
How Evil Is Tech? - monsieurpng
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/how-evil-is-tech.html
======
mephitix
My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share:

I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For
as much as Silicon Valley professes that it wants to "make the world a better
place", you can also find

\- social media websites that feed on people's addictions, almost forcing them
to post and share as much as they can instead of simply enjoying moments in
their lives.

\- the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger
the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later,
walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies
allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind
of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting
propagated throughout all these social networks.

\- big tech companies where employees are sold on "making the world a better
place" but instead become completely dependent on attaining fake labels like
"senior engineer" \- and yet have never actually talked to a single user.

\- games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up
to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons
to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts

\- the outright denial of many people in the tech industry that any of the
above is a problem. Simply read through the comments on this HN page.
Identifying that any of these things are problems is the first step in fixing
them.

~~~
smsm42
How SV is to blame for fake news? This has nothing to do with either SV or
tech in general, it's like blaming car makers for Al Capone because he used
them to get away from the police.

Internet is _still_ incredible learning tool. If you want to learn. Much
better actually than it was 10 years ago. You have free university-level
courses, you have Duolingo where you can learn two dozen languages or so, you
have Wikipedia, you have SciHub, you have enormous quantity of scientific and
scolarly content available absolutely free... But of course if you insist on
going to sites with fake news, nobody can prevent it.

Same for games - which tech industry doesn't design, or careerism - which sure
as heck tech industry did not invent, it existed way before Hero of Alexandria
invented world's first steam engine.

Of course, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer and the internet was
interneter when we're young. Everything was better when we're young. That has
also been invented sometime between wheel and fire. But tech companies have
nothing to do with all those faults of human nature - they are not free from
them, of course, but they did not create them and did not change them in any
substantial way. They did, however, make many things cheaper, faster, easier,
more accessible and more affordable.

~~~
nl
_This has nothing to do with either SV or tech in general, it 's like blaming
car makers for Al Capone because he used them to get away from the police._

It's more like blaming Ford for the Pinto ("unsafe at any speed"). Deliberate
design choices are what made fake news effective.

Think of Fake News as spam email: Gmail (and others) mostly solved spam email
because they decided to. Apple made a deliberate decision to manually review
apps in the AppStore. Twitter made the deliberate decision not to ban spam
bots in its ToS(!). Facebook made a deliberate decision to reward engagement
on links.

~~~
jaredklewis
Fake news is a much, much harder problem than spam.

Spam is simply marketing emails that a user never asked to receive. If you ask
users themselves for a definition of spam, you’ll get some variation on the
above. If users were asked to mark emails they considered to be spam, they
would generally mark the same kind of emails as spam. Some would mark more,
some less, but all around a common center. Users and companies are basically
in agreement about what spam is.

Compare with fake news. If you asked users to mark stories they considered
fake, some would mark info wars and some would mark huff post. And those
groups would rarely overlap. Given that users and companies fundamentally
disagree on what fake news even is, I can’t see how any piece of technology
can solve this.

~~~
jandrese
Fake news is absolutely real, for some definitions of fake news. This is the
problem, there is no generally accepted definition of "fake news". Some people
(including some very prominent ones) define it as "any story with which I do
not agree." Other people define it as news stories that contain falsehoods,
which seems like a better definition but is far from universally accepted.
Just look at the attacks on Politifact, Factcheck.org, etc... for people who
don't think objective truth is a factor in "Fake news". And of course things
are rarely black and white, there is usually at least a kernel of truth in any
statement, so you end up mostly measuring the depth of the bullshit covering
it.

Next time you hear an attack on "the mainstream media" remember that the
attack is targeting organizations that do their own independent verification
of stories (or at least try to) instead of regurgitating talking points. The
people are angry that those organizations are making it harder to lie to you.

~~~
smsm42
> Just look at the attacks on Politifact, Factcheck.org, etc.

TBH, those are not exactly shining examples of "objective truth". I've
repeatedly seen different ratings given to different politicians on
essentially the same statement, because in one case the reviewer felt
sympathetic to the politician and went out of the way to explain why it could
be considered accurate, and in the other case was hostile, and went out of the
way to point out why it is not true. Neither was, strictly speaking, incorrect
- almost with any statement that is interesting enough to discuss you could
find, if you look thoroughly enough, something to confirm and something to
reject, especially if you consider not only the bare statement, but the
context and implications, as those sites frequently do. It's inherently
subjective business.

> the attack is targeting organizations that do their own independent
> verification of stories (or at least try to)

Or sometimes not :) Yes, the MSM does reporting and verification, but also
does irresponsible reporting, exaggeration, conjecture, moral panic,
sensationalizing and distortion. And people that are angry at them for _that_
are trying to keep them (a little bit more) honest.

