The techlash that never happened | Hacker News Reader

The techlash that never happened

eriktorenberg.substack.com

58 pointstim_sw67 comments

The top graph (Gallup 2017 Business & Industry Ranking Net Positive Scores) is 6 years old. 2022 results can be found here:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-...

Computer Industry is now 3rd and the Net Positive has gone from 67 to 35.

Internet Industry has gone from 5th to the bottom half of the list and the Net Positive has gone from 41 to -2.

Perhaps the Techlash was just a little late.

I don't disagree with the trend you're point out, but it also has to be put in perspective:

1. That chart lists 25 industries, and "computer industry" still ranks #3 in terms of how positive people feel about it. It's ahead of almost everything. "Internet industry" is right in the middle of the pack. So tech is scoring somewhere between average and wayyy-better-than-average. Doesn't sound like much of a techlash.

2. Net positive sentiment has dropped in pretty much every sector. The most popular industry, the restaurant industry, saw a drop from 65% to 45% net positive. The second most popular industry, agriculture, saw a drop from 58% to 43%. In 2017 there were only 4 industries with net negative scores, but in 2022 there were 12, a 3x increase. So a big part of tech's apparent decline in popularity is really just a universal decline.

For the 2017 results I think it was disingenuous to ignore the "telephone industry" ranking when talking about "tech" in general. The "telephone industry" did improve its relative placement in the 2022 results.

I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.

> I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.

That's the thing. They're all tech industries, at this point.

As an easy rule of thumb I kind of draw the line for when computer and information technology is an enabler of the industry or just a facilitator. For telephones we've passed the point for the majority of the population. For radio I don't know if it has yet reached that point. And for television I just don't know, but from the complaints about smart TVs we may have.

Intel, Apple, AMD, GM, Ford and nVidia are tech producers (not an exhaustive list).

Everyone else leverages tech production to run CRUD ops on data.

Same as those companies did before but there also happened to be more paper involved.

> just a little late

It fits with the article's explanation really. The media hate tech, propagandize against it, and they eventually win people over.

I really don't understand why tech companies don't play hardball with them. Tech controls their distribution, so without their help they would just be screaming into the void.

What if the media represented a single large family of traditional wealth, while the tech were the new rich, and the media tries to dampen the tame of the new rich so that they can keep their dominance in the long term?

Sure it fits with the narrative, but the narrative is pretty poor. This article was just published recently, and it cherry-picks a graph from even before the economist article that coined the “techlash” world.

Poor research and poor writing from (presumably) successful people contributes greatly to the “techlash.”

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle".

So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides.

And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

What? Internet companies are up there with trade unions and Hollywood in donating to the left: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan...

Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA? whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make dashboards to help visualize uptime metrics for cloud services. Nobody at Apple is ashamed to tell their friends that they can't talk about whatever they do for work.

Depends on what you call the left. If you mean the modern Democratic Party then sure.

If you mean the division of contemporary politics that is associated with advocacy for the rights of workers and diminished power for the managerial and capital owning classes then they most certainly do not do that at all.

There are dozens of us!

Oh, for sure. Peter Thiel was an advisor to Donald Trump! Maciej Cegłowski (the person who operates Pinboard) has done a bunch of threads on Twitter cataloging the extensive donations of big tech companies to politicians on both sides of the aisle: https://twitter.com/search?q=donation%20from%3Apinboard

I also love the tacit admission that Clarence Thomas is acting as a partisan, rather than an unbiased member of an ostensibly apolitical institution.

Facebook is like Jupiter, absorbing the heavy hits so us smaller players can operate unscathed.

Silicon Valley is 15% Republican and 53% Democrat [1]. Tech is a highly skewed industry. 98% of Netflix employees donated to Democrats in 2020, 77% of Amazon employees. Overall 84% of political donations in major tech companies goes to Democrats [2].

https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/governance/civic-en...

https://www.newsweek.com/big-tech-employees-donate-overwhelm...

That doesn't stop them spending in such a way that they achieve their aims regardless of which color of tie is more dominant in the corridors of power.

supporting democratic candidates while working for companies that exacerbate the problems they supposed want to fix makes it hard for me to call someone a democrat unambiguously

which problems are you referring to?

If you look at the chart over time it looks like 'no party preference' is eating the republican side of the graph. It looks like the republican party is fracturing, which is great because we need more than two political parties. I wish the other side would break up too.

> I wish the other side would break up too.

At least in recent years independents (in Congress) have caucused with Democrats, but not Republicans. This is evidence that the Dems are slightly broken up already.

To get more fine-grained, each party has sub-divisions (e.g. "Freedom Caucus" in the Republican party). The real problem is that these sub-divisions basically don't cross over to allying with the other party on particular issues. If they ever do do that, and do it consistently (not as one-off decisions from individual representatives) then the US will effectively have a more than two party system.

