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Comment by danzer420 | Hacker News Reader

can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago unimaginable.

tech is like humanity's one hope.

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> 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.

Mankind will endure. Maybe in fewer numbers than today, but it's hard to imagine anything that would completely wipe out the human species worldwide, even if things collapse back to hunter-gatherer survival.

That's not... a good thing. Who cares about "the preservation of the species". If 7 billion people die and the remaining survivors are happier than ever, that's a huge loss IMO.

Bronze age collapse wasn't exactly great though.

There is also Reddit, Google… I mean, do we really need to list all the companies that need perpetual increase of “engagement” to power their business model?

Prosperity does not equate to betterment of humanity. The prosperity of concentrated to a small section of the population, at the expense of the majority.

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)

There are poor people in villages around the world that now have access to information they never would have been able to get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology.

That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is in the right direction.

Yes, I’m sure the poor people in villages watching the world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your notion of prosperity. That’s why they’re drowning en masse in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border, or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant detention facilities around the world. Because they’re so “prosperous” now.

You can also refer to “they” as the ones who now have access to more accurate information about their health, or weather, sex education, math, science, etc. There are 8 billion people in this world, surely there are a wide spectrum of experiences being lived.

Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here are some cheery graphs:

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.

My point is exactly this misguided view of the world, that the global north can live lives of insane decadence, built on its history and continued plundering of the global south, while expecting them to find a reduction in extreme poverty as ameliorative. Your comment only reminds me that liberals are people who believe that luxury can exist without the suffering of others.

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.

Just like how no policy has killed more people then Communism&Socialism nothing has saved more lives and increased the standard of living for more people then Capitalism.

I think your worldview has been poisoned too much by news and social media, which demonstrates exactly why I avoid it.

Prosperity gives access to more people. "Betterment of humanity" sounds like "human growth but by my own standards".

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".

> big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world.

Companies that actually do that are rarely big tech. And Big Tech as term colloquially refers to Facebook, Google etc.

There are tons of educational videos on YouTube. And maybe Facebook too, or connections being made there, I don’t use it though.

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.

Prosperity?

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