~~~
jandrese
Can you post some examples of times when a fact checking organization rated a
statement differently based on who said it?

~~~
smsm42
I didn't record every occurrence, but I did a quick search and here's an
example: [https://www.allenwest.com/2017/06/22/noted-fact-checker-
igni...](https://www.allenwest.com/2017/06/22/noted-fact-checker-ignites-
social-media-backlash-caught-posting-biased-tweet/) Maybe not the best one,
but certainly seems to be the same claim evaluated differently.

TBH, it doesn't even have to be a different politician - here's Obama saying
famous "77 cent on the dollar" and gets "mostly false"
[http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2012/jun/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2012/jun/21/barack-obama/barack-obama-ad-says-women-are-
paid-77-cents-dolla/) here is essentially the same getting "mostly true"
[http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2014/jan/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2014/jan/29/barack-obama/barack-obama-state-union-says-women-
make-77-cents-/) Did women pay drop significantly in these two years? Probably
not. If you read the conclusion, it's saying practically the same thing - yes,
raw statistic is saying that, but it does not mean what people quoting it mean
(that women are routinely discriminated in pay - i.e. maybe they are, but that
specific statistic does not point to that conclusion and should not be used as
an argument). But one time it gets "false", another time it gets "true". Why?
Who knows. Certainly very short of "objective truth".

And then there's this: [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2008/oct/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2008/oct/09/barack-obama/obamas-plan-expands-existing-
system/) Yes, the famous "if you like you health plan, you can keep it". Rated
as True. Or is it "Lie of the Year"? [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/article/2013/dec/12/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/)
You can read the whole evolution of this "objective truth" here:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-200...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-2008-politifacts-2013-lie-
of-the-year-that-you-could-keep-your-health-plan-under-obamacare-it-rated-
true/) I think this objective truth is a tad less than objective.

~~~
nl
I didn't look at all of those, but I did take a look at the last one since it
seemed so bizarre: why would the same site give it "True", and also "Lie of
the Year".

A very quick reading makes it pretty clear. The "True" one was in 2008, and
based on the law as it was written. The second was in 2013, and based how it
turned out after it met the real world.

The 2013 article outlines this process pretty well - the whole thing is worth
reading. But a good pull quote: _Yet Obama repeated "if you like your health
care plan, you can keep it" when seeking re-election last year. In 2009 and
again in 2012, PolitiFact rated Obama’s statement Half True, which means the
statement is partially correct and partially wrong._

~~~
smsm42
> The "True" one was in 2008, and based on the law as it was written. The
> second was in 2013, and based how it turned out after it met the real world.

This is _exactly_ the problem. They made some predictions about the law (which
turned to be completely wrong, but that's not even the point) and tried to
pass it as "objective fact", not as their private conjecture, implying that
those that disagreed with it (and turned out to be right) are just lying.

This is the exact opposite of objective fact. This time they got caught
because their predictions didn't come true and their subjective opinion
disagreed with the facts so obviously that they were forced to flip. But many
other times they do not get caught because there's no such sharp contrast
between their private opinion and facts, and you can always muddle the waters
and spin the arguments to try and present why your opinion is "objective
truth" and anybody who thinks otherwise is just "truth denier".

As a political propaganda, it's fine - everybody tried to prove their opinion
is correct and the other guy's opinion is wrong. But it takes special kind of
hutzpah to call one's opinion "objective fact" and try to paint all the other
opinions as lying. Exactly the kind of hutzpah the "fact checker" sites are
swimming in.

------
blfr
The social atomization trend in the west began long before facebooks and
googles even existed, before the Internet was available to the general public.
They, and Facebook in particular, probably aren't helping but they didn't
cause it either.

What bothers me the most about these tech giants is the complete about face on
free speech. Companies that couldn't exist without it, that couldn't have been
founded without the open web (Google) and belief in freedom of communication
(Twitter), as bastions of free speech (Reddit) are now busy coming up with new
ways to censor their users. This is part of their progressive culture
mentioned in the OP but a very specific one.

I don't know how many people still care but this is how they lost all my
goodwill towards them.

~~~
Singletoned
I think we are starting to see that free-speech has a tendancy to destroy
itself, in the same way that free-markets do.

