HN Reader

Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.

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

Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.

Tech used to be a tool. I remember participating in product design conversations in the '00s, and the focus was all on "How can we make people's lives better? How do we create software that makes things more convenient for them, more enjoyable, frees up time and opens up new opportunities for them."

Tech is now a means to turn people into tools. I still sit in product design conversations. Now they are focused on how to manipulate people into clicking on more ads and opening up their wallet more. The applied psychology is very advanced, and is more of a focus than the technology now.

IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model, along with the provision of free products to get people hooked and then upsell them on expensive and (in the big picture, but customers can't see the big picture) insconsequential upgrades. The secret to success in the tech industry is "Demonstrate value. Nurture dependence. Threaten to take away features, unless large amounts of money are paid." In people terms, we call this an abusive relationship, or blackmail. In the tech industry, it's a very profitable business model.

The worst part is this is spreading to other industries like food production and transportation.

The only surprise is how many intelligent people still believe that utopia is just a few more lines of code away.

Extreme poverty is down to almost nothing.

Polio is all but eradicated.

Many types of cancer, death sentences just 20 years ago, are treatable. HIV is practically curable.

You can learn anything you want on YouTube, Wikipedia, and the wider web with time and effort, for free. (The TFA acknowledges this.)

I'm not saying there aren't huge problems. The benefit, to paraphrase, is not evenly distributed. But in nearly every sense it's better to have been born in the 90s than the 60s.

We can and should discuss lack of regulation, legal-but-wrong tax evasion, societal risks, there's plenty of bad to go around. But put it in context - there's a lot of good to go around too.

I do relate to seeing elders feeling a sense of bliss upon using WhatsApp to connect to relatives living far away, or friends/acquaintances they couldn't keep in touch with anymore (99% of the time due to age-related issues).

But otherwise, if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control how I use that program, then they likely never had my best interest as a priority in the first place. Sometimes, using such programs is not a choice, or it comes with significant personal/financial cost for the users. But deriving something actionable from this reasoning is hard - policy makers are either to detached from technical details, are actively working against your interest due to corruption, or cannot agree on what the right direction is. I don't have a solution, besides giving some of my time and money to organizations who have consistently acted on the best interests of users, such as the Free Software Foundation, EFF, the Tor Project, etc.

Anyone who thinks ANY publicly traded company acts in YOUR best interest (unless YOU are serious shareholder) is in the words of my 11-year old kid - delulu :)

That’s life. Life is war against entropy and for the individual at least entropy always wins. We die.

The Internet made countless things better and a few things worse. We notice the things it made worse because humans have a powerful negativity bias, probably because this was adaptive. “Mistake a bush for a lion and you’re fine, but mistake a lion for a bush and you’re dead.” Your ancestors were paranoid enough to survive.

Edit: I do want to add one point on which I am sympathetic. Unfortunately it seems as if politics is a thing the Internet made worse. That’s dangerous because governments have a monopoly on force. Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse is probably an existential problem.

What did you think you would obtain by giving technology to a bunch of horny, aggressive and fear-driven monkeys? Other than making monkeys more effective at making each other horny, aggressive and afraid?

What did we expect? That the year 2000 was magically going to bring about a golden age?

Technology changes, people don't.

Personally I can name both areas where tech improved my life beyond expectations (not having to live near work for one) as well as huge disappointments (such as people willingly choosing to believe lies en masse despite truth becoming easily accessible).

> The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the only nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news.. Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively.. When the major channels for moving information are loyal to one party, its effects, while often invisible, can be profound.

I think that may be a bit biased. There was also Threads, Terminator 2, Blade Runner, Robocop, Planet of the Apes, Escape from New York, Brazil, Mad Max and the like.

Reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

The Internet was among many things that came with the latest wave. Idealists believed they were so clever to snatch back their freedom. Govs believed they are so clever to pervert the Internet to their own ends. But it's a poison pill that takes a century to act.

It's not a secret that there's a joint effort from all sides to unite the humanity. Some of the powerful want to create a tyranny we cannot escape, others want to create a paradise. But in one thing they agree: the wars must end. The state structures disagree, of course, as wars is their lifeblood, and right now they believe they can prevent this united humanity utopia. So the states were given this shiny new thing - the Internet - generously peppered with the magic powder of survelliance, and the states, unable to resist the urge, swallowed this shiny thing and they are still busy chewing it. In the meantime, the Internet slowly grows inside them, driven by its spirit of connecting everything together.

The coming wave will radically empower the Internet and at the end of this half-century cycle the states will realise what the Internet really was.

Let's all build Internet services on open standards and join all sorts of things together.

Tech in 2024:

Guess what suckers!

