[vaughands]

This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this.

It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.

It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)

[HotGarbage]

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance.

By working for them you are enabling this.

[teiferer]

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable:

I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided.

I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily work from home.

None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.

Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.

[hnlmorg]

> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.

Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones.

In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too long.

[flowerthoughts]

As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.

[tatersolid]

I grew up in a rural township 50 miles from a major city in the 1980s. We were never isolated and there were in fact a diverse set of peers my own age with interests and heritage all across the spectrum. Yes there were a few racists or religious zealots but 99% of the folks got along just fine.

My own lasting impression is that this is the “American experience” that is not dead nor impossible to recreate in 2026. We just all need to learn to be decent Americans again.

[hnlmorg]

Where did you grow up?

You lived closer to a city than I did but the UK doesn’t have insane zoning laws like the US so there was still plenty to do even in my small town.

[johnnyanmac]

Probably a similar environment to me. Around the peak of stranger danger + inefficient means of public transportation. So the world can feel extremely small.

[teiferer]

I agree that big tech is and has been too powerful and too unregulated. But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements. Which is why I called it out.

I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.

[johnnyanmac]

>But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements.

It's not making everybody miserable "yet". But the current rate of change suggest that is the goal, and that's where the alarm comes from. We had the term "embrace, extend, extinguish" used to describe their business last decade and they clearly want to extend that philosphy to the consumers over time too. Some parts of tech are already arguably at the "extinguish" stage as we speak.

>You can try to nitpick but the point stands.

I feel inclined to nitpick a nitpicker who rejects a statement "there making everyone miserable" with "yes, but not everything is miserable".

[DiscourseFan]

I think you'll find that most of the texts you can access right now are not available at your local library.

[hnlmorg]

Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.

However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.

The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).

There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.

Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)

Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.

[pharrington]

And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.

[xeckr]

>I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small.

>None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.

I also enjoy having those things, but we had all of them 15 years ago. Since then we got... algorithmic feeds?

[duskdozer]

You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.

[ben_w]

Even with the last one, "I enjoy being able to easily work from home", the reason "cottage industry" has that name is one of the pre-industrial-era modes of production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system#Cottage_ind...

[thrance]

None of the good things you described requires the existence of powerful private actors. The internet was created by public funded researchers, it is fundamentally decentralized. Wikipedia is a non-profit, video call could be p2p, etc.

[discreteevent]

> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.

It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?

Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)

[_DeadFred_]

2005 you could do these things. Heck by 2005 I had moved to the remote mountains and still had high speed internet. 30 years ago these things weren't coming from big tech, they were coming from small scrapy startups that were going to replace evil entrenched institutions with something better.

Today, these things are actually LESS accessible due to enshitification from entrenched big tech companies.

[Llamamoe]

You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.

Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.

You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.

[pharrington]

Did you mean 30 years ago?

[lurk2]

> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.

Literally all of them are.

[imiric]

> All of them are enabled by big tech

That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.

Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.

> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.

That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.

So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.

[duskdozer]

>Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.

Not only that, but big tech proprietary products have depended and depend heavily on F/LOSS and community supported code.

[scoofy]

>> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable

> Sent from my iPhone.

But seriously, this is a political problem, not a technological problem. The harms of technology are like the harms of the food industry or the gambling industry. Those of us who care, know these things can be bad for society, and we regulate them. Our society doesn’t care, we literally just legalized sports gambling, and the leagues have embraced it, forgetting the clear history of what happened last time.

Hating technology is like hating metal because you don’t like gun deaths. The problem is that our electorate has stopped caring about society.

[IshKebab]

They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.

[camgunz]

You don't think the political situation is a teensy bit worse now?

[harvey9]

The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.

[DiscourseFan]

The political situation is absurd, but its clear that people are far more resilient against state control, so in some ways its improving.

[IshKebab]

We were talking about big tech, not global politics.

[camgunz]

There's a clear connection between tech (social media, loneliness epidemic, etc) and political decline.

[IshKebab]

No there isn't.

[mlrtime]

If we're talking the 90s, No. The US is not at war invading another country (Iraq).

[hnlmorg]

> This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable.

Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.

And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.

And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.

> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.

That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.

It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”

> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)

If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise

[swed420]

Relevant for those who missed it

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

[Llamamoe]

Inevitably? Maybe not, but the situation isn't gonna get better by saying "oh I'm sure the tech industry will do a 180 and stop making everything worse"

> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.

There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.

[duskdozer]

It's certainly been making my life miserable, at least in recent years. And the trend for the future doesn't seem rosy.

[kaliqt]

It posits that the tools at their disposal will be far more powerful and wide reaching than just Gmail or even modern social networks.

The good ol' AGI and then ASI singularity everyone likes to talk about. To be fair, it is possible.

[jofzar]

I don't believe "true" agi/asi will happen, but I totally believe if a company theoretically invented they would immediately shut all API's and then go for software market dominance in every category.

[ben_w]

While I've said in another comment on this thread that comparative advantage is flawed, I still think the opening moves, the very initial phase, would be as per comparative advantage, not everything all at once.

Until supply grows to saturate demand in whatever market, comparative advantage points to the fastest way to make more money, that money then gets used to construct more servers and data centres, which gets used to saturate supply for the next most profitable market, etc. until there's none left.

