6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex | Hacker News Reader

6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

joanwestenberg.com

237 pointszoul196 comments

While this author is of a younger generation, this really resonated with me as a Gen Xer. I feel there is so much disillusionment among folks that came of age during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then, and it didn't quite turn out like we envisioned. Two things made me think about this recently:

1. I saw a Reddit post that was titled something like "The 90s were peak humanity. Enough tech to make life comfortable, but not so much that it had totally taken over the focus." It was a video of a packed mall around the holidays filled with generally happy people socializing in public.

2. That viral quote that was making the rounds, "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

I just feel there has been a growing chasm over the past 25 years where tech is no longer solving pressing human problems (generally, obviously not true in all areas e.g. decarbonization tech) but is more concerned with just rent-seeking value extraction.

> "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Except this quote is just...internet clickbait. As though technological development is a straight line with easily predictable outcomes. Hell it's even engaging in a bait and switch argument: "I want to art and writing" -> well, AI isn't stopping you from doing those thing versus the reality of creative work for hire -> "I want to be paid to do art and writing".

Setting aside the obvious "when your hobby becomes your job it tends to cease being your hobby" which so many Twitch influencers discover, the headline argument is as though someone has overtly set out to build generative AI and not "done the obvious thing of making a laundry and dishwashing robot" (while you know, also ignoring that technically we have both those things and built them almost immediately - literally washing machines and dishwashers).

The complaint is...well frankly classist as hell. "Why should lower myself to manual labor? Take those other people's jobs away first". It sounds profound but says nothing: Twitter in a nutshell.

If wanting to reduce menial tasks in my life is classist, then sign me up.

You're on a website of software developers. Our entire job description is to eliminate white collar work. Not a lot of secretaries and typists anymore. Less and less classic sysadmins as well.

Not entirely clear to me how that’s relevant. I merely disagree with valorization of menial work and the people who do it.

> I merely disagree with valorization of menial work and the people who do it.

With you all the way on wiping out menial work; if we can automate it away that is a win for all of us. But do be careful when talking about the people who do it - they're generally wonderful and making very real and measurable contributions to the wellbeing of everyone else. They deserve a bit of valorization. Not saints, but but certainly up there on the scale of people putting in a good effort.

Girl, same. I am never going to the grocery store again. Thank god for the economic underclass willing to do delivery. They're like the plankton of the economic ecosystem. Without them, it all falls apart. Sad but necessary. But, as karma, delivery will eventually be the only job left for all of us, until we get deep enough into Moravec's paradox for that to eventually be automated too.

Moravec's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

> delivery will eventually be the only job left for all of us

Reminds me of Death Stranding, aka "FedEx Simulator". The game also mentioned the topic of automation a few times.

I'm pretty sure the point is that the exact sort of "art" companies are using AI to create is included in the "menial tasks" category, and that we're therefore better off letting AI take over said menial tasks so that we can spend time on actual creative endeavors rather than soul-crushing corporate drudgery like (in the article author's case) press releases.

Well, I interpreted it about as different as possible, but to each their own I guess. Though it makes no sense to me to call it "clickbait". Bait for what? The original commenter was just expressing an opinion, not selling ads or something.

I don't think it's a statement about "classic" at all - it's a statement that people generally enjoy writing and making art, and people generally don't enjoy doing their dishes or laundry. Tech used to be about making the "hard drudgery easier".

Right but..for whom? Again: AI existing doesn't stop people doing writing or making art.

What it does stop is getting paid for those activities where they are paid for: but then, that's not "unbridled creativity" anymore - that's "corporate says we need a stylized picture of a man standing in a field by tomorrow".

Or it's the exact thing the author in the linked blog here is talking about: what was their actual job?

> One morning, I sat down at my desk to craft yet another press release touting yet another "game-changing" startup that had raised - yet another - $25 million. And I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd written something I believed in. The words that used to flow felt like trying to squeeze ancient toothpaste from an empty tube.

Literally getting paid to write...just not what they wanted to be writing.

... There is no AI or anything that can do your laundry or dishes. There is AI that can do your hobby. That's literally all the quote is pointing out.

You can talk about how capitalism ruins art, sure, but that's a different topic than the quote.

There is a machine that does laundry and dishes. You don’t need „AI“ for that - by the way it’s actually machine learning - AI is another bullshit term.

One of my hobbies is creating art with machine learning tools - so that’s the opposite, it is enabling me to do my hobby.

I get the dangers of this technology but I really don’t see why it would prevent anyone from pursuing their hobbies.

Edit:// oh an capitalism doesn’t ruin art, quite the opposite. Any political system needs art, and in capitalism it’s extremely individualistic art that is needed, which is why I would argue humanity has produced more and more varied art since capitalism exists than ever before.

But there’s no AI that can do your hobby either. If your hobby is painting… are you painting for those who are now paying Chatgpt for their painting needs? Have you been robbed of your hobby? No. The scenario is as imaginary as Dishwashgpt remains.

Nothing about the quote is related to gainful employment or monetary transaction.

It is entirely about the prospect of technology serving people by freeing their time from chores to pursue luxury activities. Instead of that expectation, the reality of technological advancement that AI has given us so far has been to do those pursuits of pleasure for us, while we still have to do mundane, unfulfilling chores in our daily lives.

It's purely a tongue-in-cheek quip about our daily lives. It follows the standard formula for pretty much all one-liners jokes. Some technology- vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, laundry machines- eliminated many hours of work. Instead of advancing this kind of benefit for people, the technology took the benefit for itself.

Setup, juxtaposed by punchline.

Something can be a joke and still be worth taking seriously. In this case, the joke is misleading on an important topic - the existence of AI changes economic realities but has no bearing on how humans spend their leisure time, or how much of that leisure time they have. In fact, it probably will increase the amount of leisure time available on net since it is freeing us up as a species from needing to do a bunch of artistic and creative chores.

> "freeing us up as a species from needing to do a bunch of artistic and creative chores."

Would you please clarify something? You're saying that we need to be freed from "artistic and creative chores" -- so that we can be free to do what?

For me personally, the highest-quality leisure I can think of is to follow creative pursuits and hone my artistic abilities (e.g. playing a musical instrument, making something with my hands, etc.)

Free to do whatever you like. If you want to sit around playing musical instruments in your spare time nothing is stopping you.

We've had superhuman chess AI for decades and that hasn't stopped anyone playing chess. But if I want to review a game showcasing the highest level of chess play I wouldn't turn to human games. Similarly, sooner or later, if I want a specific picture of something I'm not going to be wasting the time of an artist to get it.

This is such a genuinely weird worldview to me.

Like you’re missing a huge and meaningful chunk of one of the best parts of humanity.

I'm talking about work. There are people who enjoy their work, but they are rather rare. Work is a "huge and meaningful chunk" of our lives, but frankly it'd be a better world if it wasn't.

You sure seemed to be talking about your spare time a moment ago.

The part where I said "Free to do whatever you like. If you want to sit around playing musical instruments in your spare time nothing is stopping you."? I was clarifying that I wasn't talking about leisure time.

And how do you think that attitude is limiting anyone? It seems fairly open to me.

> In fact, it probably will increase the amount of leisure time available on net since it is freeing us up as a species from needing to do a bunch of artistic and creative chores.

Historically, that has just been not true.

If art is your job, then art is a chore.

For people who do art just for fun, AI is a net positive.

That's why employment is relevant to the quip.

My takeaway was that it said more about the author (and those preaching it) than about AI.