But even if that happens, the actual people getting elected will almost always only have an R or a D after their name. First past the post, as it is done in the US, can't really sustain more than two competitive parties.

This is starting to change in SF

https://www.brionessociety.org/

Having a more-than-two-party system would require restructuring the Constitution entirely.

So let's do it. Start with South Africa's constitution as a model.

As soon as elected officials agree, it will happen. 99% of aaod officiala are in one of the 2 major parties.

Unless non elected-officials win a revolution.

They live very comfortable lives with the current two party system. If we had one party only they would have to take responsibility for what’s happening. With a two party system you always have the other side to blame. With more than two parties you start losing power. The current system is just perfect for putting on a good show for the plebes to keep them fighting each other while the powerful pull the strings in their own favor.

Firstly. Political parties were not around when the Constitution was written. The founders didn't want political parties, they were a British import Secondly. Why South Africa? since they ended apartheid, got rid of their nuclear weapons and did everything the international community expected of them South Africa has declined, it's no longer the gem of South Africa, and quality of life has reverted to the mean. Why would you make that your foundation? it's like saying American politics need to be more like Mexico

This is just a chart for Silicon Valley. The Republican party fractured in California since the 70s, that much is certain. The Democrats have enjoyed a supermajority monopoly in that state for quite some time. But this is not an indication of the country as a whole. Of course, in other areas, the Republican base got stronger since the 70s.

In the US land votes. I looked it up once how many large cities have a Republican mayor.

If the US ever abolishes the electoral college you'll see Democrats campaigning in rural Texas and Republicans in Silicon valley California because EVERY SINGLE VOTE COUNTS. It would get both parties out of their comfort zone.

No. Abolishing the electoral college is a dumb idea akin to abolishing the European commission.

A large part of why Trump got so far and why the debt is so bad is because this institution intended as a forum for states and statesmen has become a shitty version of the the house of representatives it was intended to check because 17th amendment changed the franchise from the state as an institution to the state as a collection of people.

Those numbers are for individual donations; donors are legally required to disclose employer, but that doesn’t mean their employer was directing their donations.

To look at the “tech industry,” look at company-directed activity, primarily lobbying expenditures, corporate PAC donations, senior exec political donations, and especially the same categories at industry groups like trade associations. That picture is far more balanced between the parties.

BTW I would suggest looking elsewhere for your political info, Newsweek does terrible reporting on this stuff. The article you quote makes a basic mistake, confusing 98% of donations going to Democrats with 98% of employees giving to Democrats. Most Netflix employees did not make any political donations at all in 2020 (or indeed, ever).

I’d also add that there were two events relatively close to each other which I think shaped this a lot: California proposition 8 blocking gay rights in 2008 and the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United to legalize dark money. The cruelty of Prop 8 spurred unusual levels of reputational consequences for backers (on HN, notably Mozilla’s Brendon Eich) and I think that really pushed Silicon Valley Republicans to try to cloud as much of their donation history as possible. They can say our company supports diversity, donate to their company PAC, which donates to another PAC, and when that PAC backs something unpopular there isn’t a direct donation trail making it easy to have “<>.com executive J. Blow backed this candidate” blow up on social media or deter prospective hires.

That trend is only going to strengthen as the Republican Party stakes out positions which are unpopular outside their core supporters.

To be clear, donations from a person to a corporate PAC, and subsequent donations by that PAC, were not affected by Citizens United.

Citizens United removed limits on “outside expenditures,” but disclosure is still required. Netflix reported no outside expenditures in 2020, for expample (also viewable at Open Secrets).

>Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides.

Wider data seems to suggest it's not that simple: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

>And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

I don't know firsthand, but the impression I've gotten, especially more recently, from silicon valley is that Facebook and Zuckerberg is the sacrificial goat the rest of the industry hopes to lay their sins on and drive into the desert. How much of the hatred for facebook employees is perpetuated, or at least was seeded, by tech itself rather than the general population? Do Uber employees get the same reaction? More politically apples-to-apples, do Google, or specifically Youtube, employees? If not, could it be because they use Facebook to distract from their own actions the rest of America wouldn't approve of if they were more in the media spotlight, and didn't have the scapegoat to point to?

I think you're on to something here. I myself as a tech employee have scapegoated FB, but the reality is, every small startup I've worked for has has questionable ethics. That's just how business people work, they don't see things the same as us regulars. Hence why they get so rich.

I do think that tech workers have something, morally, to gain from lambasting FB. But the wider US sphere of influence does, as well. US tech makes the US super strong, and super rich. If we just forget about Google's sins, we can keep being rich and powerful.

Tech workers, politicians, heck even normal people receiving Google accounts, all have something to gain by denying reality.

