Majority of US teens have lost trust in Big Tech

The company has a product, gets loans based on said product. The terms are front-loaded according to your standard S-adoption curve which under some representations mirrors a Ponzi curve.

The debt taken must eventually be repaid. The bankers know this which is why they loan to these entities to begin with, and I'm sure they get kickbacks when the debt defaults as it almost always does from market manipulation. Then someone comes in buys everything up for pennies on the dollar to enhance their monopoly.

Non-reserve debt issuance is money printing. The business either fails later when it should have failed overnight, or it becomes or gets acquired by a silent state actor that can be coerced.

This is the ugly reality. Bankers get rich off the usury, and bailouts, the market shrinks and dies. Eventually products vanish, and once you realize the game as an actual producer you stop playing into their hands.

When the entire environment is disadvantaged from the get-go, you stop participating, you withhold your intellect, and strike. Keeping the fruits of your mind for yourself, and others of like mind.

You are not imposing destruction by doing this, you are getting out of the way, because eventually the bill always comes due, and parasites kill their hosts and then die themselves.

Nowadays you could not get away with it. But once the meta shifts again there may be another timespan in which it is possible to run with it.

Ultimately the facts and evidence are all there at least since 2005. We just all turned a blind eye to it.

Just writing this I cant believe it has been 20 years. I still remember the day when rumours started Google is doing their own browser and worried Firefox may not be funded by them anymore.

It took the world another 15 years before they were cynical enough to admit something is wrong.

The first two I'd like to avoid something analogous for a new order based on trust, but maybe the last one we can bring back if our leaders start to have a larger vision beyond focus on GDP, Stock Market returns, inflation, and unemployment rates.

But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster.

Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.

Women's employment and/or compensation in the United States peaked approximately two decades ago, and has since declined. Xi Jingping wasn't China's dictator yet, so China was a bit more free. Crimea hadn't been annexed yet, and Russians had much more access to the internet. The alt-right was still in its infancy. Brexit hadn't happened yet.

Hence, when a British think tank claims freedom is falling across the world, I'm inclined to believe it. And levels of authoritarianism are inversely correlated with trust.

On the flipside, a whole generation of people across many of the poorest parts of the world have experienced increases of standards of living due to globalization.

Those words are the problem. Why even have a democratic system if everything is done in “lockstep”? Moreover, “forward” is a highly opinionated term.

Perhaps we can all, in lockstep, take a Great Leap Forward.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

Lockstep is never a good thing. And institutions are absolutely not trustworthy.

  > It's the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.

Trust is a necessary part of a society. Trust, but verify. But you still need trust. Without trust, the burdens are far too great. The world is too complex for one man to know everything. We have so much information and there is so much to know, one man is unlikely to even truly know one thing. Look at those with PhDs for an example. How narrow the research is. How narrow their expertise is. Do one yourself and you'll see that there are deep rabbitholes even in what appears to be a very simple topic.

More important than mistrusting institutions is how you mistrust them. Understand their incentives, their patterns of behavior, their past actions, and hold them up against the theoretical ideals they set for themselves.

Far too often I see people mistrusting institutions on lazy, poorly thought out grounds - "government bad, regulations bad, taxes bad, press bad" etc and so forth.

> It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.

The parent comment you are responding to is appropriately qualified, and you are throwing away that qualification. Trusting institutions that taking advantage of you to look out for your interests is worse than not trusting institutions at all (example: the institution of slavery, justified by racist pseudoscience, when you are not a protected class). Yes, the existence of institutions that can be trusted to look out for your interests (example: food safety regulators wrt. hygiene) is important, if that is what you are trying to say.

It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on!

Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow.

Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes.

Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it.

On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast.

Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim.

Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule?

Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition.

The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation.

To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.

But what might be even worse is headline reading. Like you don't read articles like you use to. People read the headlines which are rage bait and click bait. Realtime rage on "developing stories" than nothing when the boring conclusion is known weeks later. People are going insane.

The death of the boring news paper is about as a big problem as Instagram. Modern newspapers just plainly sucks and are mostly rehashes of agency news anyways.

I think we need to figuratively pull the plug on the internet. Like make it some sort of loser thing to be hooked on social media and light minded news.

> stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered

--William F. Buckley Jr to Gore Vidal in 1968 on ABC television

Buckley also hosted a show on PBS at the time.

Joe Rogan didn't lie us into a disastrous $6 trillion war that destabilized the middle east, created all sorts of knock-on consequences such as mass immigration into Europe from the Middle East that we're still living with two decades later. Joe Rogan didn't spend decades cheerleading immigration, outsourcing, and globalization policies most Americans never wanted (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...).