1. The obvious thing is that technology (and various things we’ve called AI over time) actually has given laundry robots and dish washing robots. Her follow up tweet said of course she knows and that she's joking, but the joke/criticism relies on those things not existing. I kinda think she just forgot, as we all do, as we take technology for granted.

2. Second takeaway was the same as you, with all the free time we have now—and the free time we hypothetically would get with laundry AI—hard to believe we’re really going to start our great American novel.

3. Her follow up was something like “I don’t actually mean laundry and dishes, I mean it metaphorically”. This just read to me as "I just want things that I want. And don’t want things I don’t want. Don't ask me what those things are." We all do, but it muddles any potential wisdom in the quip if we can just swap laundry, dishes, writing, and art for whatever.

So basically a nothing burger about what AI is today or should be, but loud expression of that nothing anyway. I thought it was more like a spitball take (albeit a tad clickbaity and trolling) and had it gotten lost in the wind it would have been fine, but it going viral said something about current opinion.

The way to read it is “I want AI to automate the drudgery of life, not remove the joy from it”. The specifics are inserted because it makes it more pithy and relatable.

That was the gist I got too, but the relatable-ness felt undermined by the pithiness and the specifics. It resonated though, which is why I felt it said something about where people are at.

Technology innovation's highest priority has always been to move money from the middle class to the ownership class. Why so many people assume altruistic outcomes is beyond me. Why so many people see any other outcome of OpenAI then increased income inequality is beyond me.

That's pretty demonstrably not true, historically. The explosion of the middle class of the 20th century was because technology still required a huge amount of labor, but it increased productivity to the point where that labor could live much more comfortably on their wages.

Productivity has been increasing even more rapidly, but the middle class is collapsing, so I'm skeptical that these two things are very strongly related

A great many of our problems (in much of the developed world to varying extent) stem from just this.

Below: a chart of "share of gross national income from wages", read this as "Labor Share of Income."

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA

Doesn't that suggest that the working-class is collapsing rather than the-middle class?

Most of the so called middle class are just well paid members of the working class.

Small business owners and others who get much of their income via ownership rather than wages/salaries are often indirectly but strongly dependent on the salaries of the working class to stay competitive.

So really most people are in the same boat when it comes to these things. It just manifests differently.

You are right that those who start off being well paid in the working-class tend to buy capital with the differential in pay, and thus move into the middle-class upon doing so. But, as such, still realize the gains on the capital side, so the decline on the wage side is not the whole picture for them.

I don't think necessarily, it just describes of the national productivity, how much of that produce is allocated toward labor rather than capital. (wealth generated through assets vs. wages)

The middle class owning more assets than working class sure is better off. But both derive most of their income through wages rather than assets.

That share of income from wages started its downward trajectory in 1971, when the US removed the gold standard and money-printing replaced hard money. The result was a man-manipulated interest rate fueled economy. Low interest rates benefit existing asset holders the most since they most definitively increase asset prices. Think about the simplest discounted cashflow, a perpetuity. When you change the discount rate r from 4% to 1%, the perpetuity value increases by 4x.

I've heard the gold theory a lot, but my current best theory is it wasn't until credit cards became ubiquitous that wages stagnated and the debt treadmill began. There was also a significant population increase in the latter half of the century, there - but forget looking at milk prices or gasoline prices - look at a ford mustang, or a motorhome - or even housing.

Once a certain segment of the population realized that real estate was "undervalued" relative to the potential for collecting rent on the undervalued property - yeah. rent goes up, wages don't at the same rate, more credit card debt. High debt means you're paying nearly all interest, so that ain't going down.

Oh and does anyone actually remember earning a decent amount of interest at a bank? man, those were the days. 12 month 7% CDs, lol.

How can the middle class collapse exactly? It is a statistical group.

I don’t know why you are downvoted but the middle class was, and more broadly the merchant class were, literally created (and I mean that literally) by technology that invalidated the presumptions of the landowner class in several societies in the last few centuries. Some of these events were more violent than others.

A changing means of production will likely shift the wealth from a previous ownership class to another. Whether that diffuses into the middle class is mostly a political problem. However the stronger a middle class is, (through access to capital) the faster technology production and adoption will become.

Or so is a school of thought of contemporary political economy (read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu. et. al. )

Example: the cotton gin did not make for a healthier middle class, since the political apparatus barred access to capital (and human rights and civic participation) for so much of the population.

This is nihilist thinking. There is no complete barring access to capital, even in the 19th century "middle class" loans were possible.

Today access to capital is as easy as it ever was (except maybe '06). The people who take risks are rewarded and there are countless stories of people moving out of middle class.

There was a period of time when to get the highest ROI you had a factory built, you hired a bunch of people and had them make and sell washing machines, fridges and vacuums.

Since everybody now has a washing machine, fridge and vacuum, the profits fell and the manufacturing just barely sustains itself.

Since the founders / owners / shareholders extracted all excess profits, the companies became brittle in crises, causing them to buy each other until there is just about 1 per continent, possibly 1 in the whole world.

The only way to jack up prices until then, barred burying the whole planet under a pile of planned obsolescence electronics garbage, is to invent new ways to introduce scarcity. Like gating certain features behind a subscription fee.

And temporarily also to lay off as many people as possible, replacing them with automation.

Please elucidate how do you envision next win-win capitalism-based boom. Time savings to everyone have been driving the last one. The only area with a low-hanging time-saving fruit remaining is time on job. Which is exactly the time capitalism seeks to maximize for workers.

In one sense I wonder if there ever was intention to make middle class rich... Increasing circulation allowed them to spend more money thus increase value of corporation same goes for pensions. Which then later were screwed out of the money stored there. Their value was to pump the stocks higher...

That's why the idea of the "middle class" was invented. You either live off the land/capital or you work for those people. You can't make the middle class rich enough that they don't have to work otherwise they'll realise they were working class all along.

Also class warfare. Can't have the working class and middle class team up and beat the rich... So have to give at least middle class some aspirations. I think elite is doing same thing with culture war now... Split them up and have them fight about something inconsequential instead of seeing true levels of inequality in wealth...

Let’s differentiate between technological innovation and capitalizing on it.

Well people have discovered you can make cash irrespective of the quality of tech you pump out.

Two routes have been discovered and milked to high heaven -

Financial engineering - this is where if you accumulate more capital and faster than the next guy you win. Add to that globalization ie arbitrage on interest rates/tax rates/forex/labor cost/rent/real estate/govt regulation in generating capital.

Demand engineering - related to capital raising - since attention is finite - who spends more on marketing/ads/pr captures more attention faster than the next guy.

The creatives/engineers/scientists haven't spent enough time coming up with a response to either. So they all end up dependent on the financial and demand engineers.

This will change with time as people come up with ways to respond.

This strikes as both optimistic and pragmatic. We do have reason to believe the current model is not permanent, and it is most empowering to believe we can play a role in crafting the new model.

I don't disagree but I think it's sad to see the word "engineering" used in this context. What you describe I would call highly optimized bullshit artistry.

Maybe the watering down of the term started with "social engineering". Engineers build things that do things and/or are built to last.

It started happening a long time before that. There was a popular meme in the 1980s where housewives humorously referred to themselves as “domestic engineers.”

But then you're just changing who gets disparaged from a technical expert to an emotional one. If you're offended by the term engineering, may I suggest scheming? I think that would better convey the nefarious aspect of the term.

Most people failed to make tech their own. They wanted the lazy ready-to-use solutions and now others determine the degrees of freedom they can have.

