[leppr]

> Why is technology moving us to a Kafka story instead of a Star Trek story?

That's a problem which has nothing to do with technology itself. Technology makes providing support cheaper, so if the only changing variable was adding more technology, we would be getting better support, not worst.

The problem is cultural individualism. People give too much power to centralized entities, and don't respect the paramount importance of free market competition in accountability. A typical argument is that technology causes this centralization, but it's simply not true. For each service, there almost always exists both centralized options, and decentralized open-source ones. It's on users to go above the individualistic perspective and chose the option that's right not only for their own individual needs, but also for their community.

[maxbond]

I agree that the technology is capable of creating many sorts of worlds, and that it's a series of choices that has lead us to this one and not a better one. But I disagree that it is possible for individuals to simply change their behavior and create that world using their collective purchasing power. This arrangement works well for the companies and investors that create the options consumers may choose from, and they have and continue to offer the set of options that match their preferences. To take the example of Google, and they are not unique here simply particularly egregious, it is apparent that they are completely unwilling to offer a human-powered support facility that is able to make complex decisions and accommodate unique situations. Eg, I imagine we've all seen stories on HN about Chrome extension developers being kicked off the app store and being stuck in an infinite chat loop with an AI, as they struggled to reach the _single_ human being[1] who may be able to help them.

That's not something we can fix by making different choices in the browser marketplace, which increasingly is just Chrome wearing different wigs. Even if we solved it in the case of browsers, this is a systemic issue across not only companies, but industries. Fixing this would mean something more fundamental than individuals changing their preferences to prioritize nonhostile software. It would require society at large agreeing to change it's priorities so that good options could be presented to them in the first place.

> A typical argument is that technology causes this centralization, but it's simply not true.

I think when people say this, "technology" is best understood as "the technology industry" or "technology, the social phenomenon" rather than "technology, the artifacts of engineering." I don't entirely agree that technology is amoral (not that you claimed this), but I think that's true enough for a first approximation. But when people say "technology causes centralization" (or "technology causes X" generally) they mean, "technology, as it is implemented in our society, given that it doesn't exist in a vacuum," and that has moral dimensions for sure.

[1] https://twitter.com/DotProto/status/1261155320740499456

[leppr]

Then we should use a less general word than "technology", because it becomes hard to reason about the problem and gives arguments to luddites who don't make the distinction. "Big tech" is short enough to be used in conversations.

> But I disagree that it is possible for individuals to simply change their behavior and create that world using their collective purchasing power. This arrangement works well for the companies and investors that create the options consumers may choose from, and they have and continue to offer the set of options that match their preferences.

With proper cultural norms, it will definitely be possible to change the current corporate technology landscape to be more user-friendly. Individual consumption habits have a huge impact, that's why the advertising industry is so big after all. Of course the necessary cultural change won't happen without a collective pain and awareness of the problem. I would say we might be half-way there in the pain dimension, and awareness of the benefits of open-source is growing everyday (what with the explosion of AI artwork thanks to the Stable Diffusion open-source release).

[maxbond]

I think we agree like 80% of the way, but that our disagreement is that I believe a political action is necessary to bring about the culture shift we're discussing, whereas you seem to believe that consumers can demand it in the marketplace. But I do agree that this movement is a nascent potential that seems to be developing and that it may well be realized.

I think there's an widely held conception, which comes from orthodox economics, that consumers demand something and then businesses respond to give them what they want. But I think that's wrong in a subtle but important way; it neglects the ability of business interests to shape what consumers demand.

For instance, I believe Facebook's pivot to Meta was precipitated by Apple's privacy update which limited FB's ability to conduct surveillance on iPhone. Presumably they feel it's an existential liability to rely on their competitor's platforms, because should a privacy-focused arms race break out between Apple and Google, it could destroy FB's ability to monetize their service. So they looked at the resources at their disposal, came up with a path forward which would result in the outcome they desired, and set about trying to convince the public they wanted a metaverse. This is a particularly ham-fisted effort, which makes it a good illustration, but I believe this is a more subtle element of many products. The key element here is that Facebook decided what product would best serve their interests, and tried to synthesize a demand, rather than responding to an organic demand for a metaverse.

This is why I don't think it's sufficient for consumers to simply change their behavior. Consumers cannot put options on the table; they can only express interests and hope they are fulfilled. Additionally business interests can collude much more easily than consumers, as there are fewer of them and their interests are better aligned. Consumers can demand nonhostile products, but at best they'll get differently-hostile products which address some of their concerns while innovating bold new ways to undermine the consumer. Something like, we've stopped shipping DRM with games because we know you don't like it, but we've also moved to a games-as-a-service model where you can't play without connecting to our servers, so we've actually ended up with even more control over your ability to play. It's sort of like a chess game where black has two rows of pawns. The only winning move is to change what game you're playing.

> Then we should use a less general word than "technology".

When it comes to language, I'm a descriptivist. I neither agree nor disagree that this is a bad word choice, my only claim is about what people mean. A framing you may appreciate more is, swapping "technology" for "the social institution of technology" (I think "Big Tech" isn't quite right to swap in, as it excludes, say, technology used by the government or intelligence agencies) is the steel man of the argument, and we ought to consider the merits of the stronger version of the argument and avoid arguing about the semantics of words.