In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.

In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.

Never had this. Maybe a little bit about GNU and Linux; that's about it. Good to see someone sobering up.

Whatever you believe it seems clear that one's experience of life and the world is dominated by inner experience and mental well-being, not by luxuries or technological convenience. One could live in a palace, drive flying cars and so on but still suffer dreadfully.

Although my personal disposition is fairly sunny, verging on the manic, my model of how the world and how my life works is not one of optimism but rather a series of defeats occasionally punctuated by an unexpected victory. Sort of like the fall of the Berlin Wall or how Gollum accidentally destroyed the ring. Eucatastrophe was Tolkien's name for it.

No major technological leap has been happened disrupting social structures, putting people out of jobs, or causing some sort of moral panic. https://pessimistsarchive.org/

Nearly all of them have dramatically benefited humanity in the long term. Your children will live healthier and longer, with fewer extremes of suffering.

The drama over AI, in my opinion, simply separates those who think long-term from those who don't. On a long enough timescale, issues like hallucination, theft of artistic IP, etc are a total non-issue.

I think it's arguable the anti-AI movement is much more selfish than the pro-AI one. I don't care if I lose my job to create AGI, because the benefit to humanity is worth much more than my job.

Internet is a TV form the 80s/90s. Mindless, soulless engagement machine we all stare into.

My whole family now works from home in their pajamas, gets anything they want delivered next day to their door, and has access to all the knowledge in the world literally in their pocket. Is that utopia? I don’t know. But it sure beats life in the 1990s.

Boycott is a start, it's an easy demand to put forward. I doubt it's enough, so I'd suggest adding two classics once you've recruited and become regulars with some boycotters: mutual aid and direct action.

The plethora of gadgets, gizmos and sights and sounds that painted my perception of the 90s and 00s just felt like the way it was, until it wasn’t.

Don't call it a "computer" (computers are scary), call it a "smart" "telephone." Or call it a "device" as if it were a can opener.

Don't call it a "program" (programmers are geeks), call it an (ugh) "app" [which is just short for "application program" of course]

Never had one of those nefarious handheld treacherous computers, never will, thanks.

Maybe projects like Framework, Mastodon, et al are showing us what the next cycle may be and can be a more positive way of moving forward?

But I wonder how many people have had a change of heart, and how much is just the influx of younger people and others with different opinions. Now that tech went through a "glamorous" phase, and is still in a "lucrative" phase, it certainly has a much broader draw.

It's fine for people to update their beliefs with their experiences, I'm just curious if the cause is that vs new people with different beliefs. I haven't really been on social media (other than curated subreddits and HN, I suppose), and I have a lovely wife and children and lots of real life time, too, so I feel like I don't doom scroll or anything. I wonder how much that's colored people's opinions vs first hand experiences.

As a simple example, the tech ethics question du jour when I was coming of age was whether it was okay to pirate music. Of course it was, it's free to copy bits! "You wouldn't download a car" etc. But I don't see a ton of daylight between that and training those songs on an AI model, but now generative AI is destroying those industries and musicians, etc. And HN these days seems largely against the AI training, while it was for pirating back then.

Or another example, slightly before that was the Clipper Chip and the government trying to regulate encryption for the safety and security of citizens, and the PGP guys being folk heroes for printing their source code in a book to take advantage of free speech protections and get around it. Whereas these days a good chunk of HN wants the government to regulate AI models for our own safety. This one is a bit of a stretch, but it feels like the problems "rhyme" at least.

I realize that my "lowering the barrier" statement comes off as if I think we should support inclusive technology or that I don't believe in democratization of tech- Im all for inclusivity, but we have not actually reached a state of democracy.

One key mistake the author makes is misjudging the average person

>They are people who need to game the attention economy by increasingly disrespectful and shocking content, gore, rage bait, dehumanizing pranks17, extreme consumerism like huge shopping hauls, sloppy large mukbangs, shredding lamborghinis18, gambling streams and websites19, game shows20 and more

If your tastes are more sophisticated, you may see the profusion of relatively puerile content on the internet as "gaming the attention economy" - but how do you know the average person doesn't just like watching mukbangs? And why shouldn't they?

In my view - you should get comfortable with the fact that people have different preferences to yours and judge based on outcomes rather than aesthetics.

The author complains about racism. Maybe it's easier to be racist nowadays. On the other hand, in the decades before the internet we had more race related shootings, bombings, etc. Maybe, net net, it's a good thing if the people who would've been forming a militia in the woods 30 years ago are instead posting racist memes on X.

Likewise it's harder to make a blog or your own website today. But, much easier to blow up on X, TikTok, YouTube etc. I just don't see the issue here. We have far more content creators and similar now than in the past.