Honestly if you did make tech work for you, not too much has changed. But yes, since people always opt for the easy solution, more engineers will supply their demands.

> That viral quote that was making the rounds, "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

We developed machines that would do your laundry and dishes decades ago. The current trend is to make them less and less functional over time.

You still have to load and unload the machines. Sort it, organize it. Still lot's of work.

It is just not a trivial problem, to solve.

brb, founding AI startup to solve this important, non-trivial problem via burning through large stacks of VC cash.

:DDDDDD

The focus of the joke is on the automation of creative work. The joy is in the doing. It's nonsensical to just push a button to pretend to do creative work (generating art).

Laundry and dishes is a standin for all things that technology does very well and we appreciate it for doing that for us.

Tech is now a mercenary in the battle for people's attention and/or a fraction of their monthly money.

The number of people in tech grew in absolute terms. That also means the fraction of people giving back to open source also grows and we are getting better open source software. Many however don't give back, they just take.

Are we demonstrably getting better open source software? By what metric? (Not sure myself, asking in good faith.)

I sure don't see it. When I look at how fast FOSS advanced between the late 90s and the mid 00s, and compare to after the '08 meltdown, it doesn't look the same at all.

When you have small domain, any progress can be seen as big. Now when you have many millions of lines in linux kernel, half a million new lines is "oh, just another module". The same with whole foss domain. It's so big now that progress is seen as slow. Comparing Blender now to Blender in 2014 will show you how big progress we still make, just as an example.

Another module in linux isn’t half a million of lines. A whole new class of hardware with all the drivers may be.

Arguably by the metric of my own annecdotal evidence.

"Are we demonstrably getting better open source software?"

Yes.

The friction to create something good and useful is as low now as every. Anyone can create a github account, share source and overnight millions of people can use that thing. It happens here on HN frequently.

Google and advertising killed everything off. Google is directly responsible for making tech and the world shitty. They started the whole making money of your attention thing and then everyone sort of just followed it.

Not to mention the whole SEO industry that pushed off smaller, high quality websites for gargantuan mess of word salad articles.

And finally now the present generation of developers are slavishly solving leetcode to get a high TC (total compensation).

We need a whole new generation of hackers to take us out of this mess.

There are some clues, in the Patron, open source, community. I just hope kids make useful software for them and their friends.

my 8 year old (then 7) used to spend a lot of time in the roblox creation tool, whatever that's called. in 3rd grade we had access to Apple ][e and c in the school library - and i learned basic on an atari so it was relatively straightforward to code silly things that impressed other children - fill the screen with random characters (random colored characters on the c!) draw lines, make the printer buzz. windows 3 and/or 95 included abasic and qbasic (iirc). if you held down shift while booting, you'd drop to a prompt and could just write code.

I'm not sure where that leaves today's kids - there's nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements; further, nearly no-one will be impressed with filling a screen with random characters in the same way adults and kids were impressed back when there were 9 computers in the entire school and 4 didn't work.

I know there's projects out there that attempt to capture that magical spark of all of those 6502 and 808X machines just had by merely existing.

>nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements

Well you can do ctrl shift J or similar in the browser and start typing javascript, or open the terminal. It is all a bit more complicated than BASIC in the old days though.

Tech is fine. It's the money we made along the way that ruined it.

Somehow money ruins everything. The internet just made it easier for people to extract money from everything.

Sadly it's not money. It's inequality. To build a stable business, you need to carer to the rich more then to anybody else.

This is palpably false, as Schumpeter described: “Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man.”

This is palpably false, as evidenced by the tendency for rich people to want to make themselves richer. Notice how the overwhelmingly-vast majority (if not entirety) of the rich happily did away with those candle-lighting servants in favor of electric lighting; why pay a bunch of servants, after all, when that money could be invested elsewhere? Likewise with the cheap cloth and cheap cotton and rayon fabric and boots and motorcars and so on; the ultra-rich have adopted these in droves because the alternatives require money better spent elsewhere. Yeah, candles and silk garments and horse-drawn carriages do still exist, but for the rich they are nothing more than novelties for occasional enjoyment; for their day-to-day lives it's all lightbulbs, cotton, and cars.

Not only that, but the rich tend to be the early adopters of these very innovations - that is, capitalism begot these innovations specifically to cater to those able to afford them, and only later (after the requisite infrastructure and economies of scale took hold) did they serve as any sort of boon to the common man. Electric lighting and automobiles are two particularly-egregious examples, and they continue to be examples to this day; it ain't the rich who are still reliant on candlelight and animals pulling wagons, after all, but rather the poorest of the poor.

I don't think that's the issue so much as the global reach of tech makes it winner take all. Instead of 100,000 retailers making a bit of money they go bust and Jeff Bezos makes all the money.

You're re-stating GP's point. I agree with both of you.

That's not what is happening though.

Millions of companies and indie developers have a platform to make money. This never existed before.

Amazon, Google and Apple also employ thousands of SWEs that make a good living building these services for customers.

Bezos doesn't "make all the money".

It's akin to everyone being in a big shopping centre and the shopping centre charging rents though. Eventually you have to admit that the model has changed, people are still able to rent but the building is infinitely large. The building size is quite a disrupter.

This statement keeps getting postulated here and I still don't buy it.

The economy is NOT 0 sum. Inequality in itself doesn't doesn't do anything bad. Billionaires existing can be true while poverty shrinks.

IMO it is a low value argument to state that we could fix world problems by removing "inequality". I'm happy to be proven otherwise.

Billionaires existing are actually fantastic for poverty. The more the better.

BUT we need to somehow poke holes in the billionaire that don't both totally drain them or leave them unharmed. The holes need to be large enough that they can help the government support the people.

Problem we have is that the billionaires bought all the hole punchers and aren't letting the gov use them like they used to.

I used to love computers and software. When the next great thing came out, I’d be an enthusiastic early adopter, and enjoyed the new powers the technology gave me.

Now, whenever something new comes out, my first thought is: “how is this thing going to suck up my personal data and monetize me?” And my second thought is “how is this going to wreck some part of life and/or humanity and turn it into profits for the rich?” You can’t be a techno-optimist anymore. Everyone is working on a similar, but slightly different wealth-siphoning Torment Nexus these days.

It's interesting to read this from a market research perspective. I have a very similar opinion and also consider(ed) myself an early adopter.

This may just mean that early adopters are now signaliing that they are getting bored with software/tech and the rest of the market may soon follow that opinion.

Maybe it means they're not bored with what tech gives them right now.

In the past we adopted new startups such as JustinTV, YouTube, and Instagram because they gave us something we didn't have front and center. Live streaming, video, and stylized photos. Now every social network offers all kinds of media and in different engagement foemats, and the algorithms keep us entertained enough. There's not a whole lot of reasons to adopt something new, unless it's even more addictive.

Maybe the reign of the incumbent social networks will last much, much longer than we initially expected.

Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

Personally, I prefer 720p. It's easy to play on any device, the file sizes are much smaller, and the quality is fine. I don't need 4K for most content and save it for exceptional visuals like Godfrey Reggio's Trilogy or Yojimbo — one of the most visually stunning movies I've ever seen in high resolution. My preference also reduces hosting costs for platforms, at least from my account.

Social media constantly pushes high-res, addictive content, but alternatives like Fediverse exist. After adjusting to these communities, I deleted my X account and rarely use Facebook. On Fediverse, server operators encourage efficient file sizes (and types,) unlike Instagram or TikTok.