True free speech will end up in a system being exploited by those who can make
the most noise the most often. True free markets tend to end up as a series of
oligopolies.

Small amounts of regulation can help both systems do better, but we need to
find a way to reliably regulate regulation (as regulation also has a tendancy
to destroy itself).

~~~
nol13
See: Hacker News vs. Slashdot

Free speech is great, but a bit of regulation on the obvious trolls goes a
long way in making this a good place for the non-deranged to discuss things.

------
lacker
If you got all your information from this article you would be surprised that,
for example, 82% of Americans have a favorable view of Google. It's like the
old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-
appl...](https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-apple-
facebook-twitter/)

~~~
mindcrime
_It 's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of
the new school._

It very much feels like this. I mean, maybe I live in a bit of a bubble as a
techie, but I just don't see people (even among my very non-techie friends /
acquaintances) saying "Wow, WTF is wrong with
(Google|Facebook|Amazon|Microsoft|Instagram|Snapchat|Uber|$Whoever)?" OTOH,
plenty of those same people are very critical of (CNN|MSNBC|Washington Post|NY
Times|Fox News|ABC|NBC|CBS|etc).

Honestly, I am starting to feel like this "tech backlash" storyline is
fabricated and phony. Dare I say... #FakeNews? :-)

~~~
confounded
Are you suggesting that the NYT is faking _its own editorial view point_?

~~~
chickenfries
David Brooks... supports the media?! Gasp.

GP fails to distinguish between news and editorial, which this article is.

~~~
mindcrime
I don't think that's particularly relevant in this context. Of course I can
only speak for myself and what I said, but I can speculate on what I _think_
the parent of my post was thinking, and both are something roughly like "this
is just one more example of an ongoing thread of reporting, both 'editorial'
and 'news', which is pushing a specific narrative regarding the tech industry
and popular perception of same".

In that regard, that this specific article is an op-ed is an insignificant
detail.

Even more so when the author writes it as though he was reporting "news" and
not just an opinion. I mean, you get stuff like this:

 _Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at
Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted._

Note how that's presented as an affirmative statement of an absolute fact.

and

 _Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make
billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like
the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows
leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake._

OK, nice use of the weasel word "some", but still, this read like he's
reporting facts, not an opinion.

And so on.

~~~
chickenfries
You really have a strange standard for opinion pieces.

> Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make
> billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is
> like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody
> knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.

I don't know about you, but I am totally ready to accept this "opinion" as
fact. Smartphone/internet/social media addiction is a topic commonly discussed
on HN.

Just because you don't agree with "some people" doesn't mean you can pretend
that the things Brooks are talking about are just his opinion and not
something that is objectively happening. Is your real problem with this that
he used the word "some"? He does on to detail who "some" people are in the
article.

~~~
mindcrime
I don't even really know how to respond to this because I literally have no
idea what you're trying to say, or how it addresses anything I said above.

I guess I'll just say this:

I never said I disagree with any specific point in the article, and what you
quoted there was simply an example of how the author of TFA poses something
(which might or might not be true) as "news", in a way that could blur the
line between a "news piece" and an "opinion piece". I was just addressing an
issue somebody else raised earlier about the blurring of news and opinion, by
pointing out that the author directly contributes to this problem by the way
he wrote his article.

Whether those statements are true or not isn't actually relevant to this
specific point. They may be relevant to the broader issue of whether or not
the "tech backlash" is real, but that isn't what I was commenting on there.

~~~
chickenfries
> I was just addressing an issue somebody else raised earlier about the
> blurring of news and opinion, by pointing out that the author directly
> contributes to this problem by the way he wrote his article.

I guess I just really strongly disagree that the sentence you quoted
constitutes "blurring the line." It says that some people think something and
then went on to detail who these people were. Further more, David Brooks is
possibly one of the most well known columnists for one of the most well read
newspapers in the world. It's labeled "Opinion" and "Op-ed Columnist" at the
top. It has an editorialized title, "How Evil is Tech?" It's so clearly NOT
news. Nitpicking this one sentence to say that somehow David Brooks is
masquerading as news is absurd.

~~~
mindcrime
_Nitpicking this one sentence to say that somehow David Brooks is masquerading
as news is absurd._

That was just one example. If anyone is nitpicking here, I'd argue it's you.
And I still have no idea what point you're trying to make.

~~~
chickenfries
The point I'm trying to make is that this op-ed doesn't "blur the line" it's a
textbook, completely average op-ed and correctly labeled as op-ed.

