How the Tech World Turned Evil

tthomasstephan about 3 hours ago 16 commentsRead Article on newrepublic.com

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Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

cadamsdotcom•about 2 hours ago

The irony of tech is that reducing friction (such as the Internet making it easy to go to one provider or another) also makes it easy to go straight to the “best”.

By being consistently 0.1% better in the early days, many of these companies earned themselves an unassailable lead. Why go to the little guy when the big guy is big and safe and familiar (yes we at HN don’t operate this way; we aren’t normies and are a minority so we don’t hold sway en masse)

Thanks to a lot of hard work to make great products, big tech has (earned!) market power but still has a mandate from shareholders - and even if not legally required via fiduciary duty it IS the current culture - to find growth at all cost.

When there’s no growth to be had by being nice, but you’re still being told to grow.. well, yeah.

sackfield•26 minutes ago

If you are actually looking for an article on "How the Tech World Turned Evil", you are going to be sorely disappointed.

This article is, as you might expect, the usual cast of villains and the usual cast of saviors. The villains only act like villains, and the heroes only act like heroes. Never once are the heroes actions suspect, and never once are the villains actions sympathetic.

If you support the heroes of this article, and your dopamine lights up when your opinions are echoed in a publication, then you may love this article. Having said that, I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.

scottyah•about 2 hours ago

Seems like they mostly stayed the same, just media perception changed once they realized it's more profitable to hate on tech, and safer than hating on established bad industries like Oil and Gas, malpractice in farming, corruption and fraud in politics, whatever is going on in the medical industry.

malfist•about 2 hours ago

You really don't think the tech industry has changed?

scottyah•about 1 hour ago

Not as much as the article (and especially headline) suggest. It most certainly hasn't been frozen in time but I'd wager there are more people trying to use tech to make the world a better place now than ever before (though there has been a massive influx of people who make almost no attempt).

nitwit005•about 1 hour ago

If you look at an individual like Mark Zuckerberg, the media reputation went all the way from heroic savior, to fairly negative.

I'm sure they've changed as a person, given the amount of time that has passed, but I don't feel their behavior has changed that dramatically.

stephc_int13•about 1 hour ago

Industrial empires naturally have this tendency, once their power level is putting them in the same playground as small states, they become different entities, fighting for their own survival.

The concentration of power of bureaucratic structures, no matter their nature, will always be in tension with individual freedom.

stult•25 minutes ago

This is exactly why I don't understand the libertarian right in the US. Large corporations are just as capable of the unaccountable abuses that large governments are.

amelius•about 2 hours ago

Well, you don't have to be Stallman to have seen this coming. Or did anyone seriously think that this time it will be different?

craig_s_bell•about 1 hour ago

The accompanying artwork is really something: https://images.newrepublic.com/580ae26a8830e8fa8f2f054ca3232...

swader999•about 2 hours ago

My uninformed opinion of it all is that certain companies have been blessed or anointed by the intelligence agencies for many decades and they've been acting on their behalf every since. Google, Apple, Amazon, Reddit, Microsoft, Elon's stuff, the Telcos and so on. Backdoors, direct access and so on. Same for all the major crypto on/off ramps.

scottyah•about 2 hours ago

Once you start to have a large influence on the world, people come knocking.

bigyabai•about 1 hour ago

It's not uninformed, you're just working with what you've got. Snowden credibly condemned American tech businesses as being conjoined at the hip with the NSA, without exposing all of the blackmail material that the fed had on them. It's overwhelmingly likely that their relationship has only deepened, we've seen no evidence that FAANG is serious about detaching itself from US influence.

10 years ago you'd probably hear some spiel about Bitlocker being "safe enough", or the iPhone's many virtues as a private enclave. Fast-forward to today, and it's hard to see American tech as benign.

anon291•about 2 hours ago

They still are bringing power to the people. Including people like Musk on this list is frankly ridiculous. Sure the man has issues, but before his takeover of X, it was impossible to say anything online without threats of government intervention for 'wrongspeak'. Yes yes yes, I know there still are government threats for wrongspeak with the new administration, but luckily, no one is going to take down your post right now

They still are bringing power to the people. It just turns out a lot of the media types don't really like the people. And honestly, I can't really blame them... a lot of people are awful. However, if you claim to want to return power to the people, then you should want to return it to all people. Otherwise, just be honest and admit you're a believe in oligarchy and aristocracy -- there is nothing wrong with that; most countries are aristocracies.

ijustwantrx•about 1 hour ago

> it was impossible to say anything online without threats of government intervention for 'wrongspeak'

[citation fucking needed]

Animats•about 1 hour ago

Dubai has cracked down on anyone reporting damage in the city from the war with Iran. That incident about their "7 star" hotel being hit is being played as "minor damage". That the hotel has now closed for an 18-month renovation is just coincidental. Trump keeps trying to sue media organizations. He's trying to prosecute a member of the U.S. Senate for insisting that US troops obey US laws of war. China has severe Internet censorship, of course. So does Russia, although it's less well organized.