Being optimistic and positive on tech in the first place is the root issue here. This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient. Being overly optimistic about an industry or field is in my view a worldview error, and a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
> Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
This sounds like it's better to work within the system rather than try to overthrow it. You need more than a little angst to completely reset cultural norms. Maybe you're optimizing for a local maxima instead of realizing the true potential of saying "fuck everything" and replacing it.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, not saying the correct response to all adversity is to plot a revolution. But my point is sincere - sometimes it is the best thing to burn it to the ground and start over. Private healthcare seems like a pretty good example of a system that should be abolished rather than massaged (assuming your goal is better healthcare at a more affordable price) and we have decades of data from our own country and others to corroborate that.
I think what you are saying is orthogonal to what they are saying.
You can be positive and optimistic about big scale societal changes that throw out all the established notions. Likewise, you can also be cynical and jaded about small scale changes that just aim to incrementally improve things.
Aiming for big changes doesn't necessarily imply you have to be cynical. In fact I think you're more likely to be able to achieve big changes if you're optimistic about them.
If you're willing to accept small changes as a win in a fundamentally broken system (in the sense the incentives aren't aligned and there is no real accountability feedback mechanism) then the problem is you aren't cynical enough to attempt something drastic. I'd actually go even further and argue it's a form of being brainwashed, usually as a byproduct of effective propaganda. Going back to the example of private healthcare - I don't fucking care about small incremental changes when the system itself is still fundamentally broken. We need more cynicism about the status quo so people say "fuck this" and replace it with something better.
The point is: what are you going to do if single-payer healthcare does not materialize in the US? You have many options; plotting a revolution, working for reform inside the system or impotently complaining on social media. What is actually workable for you?
The same goes for the article's author. Sounds like they're shocked—SHOCKED—that private companies are just out to make money, and don't actually have our best interests at heart. The real issue is that they bought into the fantasy in the first place. But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world? If it will have no effect, why let it get you worked up at all? If it will have an effect, go out and do it.
> This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient.
That sounds like a story of its own. Would you care to share the story about the corruption she saw? We so often hear the stories about companies hiking prices for lifesaving medicine fo no apparent reason other than profit, but it would be interesting to hear what she saw from the inside?
Personal financial payments to physicians are a common marketing strategy used by the pharmaceutical industry. These payments include both cash (typically for consulting services or invited lectures) and in-kind gifts such as meals.
Someone who's in medical school (or finishes and goes into medicine) isn't really "inside" the pharmaceutical industry and typically has a very, very poor understanding of how pharmaceuticals are developed and brought to market.
The most substantial corruption in the health/life sciences/medicine world is simple profit motive at hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and insurers, and especially when those three entities combine into mega "pay-vidors" like UHG.
In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends, and overwhelm the incumbent minority. Once you could use a sleek, trendy iPhone instead of a clunky desktop computer to get online, the writing was on the wall.
Well we made it “idiot proof” didn’t we, and all the idiots came. We need a sort of Dark Web with low crime, and mostly that’s things like HN and people running private Slack instances.
So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Fidonet... Woe unto them, for they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind. Their troubles shall multiply as bugs and glitches in their software.
I don’t think it was about stupidity it was about desire, they would not want to come here because it’s just talking to other nerds on bbs. But bandwidth increased and porn and flash games opened the floodgates.
How many friends do people really need anyway. My social circle is peer to peer, asynchronous and sporadic and I like it that way. There are a lot of little hidden communities existing off of the public internet that behave like old school forums.
I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
I think back to all of those people talking breathlessly of really free speech and me nodding along just as convinced. Yikes.
I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
I think it's worth recalling why that optimism, at least in part.
Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.
They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.
Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.
From my experience mentoring junior designers Ive learned to set the utopian belief that "its all for the user" is a matter of perspective. A stakeholder is also a user and their utopia is different from any preconceived ideal user an upset designer might have. It can be more constructive to enable the continuation of and building up of new fantasies rather than see it as a doomsday scenario where the good times have ended. they never existed and they always existed its just how you look at it. solve problems and harmonize the multi-utopias :)
> Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
I'm not sure about that. Very little was digital back then. It was far easier to claim lack of earnings back then than it is now, even with the high rates
Kind of, yeah. I remember being a teenager in the 90's and it really felt like things were going to be radically different, and better. The cold war was over (well, we thought it was), anybody could talk to anybody else anywhere, anybody could publish anything, and surely this would mean regular people would be more empowered than ever before, right?
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
Everyone's different but I think I felt like the increasing polish and commercialization of the web killed it slowly. And that makes sense to an extent, as there was money to be made people would invest more (and have entire teams) in making ad-optimised content instead of just having one person cranking out homestarrunner or thebestpageintheuniverse or what have you.
Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.
Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.
Years before 2015 “the internet” for most people had been replaced by “social media” and its was pretty well understood that big tech companies now had a means and motivation to monetize our most toxic traits.
The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.
Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
Naive twenty something (back then) here. The latter half of the 1900s changed so drastically that yeah... a Star Trek like utopia seemed plausible, if not inevitable.
It wasn't until the mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
It definitely brought about a lot of positive changes. It's fair to be disappointed that some of the things we hoped for didn't materialize, and that a lot of negatives were even worse than expected.
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
If you were alive back then: yeah, pretty much? The expectation was that merely getting a tech education would seamlessly and immediately roll you into a six figure job no matter which industry you were interested in, because much like AI today, tech was literally seen as the magic ingredient that had been missing all this time.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
In the year 2000, Google was fresh, the Internet was becoming a normal thing for people to use and it was supposed to get rid of the old power structures and bring about a new age of egalitarianism and meritocracy. Plus I was younger and much more idealistic. And to be fair, it has caused revolutions and caused new power structures to be established, and torn down old ones. But as the old adage goes, it turns out that power corrupts. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'd like to pretend I'd do better with my money if I'd invented PageRank back in the 90's, but having seen how money corrupts people, I'm not convinced that I would.
> “ The companies themselves and the VC’s they take money from are supporting values and governments that do not act in your best interest and do not even align with their marketing image.”
Anyone who thinks ANY publicly traded company acts in YOUR best interest (unless YOU are serious shareholder) is in the words of my 11-year old kid - delulu :)
My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.
Our actions certainly are, and if we think we have free will, we ought to be able to control those. And I think it is possible for us to do so.
But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about.
We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.
> My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
Ok so I'm curious about this.
In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?
Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
This is my sentiment too. It feels like the world is entering a dark period like it has many times before in history. I don't consider tech to be the cause, but it does seem to accelerate and amplify things.
I'm not genX but I felt the same. Even as late as the late 00s there was still widespread optimism about what the internet would bring. By the late 10s that feeling was completely gone.
I don’t fully disagree with what you say. I think social media also has some positives. The amount of transparency over government and exchange of knowledge and ability to learn is greater now than ever before. Hopefully we will swing back to a balanced lifestyle where phones and social media are just tools that people use in a limited way instead of being addicted to it.
My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
Hardly. Tech is built into the future of every industry in the United States. We still have a runaway advantage with regard to innovation thanks to our tech industry - it impacts at the GDP level. Until that changes, the party is still going.
Utopias are always fantasies. All of them. There is no such thing and never will be. Solve problems and more problems present themselves, often harder ones since we are always swimming against entropy.
That’s life. Life is war against entropy and for the individual at least entropy always wins. We die.
The Internet made countless things better and a few things worse. We notice the things it made worse because humans have a powerful negativity bias, probably because this was adaptive. “Mistake a bush for a lion and you’re fine, but mistake a lion for a bush and you’re dead.” Your ancestors were paranoid enough to survive.
Edit: I do want to add one point on which I am sympathetic. Unfortunately it seems as if politics is a thing the Internet made worse. That’s dangerous because governments have a monopoly on force. Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse is probably an existential problem.
Liberalism (market-driven societies) has a complete inability to imagine any concrete future. Aiming for a utopia at least gives us focus on what matters and what's worth working towards. Without it we'll be seized by reactionary fear at every turn.
Even star trek, a product of liberal society, could not envision a future that did not entail mass collapse and war before we organized ourselves into a more functional species. Star Trek is utopian. We need a lot more utopian sci-ci, IMO.
Liberalism doesn’t try, and shouldn’t, because it takes the position that human beings should be free to seek their own goals rather than have them imposed.
The alternative is to have a vision imposed by the state. History has shown this usually doesn’t work very well and often results in horrors. The horrors come when reality inevitably conflicts with the vision and the political leadership grabs a mallet to bash that square peg into the hole. See: communism, fascism, theocratic regimes, imperial adventures, etc.
When there aren't many problems people seem to invent them. I think people in the US don't realize how unbelievably lucky they are. No- we need a shakeup!
The author is a 14yo complaining that the world is more complex that her land of rainbow ponies. "Those who fly on their fantasies, end up hitting concrete walls".
They have absolutely no theory of power. It's just bad men trying to hurt everyone for fun, and the poor upper-middle class elites (who work for them) not being listened to enough when they speak in the name of black people. Life through the lens of superhero movies.
Us humans do have noble goals which some literally willing to die for and we also produce world class villains and everything in between. Tech does nothing but amplifies what we can do to achieve our goals. It enable all the good things we have dreamed about and it also fucks everything up.