------
KKKKkkkk1
We've been seeing this type of articles from the New York Times on an almost
daily basis recently. Given that the New York Times considers Facebook, Google
and Apple as direct threats to its business model, I think the use of words
like "evil" in this context is an insult to their readers' intelligence.

~~~
beaner
It's become really easy to see when NYT has decided to push an agenda. The
Trump/Russia thing, for a while. "Tech is evil" for a while now, too. It
wouldn't be as annoying if they didn't promote themselves as a bastion of
truth with marketing lines like "Independent Journalism. More essential than
ever." Much of NYT is editorialized storytelling, not independent journalism.
Sometimes it's overt, but more often it's subtle by the simple selection of
what stories to publish and which to not. I feel like it didn't used to be
this way and it has become worse over time.

~~~
chickenfries
This is an op ed. By David Brooks.

~~~
beaner
As per my comment, individual op-eds are not necessarily the problem, it is
the curation of various articles fitting a theme across the entire paper by
the editorial board.

------
confounded
Using the word “tech” to describe the business practices of unregulated
monopolies is really starting to grind on me.

It’s not necessarily journalists’ fault; that’s the term these companies have
used to market themselves for years.

We (the engineering classes / actual _technologists_ ) need to do more to
brighten the line between the _technology_ and the _motivations and
incentives_ of the people putting up the capital (and the
executives/lawyers/lobbyists they control).

And, possibly, to recognize our latent power to influence certain decisions.

~~~
lucas_membrane
> the people putting up the capital

If you look at the balance sheets of many very profitable software/service
companies, particularly those that use the cloud but do not provide the cloud,
you will see that the concept of 'capital' is not what most think it is. There
are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system
'capitalist.' The rate of return (free cash flow) on assets is astronomical.
For example, I have recently worked for a firm in which the assets and annual
return to shareholders were each equal to about 2 months of revenue. And most
of the assets are either cash equivalents that the 'capitalists' have simply
squirreled away out of past earnings, or agreed-upon fictions like deferred
costs or goodwill, or monopoly rights (intellectual property) created by the
government for the corporations.

This is not to say that successful entrepreneurs do not have extraordinary
talents at what Barnum called "money-getting." But it is hard to call someone
who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his garage and sells it for 10 figures, or
someone controlling a similar firm who has already recovered his initial
investment 100,000 times over, or a hired-gun employee slash-and-burn CEO who
is given a few million in shares to motivate more money-getting, a
'capitalist.' Especially since the $1,000.00 probably went for things like
telephone and answering services, stationary, advertising, legal fees of
getting set-up, or finding a first customer, which are expenses, not capital,
and none of which are recorded in the firms capital accounts. Our respect for
capitalism is so overblown that we take it as given that any making of
unimaginable amounts of money by means that no one understands is an example
of 'capitalism,' because if it were not, the reverence for capitalism would be
called into question.

~~~
confounded
Thanks for writing this. It's tangential to my point (which is specifically
about the large corporates which constitute "tech" in the colloquial sense),
but I find it very interesting, and am keen to reduce my own ignorance.

> _There are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system
> 'capitalist.'_

Why do there need to be physical assets? I know the classic Marx-ish "seize
the means of production" stuff is written in this way, but it doesn't make
much sense to me outside of the factory labor of the industrial revolution.

I use 'capital' to mean investable money, or assets that can be traded or
exploited; e.g. accumulated wealth, as opposed to income. And I generally use
'capitalist' to mean someone who invests 'capital' seeking a return on
investment, without producing much productive labor themselves. Often this
means maintaining the capability to partially or fully control the product and
the nature of production, in exchange for the investment. E.g. a venture
capitalist.

> _But it is hard to call someone who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his
> garage and sells it for 10 figures, or someone controlling a similar firm
> who has already recovered his initial investment 100,000 times over..._

These wouldn't really be 'capitalists' per my working definition above, just
extraordinarily successful founders of bootstrapped-small-business. I think
we're aligned, except on whether examples like these are in any way
representative of anything that's likely to happen to anyone, or what's meant
by "tech" in the article. Google raised 36MM pre-IPO, Facebook 2.3B pre-IPO.
This money came from venture capitalists, who would have exchanged it for
boards-seats, strong influence on executive appointments, and ultimately the
direction of the company.

I can't tell if you're an accountant or a Marxist (or a Marxist accountant!),
but I'm keen to know more about your perspective.

