> 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.

>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.

Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.

I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.

It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.

> 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?

You've got to separate the tech from human nature. Penicillin, modern medicine, travel, communication etc. are good. Greed corruption and self interest are a human thing irrespective of whether you have high tech or not. We may make some progress there but it's not really a tech issue.

> it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit

I continue to be fascinated by how easy people priorities profit over doing the right thing. Sometimes they don't even stand to personally gain all that much, they do it for the benefit of some soulless company.

If you aren't actively making things worse for the general public I'll even let the sole focus on profit slide, but how can you justify to yourself going out and actively causing suffering.

Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.

Fully agree.

A sort of “second order” expression I see of these problems is the sheer quantity of SaaS tools that exist to “fix” a problem, not solve it. These companies have zero interest in actually making anything better. Instead, they exist to sell a “less sharp edges” version of the problem and leech all the money they can. An actual improvement is completely antithetical to their existence, and I suspect most of them would act to destroy a true solution if the opportunity arose.

> free products to get people hooked

This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which was inspired by the then-nascent F/OSS movement.

That F/OSS "gift culture" really keeps on giving, eh?

> IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model

What is your alternative?

Of course we were optimistic when the internet was young:

• All the world's people will effortlessly be able to communicate and collaborate together? Surely this will bring about an age of open-mindedness and harmony!

• The bulk of the world's information will go digital, and become accessible to anyone? Surely this will relegate ignorance and superstition to problems of the past!

I've never considered myself an optimist, but if someone back then had predicted the internet we have today, I would have written them off as a hopeless cynic.

This is important, the reproducibility of information made the potential for endless bounty seem so prominent at first. I also don't think the antithesis is discussed here; copyright law, the DMCA, and all the ways in which IP helped make tech the dystopia it has become.

> They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.

That was the first mistake.

Free products don't have a "competitive advantage". They destroy market segments. "Free" is the area denial tactical nuke[0] of business. "Free" is the singularity of business models - as price approaches 0, math starts to break out, and the local fabric of the market unravels. "Free" turns competition into a race for growth.

Being "open source" is optional here. Which is why it's not F/OSS that won on the general market, "free with ads" did. F/OSS is mostly used as a weapon to deny market segments to competitors, forcing them to either leave or play the same "free"/growth game. This is used both offensively, to break into existing market segments, as well as defensively, to "pull the ladder behind you".

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb

I think most people think of themselves as not the problem but some guy will post some Show HN and it will be all middlebrow dismissals. All those people are the people involved here. Lots of guys who “yeah, my GitHub is only empty because I’m a professional and don’t make it public” blah blah. But you know they spend all their time aligning stakeholders and have never written a line of code but have opinions.

Being alive today, we have swapped the problems that our parents faced, with new ones. On that point you are correct.

However, I don't see how any of those are relevant to the points being made by the article, as none of the technology companies, nor VC financiers, mentioned in it had a hand in solving those problems.

The idealism has been bled out of big tech, and it now mostly only revolves around capturing eyeballs and efficiently selling people badly made stuff they don't need.

In my opinion, small tech is where the future lives.

If you read the entire article you will get to the problem: the rapid information dissemination tech has provided ...

> there is a worrying trend of Tech veering strongly to the right and using the money they get from us and our data for questionable causes.

Tech may have ... not given the election outcome leftists wanted. Twice! It now appears tech will not lead to a communist/socialist utopia, and so they are now the enemy. And so, they will, read the paragraph after this statement:

> The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong. 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. Don’t be further misled. Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.

This paragraph comes after more than a page of text pointing out that tech DID in fact, bring a lot of parts, some would say most, of tech utopia.

Frankly, I'm pretty damn sure that the actors responsible for the swing to the right are not FANGs, and not even Twitter. The fact that the world has changed and that China, Russia and Iran ... and "that" ideology's extremists ... have started cooperating and have become a real, serious threat to the lives of billions of people, and are actively killing millions ... I feel that has a lot more to do with the current situation than either Facebook or Amazon. Combined with the failure of governments to keep the economic growth of the past 10 years going (e.g. housing, ...)

