (see any time politics and Twitter or Meta end up in the news).

As for engines... yeah. We're just going to have to disagree there. I understand engines pretty well, and am familiar with roughly the last 100 years or so of them in various forms. I work on them, can reason about them, and they're generally a fairly simple set of electrical and mechanical systems. I'm not sure what your point about regulations actually is - I don't believe we have reliable engines because of regulations, but because "the companies who figured out how to build reliable engines" rather outsold those who built 100k mile engines. And if you trust health inspectors and restaurants, well, you probably don't know many people in food service. I also don't eat out that often.

What's obvious about slave labor, though? That literally every bit of consumer tech has aspects of that somewhere in the supply chain? I agree! It probably means we shouldn't be using the stuff.

Dis-intermediating & making tech real again, a genuine experience, feels like the only conceivable path through. I think you're both super on key here, but the analog mentality feels like trying to gear back down when I strongly think the only way out is through. Give the luddites control of the machines, don't smash them!

> solid couple years of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it's been an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways.

You've hit on so many issues, recapped well, but the huge blank this article leaves, that Rushkoff's abandonment ask, is what could we hope for?

Right now we are beholden to software. We need to figure out how to make the rawer real experience tractable, interesting, & engaging. Something between coding & systems will emerge that lets us not just be ignorant consumers. We can start to create a hypermedium which enables literacy, not merely enabling spectacle.

I think it's an open question as to if we can turn our current tech into something human-centric and not violently human-toxic at some level or another.

And I'll argue that it's really not. And that, yes, we should "gear back down," and stop using nearly as much. I've been on a gradual trip that way over the past half decade or so, and it's pretty darn nice. Tech has been my entire career. I look forward to the day I can put a computer down for the last time.

You're arguing that "something like what a lot of people hoped computers and the internet would become" can still happen, and I think the time window on that has closed. Within a rounding error of "nobody" understands computers deeply anymore - and most who still can keep up with the low level stuff are in their 40s or older, grew up in the ISA era, and generally are looking to retire. An entire generation doesn't know how computers work now, for an awfully wide range of definitions.

But unfortunately, even if you could "give the luddites control of the machines," most of those neoluddites don't want control of the machines. They've tried them for a few decades, and have found an awful lot of it wanting. And if you do insist on asking them, you'll find out that most of them lurk on IRC, and are quite happy with the 80s level of interaction IRC allows. :)

Computing needs new paradigms forms & structures to become legible. Your timeline is absurd to me. How long did it take for writing to become useful? Yet you expect the world will adapt & become competent... in this?

What we have now will not be the way. I suspect the web will probably be the platform that a user-agency enabling computing will come from, but it will come from making pages with entirely different ethos, pages designed not by and for developers to develop on, but pages designed to surface & raise the hypermedium. People love themselves some hypercard, & I don't 100% get it, but that idea of combination visual / programmatic experiences, that notion of making computing more tactile & rooted, I think is what has to happen. Data and declarative systems are such shit now, nothing affords us our data, it's all burried deep inside code, and the hypercard world, the web/dom world is about an inversion, a juncture where the abstract code falls below the surface of a more general information platform of which code is just a part.

There's no timeline here. There's no past due, time's ran out. Iteration, and back & forth can keep happening. The frontier isn't defined & circumscribed by the mainstream, by the popular. Good ideas have plenty of opportunity to take root & grow. If anything, I think the desperation & starvation society knows it's undergoing emphasizes how rapidly better could take hold.

A while back I saw the original unveiling of the Next Cube, when Steve Jobs called computers a bicycle for the mind - it was so apparent in what they demoed.

A machine that helped people create rather than just consume, even simple things like having an inbuilt dictionary. We still have that but it is always running off to the internet to do what was done in 1987. And that leap to something external is not just for convenience, it is a leap of how we used these things.

Like Rushoff, for the last 15 years I have been trying to figure out ways to return a little of that of that isolated but functional style to computing. I no longer try. Every attempt has just been meet with further disappointment. Unlike others here advocating for pushing through, I don't think we can. In pushing through it is merely providing more fuel for potential missuse.

I still use modern technology but only that which is basically forced on me by the rest of society. Even then its impact is minimized - I think Hacker news is the last regular thing I really engage with in this space and that is slowing down with time as well.

Maybe there is a part where spectacle is the main driving force that allowed these technologies to become so pervasive in our world? That is to say that if we never went down this path computers would be treated more like we treated type writers. A neat tool but something few would get obsessed with.

I think we've become obsessed with the conservative, scared, frightened, what-about-the-potential-for-abuse viewpoint. Because, in large part, it's the only view we can talk about & sell. Everything else is esoteric & technical & speculative, is just some idea that may not work, & is mostly abstract.

But damage & harm is real, and it makes a powerful headline.

I really believe things would look different if we weren't all to at ends. If we could actually see & experience tech in a modestly reasonable, user-controlled way, if we could see the overlays of weights & pressures that make up our current upvote/downvote algorithm & tune it ourselves... if we had some post-consumer avenues for exploration we were walking, I think we could see society improve itself & make gains. Right now that's unimaginable. The harm & the bad is the only thing we can grasp. In part because computing is kept all in the cloud, in big data keeps, far off & remote, with us here as powerless agents simply receiving whatever signals it deigns beam at us.