~~~
lucas_membrane
No, I am a skeptic, not a Marxist. I try to keep this question of Einstein in
mind: "What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?"
We never know how much we are missing, what points of view will come and go
back and forth between unrecognized and undeniable.

I've been following these fashions for some time (I can trace my skepticism to
reading Parkinson's Law when it was fairly new and I was 11 years old). When I
was taking my degree in economics, the theory of the firm said that the firm
exists to cooperatively advance the combined interests of its suppliers of
capital, its suppliers of labor, and its customers. Later, that was expanded
to also recognize the reasonable expectations of other 'stakeholders.' The
apotheosis of wealth has changed that so much that deciding how much we have
gained or lost is much like the index-number problem in economics --
unresolvable. We cannot value what we have today by standards that we used to
embrace, nor can we value what we used to have according to today's standards.
We cannot not change, but changes over time confound the problem of evaluating
change.

I might suggest that the single biggest cause of the runaway worship of vast
wealth was the arrival of the New Hampshire lottery, the first modern lottery
in the 50 states, subsequently imitated by almost all the others, in 1964. Now
the man in the street can identify and sympathize with the millionaire because
it is only a matter of time until the right numbers come out (lottery
investments in the USA are now around $1.00 per capita per day). Belief in
American capitalism runs on optimism; optimism and denial sustain each other.

This too shall pass.

------
skrebbel
Somewhat a tangent, but "How evil is tech" is a nice Trumpian headline. Looks
like NYT is catching up with the times.

By formulating is like this, NYT implies that everybody agrees that "tech" is
evil to some extent, and that the only discussion is about exactly _how_ evil
"tech" is. Don't forget that NYT is in pretty direct competition with some
companies they call "tech". This article is not unlike Coca-Cola publishing a
press release titled "How evil is Pepsi?".

(Note, I did not share any opinion about whether "tech" is evil and I don't
necessarily disagree with the premise of the article. I'm just trying to
highlight that this kind of writing appears to be the new baseline and it's
not just fake news and the alt right who do it anymore and that bothers the
crap out of me because I feel like I can't trust anyone anymore)

~~~
Ygg2
> "How evil is tech" is a nice Trumpian headline. Looks like NYT is catching
> up with the times.

What makes you think it needed to catch up at all? Look, press/media, tech,
and any industry out there are there to "Make world a better place... for
themselves".

~~~
meebs
> any industry out there are there to "Make world a better place... for
> themselves".

Under capitalism, at least. :)

------
oh-kumudo
Very evil apparently.

Tech is the greediest industry at this point, even comparing with Wall Street,
all under the philosophy of GROWTH. Too many pretentious people get into this
industry to chase the hot money, it slowly degrades to this toxic, selfish,
out of touch culture, that benefits no one except the tech people and their
pocket. Worst of all, they lack the blessing of self-consciousness to see it.

Tech is changing the world, but it probably not making the world a better
place.

~~~
AstralStorm
Real means now needed is material progress. Energy progress. Fixing backwards
places in the world. Political progress. Ecological and economical too.
Medical perhaps.

Apparently this is not quick buck enough.

Information revolution can only go so far. Many of the alleged tech companies
are not innovative at all.

------
wpietri
I am torn between my desire to see the numerous legitimate criticisms of the
tech industry given deeper consideration and irritation at the eternally lazy
way David "Applebee's salad bar" Brooks tackles anything.

The "destroying the young" thing is especially tiresome. Every new thing has
been destroying the young. That's true at least as far back as the novel [1],
and probably back to prehistory when elders complained that fire was making
kids soft, what with their "cooking" and their "warmth".

It's also deeply self-defeating of him to be complaining about the lack of
"cohesion" and "focused attention" in a sub-1000-word opinion piece that tries
to make a half-dozen points, none particularly well. And all that in a daily
newspaper, which is built to contain small amount of a great variety of
things, and which makes a lot of its money from distracting its readers with
ads. [2]

[1] e.g, point 4 of [http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-
complaint...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaints-
about-young-people-ruining-everything) and [https://op-
talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer...](https://op-
talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-
york-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-
earnings.html)

~~~
notacoward
> the eternally lazy way David "Applebee's salad bar" Brooks tackles anything.

Which leads to the question: how evil is David Brooks? How much of our time
has he wasted? How many minds has he warped? How many Evil Empire agenda items
has he helped to push? I'd say very few in tech have done as much harm as he
has.