None of the complaints seem that meaningful to me. Technology improves. Things aren't perfect (yet) - but they might be in the future. We have greater access to information, communication, and intelligence every year. If these trends persist we will use the improvements to enhance all other aspects of life (as we are already doing). The future where power comes from solar, nuclear, or fusion, physical labor comes from machines, cognitive labor comes from AI, material comes from space travel, advances in biology/physics/chemistry radically extend our life and health spans is not only possible, it is visibly approaching.

This is especially ironic when the author expresses skepticism of the social benefit of smartphones in paragraph 2, as if no company in particular made them.

Let's just hope there are enough people out there using these things wisely that the future will be a better place.

People got excited when our tech solves their real problems. It looks we've been in a plateau since before the Covid with a couple of exceptions.

The fact giants push modern and worse mainframes (the cloud/mainframe + mobile/dumb terminal) to retain control, "you'll own nothing", and to sell fast-tech crap instead of long lasting, partially upgradable desktops, does not meas that's the tech, it's just a commercial choice.

The main issue is not even technical but political: on one side giants needs slaves to prosper, so people who depend on them, who own nothing, who consume the 100% of what they earn in services and so on, while nature and the civil society needs Distributism. From the '900s -ism we have dropped most of such "giant-centric" way of thinking, it's about time do drop a bit more.

As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, this image confuses me.

Buy a dishwasher and a washing machine.

This constant casting off of blame onto celebrity enemies is insidious. It's an acknowledgement that the Western upper-middle class will never change their lifestyles or values, just spend all of their "political" time looking for scapegoats, ceremonially killing them, and patting themselves on the back for it (want a Pulitzer? A Nobel?)

That's why Trump was at first revitalizing, because he was a sacrifice that refused to die, immunizing them from the fact that their invested wealth doubled during his presidency and the one that followed. The fact that he overcame their frowny faced disapproval and their willingness to abuse the legal system has left them in complete disarray: could it be that the problem is that they've become ridiculously wealthy while working increasingly parasitic jobs, rather than that tech billionaires are assholes? You work for them.

And none of them deregulated telecommunications, none of them deregulated the banks, none of them made at-will employment the standard. They're not the reason that I had three educational tv channels as a child, and now, for the past couple decades, the only one left in PBS has been fundraising with Deepak Chopra lectures. You've all become libertarians unless your lifestyle or aesthetic is bothered in any way, then you become authoritarians. Or in other words, you're narcissists.

The outsourcing of morality to voting and donating to Democrats is over. The elevation of that private group to a moral authority based on the fact that they were vaguely nice to black people from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, and that being drilled into every school age kid, has to be overcome. The party hasn't broken with Reagan, via that likely rapist, definitely sexual harasser that they platform at every convention, one that took a break from campaigning to execute a retarded black man. You shouldn't have ever left it to them, you did it because it was easy. It's not morality if it doesn't involve sacrifice.

Also, ask yourself the question: what do you do? Are you contributing to anything net positive in the world, or are you simply a facilitator for a middleman who lives through extracting value from the defenseless? Are you double-dipping by spending the cash of the people you make social capital out of publicly whining about?

When I was younger, in my teen years (~2014-2020), I imagined the future only to be better than it was right now. The technology would only keep getting better. People would use the internet (especially social media) and become cleverer, less xenophobic, and more open to all kinds of cultures. We all would be getting richer, quality of life would only increase, no more wars, yadda yadda. It was so obvious that liberal democracy is the only right way forward, the pinnacle.

(when I say "we" I refer to the collective West)

I'm quite disappointed with how so many things are turning to shit right now. I know, I know, what I wrote above probably sounds like "the end of history", which has been recalled even by its originator by now. Nostalgia probably also plays an important role – things are much simpler when you're not an adult.

But still, we had a good thing. We had it all.

I keep hoping we will get back on track.

In a lot of ways, I feel like this author still believes in (a slightly modified version of) the tech utopian fantasy. Do we really think that a) research is HARDER to access today than in the 2000s, and b) that the thing keeping sensationalized rage bait popular is paywalls around research papers?

Besides excuses.

Technology is treating me well and I hope that continues to be true for a long time. I mainly worry about the sociopolitical consequences of the mass disenfranchisement of the middle classes but the middle class is so folded in on itself that it’ll likely disappear in with a whimper and we’ll end up with a 3rd world level of inequality. While not as nice as more egalitarian societies they do largely continue to function with a surprising degree of stability.

Radio "shock jocks" etc.