The network effect drives people to the few social networks, but I'm not convinced people actually want what they're being given. Repeating for emphasis: I'm not convinced this is what people want!

> Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

This sounds way too much - prohibitive, in fact, when cheap all-you-can-eat dubiously-legal IPTV services exist.

On the one hand, AWS quote something similar as an estimate ($12,000 for 10 hours for 10,000 viewers at 1080p) [0]. All but a rounding error of this is paid to AWS CloudFront for per-GB distribution costs and this assumes 99% of bits can be served by the CDN.

On the other hand, Amazon note that this is typically an overestimate because it's unlikely all your viewers will get the 1080p, and they can degrade service to some (QVBR) and pass you on the savings. Additionally, Twitch video content (disproportionately, video games) seems like it should be more compressible than most video. And most importantly, Twitch don't pay the retail price.

Still, it's going to come in an order of magnitude above what I thought Youtube/Twitch etc needed to pay their bills.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_sNcbXj5A0

my source for the part you quoted - apparently this is in their dashboard? it could be a third party site. I no longer have access to a twitch account (as an aside i blame starlink and not using gmail) so i can't verify if streamers on the platform have access to those tools.

And the pricing seemed about right. You can't tell but i am napkin-ing this right now: twitch recommends 4500kbps for 1080p30 on the uplink side, which fans out to 40gbit. per second. So maybe you can get that for $5000/month; or you can get 10gbit links in four places. Receive bits, transcode, stream. how hard

wait transcode?

A certain very large media company was paying a third party $250,000 per month for transcoding, on three 24x7 streams. I'm not saying that spend was necessary, because it isn't, just that it is a pain point.

anyhow that video shows $0.132 per half-viewer-hour (or something) at 1080p - probably 60fps. Come to think of it that's suspiciously close to what i'd guess AWS would charge for transit (which you alluded to, i think) - so this is showing streamers what they would be paying if they self hosted?

> Come to think of it that's suspiciously close to what i'd guess AWS would charge for transit (which you alluded to, i think) - so this is showing streamers what they would be paying if they self hosted?

It was always going to be something like that. It's unlikely Amazon/Twitch wants to reveal exactly its costs. In general, people complain that egress bandwidth seems to be a high-margin line item for AWS.

Many 'dubious-legal IPTV services' will use stolen or trial AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, etc accounts for their CDN and when the account gets locked they just spring up another account.

So the cloud providers tend to be the one's paying and consequently their legitimate customers pay.

> Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

That's what Peertube is for. The original video comes from a specific web site. If the viewer count goes up, the people watching it also stream it out. So a hugely popular video won't overload the source server.

This is not like Bittorrent. It's not distributed file storage, just distributed streaming. It's only a load on the viewer's system when they are watching the video. Now that there are large numbers of users with symmetrical network connections, this is a practical way to distribute video.

I put technical videos on Peertube because there are no commercial interruptions.[1] I recommend it for content which doesn't need "discovery" service - that is, users arrive from some other source than the hosting site.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

Naw, they aged out of 18-40.

There's a reason that's the prime demographic. At some point you see the recycled shit dressed up as something new, and realize your "new" was also repackaged poop.

That is how I felt. Computers made everyone's life better!

My opinion is that "the big sellout" happened when apple introduced the iphone and the apple app store.

and it basically came down to a couple nuances in their policies...

#1 apps have unfettered network access

#2 apple would never approve security apps like a firewall (because #1)

and when a big player sets an example, it normalizes the situation for everyone else.

I think it was seen (or sold) as "advertising will fund everything" just like television, radio and print advertising did in the past.

Except the old advertising was one-way. Advertising today means ubiquitous surveillance and dossier building on every person on the planet.

It's been ~ 17 years of this iphone BS, and now behavior is creeping into every app, device and platform. Look at microsoft breaking new ground in appalling behavior with each software update.

Thank goodness for linux, open software, open hardware and people coming up with great hacks all the time.

This seems like historical revisionism. Not saying Apple wasn’t part of a certain trend, but it’s an odd bone to pick since Apple technically is one of the few companies that relies on hardware sales, not ad revenue.

Google is far more likely to fit your profile. It’s where ads (adwords and adsense) started to transform the web. First just a few cute banners at the top. And these days some sites just plaster the whole page with them.

Even still it’s hard to pick any singular company that started to make tech suck, they all followed or initiated trends that made things worse from a consumer standpoint.

It's hard to pick any singular company that started to make tech suck because it's a result of the economical structure in which these companies are trying to exist. The neverending search for more profit, more growth every quarter has made it impossible for companies to adopt a strategy that is not focussed on consumer exploitation, at least in the long run.

Agreed, they also calculate in “future profit” in the valuation and so you need to always hit your targets.

Agree. Ad-based businesses are eating the world. They hoover up data, invade your privacy, and then set up moats around their little fiefdoms (when they aren't selling your data to the other fiefdoms).

And every ad-based business has the same underlying strategy: steal from the finite amount of attention you have and use it to extract your wealth.

> relies on hardware sales

but apple made it a free-for-all on the device that you arguably own.

for example, you can block google in your browser. web browsing still has choices and is still somewhat democratic. But you can't block google in an app on your phone.

I think a lot of companies (including Apple) figured out at around the same time that the Internet finally allows them to have that unbreakable "tether" to the end user. The Internet provides them the control over what the user is doing that they never had before. Without intrusive things like hardware dongles and long distance modem calls, they were never able to watch the user and control their activities like they can today.

In think it boils down to the difference between technology as capital that individuals could acquire and control for their own priorities, versus technology controlled by a large company to deliver--or deny--a limited service to individuals.

While the past 30 years have absolutely put the "personal" into "personal computer", I'd rather have a personal assistant than a personal overseer.

I agree with this most out of all the replies. The PC of the 90s was a personally empowering device. You bought it from the manufacturer (or individual parts), took it home, turned it on, and it was yours, and only yours, to explore and use. You could make it do whatever you wanted, up to the limits of the hardware and your programming ability. You decided when to turn it on and off, what to run on it and when. These devices existed for the benefit of the users, and to make your life easier and better.

Modern technology lost this. Everything now comes with a hidden, or not so hidden, tether to various companies. Unlike the PC of the 90s, ModernDevices today are limited. And the limits are artificial and set by the device and OS manufacturers, not set by physics or your own personal skill with the device. Now you constantly have these manufacturers looking over what you're doing, to ensure it's OK with them, and to ensure it's still making them money. And as soon as what you want to do with your ModernDevice conflicts with what all these various companies want you to do with them, they get to ultimately decide, not you. The companies are more and more deciding when the device can be turned on and off, what can and cannot run on it and when. These devices exist for the benefit of their manufacturers.

Companies' paternalistic attitude of "What should we allow users to do?" is what soured new technology for me.

THIS. Our devices are now like a Soviet-era neighbour spying on our every action so they can tattle to the state police.

>You can’t be a techno-optimist anymore.

You can be, we're just getting old. LLMs are very exciting! WASI (and a bit older WebAssembly) is a bold idea! Rust is a breath of fresh air and ancient tools are finally being rewritten! Edge computing may change the way we write programs! Hardware is finally ready for VR!

Now, I'm quite sceptical and pessimistic about all of the above. But I think this says more about me than about the world. Younger me would be prototyping a LLM in Rust and compiling it to webassembly to use in his VR game right now. Current me thinks similarly to you.

> LLMs are very exciting

This just goes back to your grandparent comment: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Also, I'm not particularly excited about my day job becoming about fixing up half-broken scripts that other people pump out with LLMs.