I worked at Google for a few years and moved back to the Midwest afterwards. At first I was afraid to mention it even if it came up directly, but honestly I've come to realize that this perception that everyone hates tech companies so much that there's a stigma against it is probably more paranoia than truth. Whenever it does come up, I think people are put off by how much I preface it as if it's something terrible. I've since stopped doing so.

The truth is, even if some of this could be explained by social pressure, I really think most people in the world just don't care as much as you think they do.

More than anything most people just seem annoyed by tech companies.

Actually, now that I think about it, the most unwelcome I've ever felt for working in tech was in California.

wrt to the NYT specifically, it was an intentional top down decision

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

Context: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104205605/https://twitter.c...

I'm surprised that the article didn't mention this, given the company the author apparently keeps I would have thought he'd have been among the criminally few people who witnessed and is aware of it, and it's both narratively aligned and the single most important piece of background information.

I left a comment on his post (I think, substack commenting is a bit confusing)

Oh I forgot that one. Good catch.

Does anyone know why the original tweet was deleted by Matthew Yglesias?

From some cursory searches, I haven’t been able to find a specific reason like a retraction, and it doesn’t look like he did a general wipe of his history around 2022.

Just off the top, I'm seeing a common logical misfire here, specifically:

> If you asked the average American on the street about tech, they would tell you they like to use products like Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and many other supposedly maligned companies.

It's actually a bit of a giveaway when you say "on the street". Most Americans aren't on the street at all.

I dunno what the quality of this source is, but I found that Doordash delivers to 20 million consumers in a given month[0], which if true, accounts for 6% of Americans! 94% of Americans do not "like to use" Doordash.

Even Uber, which according to the same random well-SEO'd source, has 93 million monthly platform consumers[1], which means only 28% of Americans use Uber.

I'm not sure if there's really a larger point to make here, or if I'm just quibbling with terminology, but it's a giant mistake to presume "most Americans" do nearly anything.

[0] https://backlinko.com/doordash-users

[1] https://backlinko.com/uber-users

Bubbles are super common, and even more common on the internet. I find this phenomenon fascinating.

For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely cannot comprehend why people prefer single family housing, with a yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered writing an article from my perspective, about why I prefer low-density housing.

The ratio of commenters to lurkers is super low, and (speaking from experience), commenters often have mental problems, which drives them to post excessively.

The vast majority of Americans are absolutely nothing like the drivel we read online. I waffle between thinking this is caused by "terminally online" folks like myself, and bots aka astro-turfed corporatism. Either way, the opinions we read online do not reflect reality. Historians will have a hoot interpreting our society and describing it from the perspective of the Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal.

> For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely cannot comprehend why people prefer single family housing, with a yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered writing an article from my perspective, about why I prefer low-density housing.

Personally, I've never seen a lack of understanding for the desire of SFHs, but rather the factual realization that SFH housing is not an economically sustainable path for the majority of Americans and the world.

Who are these people who can't comprehend SFH car preferences? I'm pretty pro-urban-density and pro-transit/walking/cycling, but I definitely understand why people prefer SFH and cars and low density. Heck, I don't think we should ban any of those, we should just allow people to build denser if they want to and spend as much on mass transit and cycling and walking as we do on cars.

Not sure what to tell ya, but if you read thousands of HN comments under housing articles like I do, they are out there.

> Even Uber, which according to the same random well-SEO'd source, has 93 million monthly platform consumers[1], which means only 28% of Americans use Uber.

Looking at month to month stats like this seems like a poor proxy for "likeable". Something like Uber tends to have a core set of heavy users with a long tail of more infrequent users.

I and most people I know use Uber every few months and often in spurts e.g. I travel a few times a year and don't rent a car at my destination. My uber use spikes during this time but is otherwise close to zero.

Similarly, some people seem take a "uber in an emergency approach" to the service. This is something I certainly appreciate about the service as well.

None of this actually tells us how "liked" the service is though.

My usage probably breaks into use it pretty much daily or at least close, use it/consider using it in spurts, and basically never use it. I suspect my never use it (or at least once in a blue moon) bucket would make me seem like an alien in some demographics.

Uber/Lyft is probably my main thing in the middle bucket. I mostly only use on fairly occasional trips by plane and not frequently even then.

For sure, but I think the point stands. 93 million is a huge number, but it's not even a third of "Americans".

I don't think there's any measurement you could use that would show Uber used by even half of Americans.

And even those that do "like to use" those products may still take issue with those companies on moral grounds while continuing to use them, either because there is no meaningful alternative for their purposes or because the convenience overrides their moral objections.

The Uber example seems like a stretch. If 28% of america uses it monthly, its probably comfortably a majority when you stretch to yearly (ie airport trips). Especially if you extend it to include Lyft.

Rideshare has comfortably replaced taxis, likewise Doordash + competitors have comfortably replaced the alternative (which for most of the country was pizza delivery).

