Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
bigtechwiki.com
bigtechwiki.com
Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having nothing to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same.
So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence that is suggested.
Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm.
The term has become so denatured that a new term, “deep tech” has been coined to mean what “technology company” used to mean.
The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are.
No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of value tied up in their brand or their sales book of business.
Texas Instruments' value is mostly in their integrated circuits IP (as well as manufacturing prowess, process knowledge, and a little bit of software). They're still solidly a "tech" company in my books.
For example, imagine a company with very little proprietary code because they focus entirely on renting out their CPU/GPU/disk capacity, for supercomputing, databases, render-farms, cloud backup, etc. I'd still call that a "tech company."
It's also not clear how this "intellectual property of the source code" angle would accommodate the network-effects or value of a subscriber-base... Well, I suppose you could argue that such an asset doesn't require high-tech means, it could all be snail-mail.
An X business is one that differentiates itself on factor X. If they use it in a truly innovative way (which changes — what was innovative in the 90s is commodity today) or develop new technologies in house than you’re a tech business.
When you understand that, you know that is not how the world runs and is actually very specific to big tech as they pioneered this hyper specific shift. You do not have access to everyone's information who sees your billboard. You do however have access to exactly how many people in a certain area during a certain time with the income between 50-100k who are older men who enjoy football, has seen your digital ad. Hopefully that illustrates the difference well enough.
Sure and some people take issue with aspects of how the world runs and want to discuss it.
> If you want to hold it against them then you are basically ranting...
Bold to state that making a critique of the status quo automatically amounts to "ranting".
> ...against all of capitalism rather than anything specific to "big tech".
It is not unreasonable to critique capitalism.
From 2018 to 2022, 95% of HN comments on the subject were against any form of Ads. Those who stood up for ads, were the absolute minority.
But then I guess you are right. Because those group of people are also the ones "ranting against all of capitalism".
The 'dirty' parts of tech: * media * social media * PII repackaging and unethical sourcing * targeted ads
Neutral or clean parts: * e-commerce * business automation * technical and educational information
Meta is an ad company and has a device business and happen to use social media to sell ads.
Amazon is rapidly shifting to be an ad company, who happens to use an e-commerce platform to place ads. They bought a healthcare company who collects massive amounts of PII and provide affiliate programs which funnel traffic into their ads and marketplace.
Apple, Microsoft and Google all have ad units that are major contributors to their overall profitability.
The problem with these firms is they have too much concentrated power, which they obtained through anti-competitive practices that are now cemented into the business model.
This is bad for society and it’s imperative on society to break up these entities and the power they wield as it’s incompatible with a democratic society.
And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?
People are using their own free will to use their products
Court order, legislation.
> And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?
Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, for starters.
By the way that’s not the definition of a monopoly.
> People are using their own free will to use their products
From an artificially constrained set of options. Anti competitive behavior has clear definable negative outcomes, you can feign confusion if you want but it’s not confusing.
Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens must be governed and restrained by democratic process in order for society to function.
That’s not what I meant. What would a break up for them look like? For instance AT&T was broken up into the baby bells.
> From an artificially constrained set of options
There is no other option for phones? Social media? Computers? Online commerce? And how is it “artificial”?
> Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens
So what is this “power”? How are they forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do?
All I can tell you is that my kids do not ask for social media or even screens that much because I plan outings for them that are more interesting and exciting - and that isn't about spending a ton of money or going very far, just being creative about how to frame what we're doing. For example, when planning to go to the local pool, I make up a story about how at their age I was able to run across the pool in X seconds, and that if they can break my record 5 times, I'll take them out to a restaurant for dinner the next day. Then when we are there, I'll also break out some plastic water toys that I didn't tell them about.
I just make family time more fun in terms of anticipation and surprises than being online.
It’s probably not healthy to live your entire life online, which is what youth are encouraged to do by everyone around them, and that alone is enough of a problem and I don’t think technology companies are to blame.
Dopamine obviously is a shorthand for a more complex psychological phenomena. While having their own failure modes, meditation or public speaking are not entirely ego-syntonic endeavors, there is a continuous contact with reality that puts your identity into question. Whereas social media has a near perfect psychological profile on its users and manufactures a purpose built personal “reality” that fits with their self concept - however dysfunctional it may be. There may be still frustration but it is still conforming to the user, because the challenge is optimized to drive engagement, not to make the person a better person through contact with reality.
tech is like humanity's one hope.
It's funny, because despite constant warfare, plagues, nasty ideologies, etc. the last time at which mankind was basically guaranteed to endure was before the industrial use of tech. Since then we've had world wars, the atomic bomb and its scare, global warming, accelerated biodiversity collapse, and it seems we can't pass a new day without discovering a new things which we rely on that is endangered.