Society, if given a chance to do so, would regulate & improve this world. But society's input has not been welcome. Computing has been getting less & less democratic, less and less part of the natural observable world, and more cloistered, closed & shitty, for decades. We cannot even imagine a progressive outlook, where we might participate, and it's hard to guess what things would be like, if we could.

I wrote an essay a few weeks back that has yet to be published (it was about AI but it applies here). It is starting to feel like everything is starting to feed back on itself. The output is being funneled back into input. Like a fractal. Interesting but you do not want to build a society on a fractal. Or a city on Rock and roll for that manner ;).

In that sense technology is becoming a feed back loop of society itself. Anxiety, can be an act of repeating the same nervous though again and again in a loop never moving on. In that way, this is were information technology had lead a lot of realms of us to.

To some degree I think this is what Jaron Lanier means when he says AI could drive us insane. This level of feed back is not going to work out well.

> In that sense technology is becoming a feed back loop of society itself.

I had a discussion recently with somebody about how it feels as though the 70s, 80s, 90s had a distinctive style but from the early 00s onwards there appears to be no distinguishing character to the recent most decades.

Their conclusion was that it was due to 'the increase in technology use, less creativity - more sat about consuming media in one way or another'.

I wonder if that's true - we no longer have to suffer silence or boredom thanks to an endless stream of 'content' available to us.

It prevents rumination and leads us to have every thought impressed upon it variations of patterns from the past.

> A good number of people who have grown up with the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it's turned out to deliver (...)

I grew up with the PC and matured with the Internet, being optimistic along most of the journey even when I didn't view some of the outcomes favorably. When I read about the history of computing these days, even the ones that glorify progress, the interpretation is dark. It's not that I view the technology as bad. I have seen the good it can bring and I see the potential for how much more it can improve society. That said, I now believe that the promises were lies. The machines of my childhood, the "computers for masses, not the classes," or the, "bicycles for the mind," lost their luster of computers as the great equalizers once I realized these slogans were enablers for large corporations that were attempting to consolidate control over the industry.

Yes, I realize that interpretation is horrendously unfair. A lot of people at a lot of levels within those corporations probably believed in the social value of what they were delivering. When you look at what they were replacing, such as relatively inexpensive microcomputers for the consumer market replacing expensive computers for the business market, there is some truth to those promises. Yet it is also difficult to see those promises as anything more than ideals exploited by opportunists for their own personal gain. They didn't really care about the outcomes, so the outcomes never ended up reflecting the promises.

Things started going downhill when the "establishment" took over - when computers became a surveillance tool with stuff like Intel Management Engine, AMS "Secure" Technology, Intel AMT etc started getting pushed down our throats with nary a wimper from any major company complaining about the impact on security and privacy.

It became clear to me then that we are the slave class.. The rulers will have us use technology the way they would want us to - for their benefit, not ours.

Things have gone downhill when spyware and spam stopped being considered a crime and became a viable, socially-acceptable business model.

Nobody needs to use Intel ME to spy on or control people when people willingly install malware such as social media apps, give them all their data and their network effects force others to do the same.

Intel ME/etc is the least of my worries when it comes to computing freedom.

True

I cry for what could have, should have been. We went to the moon with 2kb of RAM. Far more engineering effort than went into Apollo now goes into manipulating humans to be insatiable ingesters of disposable physical and digital product. Can you imagine how rich and beautiful human culture could be if they had allotted even some of these resources towards unselfish genuine innocent curiosity?

It's very refreshing to see such a sensible thread on HN of all places. A lot of people in the industry need to take a good hard look in the mirror and evaluate what they've done with their careers.

The biggest puzzle we've got to solve right now is, how do we make people realize that Karl Marx was not the devil, but in fact, the most perceptive thinker of his time who put his finger right on the problem that bedevils us today?

People have this lazy idea of the word "capitalism," which they consider to be "our not-communist system".

Capitalism is the use and espousal of Capital.

Money is not Capital; money is a representation of labour done and value created.

Capital is when you take money and frankenstein it into acting like a magic vegetable/seed which you can plant in its current form and harvest in the same form and then plant some more of in that same form and then harvest more in the same form and it never changes, just magically grows through the mystical power of what Economists call "externalities".

Externalities are mysteries forces that we don't really understand, but which provide us with resources to use, and according to our model, no harm is ever done.

We need to start treating money like money. Capitalism needs to be snuffed out. Work, business, trade, all that can (indeed, must!) go on, but Capital must end.

Can you explain how you envision that would work? Does the state own all capital to prevent people from accumulating capital, profiting off that and accumulating more?

I don't have a plan, I'm just tired of Economics cultists pretending like they do.

edit: but give everyone free internet and some server space as a starting point, and let them speak. EVERYONE. If anyone's government thinks they shouldn't have this, fight their government until they give it to them.

I just had a thought: no profiting off a company that you don't work [forty] hours a week at.

If you work eight hours a week, you get shares. No negotiations, labour is entitled to the value it creates. The trust fund scumbag who just uses money like a sponge to suck up more money is not.

edit: I'm on drugs

edit 2: In case my employer is trolling my history for signs of moral degeneracy, it's a holiday, piss off.

edit 3: I was gonna come back and make the second 8 into a 40 also, but fuck that. 8 hours a week, you get shares. Send the trust fund babies to me, I'll explain the reality of work to them. I used to drive a dump truck, it's lots of fun.