Looking at the history of science, technology actually seems pretty good at disrupting and replacing the controlling class. The Renaissance led to the general irrelevancy of the hereditary nobility across most of Europe; the industrial revolution led to the irrelevance of the landed plantation class in the U.S. and the landed gentry in Europe. This is not just a matter of the leaders of the technology revolution being accepted into the existing aristocracy; instead, there's often a series of wars and revolutions where the controlling class of the new technology replaces and then subverts the controlling class of the old order, usually bringing their particular culture and class markers with it.

What technology can't do is get rid of power structures entirely. There will still be a controlling class. It just will be made up with different people.

Society seems to be scale invariant over time. Locally it changes but the overall patterns remain the same, even as we reach unprecedented levels of population and everything it enables and entails.

> Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse

I don't think it's just a systems problem. Sure, systems can help, but education is even more important. Recognizing it's terrible is valuable too (I hope most people have recognized that...).

I recommend Julia Galef's Scout Mindset[1] as an inspiration for the kind of change that I believe is needed. (perhaps the most book of the 3rd millenium? :P ) We need to boost our immunity against fake news and extreme discourse. Information now is what is decisive, and viral (and wrong, misleading, hateful, etc.) information can spread very quickly.

Apart from that, more compassion in general. We're very good at teaching kids about "productive" things they are interested in, but very poor about ethics and meta things, like compassion for fellow beings, the importance of a peaceful and kind discourse to the survival of civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scout_Mindset

> Utopias are always fantasies. All of them.

Historically utopia had this association. But I think if an utopia is impossible, then it's less interesting. There has to be something achievable that's worth striving for. It's not going to be perfect of course, but I'm confident it exists somehow.

I also think Utopia is as much as about the small as the big. Tolkien famously had his utopia in the Hobbit way of living, with a simple, relatively wealthy, relatively peaceful society -- but with great interpersonal relationships and all the little things (literally :) ).

> sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse

Polarization (as the word implies) is not outcome of the tech but side-effect of two-party system.

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!

Well said.

People definitely latch on to the negatives, and that is in itself a big part of the problem of social media type platforms today.

Sure there's misinformation etc, but I'd much rather what we have today - it's not perfect, but it is so much easier to learn topics, so many more resources, and no not everything is free, but a lot of it is, and at least the paid resources exist!

I'm also glad that we do have people raging and seeing the negatives too. We need these people as a way of finding balance, and I'm sure as a system we'll regress to a mean and everything will be ok.

omg that bush is a lion! I'm just gonna jump over here... argh snake!

[flagged]

> I may have missed something, but I've never felt the "optimism" described by the article in the first place.

I think it depends what the "old days" are for each generation.

For me it is the early days of the Internet becoming widely available, late 80s to early 90s. Suddenly everyone I know has email, everyone is on usenet, I can talk (i.e. text chat) with anyone around the world.

Which of course we can today. But back then there were no corporations involved (commercial use of the Internet was prohibited), so no marketing involved, it was all real people.

And to me this is a key part:

> if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control

This wasn't a thing. All the communication protocols were open standard (RFCs), the implementations were open source. Every program I used (aside from the OS, which was the domain of proprietary software back then) was one I compiled myself and could modify or rewrite to taste. So it was just us, regular people, who owned and controlled how everything worked and the possibilities were unbounded and thus extremely exciting.

Today mostly we're stuck using proprietary software/apps, or even worse, the "cloud" where the companies control everything.

As much as I can, I still want to control my environment so I stick with open standards like email instead of proprietary chat apps, and I run Linux & FreeBSD, and I avoid phones like the plague since there is no way to own anything on a phone platform.

In 2013 Google Reader has been shut down, and Google defederated from XMPP. That has been the beginning of the end of "Web 2.0". Before that we were naively thinking all those APIs were free, and only the old enemy Microsoft wanted proprietary protocols and vendor lock-in.

Agreed. The thought isn't particularly new, but it's nice to see the myriad examples compiled like this.

I'll ask my delulu question here but: where are the angel vestors who DO in fact what to help humanity. Do they exist and are just working "underground"? Or do you just get absorbed into the system once your net worth is past $X million dollars?

> 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.

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?

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

was not meant ironically.

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.

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.

Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us.

Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556

The fact is, it not the Internet that failed us, but education. Education quality in the US has declined a lot since the 60s. Now education is only used to create bio-robots, not people who can still think critically.

In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".

When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything.

So here we are.

"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"

Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?

Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?

Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.

So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.

Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outside social factors, as well as internet-related developments like the rise of microblogging that doesn’t encourage nuance and rewards partisan performativity) can lead nerds to act harmfully.

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.

Some nerds got it. See Richard Stallman. The GPL is based on the inherent badness of mankind and finding ways to protect against it.

Some nerds were autocrats and sleazebags but they just needed to gain dominance for those traits to appear.

Personally I think the iPhone was the turning point for much of the dystopian era.

Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better.

But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device.

People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing.

Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.

The internet we fell in love with doesn’t exist anymore. It was replaced by the walled garden of smartphone apps.

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.

> 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

This.

There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.

Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.

Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.

There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be: 1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and 2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys

We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.

Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.

I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.

Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.

Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture

These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil

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.

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.

Yes, though I'd characterize it as more naive than arrogant.

Is it that the nerds became the bullies and autocrats?

It was extremely arrogant to think that money wouldn’t change nerds.

Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today.

Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.

Clunky desktop computers connected to the internet in the 90s were already an easy mode. It's a weird point in time to pull the ladder up. I wonder if the people in the 70s shared the same sentiment.

I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.

Your theory is that the nerds are the good guys in this story?

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.

I think the point of the article is that while tech may in theory enable all the good things we have dreamed about, in practice it mostly doesn’t.

Before social media, you needed some web development skills to have a voice. Maybe that was a beneficial speed bump.

> Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism.

I think this is blaming the outgroup. 'We' are the problem, too.

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.

to be fair, was there anything you didn't feel optimistic about in the 90s?

From what I remember everything about that decade was full of unrealistic optimism (end of history etc)

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.

None of this has anything to do with technology itself, though. All tools used by humans will be put to the purposes that those humans bear.

The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity.

After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean.

A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project.

Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.

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.

> 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?

People forget that the vocal majority of FOSS people back then thought Microsoft was a danger and were engaging to counter them.

OSS is founded as much on what it rejects as what it embraces.

Maybe not in rich countries, but internet and smartphones in poorer countries were definitely viewed in a very positive light.

Specifically, "Digital Inclusion" was a term I remember from before smartphones became popular, and how important it was to get everyone on board. Well, smartphones were what brought internet to them, and this progress was celebrated.

With Social Media it was a bit more complicated, as it only became accessible to the general population of poorer countries at the same time it started receiving criticism internationally. They don't remember Myspace.

(EDIT: Maybe you're talking about the article in general, but the paragraph the text you quoted comes from is about smartphones, social media and internet)

In this regard, I see a lot of projects aiming to "optimize user experience" that are actually optimizing for imaginary users at the expense of real ones.

GNOME is a great example of this -- they're constantly removing functionality over the objections of their actual userbase in order to implement features that fit the speculative needs they project onto people who don't -- and likely never will -- use the software.

The lead designer for Homegrocer (Amazon Fresh but too early) was in my social circle, friend of my friends, and the part he didn’t like about his job was that you still had to push the high margin items that the grocery stores put in easy reach to get your visit to be profitable to them. So there’s a moral hazard for things like search filters and sorting. As a customer I’d love to sort by price per unit. But they don’t want that (look at how many items are priced per pound in one size and per ounce in another).

I think this idea of “for the user” is a symptom of being trapped in a certain worldview. For some people, the only form of productive organization they can imagine is a company, which consists of an insular minority of producers, and a large majority of consumers. In such a structure, how can the minority of producers possibly know, anticipate, and retain concern for the interests of the consumers? They have to cross this huge gap between them and their users to do so. Eventually, the company grows larger and that gap between users and decision makers widens to the point where the company loses favor, and this process is inevitable so long as the structure of “company” is presumed necessary for the making of the product. I think open source communities demonstrate a potential alternative route.

But isn't know-how how you got to this world view of yours? If you could do it, so can others, and technology does improve the global know-how. Even if some also use it to "control, destroy and sow despair" as you say. There would be people doing that anyway, as history shows. The printing press was the same, but I think we can all agree that the net result is positive. So is, in my view, the modern "tech".

> It's a psychological strategy to avoid noticing that there are dark forces which aim to control, destroy and sow despair

I thought techno-optimists/technocrats fully acknowledge the inevitable presence of bad actors, but believe that with a proper design they would be unable to do any significant harm. Am I wrong?