Sure, I'm having lots of fun with tech, and I hope we can leverage it reasonably to improve our condition, but this technological religion that puts tech on a pedestal above critics really causes more harm than good. Many other technological advances that came before have required heavy regulation, and from the point of view of users, that evolution has been a progress rather than a regression.
It is nowhere near the deliverer of hope you're making it out to be, it's an enabler of great negative paradigm shifts that is slowly starting to be recognised. Social media is starting to be recognised as a harm on society but slowly... It'll probably take a few decades for wide retrospective agreement (in other words when it's too late)
That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
That doesn't mean that everyone is rich, but it is actually a really big deal. Next time you're tempted to write a phrase like "watching the world becoming ever more desperate" when talking about poverty, please take a moment first to remember that the opposite is true.
There is no path in the current Capitalist world order that will allow for a rise in the global south to current, western levels of development. The resulting increase in labor and resource costs would face immediate armed confrontation from the global north, as already happened with the myriad US-backed military coups during the past century.
Prosperity is what's made it possible for anyone to survive and have varying levels of access to thriving. Humanity is moving forward and we're figuring things out.
Pointing at a big category of businesses to demonize them is not "betterment of humanity".
Companies that actually do that are rarely big tech. And Big Tech as term colloquially refers to Facebook, Google etc.
Either way, I have learned how to do many things from watching instructional YouTube videos, and it does not seem anyone else has been able to make the economics work like Google has.
Sure, there’s bad too along with the good, and maybe the bad outweighs the good, although I would need convincing that is true.
I don't think it's wrong. "Stupid" random information is addictive and has neurological effects and we're bombarded with it.
Conflating a normal stimuli with something that's actually addictive is more dangerous than the thing it intends to stop because it justifies the use of force in a situation where there's no force used. Not even implicitly like with cigarettes being addictive. If you look at the DSM5 you'll see the only behavioral addiction disorder is "gambling disorder" and that's grandfathered in.
These modern memes about how screens are addictive being taken seriously are themselves the danger. Just like with "porn addiction" or "curing homosexuality" the people pushing it in serious contexts are generally ones running for-profit private "detox" centers or expensive "treatments".
I'm no fan of "big tech" but I can easily chose not to use it. And if I have to use it for work, it in no way forces me to use it at home. Big tech is bad but this line of argument is nearly as bad.
Ad-tech is sleazy, and no doubt needs to be reined in, but the problem is that private corporations in general need to be better held accountable, not "Big Tech" specifically.
Insanely naive take.
Even if we focus only on big ad-tech, many of the ad-based companies provide very useful products. That's why their business models work. Think google - maps alone is one incredible product or think Meta, Whatsapp has helped me save thousands of $ I would have otherwise spent on international calling, and I am so much closer and engaged to family and friends because of it, Martketplace has helped me buy/sell lots of stuff and saved me lot of money too. And the list goes on.
I do not disagree there are problems with these companies and products but its just simply incorrect to equate it to tobacco. There are tons of products that these companies make that are actually very productive and useful.
Which is ironic since many of them (us) make their living either working at BigTech, or working at a startup hoping to get acquired by BigTech
I'm also talking about time that is so utterly wasted that it's the same as not living at all. What percentage of TV watching or phone scrolling time falls to that level? Surely some parts of TV watching aren't wasted, if not then why does comparing that to smoking not sit right with you?
I'm not trying to say that the numbers match up to smoking necessarily. I'm setting up a "living hours lost" framework for fun and comparing how things match up to one thing that Americans have deemed not worth it.
We could also factor in the time it takes to work for the money to buy cigarettes or say that time in your 20s is more valuable than time in your 80s, but I've never been 80 so I could be wrong about that.
I definitely get the fun of trying to like actuary out all the ways that we waste our life doing unproductive shit, certainly I think about this a lot in the context of my working life.
With this said, I don’t know if I agree that “scrolling” is time so utterly wasted that it’s equivalent to death, or least that if scrolling qualifies then so does the vast majority of TV consumption (just in my own opinion I’d say I get more value out of like following Twitter beefs than a five hour Scrubs rerun binge). At least the latter is fun in a trashy kind of way, similar to how I imagine people might enjoy such quality content as “F Boy Island”, which I’ve been assured is good television.
The unhealthy food industry also lobbies against regulation (such as sugar or snack taxes, or banning unhealthy foods in schools), and blames the consumers of their products. I wouldn't be surprised if they funded biased scientific studies as well. Meanwhile sugar subsidies cost US taxpayers billions of dollars.
Also consider the "low-fat" movement that blamed fat for obesity, disease, and death while ignoring soda and highly processed foods loaded with sugar, simple carbs, sodium, and additives.