Joe Rogan is popular because people can tell that his gut instincts and general world view are consistent with their own, which makes them trust his takes. If your alternative to that is people who believe in their hearts that the U.S. should bring democracy and human rights to the world, or take on millions of immigrants, you'll never get peoples' trust, just as you probably wouldn't trust someone who thinks the rapture is coming soon.

I mean up until 5 years ago I trusted Microsoft and Google to handle my mail, since I though I was too unimportant and it would to much of an effort to read my mails for them. But I in no way trusted them.

Concerning Amazon I guess most trust they will have their toaster. Like the same question about Walmart would be about food safety and quality.

Not corporate culture or long term political influence.

But they do tend to control what entity they are employed by, and sometimes what team within that entity they work for. Let's not defend programmers as helpless cogs who are forced by their evil managers to program bad things. We all have agency, even during bad hiring times and bear markets.

If my boss asked me to build the Torment Nexus, I'd resist up to and including quitting. A disappointingly high number of us wouldn't even put up a fight.

But according to HN, teenagers could always use an open source alternative to Android on their phone if they were so passionate about it.

But that just requires any cellphone that can text, and cell phones have been common for 25 years. Are there some specific examples of where you have to have a smartphone?

It misses 2 main points:

1. The system we have seems to have done a pretty good job, since people are choosing its products, rather than products created by another system.

2. A lot of people will rarely make a larger sacrifice than maybe quitting Twitter for a while despite spending a huge amount of time trying to preach to other people about how important their cause is. Which makes it seem like the noises they make are often just posturing.

I think your perspective may have been different if you grew up seeing it weaponized and your data constantly being stolen

If the KKK wanted to put their stuff online, it certainly wouldn't be hosted on Microsoft's website, surrounded by Microsoft branding and ads that pay Microsoft - there were no "platforms", they'd have to make their own HTML and upload it to their own hosting provider.

And the nearest thing to "Social Media" was hundreds of tiny phpBB forums, IRC channels and suchlike, administered by genuine human beings, and for minimal reward. Censorship meant blocking mentions of viagra and cialis, which everyone knew were obvious spam. You can't put profits before users when there aren't any profits. And of course the guy with ops in the #north-west-london-anime IRC channel is going to look out for the users, they're his buddies.

Algorithmic news feeds hadn't been invented; the front page of Slashdot was whatever CmdrTaco and Hemos decided to post. Clickbait? Ragebait? Parody story mistaken for real? Dupe of a story from yesterday? They just wouldn't post it, simple.

Into this unbelievable environment came a tech company whose goal was to "organise the world's information" with the guiding principle "don't be evil" and such was the hope and optimism at the time, people treated such claims as literally true.

You're just assuming there were only two options for that question and making up a number.

This type of magical thinking is unfortunately endemic to humans

Proof? Cigarette companies, Dupont, and others were happy to do that.

Yeah sure they have little moonshot side projects involving quantum computing or whatever, but data centers and surveillance and browser malware has all been around for decades. They've been moving the needle hardly any all.

These are ad companies, or propaganda companies, or attention companies. They have malicious intent, and calling them technology companies confuses people into thinking that technology itself has malicious intent.

I'm shocked and dismayed that this book is not more prominent. The book opened my eyes not only to the fact that these companies would become enshitty, but why they weren't in the first place.

now that they're at the top — they vacuum all the data up, give you shit results, and sell more data than you probably even know about yourself to advertisers

You have options other than Macbooks. The communist kid with a Macbook is a meme for a reason, they're out of touch. It's absurd to call oneself a communist or socialist while buying one of the most expensive options from one of the biggest companies.

What a different example? It's easier to take a communist/socialist who drives a basic Corolla seriously than one who drives a BMW.

20 years ago being a rebel meant having a GMail account instead of a hotmail or aol account.

Today it means not having a GMail account.

It only became an issue because it helped Trump win. Obama spammed Facebook years earlier, which I think is much worse and people in the tech community called it 'genius'.

This sort of double standards is why nobody trusts big tech.

(now, how organic was that? Probably impossible to tell at this distance in time)

The Facebook driven Rohingya genocide was starting up in the same time frame (adoption in 2011, military forces deployed in 2017). But following the effectiveness of social media as a revolution-triggering force, governments and political parties had to catch up and control it for their own purposes. Now we have what's effectively been a rightwing revolutionary force derived from the Tea Party take over the Republican party and replace it with strongman populism.

HK protests (2019): https://news.sky.com/story/hong-kong-protests-facebook-and-t... ; Chinese government taking action against the last of the 2010s protest wave.