I wouldn't say "never" for AI that can economically substitute all human labour. I think that meaning of AGI/ASI is slightly easier than the "AI which learns from as few examples as humans do" meaning, which I also think is possible eventually but don't know how far away it is.

[vaughands]

It's vogue on HN to sometimes criticize critically so I want to try and be as constructive as possible:

I work for one of these companies. I also have pay bills to pay. I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.

Frontier labs such as Google DeepMind are not just going to shutter their doors because 10% of the peons dropped their jobs. I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society. I only get to live once: if I am to spend it for social change, I best maximize by expected return.

And quitting a job in a capitalist society probably has negative return overall.

[duskdozer]

>Frontier labs such as Google DeepMind are not just going to shutter their doors because 10% of the peons dropped their jobs.

What about 20%? 50%? 90%? 100%?

[johnnyanmac]

I also argue it depends on which 10%. 20% of all key talent may stall the project for years, so it would be a similar form of collective bargaining. But those at the top tend to be more complicit.

[johnnyanmac]

As is it, nothing is "real". But I'll offer options

1. Unionize

2. Work to form a general strike. Even an industry wide strike would be highly effective

3. Work your civic duties to push for stronger labor rights in the United States. It can include anywhere from 4 day work weeks to raising minimum wage to preventing abuse of the H1b Visa. There's dozens of initiatives to push for.

4. Similarly work to properly regulate Ai before the genie is out the bottle.

5. In the abscense of the ability to do 1-4 for whatever reason, research efforts out there and use capitalism to support them financially. Anonymously if need be.

Quittog your job without. Collective bargaining is a drop of water on a clear sunny day. You need to make it rain, and we can only do that together. Or have enough money to lobby he government to do your bidding. Too bad people at that level only seem to resort to authoritarian efforts.

[phtrivier]

> I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society.

You can't help but swing between "AGI is going to save us, praise the tech lords" and "AGI is going to kill us, tech lords have mercy" if you believe there is no counterpower to the tech lords.

"You, alone, leaving your job" is not a great way to counteract the tech lords (although at least it makes a point and show other people there is a problem.)

But there is the option to use your counterpowers (you know, legislators and all that ?) The tech lords are actively trying to avoid that (see the hilarious Musk vs Breton feud.)

It would be better if your system did not give money to power to choose lawmakers.

Maybe AI will make USA realize the definition of corruption and proper election funding laws.

But, if you don't want to join the underclass, maybe, just maybe, consider not picking tech lords as kings next time.

[wickedsight]

> I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.

The "real, good" part all depends on your expectations of life.

There's a real shortage in trades people and I'd love to see ChatGPT fix a leaky pipe, build a house or make a chair. So switching to the trades/manual labor, while financially tough at the beginning might be a good long term choice. But this requires much more physical work than most of us on HN are used to.

Moving away from capitalist society into a cheap tiny off grid house in a rural area and leading a much more basic life is also an option. You don't need 100k to survive, but you do need it in populated areas. (Also, I'm European and therefore not dependent on employment for health care, so I'm ignoring that part.)

There are many choices we can make that remove our dependence on big tech. But big tech is hella convenient and so is having expendable income, so it's a tough choice to make.

[mlrtime]

>And quitting a job in a capitalist society.

What other modern society has existed and prosperous where you could quit a job and have positive return?

[Sverigevader]

Well, you could say that the proposed alternative is: Consider not working there.

This means, work somewhere else, or even _do_ something else.

[1dom]

I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.

From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.

Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.

To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.

Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.

If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.

Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.

[onesociety2022]

This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world.

Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.

A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.

[1dom]

> This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful?

> Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard.

I don't feel like you're engaging with entirely positive intent here. I also don't understand how you can know the concept of FIRE and come to the conclusion that reducing your outgoings is the stupidest take on how to retire earlier. It may not be obvious, or the best, but if it's genuinely the stupidest you've heard, then I don't think you've heard much.

> You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.

That is what I'm saying, for me, and it's probably an option for you and many people here if they consider it. Not really Fat or necessarily RE. But my generalisation is: doing things that more directly help your household or family members or local community is far more virtuous thing to do than what the majority of engineers at BigTech spend/spent their time doing - including us both probably. I feel like you're a bit perplexed by that.

The whole point of a job IMO is ideally to: 1. improve the world so you can 2. earn some money to 3. do what you want, ideally improve your life and those around you.

The longer I was in BigTech, the more I noticed me and a lot of people around me were overestimating 1 because of 2 and not doing the best job of 3.

> A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.

I agree entirely, breaking them up is also a good contribution. I'm not sure I remember it being suggested that the only issue was the products/services they build though - there are lots of issues with BigTech, that's the big issue.

[pharrington]

We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.

There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.

[wickedsight]

> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.

This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.

There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.

I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.

[pharrington]

If you're working in big tech and you truly believe you are spoiled, then why not quit that job and let the migrant improve their living situation, while you live in the luxury you already have?

[wickedsight]

I don’t work in big tech. Wish I was, would be a pretty big improvement in my salary. Still think I’m very spoiled compared to about 90% of the world, probably more than that.

[imiric]

> big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable

"Will"? If you don't see how this is happening today, you're either a part of the problem, or blissfully ignorant.

> It offers no constructive alternative

WDYM? The article clearly suggests that people should stop working for these companies.

Besides, why must every criticism propose a solution? The problem should be fixed by those who created it.