------
beaner
I feel like none of the problems described are really symptoms of Big Tech,
they're more symptoms of technology itself along with the fact that we haven't
yet adjusted to it psychologically as a species. None of the problems that the
author describes are problems that would not be there if "Big Tech" didn't
exist and were replaced by decentralized systems or other alternatives.

I think the author missed a really good opportunity to explore the developing
relationship between the human psyche and the overflow of information that
this age has provided us with, and instead made it political and blamey.

~~~
confounded
I’m not so sure the role of what we’ve let become called “tech” is as neutral
and inevitable as you make out.

There’s nothing about the technology behind the Internet that means that ad-
surveillance needs to be its default business model, for example.

~~~
beaner
Yeah, there's not a law, but I think if we had started in any other model
we'd've still ended up here.

Information is cheap and fast. This makes it difficult to charge for most
content. The only way to do this and profit is to advertise. Competition among
ad networks leads to ad tracking because it results in higher revenue for
publishers.

~~~
AstralStorm
Correction: only commonly available information. Want to get latest research
of high value that is not a patent? Get double dipped by Elsevier. And IEEE.
And ISO committee. Or pay for good online courses.

Likewise with common services. Social chat app number 1001 has little value.
Highly integrated with your business? Now you pay.

Unfortunately for news sites, their information is commonly available. Apps
are fungible and it is easy to develop "good enough" nowadays.

------
oldandtired
Technology of any kind is not inherently evil, not guns, computers, genetic
manipulation, not even nuclear bombs. Evil only arises when man uses and
formulates technology for evil purposes.

Too often, people get "a bee in their bonnets" over some form of technology
when it is abused and misused by other people. They don't separate the tool
from the tool user and associate evil with the tool.

Sometimes there is a case for not developing some form of technology because
the development requires the destruction and damage to people and the
environment. Here the problem is still people not the technology itself.

~~~
ndh2
This is a bit of a slippery slope. Take gas chambers for example. We all know
what they were designed to do, and what they were used to. So was it ok to
design them, because only those who used them were at fault? Was it ok to
build them? Was it ok to execute the command of pushing the button, because
you didn't issue the command? Who's at fault here?

Why is it ok to design and build algorithms that make people unhappy?

~~~
vorpalhex
Before the gas chamber was the firing squad. Before that was the noose, the
axe, and the guillotine.

Humans have a long history of killing each other, and typically over time
(with a few exceptions such as the electric chair) the methods have generally
gotten more humane (if state sanctioned punishment resulting in death can ever
be considered humane) and when those methods failed to be available, no human
government has ever held off on using a more barbaric act of killing in it's
place.

Technology will either evolve without us, or less humane methods will continue
to be used. Progress is both a promise and a threat.

~~~
musage
> Before the gas chamber was the firing squad. Before that was the noose, the
> axe, and the guillotine.

That doesn't answer any of the questions posed.

~~~
vorpalhex
Right, you need to continue reading.

Even if the Gas Chamber had never been designed, those people would of still
been marched outside and shot by firing squad.

~~~
musage
Technology, and the obesssion with it and being "dynamic" was absolutely a
cornerstone of Nazism. You don't know the first things about it is all.

------
palad1n
>Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech
merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices.

Hear hear.

------
markbnj
> Their technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that
> require shallower forms of consciousness, but they often crowd out and
> destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people need to thrive.

Boy that's a hell of a label to stick on all the technology produced by
Google, Facebook and Apple. How do you even get all three of those companies
into one bucket without just making it a stupidly big bucket? One is a search
and advertising company with a bunch of side business, another is an
innovative hardware company with a bunch of side businesses, and the third is
an addictive social network. They're all "tech" and they're destroying our
deeper consciousness? Ok.

~~~
confounded
Any specific counter-arguments? I work for one of them, and it sounds about
right to me.