Well it also absorbs a lot of resources. We could have largely the same benefits from tech at a fraction of the cost. But that doesn't produce maximum growth! Or at least, not in terms of GDP.
This sort of thinking is what leads you down the “guns don't kill people” route. Each piece of technology has, in it's design, a set of biases. To someone with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The tools you have affect how you view the world.
It's not that simple. If all I have is a hammer, I don't view everything as a nail; I see first what other uses my hammer can have, then if a hammer won't do the job I seek or create another tool that will.
I am still really happy about what tech has brought us and how comfortable life is in this day. OP brought out all sorts of negative examples, but so could I bring out equal amount or more of positive examples on what the tech has brought us.
I'm excited for what the future brings, and I'm still amazed by how sudden jump there was of ability of LLMs. It's still crazy to me.
Sadly there is an element of mass advantage in any commercial entity. Think of GE in the 1980's and 1990's. This is the effect of a less than perfect capitalism, but it is what we have and requires huge investment to solve humanities problems - who else can do that? Today's armchair philosophers, especially those on LinkedIn and Twitter who spout doom about techno-optimism without looking at the evidence around them?
I can't remember exactly when, but like 8 or so years ago a british guy had a post on HN that questioned all of this and everyone, I mean EVERYONE here basically lambasted him. It was the first time I kinda turned my head and started saying that all this stuff is fake. All these "save the world" job posts, etc.. etc.. it was all bullshit. I think everyone knew that then - but were not willing to admit it outloud.
That's totally a human thing. Digital window dressing (or in this case, defensive tribalistic behavior) is just another projection of how human beings do social things.
Generally speaking, if you place anything under close scrutiny, you will catch yourself (assuming you're human) like the ouroboros - the serpent consuming its own tail. You can't escape the flaws of your own perception and your nature.
All other things, including praising technology and envisioning a better future, are just the tip of the iceberg. People will never find solace outwards unless they turn their focus in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this is impossible for society in our capitalist, highly materialistic world.
This seems very negative and pessimistic to me. My tech utopia fantasies are alive and well.
One key mistake the author makes is misjudging the average person
>They are people who need to game the attention economy by increasingly disrespectful and shocking content, gore, rage bait, dehumanizing pranks17, extreme consumerism like huge shopping hauls, sloppy large mukbangs, shredding lamborghinis18, gambling streams and websites19, game shows20 and more
If your tastes are more sophisticated, you may see the profusion of relatively puerile content on the internet as "gaming the attention economy" - but how do you know the average person doesn't just like watching mukbangs? And why shouldn't they?
In my view - you should get comfortable with the fact that people have different preferences to yours and judge based on outcomes rather than aesthetics.
The author complains about racism. Maybe it's easier to be racist nowadays. On the other hand, in the decades before the internet we had more race related shootings, bombings, etc. Maybe, net net, it's a good thing if the people who would've been forming a militia in the woods 30 years ago are instead posting racist memes on X.
Likewise it's harder to make a blog or your own website today. But, much easier to blow up on X, TikTok, YouTube etc. I just don't see the issue here. We have far more content creators and similar now than in the past.
None of the complaints seem that meaningful to me. Technology improves. Things aren't perfect (yet) - but they might be in the future. We have greater access to information, communication, and intelligence every year. If these trends persist we will use the improvements to enhance all other aspects of life (as we are already doing). The future where power comes from solar, nuclear, or fusion, physical labor comes from machines, cognitive labor comes from AI, material comes from space travel, advances in biology/physics/chemistry radically extend our life and health spans is not only possible, it is visibly approaching.
There are several classes of problems that corporations are not well-designed to solve. Corporations couldn't and didn't end slavery, they couldn't and didn't end child labor, they couldn't and didn't create the 40 hour work week, they couldn't and didn't prevent our rivers from turning into toxic sludge, they couldn't and didn't prevent our air from turning into unbreathable smog, etc. etc.
After having read about some arrests relating to an underground network of people who purchase and view videos of monkeys being tortured and killed, for pleasure, and those who shoot and provide these videos... I'm beginning to wonder whether the internet itself was a good idea.
It would be important to know what they would be doing without the Internet. Are those desires as such that if they don't get outlet, they explode and so something worse in real life, or does being able to consume it on the Internet normalize it for them, pushing to seek for more.
It would still happen with or without the internet, so long as there are video cameras. First is back-alley vhs or cd's then dvd's. Take video cameras aways and you have secret handshake underground viewing parties. I've finally come to terms with the idea that: humans are gonna human. And it allows me to focus on the more positive things that have also come from the internet, because then you get to find the positive, kind ways that humans are gonna human.
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