[xwdv]

You’ve basically described one segment of the tech industry and assumed all tech is like that. You’re talking about consumer tech.

There is a wide range of tech that has nothing to do with consumers or anything social: manufacturing, medical, hardware drivers, command & control, finance, safety systems, etc…

[Torifyme12]

I mean... what tech do people interact with most? Consumer fucking tech.

Someone said it better below

"You know why people hate the tech industry? Because they've wedged themselves into everything, and made it suck more, in pursuit of glorious advertising profits."

[DangitBobby]

That's cool, but this is why people hate tech. Even if all those other things are sweet, they have little if any noticeable impact on my daily life.

[andyferris]

> they have little if any noticeable impact on my daily life

I mean, all of those modern technologies actually affect a large fraction of everything you do when you're not in front of a screen... (Maybe such technology has existed in a similar form your whole life, though, so you don't notice, but over a longer timespan we are are talking about the majority of modern society).

[DangitBobby]

I am mostly considering developments over the past decade. I think people were really optimistic about tech progress until relatively recently. Maybe it's just me, though.

[xwdv]

That’s fine, aside from being a source to extract money from, consumers don’t matter. They have no choice but to use whatever we build. We’re not talking about shitty apps, we’re talking about everything else they take for granted and is deeply embedded in daily life.

[DangitBobby]

I don't get your point. People should not hate tech because they have no choice? They don't hate tech because they have no choice?

[xwdv]

I think my point is people should just be quiet about things they know nothing about. 10% of tech is consumer tech and the other 90% of tech is the things that run daily life that people know nothing about. Think machine to machine communications, scheduling systems, fraud detection, facial recognition, infrastructure, manufacturing, etc… you can have a whole career in tech and never have to think about consumer markets. One of my first jobs in tech was writing programs to cut parts out of expensive materials so efficiently that waste was minimized as much as possible, saving so much money, getting fat bonuses.

If you hear the word tech and just think of websites, apps, social networks, ads, you have a very simple world view.

So yea, consumer tech sucks, but consumers also fucking suck, and get harder and harder to extract some kind of value from as time goes on.

[DangitBobby]

Ah, well it was news to some people that tech entrepreneurs aren't exactly beloved and I was explaining why I think that is. I know something about that, anyway. Also not totally clueless about a steady march of technological progress that most people don't notice the benefits of. Since people don't notice it, it's not relevant to why people don't love tech entrepreneurs, hence the question. It's about perception.

The "consumers suck" attitude probably goes a long way towards explaining the problem.