> WASM/WASI is a bold idea

I will admit that I have not looked into this a lot, but how is WASM substantially different from other bytecode interpreters like the JVM?

> Rust is a breath of fresh air

Finally something that I agree about.

> and ancient tools are finally being rewritten

But as someone in their 30s who has now personally witnessed several hype cycles, I am increasingly frustrated by the observation that most things billed as "progress" are either "change for the sake of change" or "reinventing technologies that existed decades ago under different names" (e.g. JVM -> WASI or FreeBSD jails -> Linux containers).

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

To read this and get upset is very bizarre to me. LLMs as most of the public know, is just a few years old. The things these services are doing are nothing short of sci-fi ideas 10 years ago. And were complaining it can't do our laundry?

IMO this is peak first world complaning. Give it some time.

> And were complaining it can't do our laundry?

As I read it, the complaint is that it looks like it will be automating the things we don't want automated rather than automating the things we do.

But even that is a little bit BS. ChatGPT automates yak shaving code for me every day. It saves me from code and doc diving on esoteric libraries that arent well written and i have no desire to learn. It lets me focus on more interesting higher level design and automates or speeds up the stuff that used to drag that down.

You seem to have missed my point slightly. 17 year old me would be very excited about LLMs - they have potential to be very disrupting, and are almost magical compared to what we had just a few years ago (remember when image recognition was a challenge?). Current day me is not. And I have also witnessed several hype cycles - enough to grow tired of pointless changes. Even though I was an early adopter of everything 20 years ago, always ready to try new technologies.

But did the world really change? Are dangerous technology and hype cycles new? Or maybe the world is the same but it is me who have changed? Will current day teenagers recollect 2020s as a golden age of tech?

I thought about that when I wrote the comment: Maybe it's me (or the world) that's changed, and not the technology. But that's not it. What has changed is the technology, and specifically who the technology is empowering/serving. 17 year old me was excited about PCs because they empowered/served the user. 47 year old me is not excited about LLMs and 17 year old me also would not be excited about LLMs. Because LLMs are obviously being developed for the purpose of empowering/serving the LLM companies, not necessarily the user. Any benefit the user happens to get out of LLMs is a side effect and not really the purpose of the software.

I am actually excited about LLMs that are entirely mine to tinker with, run 100% on my own silicon, open up and modify, publish my changes.

> You can’t be a techno-optimist anymore.

You can't? Just yesterday, Waymo opened their self-driving taxi service to the general public in San Francisco. We now have self driving cars. You draw a stick figure and the computer draws the rest of the fucking owl. I have an AI that I talk to on my phone and I tell it about my life's bullshit and it guides me through it. It helps me with my writing and my programming. Robots are getting better and better. Pretty soon we'll have humanoid robot companions to help around the house. I earnestly believe that I'll live to see the singularity.

That just means that most humans are now obsolete and the government and corporations have no need to keep us around

Corporations should be the focus of your ire, not government. To the extent that government is making your life worse it's because of capture by the corporations / ultra wealthy. Taking back control of government is the only tool we have against them.

Obeying Computers just leads to the commodification of control and efectively humans-as-a-service

> during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then

Was there? I remember the 90s as an intermittent software dark age we had to crawl out for the next decade until things started to improve around 2010. The unbearable OOP hype, turds like CORBA and Itanium, UML, "Enterprise scale" software development with Java, the first big VR hype cycle, the worst of the desktop operating systems won (Windows), and I could go on and on... there was also the same amount of human bullshitters in important positions.

We are much better off today than in the 90's in that good stuff can actually win traction (at least as long as no money is involved - once there's money involved, the bullshitter will home in like flies on a pile of shit).

IRC. NNTP. Email. dare i mention AOL (some of us are younger and didn't know OOP from OOM), the first 3d games that were immersive, Hotline, massively multiplayer voice chat like mpath (Mplayer.com, then gamespy), and for that matter, multiplayer gaming with people anywhere.

And yet here we are with energy wasting crypto scams, AI 'innovation' which is just an app sending a line of text to ChatGPT, a simple video call needing 2Gb of memory (Teams), lots of developers bundling functionality they want instead of what their users want and don't get me started about all the JavaScript ecosystems. It seems to take more time than ever just to get a nice app off the ground since we keep reinventing frameworks instead of expanding on a few good ones.

The author of the post is "@daojoan.eth"... personally, not who I would choose to lead the charge against "tech BS".

You're talking about how it was to be in tech as opposed to using the tech - what the parent meant I think.

From the consumer's point of view, the parent is completely right. In the 90s/early 00s there was a real feeling that tech was trying to improve your life and make it easier without necessarily controlling every aspects of it.

That's actually a very good point! Things always looked worse when you know how the sausage gets made.

There's this comment that I read said that the world really did end back in 2012. Because today's world seems way different than it was before 2012.

> The 90s were peak humanity

Yeah, sure. At the same time a large European country was falling apart in a bloody and cruel war that saw many innocent people outright murdered or displaced.

You will find a country doing that somewhere every decade, so it's irellivent to this analysis.

Let's agree to disagree -- I find it very relevant. "Peak humanity" is a very general statement, and ignoring large parts of the target cohort makes any analysis quite meaningless.

I think some folks are missing the point.

I don't literally think it was "peak humanity", worldwide (to be clear I was just quoting from this post, https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/1dbsgnc/90s_...) Yes, there were still wars and genocides.

But, as it relates to the article here, the other part of the title, "Enough tech to make life easy, not enough to become life" is very relevant, and that's the negative change I feel like a lot of us who remember the 90s well can identify with.

I walked through Salesforce Park. There were families everywhere. Some twenty kids were playing Marco Polo. I went online: everyone was miserable. Miserable people drive away others so they create a Dead Sea Effect where their world seems universally miserable.

I’m enjoying the diffusion model art. My wife is a creative director and illustrator and it’s loads of fun for us to play with. Besides I have a washer/dryer and a dishwasher.

80% of Americans are happy with their personal lives so why is everyone so miserable online? One should never forget the 1/9/90 rule of interaction.

Technology is fantastic. Today it’s amazing. Without it my wife and I would struggle to have children. Nah, this is the Golden Age.

> 80% of Americans are happy with their personal lives

I think it's fair to point out that this number (actually 78% who say they are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their lives) is "near a record low".

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2024/02/12/american-...

But I do agree, the "miserableness" online seems much greater than "the real world", but that's also kinda my point. So much tech is designed to addict you (i.e. doom scrolling), that I find I'm happiest when I get rid of tech from my life (leave my cell phone at home, go for long walks in nature, etc.) This wasn't the case for me in the 90s primarily because lots of tech was a nice diversion but not a constant negative distraction.

There’s a lot to be optimistic about to be fair.

You live at the cusp of an inflection point. Something potentially to consider and be grateful for.

For me it was the success of “platformization” suddenly it wasn’t enough to be a large player (or even just successful) in the market but to have a monopoly or near monopoly position instead. Ideally co-opting the market at the same time. Now every idea tries to overextend in all sorts of obnoxious ways.

> The 90s were peak humanity

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.

I was a teenager during the 90's, and I do have fond memories of things from that decade, but it would do well to keep your nostalgia in check.

Even when we restrict ourselves to the realm of tech, a lot of things back then sucked horribly. Large tech companies already showed their rent-seeking tendencies, there was crazy hype for shit ideas (the dotcom bubble popped for a reason).

