Ask HN: Concerned with consequences of Tech with age – feeling paralyzed

[dezeiner]

I feel with every year that goes by, I am more conscious of the impact my decisions have on myself, loved ones, and broader communities, particularly when it comes to decisions around my career and what I choose to commit myself to. And that awareness is making it hard to move forward in my career.

I saw the rise of social media and the damaging effects it has had on my own mental health, those of family members, and society as a whole. The lack of deep, embodied connection brought about by the prevalence of screens and mobile devices. The rent-seeking behavior of BigTech. In some way I feel I'm developing a "digital technology = bad, physical nature = good" mindset – a mindset I can't seem to pull myself out of and one that is making it very, very hard for me to feel any sort of excitement for tech.

I feel almost ethically paralyzed from a professional standpoint. Is this what becoming old an grumpy is like? I'm only 35!

[salawat]

I second the call to pay more attention to Free (Libre) Open Source Software as a potential direction, and believe me, you are not the only one feeling ethically paralyzed in reference to the industry. Further, I want to emphasize, you are not wrong to feel that way. Your moral/ethical compass is working just fine. You are an actor bringing morals and ethics with you into an industry ripe with unethical, power seeking actors who either did not have a functional moral/ethical compass in the first place, or abandoned it in the name of a paycheck, knowingly, or unknowingly at the time they accepted the job. You are not broken. The stuff the industry wants to build, and the motives behind why are.

Your job is essentially setting the status quo everyone else starts from, and as of right now, you're only working for people looking to shape things for max $$$ extraction from everyone else. Implementation skews toward availing oneself (as a business) of access or management capabilities over vast swathes of the world population's data, economic activity, or some combo of the two,and the concommitant control such management capability confers.

Welcome to mid-life. Where you finally start to get a high level enough picture of how horked everything is, and start to realize that there may not be enough time left to even start to make a big enough dent in the suck to get things going back in a less suck filled direction.

Stay strong, friend.

[fsflover]

Perhaps you should pay attention to the concept of free software [0], which gives the control to the users instead of the big tech. No surprise that the big tech never mentions it and uses "open source" [1] instead. Even the latter is used as rarely as possible, e.g., not in javascript [2]. Personally, I am relying more and more on free software and feel much better. Very excited about my Libem 5 phone running an FSF-endorsed OS [3].

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy//po/open-source-misses-the-po...

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

[3] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed...

[PaulHoule]

I think the time period of 2016-2022 has been particularly bad. I mean, there was a time when somebody could have thought social media was a good thing but it was the events around the election of 2016 that got me to delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Since then we have also had the cryptocurrency grift.

The fallout of musk buying Twitter and the wave of crypto collapses despite the efforts to keep it going may be the beginnings of a better era.

[fsflover]

There is nothing wrong or bad with the social media. The problem is big tech trying to squeeze maximal profit via advertising by selling the attention of the users. Mastodon is the answer here, works amazingly well.

[PaulHoule]

I would (mostly) disagree.

(1) Freedom isn't free. A social site needs a sustainable business model. That might be advertising, it might be something else, but it ends in tears without it. To some extent I like the membership model but there are always going to be people who will complain about the cost of even something tiny like a $2 a month subscription, they'll say something like "Elon Musk can afford that but I can't..." Advertising has problems that come with it, but so do other ways of running a site. Advertising also has the socially positive potential of getting you better products and services by enabling new competitors to make themselves known.

(2) There is something particularly toxic about the Twitter model which is mostly open and encourages you to have a single presentation of self. If you are in some place where the music you like and what you do for work and what books you read, what hobbies you have, etc. are all there together with politicized aspects of identity such as race, gender, sexuality.

Like it or not if you want to shove your identity up everyone's noses and under their fingernails you're going to meet people on line who have an opposing identity and feel the same way and they will deprive you of being able to enjoy other activities. At best you can fight back and try to deprive them of a normal life online.

People who share an interest in say, photography, can go to a photography forum where there are community standards and a person who is a member of that community will find themselves protected from bullshit behavior from others in the community while themselves being expected to refrain from bullshit behavior. Communities like that can exclude people who do bullshit behaviors, whereas the point of Twitter seems to be bullshit behaviors and 95% of what people seem to think is "free speech that must be protected" is bullshit behaviors.

It really is a problem kicking people off platforms like Twitter and Facebook that you use to log into other web sites, but in a decentralized world it is much easier to take out the trash. And it is necessary.

That said I am indifferent to Mastodon. It's boring. I haven't seen extreme trolling there but also not anything I'd want to read. What can I say? It seems that the less people have to say the more they think their free speech is being violated.

[fsflover]

> (1) Freedom isn't free. A social site needs a sustainable business model.

Mastodon is not a single social network. What is the business model of the whole Internet? If you would say it's advertising, then I would reply that it worked better before it became widespread.

> (2) There is something particularly toxic about the Twitter model which is mostly open and encourages you to have a single presentation of self.

I agree. Mastodon does not force you to have a single identity.

> I am indifferent to Mastodon. It's boring.

Counterexample: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34232041.

[PaulHoule]

So my next concern is: how does Mastodon control spam?

[fsflover]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)#Cont...

[treis]

I'd look into CBT via a self help book or therapist. "digital technology = bad, physical nature = good" is a "All or Nothing" negative thought pattern than is usually #1 or #2 on the list.