Of course, whenever such designs are possible in reality is a whole different issue (and the reason for a lot of disappointment). I’m merely surprised by this idea that bad actors are somehow not noticed.

My kids (10, 7, and 5) try going outside to play every day and all of the neighbor kids are tucked inside doing whatever the hell it is kids do nowadays.

I lived in a very similar suburb in the '90s and had many, many other kids to play with outside every day. Bicycling, sports, adventures, you name it…

For them, I am 100% positive that 2024 does not beat 1994. They all seem so ridiculously lonely.

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.

Many would be quick to argue that they are interlinked but I strongly agree with you - particularly in the context of this thread.

For me, optimism still provides a lot of value in my worldview. The beliefs that have changed the most for me in the last 25 years is the limits and boundaries of what tools can do for us.

Technology ‘fixing humanity’ (when that ‘fixing’ is based on your own personal value system) is certainly a fools errand. But that limitation shouldn’t get in the way of imagining a utopia which is worth having.

Sure, I miss my childhood feelings of the 90s. But I also never expected a techno utopia to be ‘easy’.

I feel like you aren't reading this in context? It's important the author address the obvious reply, and they clearly state those efforts are not enough.

HN is a bubble within a bubble. It’s where Kagi rules the search world and Google is all but a dessicated corpse. It’s also a place with a karma system, encouraging only the most bubbleworthy discussion and discouraging any posts from dissidents. I would put a negative weight on sentiments here when averaging them with those elsewhere.

> As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.

I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism.

Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.

I'm an erstwhile techno-optimist who was disabused of his Panglossian views by the Utah Data Center, drone warfare (now advanced to the point of remotely piloted rifles gunning people down on the streets of Gaza), crypto ponzis, AI enclosing and monetizing decades of humanity's collective mental efforts, and the general indifference or even embrace by most of the tech community of all of the above. Technology has liberatory potential, but not in the hands currently wielding it.

I don't think this actually has anything to do with tech itself. Society in general is in a more pessimistic mood than a decade ago, driven on by all sorts of institutions pumping out content that everything is bad, so you should upend the world in their vision.

Maybe I was just too young and inattentive 16 years ago, but before the GFC and Occupy, I don't think there was such a pessimistic narrative overall, and it only got worse over time.

To help with your wonderings, I was a tech optimist who became pessimistic. I enjoy working on and thinking about technology problems, but it's so hard to keep my own creations from going on to become harmful. Perhaps my pessimism began with Jevons paradox. If I got a redo, I'd pick a different field.

The two biggest advancements in tech in recent years: Crypto and AI have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable. And arguably have done far more harm than good.

Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world.

So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.

One cause of the mismatch is that tech did not turn out to be "lucrative" for the vast majority of techies.

I’m an old guy (older than you at least) who’s been working in and around tech since the 90s.

What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present.

The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways.

That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things.

But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.

If you're not on social media, you might be missing part of what has changed people's minds. Social media is the biggest consumer-facing technological innovation of the last two decades, and it's financially lucrative, but also net-bad for society. I have a sense that we should do something about it, but as you say, doing something would require repudiating the values I held when I was younger.

I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation.

It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.

Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.

Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.

We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.

I still love technology. It's only getting more amazing all the time. If you view just that, we're not just living in the future, but way beyond.

The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh.

So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.

Interesting, ~2014-2020 seemed to me already past the best date. I mean that was the time of Cambridge Analytics scandals and rage-baits on Facebook.

The problem I see with free software advocates is they're basically trying to paddle upstream to a destination that is not particularly desirable. Most people don't care if they can go visit their local water treatment works and propose modifications – they really, really want their water to be drinkable and would prefer some regulation and oversight from the state.

I hope the stuff you talk about at the end of your comment come to fruition, but I think you’re very wrong about the attention economy. The issue is simply that these platforms are companies that need to optimize their user retention, so their algorithms have learned to prioritize the most gutturally stimulating material, whether mukbangs or drama, implicitly at the expense of everything else.

The Hype Train for tech is finally pulling into Disillusionment Station again. See also Silent Spring, which turns 65 in a couple years.

> Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.

Well, to be fair, the movement that seems to have largely infiltrated the Republican party in the US is (openly) against democracy and prefers a concentration of power and subjugation of "others".