In fact, I think that the current mindset of people being increasingly jaded, skeptical, and mistrusting of tech is healthy. It shows that at least some people are learning their lessons, even if this mindset is somewhat restricted to bubbles like this.

Yes, it's good to be cautious against nostalgia, but it's also bad to just pretend that everything just basically repeats.

To be clear, since I feel a bunch of comments are taking that "90s was peak humanity" quote overly literal (another commenter pointed out there were still horrible wars during the 90s), I'd point out that it was about the expectations of how tech would improve human lives.

Most specifically, there was a very broad belief that things like the Internet would bring people closer together. But by lots of objective metrics (measures of loneliness, polarization, pessimism for the future, youth mental illness, etc.), not only did tech not "bring us closer together", it actively helped rip us apart. And I think if you time traveled back to the 90s and explained those outcomes, the vast majority of people would be genuinely shocked and surprised.

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-peo...

Indeed so.

For a while now, I've been struggling with the realization that I may need to just leave this industry entirely as a dev.

The tickle in my brain that tells me that as an industry we have ceased to be a force for (on the whole) good and have instead become a force for profit extraction above all else is getting too loud for me to ignore.

It seems to me that the tech that I've been helping to build for decades has been repurposed and weaponized against people instead of helping people and improving everyone's situation.

I'm with you. 1999 was the last year I remember being genuinely content with life. Since then, it's been nothing but accelerating entropy and ennui.

It would be interesting if someone analyzed the “California communication style” and its effects on the startup industry. As someone that grew up on the East Coast, I often notice how the communication style on the West Coast is much less confrontational and more “everything is awesome”, which I think leads to the sort of fake enthusiasm the author grew tired of projecting.

Of course, there’s no lack of hype and BS in NYC/DC/Boston, but there seems to be a much more developed culture of criticism and analysis than in California. And so the default attitude on the East Coast is a bit more cynically pragmatic, which is both good for the above reasons, but also less imaginative and more restricted - which is why SV has more “dreamers” that do crazy things.

Hope I’m not firing off too many East Coast vs. West Coast battle shots here :)

Everyone in silicon valley is a transplant.

Sure but there is still a particular communication style that prevails, and people adopt it, or try to adopt, to fit in. It’s less about the accent or vocabulary and more about the tone.

A lot of this was parodied pretty effectively by the Silicon Valley TV show.

I don't think that's location based. More likely industry.

Even in California once you leave SaaS /software /internet startups the corporate culture is different.

My wife doesn't have pronoun police at her California office job. Me working in web software, I had a guy from the Midwest scold me about pronouns.

I guess what would be interesting (and what my original comment was about) is how / if the California communication style got started in SV and then traveled around everywhere else via the tech industry. I think it likely started as an aspect of a particular location and then became an industry thing later.

> I often notice how the communication style on the West Coast is much less confrontational and more “everything is awesome”, which I think leads to the sort of fake enthusiasm the author grew tired of projecting.

I raise you British cynicism and the sarcastic piss taking that pervades our every day conversation. Frankly we are truly a world and culture away from California.

I'm afraid it's pervasive here as well. Just talk to people about AI :)

I love it.

There have been a few times in my life where I put everything on the line (or so I felt then) for a value I deeply held. Risking friendships, letting go of money, deeply uprooting behaviors… all for abstract (yet impactful) ideas like honesty and kindness.

I in no way regretted those choices, ever, and found that after a few weeks or months my position was strengthened. Integrity has this effect — it closes feedback loops. The result is a deep empowerment.

I praise the author and wish them continued courage.

This is very well written. Good on them for following their integrity.

More people in this industry should realize that there are large sections of it that are deeply toxic to humanity, and reconsider whether they want to be a part of that. For all the "disruption" caused by "unicorns", has it really had a net positive effect on our lives? Big Tech companies keep building technology that is designed to extract as much value from their users by any means necessary. Most of the startup world revolves around growing companies based on this premise, in the hopes of one day making it big as well. There are still companies that ignore this rat race and try to do the right thing, but they are hard to come by. Those are the real unicorns, IMO.

I realize the irony of this opinion on a VC forum. But this needs to resonate here more than anywhere else.

Public Relations used to be known as Propaganda. It rebranded, because of the use of its techniques in war, but it's still based on grabbing attention on the masses who are then put through the sales funnel. It doesn't matter what you are selling, all that matters is that you follow some basic rules. It is not for people with conscience or those who are able to see that what is being sold is not good for the buyer. One of the early commercial successes claimed by that field human activity was successfully encouraging women to smoke cigarettes by hijacking women's liberation movement. When you start that low and are paid more to do more of it, you have to choose money or conscience.

This resonates with me - someone who left big tech 2 months ago. It is so refreshing talking with business owners and thinking of smaller scale ideas. In addition to being a lot more authentic, they seem to generate a lot of wealth.

This person acts like they were disseminating propaganda for the reich. I get that doing corporate PR probably feels very cynical in general but coaching founders not to fumble the bag in an interview or writing blog posts about funding rounds are on the lesser evils side I think. Who is the victim of manipulation there? VCs? Lol

> Who is the victim of manipulation there

Sometimes your own soul becomes the victim that affects you the most.

> This person acts like they were disseminating propaganda for the reich.

I think part of the comfort one could enjoy when working for the Reich is that you are working for your own government and you are part of a large network of people that are actively telling the same lies you are. You might also assume that large parts of the population know you are lying, but you're lying "patriotically," so you feel much less guilt or confrontation over it.

> are on the lesser evils side I think.

It is interesting that this _often_ takes a much larger toll on people than those working in war. More interesting that people think a little moral relativism is the obvious cure. "It could be worse. You could be a Nazi."

> Who is the victim of manipulation there? VCs?

Did you read the article? This person clearly believes that VCs are poisonous entities that pervert the original vision of the founders they invest in so that they may see larger and faster returns on their speculative investments.

So.. probably.. the entire industry?

I don’t know. The whole thing feels pretty insular. Who even pays attention to this kind of content that isn’t in the industry? The general public doesn’t care about this. An actually bad example of corporate PR is spinning oil spills or dangerous side effects with prime time advertisements. This is just good business imo

You don’t need to be not-doing evil things to feel dissatisfied with your work. There was a line in the post about not having written anything they actually believed in for a long time.

That kind of thing weighs one’s soul down, even if it’s not “evil” in a grand sense.

this.

I imagine the author found themselves approaching their job like many of us here would approach a highly paid job where you have to write COBOL or caricaturally bad entreprise Java all day.

Yes, but also at the same time I feel like we need to raise the bar for what isn't evil. Maybe not Bible levels of unwashed hands are evil. Maybe we could start calling the BS evil. That doesn't mean we have to call everyone involved evil, but the BS can still be evil.

They are disseminating propaganda! Not for the reich but for an other evil: greed.

Great summation of how it looks (and smells) from the outside. The only thing that jarred me out of furious agreement was this line:

> At least I have my integrity.

And I may be throwing stones from a glass house but, in my opinion, they have 6 months of integrity on a backdrop of <unknown number> of years of quite specific non-integrity.

Exiting the speeding-train-with-no-brakes saves you. Helping to stop the train has at least the chance to save others, which earns integrity.

Write an (anonymous?) blog describing how to recognise the bullshit, what the strategies are that you, yourself employed to convince the rubes. Expose your methods so that others who are employing them are made toothless.

There lieth integrity.

Edited to add:

This kinda thing, it's good to see the reversal: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/techs-accountability-tantrum-...

It’s easy to wax poetic about integrity when you got a few million in the bank.