I don't think you can say with any certainty at all that "comfortably a majority" of Americans use Uber, especially given that relatively paltry 28% monthly. I understand some people use Uber infrequently, but I think you'll need something more substantial than anecdote to demonstrate that moves the needle more than a percentage or two overall.

The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak.

E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. Same with Juicero.

And the "economic attack" on Hollywood, for instance, is hardly so - the initial investor-money-burning decade of streaming talked about here was WONDERFUL for most of Hollywood. You get to make way more shows, and they aren't supposed to all be lowest-common-denominator reality stuff? That was a bonanza for actors, writers, directors.

I'd also want to see media sentiment of TV, streaming; ad revenue comparisons of that, and all the other options in the world between a binary "newspaper" and "tech" in that one graph.

Not to mention some research on consumer sentiment not just media sentiment. Does the author really believe the average Joe wasn't getting more negative about FB over that time span? Where was "Tech" on that "people think the president should do something about" list five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? 40% is lower than oil and airlines; what's the rate of change? (One might say "yes, the public got more negative because the media pushed the narrative" which would be a pretty interesting argument, but it's notably not what this article is saying - the author is saying that the public "Techlash" basically "never happened" outside the media. (But that's not really new, right - Tech criticizing the "media" [or slices of it] is also a decades-long well-established practice. This ain't a one-way street.)

Yet spend a week on HN and you'll see that even in the industry, there's a LOT of organic negative sentiment against certain tech companies. I would agree with a claim that the media is oversimplifying that to "frustrating with tech," I don't agree that it's not a real trend with real causes independent of media reporting. We all use these products, we can all see the gradual shittification of them - FB, TikTok, Snap, Google Search...

The bit about ad revenue was actually specifically called out here as probably not the story.

The interesting part to me is the overall positive sentiment towards tech in general, because you are right - at least for specific companies, sentiment as reported by a local poll of people I play games with, Elon and FB are the literal devil.

I felt the same way about the article. Large amounts of conspiratorial conjecture presented, little to show for it.

Idk that economic “attack” is good phrasing but the bundling of video content combined with tools/platforms/monetization for user generated video content absolutely had a devastating effect on legacy video media. Maybe, in your words, the initial money-burning provided a lift, but now Hollywood writers are striking for more pay and Netflix is one of they key bogeymen.

Agreed - initially it was a windfall in the 2010s, now we're seeing a backlash because the cable residuals aren't there anymore and the streaming networks realized that lighting money on fire to out-compete each other was a zero-sum game.

If you dig in more into the techlash, you also see a lot of... biased behavior on the NYT. Other newspapers also have this demonstrated behavior too, but the NYT is the most well researched.

It's not just FB article sentiment analysis, it's everything they've written. If you look at all sentiment & word usage of all articles you'll notice sudden shifts . The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative. And because people that work in these industries do not want to be informally blacklisted explaining this, in an industry where it's hard to get work, there isn't much in terms of good investigative journalism into the behavior of media itself, so it has to come from outsiders often. If you can get an NYT journalist drunk and talk about the right things, your eyes will start getting realllllllyyyy wide.

The NYT explicitly decided to generate the techlash as their current narrative, it wasn't an emergent behavior because of events in the world.

> The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative.

Citation needed.

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex (NYT controversy)

Neither of those links provide evidence for the existence of a narrative department.

I think I generally agree that the media often reports on its own feelings as though they represented the vox populi, when they don't. We all make that attribution error, but (good) journalists are expected to be more aware of it.

Another thing I think is generally true is that, even if people hate tech, ultimately tech is just giving them what they want. Nothing will change until what people want changes, and any hypothetical Techlash would be mostly performative in practice: bad publicity without real consequences.

A lot of this was manufactured, it came out recently that NYT has a top down editorial policy that tech cannot be portrayed in a positive light

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger story at the time. News orgs will obviously have a bias based on who they hire. But historically they always try and appear to be balanced at the editorial level, ie Fox News has a few token left wing people, CNN has/had a few conservative punching bags.

Right, the founder of the biggest social media on earth pivoted to a company destroying hobby project because he is afraid of govt regulation of his platform. No tech lash lol.

And the media learned a hard lesson: Success against tech requires long-term criticism; but they turned everything into clickbait and put many criticisms behind paywalls. Nobody was interested after more than a week, because nobody had the attention span or interest in paying for stories about a personal squabble.

"in an alternate reality" (/s) some media conglomerate invented equivalents of YouTube, reddit, and Twitter, and they never have to ask for permission to use your content in their pieces because it's part of the TOS for those sites anyway.

Kinda glad they didn't

It’s a good argument, but have they considered that tech companies are actually evil? There is a lot of evidence to support this and they don’t really explain that away very well.

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