~~~
otalp
Apple doesn't care too much about how long you use an iPhone everyday as long
as you buy one every year or so. Facebook and Google's entire business model
relies on you spending a lot of time on their services. It's inaccurate to put
them in the same bucket.

~~~
confounded
It’s true that unlike Facebook and Google, Apple is primarily a B2C company.

However, aside from their own dark-UI patterns and walled garden strategy,
Facebook and Google provide the _killer apps_ for Apple’s highest margin
product. And Apple absolutely do care about engagement on the iPhone; it’s
highly predictive of buying a new one every year.

------
yannis7
just another attempt by the witch-hunting media trash to portray tech people
as the "new bankers".

it is amazing how similar those "respectable" metropolitan left-wing
newspapers are to their populist-right counterparts:

for the latter "immigrants are gonna take your jobs and globalists are evil"
and the former "robots are gonna take your jobs and techies are evil".

------
megaman22
Literally my job is to make software that increases productivity, in a
blatantly Taylorist sense, for a segment of business that is almost
universally considered a cost center. More throughput with less people, and
ideally the software enables using the cheapest people possible. I'm tasked
with creating metrics that line-managers can use to drive their workers like
oarslaves on a corsair galley. In a perfect world, from the business'
perspective, I'd utterly replace the people with some conglomeration of AI
buzzwords that could do the job at 65% of the efficiency of a human, at less
than the cost of one minimum wage salary.

------
hjorthjort
There is a lot of statistics about how social media causes
depression/unhappiness in the article. But I didn't see sources, and from what
I can tell (without looking at the studies) it's just a correlation. I do
believe social media impacts depression rates and creates some unhappiness,
but the claims in the article seem unsupported. Surely, depressed kids would
have spent more time alone in all ages, hanging out in their room, watching
TV, maybe reading. Honestly, even if social media made you HAPPIER, I'd expect
unhappy eight graders to spend more time on social media than those with a
sunnier disposition.

------
pgl
I think the question should really be, "How Evil Are The People In Control Of
Tech?"

------
HumanDrivenDev
I dunno, how evil is the media?

------
uptownfunk
The article brings up three critiques of tech:

+Tech is destroying the young via social media

+Tech is causing the social media addiction deliberately to profit off of it

+Tech giants are monopolies (Apple/Google/Microsoft) that invade privacy and
impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors.

Then at the end the author proposes a rebranding of tech:

> Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech
> merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save
> us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the
> best things in life.

> Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would be an amazing show of
> realism and, especially, humility, which these days is the ultimate and most
> disruptive technology.

So rebranding is going to make everything right? Who is he writing to, the
public or the tech companies? Is he trying to give them advice on how rebrand
themselves to appear to be less evil? I can understand his critiques of tech,
but his proposed solution falls quite short of the mark!

~~~
icebraining
I think the proposal is for a change of perspective by the people in the tech
industry (hence "saw itself"), not just how they brand themselves to the
outside, although that would change too.

Seems quite naive, though, and considering the source, it strikes me as
disingenuous.

------
otalp
1)Comparing the tech industry's effects to the tobacco industry is a bad joke.

2)Of course monopolies exist in tech and are bad, but that's the nature of the
protectionist state capitalism in the US over the last few decades, and is not
restricted to technology alone. Unfortunately corporations have more influence
on the working of the government than the people, and we're now into an era of
unprecedented corporate mergers and monopolies.

3)"Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech
merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us
time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best
things in life."

That's what a lot of companies do. Apple and Microsoft market themselves as
selling productivity devices that help you get work done quicker. Jony Ive is
on record saying that people use iPhones too much.

It's also not reasonable to sweep in hardware companies like Apple, who don't
particularly care how much time you spend using their products as long as you
buy them regularly, to facebook, who very much care about how long you spend
on their site, since this is inherently linked to their profitability. What
are facebook going to do, encourage people to log off so that they can live
happy lives while facebook's profits decline? The purpose of a corporation is
to maximise profits, you cannot expect companies which compete in the
attention economy to compromise on that even if their services are addictive
and not useful to the people who use them or productive to society.

If you really think monopolies and corporations like facebook are harming
humans without offering any competing benefits, you'd have to question the
whole system of corporate capitalism and whether we should allow corporations
freedom to function without public influence over their activities.

~~~
wpietri
> Comparing the tech industry's effects to the tobacco industry is a bad joke

Nah. Even people in the industry are starting to wake up to the ethical
questions that come with making addictive products. E.g., this thoughtful
piece from a game company on why they're abandoning the free-to-play model:

[http://www.clickerheroes2.com/paytowin.php](http://www.clickerheroes2.com/paytowin.php)

~~~
otalp
There's a huge difference between addiction from games and apps, and actual
severe physical addiction from a drug like tobacco that also leads to cancer.
I'm not saying app addiction is inconsequential: it is not. But comparing it
to something that literally causes cancer is hyperbole.

~~~
bambax
Depression, suicide and social isolation are real problems; it's not just
people wasting time in pointless apps.