That's what they're doing , but not anonymously. They're writing tech critical articles, which their friend advised them not to do

Good on them, I applaud them for deciding to change even at the cost of a fat check.

I would not, my bank account really matters Integrity might sooth my soul, but not my retirement.

Life increasingly feels like a trade off between integrity and living in modern society.

Advertising.

That's the problem. Computing has become a branch of the ad industry.

What we need is a big tax on advertising and marketing. In the US, it doesn't create more demand, because most people are spent out. It just moves demand around. So much of that effort is a net lose that pushes prices up.

(This might be politically possible during an "anti-tech" Trump administration.)

Advertising is a big part of it, sure. But it is merely a component of late-stage capitalism. Using psychological manipulation to sell products is the most profitable way of sustaining a business we've invented yet, but we have many other ways to unscrupulously exploit one another for financial gains. Humanity has been doing that for millennia, and we've gotten very good at it.

> most profitable way of sustaining a business we've invented yet

Which is why it's something to tax. As opposed to more productive endeavors.

Sadly, advertising is the best way to pay for your online product in most cases.

Micro-payments have been tried a few times but most people did'nt like to pay for stuff that they used to get for "free". Since everyone is now locked into a few big tech platforms, they can now supplement their ad income by charging users, too.

That seemed to work for a while, but now everybody who actually has original content of any value seems to have a paywall.

I'm freelancing about ten years in audiovisual production and design. I'm avoid commercial sphere. I'm absolutely avoiding product advertising.

In those 10 years I realized how fake it is. Basically product advertising is proof that product is not good enough to be sold on market. Good product is advertising by itself. With this honesty, you cannot participate in fake indistry.

"Good wine needs no bush".

Great piece. Good on them for getting out.

>Give me a half-baked startup idea, a semi-charismatic founder and a fistful of VC dollars, and I could write a story compelling enough it barely mattered whether there was an ounce of truth in it.

Pretty sure anyone can do this. The setup is not in the writing of the story but in the things you just listed...

> Tech is an out-of-control locomotive with no fucking brakes.

The way I see it, "tech" is simply the area where a very old pattern is playing out.

In another era, the dreams being peddled would involve gold from transatlantic expeditions, Dutch tulips, textile machines, railroad networks, etc.

Thank you for your honest words, I needed that.

I am one of the tiny wheels in the corner of this industry in an organization not built on top of loose bullshit from the start with the speed of light but made to build useful tools for engineers decades ago. However along the road the 'do whatever that looks good' overruled the 'do something good' in the competition with the pretentious capitalists and their servants wandering in all corners of the industry now poisioning good places with attitudes they learned and grown with in bad places and now being considered 'experts of the industry', not to mention the need of survival pushes you in this direction, the must pick up the indutry trends or die panick makes you do things you hate, and all this sweeped in to my low level of building parts so I have to make things that look good with degrading quality tools and degrading quality operating system built to look good to sell instead of helping the user so my every day, yes, every day work is a piss in headwind uphill. The products of the industry serves itself rather than the users, we can do a lot very fast that we wouldn't need to do if things were made right not pretentious. The life got difficult on a whole different level, not easier, with the products of the industry. I see little option than getting out, it is poisioned to all parts now. I have two babies so it is hard and very risky but I will need to show example to them soon and this is not something to show with integrity. Not to mention that staying is also risky when you are increasingly handled as commodity (Human Resources is a very hones title indeed!!). The previous personality of yours made this happen with the likes but still thank you for not doing it anymore and for spreading your story. I might never be in a position to work with you but if I will I will recommend you.

Sort of a vapid piece.

The optimism and buy-in that excited people about tech from the debut of the iPhone until fairly recently was a function of PR and technology marketers-- like the author-- doing their jobs very well. For any industry, generating interest and excitement is more than a purely descriptive process. The magical venture doesn't just appear and then the marketers have the simple job of describing it. Marketers/strategists/PR people play a very important role surveying the project and then articulating a compelling vision. That vision then becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy since stakeholders (both creators and users) have bought into the promise of worth.

If strategists aren't able to see a path forward, to survey the field and identify the things that make the project worthwhile, exciting, sustainable, tactical, etc... then they're just not great at their job.

Admitting that you haven't really believed in anything you've worked on as a marketer is a bit like an actor admitting that someone else is reading their lines. A good marketer, like a good actor, lives in their promises like they are already real. The realer and more convinced you are, the more you can speak your vision into reality.

> A good marketer, like a good actor, lives in their promises like they are already real. The realer and more convinced you are, the more you can speak your vision into reality.

Wow. Don't you see the problem with selling something that doesn't exist? There's a thin line between making up a story to make people buy a product, and straight up scamming people with a nonexistent product. Elizabeth Holmes was a genius marketer, but is that really somebody you want to idealize?

Marketers necessarily sell something that doesn't exist because part of their job is creating that thing.

Theranos is an example of a failed project through and through, but even something unarguably successful like the iPhone was built through market strategizing-- not just technical engineering. Identifying what consumers wanted, conveying that vision, shaping a compelling brand, these are all things that can easily be written off as "fake" by people who cannot buy into the vision, but when done well they are just as important as the technical innovations.

> Marketers necessarily sell something that doesn't exist because part of their job is creating that thing.

Funny. I thought a marketer's job is helping companies sell their product, not selling a nonexistent product based on a vision. The individuals and companies doing the latter are known as grifters, snake oil salesmen and scammers.

The iPhone succeeded because it was a fantastic product released at the right moment in history. Apple saw a major gap in the market, and they filled it brilliantly. No amount of marketing would've made the iPhone a success if it wasn't an outstanding product on its own right. Apple embellished its capabilities with its usual marketing tactics, but the product was real, and people wanted it regardless.

What you're advocating for is exactly what Theranos did. Market the product first even if it doesn't exist yet, and the product will miraculously materialize from that vision. This is known as fraud, and is what rightfully landed its CEO in prison.

This is a popular misconception. Tech has always been built in the face of massive distrust, mischaracterization, and dismissiveness - especially by media outlets.

PR was not how tech overcame that. It was charismatic founders (who often broke the rules of PR at the time) and massive break-throughs in adoption by winning customers over directly.

It’s honestly amusing that so many believe that marketers were the reason users decided to love tech. By and large, market-speak was the anti-thesis of what would win over the early adopters of tech. Like most sea change movements, tech was very punk at the start. To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value.

Doesn’t feel like it today, but most of the people I know in tech are still coming from a place of wanting to build things of genuine value, usefulness, and helpfulness. Those intentions may not be enough, but there’s not much to be gained in discounting them either.

Charismatic founders are PR lol. Steve Jobs was a market strategist.

>To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value.

Positioning yourself as punk, as pro-consumer, as an alternative to the corporate hegemony... This was all carefully developed by marketers and brand strategists to grow their vision of selling tech. You are not immune to propaganda, it was not some granola revolution that gave the people iPhones. And that's ok! It's ok to admit that marketing is an important force that should be leveraged for change and innovation.

I think the single best argument against this viewpoint is to just look outside. People are obsessed with iPhones because they're a superior product, not because they were sucked into a PR campaign filled with Justin Long ads.

What I can see by just loooking outside is that people are obsessed with iPhones. Why they are obsessed is definitely not obvious at a glance. Could be quality, could be PR, could be something else.

You just think your opinion of something is the obvious truth and anyone not seeing it is blind.

iPhones are used so widely around the world by such a dominant percentage of the population. That it's due to a PR campaign seems extremely unlikely to me. The best advertising in the world doesn't have a fraction of that kind of reach.

