Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance.
By working for them you are enabling this.
By working for them you are enabling this.
I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided.
I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily work from home.
None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones.
In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too long.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
You lived closer to a city than I did but the UK doesn’t have insane zoning laws like the US so there was still plenty to do even in my small town.
My own lasting impression is that this is the “American experience” that is not dead nor impossible to recreate in 2026. We just all need to learn to be decent Americans again.
I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
It's not making everybody miserable "yet". But the current rate of change suggest that is the goal, and that's where the alarm comes from. We had the term "embrace, extend, extinguish" used to describe their business last decade and they clearly want to extend that philosphy to the consumers over time too. Some parts of tech are already arguably at the "extinguish" stage as we speak.
>You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
I feel inclined to nitpick a nitpicker who rejects a statement "there making everyone miserable" with "yes, but not everything is miserable".
Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.
You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.
It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?
Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)
That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.
> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.
So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.
Not only that, but big tech proprietary products have depended and depend heavily on F/LOSS and community supported code.
Literally all of them are.
Today, these things are actually LESS accessible due to enshitification from entrenched big tech companies.
>None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
I also enjoy having those things, but we had all of them 15 years ago. Since then we got... algorithmic feeds?
> Sent from my iPhone.
But seriously, this is a political problem, not a technological problem. The harms of technology are like the harms of the food industry or the gambling industry. Those of us who care, know these things can be bad for society, and we regulate them. Our society doesn’t care, we literally just legalized sports gambling, and the leagues have embraced it, forgetting the clear history of what happened last time.
Hating technology is like hating metal because you don’t like gun deaths. The problem is that our electorate has stopped caring about society.