1. Sees things from an excessively American point of view. 2. Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.

This is a global problem, and a lot of the problem is the concentration of power. The problem is not which side companies in a particular industry pick, but that which side they pick matters too much.

The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem. Disparate issues get labelled "left" or "right" and everyone agrees with all the opinions on their side.

This is not new. It is why a lot of people are interested in YC, and this forum as a result.

The problem with that system though is that it creates misaligned interests. As consumers, we want technologies that make our lives easier. But the people who are running the game - the people with money and therefore power - want to just make the extraction of value more efficient.

Social media exists to sell advertising against content you don't have to pay anyone to produce, and is therefore one of the greatest utopian ideas of capitalism. There is minimal material cost, labour costs are reasonable even when you pay 95th percentile compensation packages, and to boot you are seen as a media entity that powerful people want to influence, so you can help them influence others, thereby giving you access to all sorts of mechanisms to protect your value extraction machine.

The system is working as intended. This isn't a bug.

If you don't like it, you need to start supporting other economic systems within these industries. Technological utopia is still achievable, but not while the people building it are so absorbed by return on capital and extraction of value.

As a side point, Elon Musk borrowed money to pay $44bn for Twitter and seems intent on driving it into the ground, which we might all say is an example of the capitalist system self-correcting. Except since Trump got elected - the candidate he endorsed and heavily personally promoted on that platform - the value of Tesla has gone up over $200bn. That's not self-correction, that's the system working as designed. You need to decide for yourself if you think that's healthy for you and your descendants. I'm not convinced it is.

The pieces are in place, it's just nobody has put them together.

AI /will/ be a net-benefit for humanity, even if it stopped progress as it currently is.

- They both criticize ByteDance for pushing Russian propaganda, and Google for not pushing Russian propaganda (sorry, "censoring").

- Also criticizing people for having the "wrong" political persuasion is telling. I'm not American so I can only look in from the outside but if Donald Trump won so decisively, maybe the left needs to look inward at what they did wrong instead of blaming big tech for not supporting "their side" enough.

- Criticizing tech for being anti-regulation and anti-deceleration... If we regulate our own technology all that'll happen is that bad actors will leapfrog us. Maintaining technological superiority is a matter of survival for liberal democracies. Friendly reminder that 70% of the world population lives under dictatorships today and it's ever rising...

- The idea that social networks accelerate xenophobia is ridiculous. All it does it expose it. Also left-leaning westerners have this ridiculous idea that we're not the most progressive culture on earth. We are and it's not even close. There's literally race wars and modern day slavery all over the world.

- Labour conditions... It's obvious the author has never worked in a truly bad work environment. While their criticisms aren't unfounded, perspective is needed. The past was worse, things have gotten better.

IMO tech is still an overall net positive. It's what's enabled the earth to support so many people, even if power generation is higher and less efficient than we want, it's more efficient than it used to be. Even if the current geopolitical situation is getting spicy, most of human history was still worse...

This reads to me as a leftist having a meltdown over the current political state. The truth is, leftist governments brought this upon themselves. They thought that QE wouldn't lead to inflation because it didn't during the 2010s... However the economy then was otherwise deflationary. When those conditions ended, QE did what economists always knew it would, add inflationary pressure. And let's be real, most people vote based on economics. Left-leaning governments tried to gloss over the poor state of their economies with social issues that most people are ambivalent about at best and lost. Also millennials are the next largest cohort after boomers now. Even if the birth rate is lower than ever, a majority of millennial women have had at least 1 child. This changes voting demographics dramatically... The US left needs a bit of introspection instead of blaming everyone for their loss.

Maybe this person should try using tech for something positive. Or go outside and touch grass.

While I'm slightly ambivalent about LLMs, I do think that the promise of AGI has awakened something in the tech world... AI could usher in a new age, supercharge the economy, bring about a lot of positive change. Instead of whinging about the current state of politics, maybe think of positive uses for it. I'm personally using AI to build an app in the domain of finance and economics. I think AI could bring about a lot of economic benefits and change a lot of the things OP is complaining about.

And final thought. Depression is real. Currently it's -20 degrees celcius outside, there's a foot of snow on the ground and the wind is blowing. We lost our home to a wildfire this summer and spent much of the summer homeless (well, bouncing around various places anyway) with a toddler. My SO is East European, have lots of family within 1000km of Ukraine, have Ukrainian friends and family (even my own family, although they immigrated to the west long ago)... It's not like my life is without stress. But I'm still optimistic that tech can produce good in the world.

It was never real.

Anybody in any of the tech companies mentioned (and many others) has always known.

You can buy groceries and social status with a fat paycheque and stocks. You can’t do the same with “just” a clean conscience.