It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables, and even in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet. We have known for years that it's not good for anyone, but they have tough lobbyists, so getting rid of the problem just seems impossible. We all accept somehow that sports figures and celebrities endorse the product - they're adults. We accept that adults should be allowed to make their own decision. But just when we had religion-free zones for children, here comes the 10 commandments on the wall and creationism in biology class. No "this is your brain on religion" commercials yet that I know of. Etc.
Just like there was never a "war on tobacco," there will never be a "war on religion." Just like tobacco, there's too much money in religion for that to work.
> [E]ven in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet
No municipality in a region with a bill of rights providing freedom of religion is going to create no prayer zones.
> It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables
This makes me think this is satire...
I mean... really? It's clearly satire. And fairly well constructed prose imo.
What the author's actual point is, though, I have absolutely no idea. Maybe there is no point, and it's just pretty prose.
This is what makes me unsure its satire; what is it poking fun at exactly? What is the metaphor?
> It's clearly satire.
I don't think it's "clearly" satire, though I lean in the direction that it probably is satire; I have heard plenty of SF rationalist types say similar things before, so on HN the probability that it isn't satire is much higher than in the outside world.
> And fairly well constructed prose imo.
Agreed. It is fun and well-constructed prose, which definitely earns it several points in the "probably satire" column.
To calibrate, imagine if government and all public sector entities would include in all their commumications with citizens prominent mention of specific tobacco products and brands and actually inviting people to use them.
This incredible and abnormal capture of society is now the new normal. Check any public institution site and it explicitly advertises big tech services using links and invites people to engage using these specific, private, for-profit platforms. Picking winners, explicitly endorsing platforms that have turned users into products, track and model any and all behavior online etc.
People just dont realize how degenerate and dangerous our predicament. The fact that there are no reflexes to violently expose and terminate this collusion means there is basically no meaningful democratic muscle left.
Big tech is the tombstone of democratic society. 10x worse than big tobacco. Nobody will force you to smoke but increasingly it is impossible to be a normal member of society without conceding our agency to nefarious digital conglomerates.
The latter is the subset to which people’s ire should be directed.
Very interested, where does this money go?
Big tech does not cause fucking cancer, so don't pretend it does.
tldr; The testimony of one of the Facebook "whistleblowers" drew the analogy to Big Tobacco from Sen. Blumenthal back in 2021.^1 But in 1995 Congress took action after Wigand^2 testified. None of Big Tech's leakers so far have triggered action by Congress. Even more, in the 1990's there was at least 10 years of litigation before there was legislative action. Suing Big tech is more problematic. IMO, it's mainly because they can continue to hide behind Section 230. Was 230 was intended to protect corporations with trillion dollar market caps. Big Tobacco had nothing like Section 230.
1. Even earlier Salesforce guy was comparing Big Tech to cigarettes.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigare...
https://www.jeffreywigand.com/pascagoula.php
According to the Washington Post, Wigand was making $300,000 at the time he leaked. In today's dollars, that's $594,784.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-most-famous-whistleb...
Honestly, 60 Minutes today feels nothing it was in the days of Mike Wallace or even Andy Rooney. It mostly treats Big Tech with a sort of "awe". Sometimes the show feels like an agent of the US military-industrial complex. In retrospect Mike Wallace looks like a journalist one could only wish for today. 60 Minutes is soft.
1) What content would be interesting to the mark
2) Generating the actual content for the mark to view
And AI can easily do both.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will go down as authors of a new kind of tyranny.
> Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
Both of those two were born in 1955, making them solidly Boomers. Don't blame us for their shenanigans.
Boomers were too late to the game but rode the wave once it was normalized. Millenials recognized the ills and tried to criticize to undo the justification. Gen Z never understood the world any differently and so are little more than victims.
>Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
You don't comprehend well.
Meta, Twitter and other companies that build deep social media products are in this group.
Netflix is not. Microsoft is not. Google is not.
I don't like that just because you're a large tech company you're immediately demonized. This is demonizing success in this field rather than "wrong" doing.
In the US it's illegal to imprison someone based purely on vibes, and you can't make things crimes retroactively. (See Article I, Section 9 of the constitution; in particular the parts concerning habeas corpus, bills of attainder, and ex post facto laws.)
But suffice to say, outright fraud about the ad business is pretty core to most of Google and Facebook's revenue, and the entire original C-suite of Google has at least some sort of sexual harassment or abuse story out there they never got held accountable for.
The biggest problem is not making crimes, it's that our enforcement of our own laws involving executive misconduct has continued for so long, that the statute of limitations would be the biggest problem prosecuting a lot of people today.