Thinking that TV spots are the limits of brand strategy is just kind of naive.

You think iPhones are a superior product... Why? Other phones have more RAM, better screens, more capable OS. An iPhone is designed in response to market demands-- it is the vision of Apple to anticipate what users will want, and to show users what phones can be.

So many Apple billboards around New York show kids or families, the "memories" function of the iOS Photos app is designed to pull from forgotten pictures and tug on your heartstrings. Part of this is Apple marketing responding to a demographic of tech-consuming people becoming parents or grandparents... But it is also Apple showing us what tech is good for. It's a vision of compassionate technology that will hopefully sell more iPhones while also structuring the narrative of what an iPhone is. An iPhone is a superior product not because it has the best tech specs or the best combination of components. An iPhone is the superior product because the future of technology can be compassionate, and Apple wants to position themselves there. This is a marketing strategy, and it is likely why you associate iPhones with quality and superiority.

We cannot immediately see all possible uses and promises of technology, no matter how tech-literate we think we are. It takes institutional vision (in many cases a function of market/brand strategy) to figure out what makes a good product and how we can show people that our product fulfills that idea.

The TV commercial reference was a joke. Sheesh.

iPhones are extremely popular around the world and in 99% of those places, the people have little or no interaction with Apple billboards or marketing. Not everyone is a family in New York City, or even speaks English.

You’d have more of a point if you said Apple aims to portray a premium brand and therefore they have this reputation globally because of marketing, but even then, that doesn’t last for long if the products themselves don’t have a good reputation.

Joke or not, you're still demonstrating that you're naive about the scope of brand strategy.

The majority of brand management work is not material that is shown to the public, it is strategic decision making about how to position a brand and control it's reputation across markets. This includes yuppies in NYC and teenagers in Southeast Asia. The cultural positioning of Apple is a function of western hegemony and global memetics. An Eastern European housewife that wants an iPhone doesn't want it because she's done the tech research to understand that it is the most reliable and technically sound product, she wants it because Apple has taken great care to maintain their image through brand strategy. She probably sees iPhones on social media, in the hands of celebrities, the nicest store in her city is the new Apple outpost, they're teaching classes on apps and she wants to have the experience that she sees other iPhone users having.

Your misunderstanding is a larger trend in the tech space of people overvaluing "utility" instead of recognizing that the driving forces of any industry-- not just tech-- cannot be reduced to a spec sheet.

I actually live in Eastern Europe, and no, that woman doesn’t care about the iPhones in the hands of celebrities and there is no Apple Store here, and the top shop that specializes in Apple products is mediocre and has bad reviews. In fact, there are no Apple Stores in a lot of countries. [0] There is also minimal advertising done by Apple - although there is a ton by Huawei (how well do you think that works?) iPhones are popular because they’re perceived as a high quality product from a dependable Western company. Not because they have billboards and celebrity sponsorships.

You really don’t seem to understand how widespread Apple is, and instead are intent on portraying yourself as some kind of expert that puts down others. Their popularity isn’t merely due to some brand strategy plan, as their products are practically a baseline of modern life at this point.

I didn’t say anything about “utility” I said their products were higher quality, which they are. Especially on the design/UI front. People buy them because the competition simply isn’t as good, among other social reasons. A mastermind branding plan is not really that relevant when you’re already as widespread as they are. Nothing I wrote has anything to do with customers doing tech research.

So just to reiterate and wrap up this conversation: no, Apple is not widely used because their branding team crafted a smart campaign for every corner of the globe. They are widespread because they’ve been making solid products for a long time, people use them, and then form an impression that they’re quality products. All the advertising and celebrity sponsorships and everything else are dressing at best.

This is a unique situation and if you were talking about anyone other than Apple, I’d agree with you that the market positioning / PR is key, but in this instance it’s simply not the case.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Store#Countries_and_regi...

Easy to say when you made money, that's the good moment to get out.

“Technology has potential when it's guided by ethical considerations and a genuine desire to improve the human condition.”

Yup, and Bill and Dave are probably the last two that I can really point at to say that’s what they had. True ethics and a genuine desire. Probably also the Fab 8. It may have stopped there.

“The tech industry has a long memory.”

Nope. I think it has no memory and zero penalty for failure. That’s, of course, a double-edged sword.

It would be easier to take her seriously as a critic of tech industry BS if her LinkedIn didn't list her as a current advisor to "MODA DAO" and her social media handle wasn't "@daojoan.eth". Yee-ikes.

> The inflated valuations, cult-like frat house “culture,” and the relentless, mindless pursuit of growth that comfortably glossed over the human cost of "disruption."

It has been finally admitted.

The entire VC grift that was seen through unfounded valuations was purposely executed to gloss over the issues and positive spin to unprofitable startups and startups generating little to no revenue for years rather than necessary scrutiny in their business models.

> A nagging doubt. An odd moment of "Jesus, what the hell am I doing?"

> I would lie awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling. My life was slipping away, and I had nothing to show for it

Perhaps the bullshit industrial complex just accelerates this realization. I think I'm a bit older than the OP. I work on notionally quite pro-social software and still wake up thinking the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#...

in other words, she had a midlife crisis

I kept on gritting my teeth, waiting for the author to try to sell me something, or on something. Says something about this bullshit industrial complex, I suppose, that I’m so jaded about anything contrarian in this vein.

Everyone with an ounce of common sense can see that the gig economy is just a way to pay people less and side step labour laws, so a small number of people can sleep on a bed of money. I find it obscene and sociopathic.

If you are grounded in religious faith, your whole life won’t revolve around whatever your job is. The author seems very intertwined with his job and the output.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t analyze the meaning of your work, but he seems fairly un-anchored

Belief in a higher power is not a substitute for finding goodness in what you do.

I agree - with rose tinted glasses, there was a period that lasted all the way to shortly after the release of the iPhone where it was reasonable to be (and much of society was) excited about the possibilities of technology.

Those times are dead. Financial engineering and the monetization of every piece of user data, ever flat surface, every eyeball, from birth to death have left me a sad husk sitting in a chair typing for a paycheck. My solace has been the kind of creative activities now undermined by generative AI.

So many great artists got their start at the entry level - whether as a mall portrait photographer, an understudy at a newspaper, or what not. With those roles killed by AI, where will innovation or even passion come from?

> Belief in a higher power is not a substitute for finding goodness in what you do.

But it can be, namely because it’s one path to finding motivation to do good. Not saying it ends up there for everyone, but it certainly can be for some.

Belief in a higher power won't make you feel better about lying to boost stock prices. If your higher or is supportive of lying without feeling bad, find a new one.

Belief in higher power gives you the coordinate system that is not moving with the train. Doesn’t have to be religious really, bit it gives more credibility if the value system if X thousand years old.

Pretty sure this is a she/her situation.

Anchoring your life to a set of beliefs that, by necessity, are entirely unanchored by reality is not a strategy that works for everyone.

Not beliefs, but practices and experiences that appear to reveal truths otherwise inaccessible

That’s just acid, no religion required for that

One can ground themselves in many ways, many of which don’t necessarily include ceasing further inquiry as many relgious faiths utilize as cheap mental crutches. Becoming un-anchored is a reasonable place to be while trying to hash out what makes meaning for you.

There have been plenty of bad and religious people. Doesn't seem to make much difference.

You're getting a lot of hate, but it's kind of true. For most people, pulling at the thread of what is meaningful will just lead you into the abyss lol.

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