And it's a two-party first-past-the-post voting system so a vote for any alternative between the two ruling parties is effectively a vote for whichever party is least like them.

So it's against your own interest not to take part in the tribalism in the US.

It's an American POV because a lot of EU and Asia have safeguards against this stuff. America's been deregulating such things for decades now.

It is indeed an American POV that universal healthcare seems to come and go with the president, something unthinkable for other first world countries.

>The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem.

Following up on the other response: if you got or know a coalition that can push more ranked choice voting in some states, I'm all ears. That's the only real way to affect this as any reasonable level.

These existed before the internet. In the 90s and early 2000s, there was definitely a feeling that these will be solved by easily available information. It was extremely naive to think this, but everybody who knew what’s the internet thought this regardless of country.

Today, there are topics about which getting information is as difficult as ever, because there are only ads or misinformation what you can find easily.

Buying a new vacuum cleaner shouldn’t take hours or even days. And I shouldn’t need to learn all the technical details of them. But I need to because there is no trusted source of information, because almost everything is ads. I trust filtering to reddit less and less.

Figuring out what really happens in Ukraine and Gaza (or just in universities in America) shouldn’t be a week long research, because there is misinformation all the time, seriously everywhere, in every single newspaper, blog, website.

So not even the base idea is completely true, its supposed to be effect is even less true. The general populace has clearly less power than 20 years ago as you mentioned.

Those are not AI, or am I missing something and you are asking a dish washer to assist you with your code?

Haha yeah, more like "look - it's a bunch of dorks playing on their computers"

I so very much agree with you... I was first baffled by how unintelligent some parts of the OP managed to come through - while it's still a very nice collection of woes and unethical lies, which is very valuable in itself. But then, I've read the linked CNN post about Jeff Bezos prohibiting presidential endorsement in Washington Posts and the outrage that has generated. No, this is surely not the author's folly - there must be a more generic problem there... Why do so many people considered intelligent think it's normal practice that newspapers give such a very direct and simple political message, like vote for X. And have been doing it for 40 years. It's normal for newspapers and editors to have clear and mostly stable political views and voice that, but I feel it very weird that they publish something as direct as this one. Just like it's very weird for celebrities (who normally work outside politics) to publicly endorse X or Y. By doing this, you lose focus on what you really want to say, and just simplify politics and communication into a binary question. Is it really needed to ELI3 everything even in politics, even to such a binary degree, and if we don't THAT is the "betrayal of responsibility"? While I'm not a great friend of using the usual left-right distinctions, especially in global settings, but that's not really important (people will see whatever enemies where they want to see, but it's still much better than naming your global enemies after a more specific group/country/religion). Technology can give us hope for new opportunities, that we can receive some "outside help" to change our social constraints. But we shouldn't blame yet another group of people for specific technology failing to solve or address some important issues of society. I wholeheartedly believe it is inevitable to convince as many people of the 8 billion to feel compassion for each other, to save the planet, to give better education and equal chances to live a full life for those who can make use of that and social care to those who need it, and, to work together for such important and clear goals... But business-as-usual will not do that, current recipes of "pluralistic democracies led by wise citizen journalists telling us what to do and think" will not get us there. And that's also a problem for LLMs: mandating guardrails will not make them more useful, and as long as LLM safety and "bias" is about how many people will be offended by their responses, then we're clearly just heading in the same wrong direction of blinding ourselves. (My condolences with you! But having a toddler is a wonderful thing, it gives you hope and a good reason to expect many joy from the future ... even if it doesn't look bright now, cheer up!)

The issue of morality and character wasn't just raised by Democrats and the "fake news" media. It was also raised by Republicans who directly served in the administration. When your former VP, chief of staff, military leaders and scores of former cabinet officials say issues of character made him unfit for command, I think people should and ought to have taken that very seriously in both the primaries and general election. This is before you even get to his numerous legal issues both civil and criminal. It is unfortunate that so many still choose to see this through only a political lens.

Wow, what an intelligent and even-minded way to respond to the blog post. Very nice!

I'd still recommend it, the Trump mentions are pretty marginal. I think the core message is pretty apolitical.

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.

Seems it is easy to confuse humanity with few corpos and their productive bees.

AI (particularly LLMs) is a net-benefit for PRODUCTIVITY - it remains to be seen if it will genuinely benefit humanity as a whole.

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.

[dead]

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.