~~~
otalp
And these are not caused by apps in isolation; suicide rates today in the US
are lower than what they were in the 70s. Young people are the least likeliest
groups to commit suicide or have depression. Again, that is not to say that
there have never been cases where social media and apps have caused suicides
or severe depression. It's just not a significant driver of deaths like
illness like tobacco.

------
zaarn
>The first is that it is destroying the young.

>The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing [...]
addiction on purpose, to make money

>The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near
monopolies that use their market power to invade the private lives of their
users and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors

I agree with all three of these, though I think this is fixable. They obvious
and easy solution is to pick apart the giants. The EU's ePrivacy Law and GDPR
make this possible, in addition to Germany's NdG making it difficult for large
social network to operate compared to small ones.

The solution, in my opinions, is federated networks like Mastodon. Mastodon
Server Operators have little incentive to abuse their users since the users
will happily just swarm to another instance. Once they have figured out
portable profiles, this becomes even easier.

Federation solves these problems by detaching the user from a specific
operator.

~~~
thanatropism
Mastodon is one technical solution -- it makes me think of space exploration
through Lagrange points. But have you figured out how to make it an actual
solution?

~~~
zaarn
I'm working on solutions as a side project and there are other projects in the
space too.

All it takes is for one of them to succeed.

------
jondubois
Most big tech companies are evil to some extent though they also do some good
too. I've worked for a few and I can rarely stick around for longer than 6
months. It just doesn't feel right to me. It's obviously a zero-sum game.

It feels like executives are slowly turning the knobs and making companies
more and more evil over time but doing so at a slow enough rate that nobody
pays attention to it.

The hypocrisy of some big companies is that they promote themselves as being
against any form of violence, aggression or discrimination but a large part of
their business is about mentally abusing people and creating inequality.

------
TrickyRick
Does make me wonder, will we look back at this time of unregulated tech
companies and social media in 50 years the way we look back at unregulated
sale and advertisement of tobacco today?

~~~
platinumrad
I honestly find "tech" to be way too broad of a label and only really see
major problems with social media and fintech. Juciero-type companies are
stupid, sure, but they're not hurting anyone. Instagram and Twitter, on the
other hand, are likely strong net negatives for society.

Edit: Microtransaction-based games that are essentially gambling simulators
are highly problematic as well.

~~~
TrickyRick
Yeah, I guess that unlike the tobacco industry there are actually parts of
this industry that do something positive for the world. Perhaps Big Social is
a better term, or Big Gaming (AKA the AAA Industry...) depending on what
problem you want to focus on.

------
JudasGoat
Has anyone thought of making a nanny type app that would set "healthy limits"
on time spent on social media and news. I don't think we can rely on facebook
to tell users what is healthy, when it is unhealthy to their revenue.

------
foxhop
I ranted a couple days ago about the evils of what has become of
cryptocurrency:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746019)

------
gerardnll
What's evil are the minds behind the tech.

~~~
diyseguy
They were cultivated by a system that encourages them to treat life as a game
where money is the points that decides who wins. Human values like ethics are
pesky speedbumps that get in the way of maximizing greed.

------
microcolonel
I swear, if 00s and 10s Silicon Valley ruins the freedoms enjoyed by the
computing industry by being short-sighted, it will be the greatest grudge I
hold in life.

------
dredmorbius
Addressing a few points raised in comments:

1\. The drumbeat of criticism against major information-technology-centric,
largely media-based firms, has been palpably increasing. As a long-term
critic, this is oddly disconcerting. Calls for regulation are increasing in
the US and elsewhere. Critics include numerous former (and some current)
employees, or executives, of major tech companies, including Sean Parker,
former president of Facebook.

2\. The dynamics and interactions of media, the public, tribalistic impulses,
and politics (as well as other phenomena) are an ancient study, though one
apparently not much focused on by many working in information technology:
programmers, system architects, sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers, designers,
UI/UX specialists, product managers, etc. Which is ironic because that really
_is_ our melieu.

There's a very large literature on this topic and I very much recommend
getting up to speed on the topic.

MOOC ICS has a good, fast-paced introduction. I've been commenting on HN and
elsewhere of my own explorations: Robert McChesny, Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone,
Marshall McLuhan, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Gustav la Bon, Davic MacKay,
Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato are among the authors I'd recommend.

First video (apologies, I cannot find the playlist link):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8)

3\. "Technology" is a tremendously unsatisfactory term for the many meanings
and connotations we give it. It's become synonymous in large part with
"inforamtion technology" (though writ broadly it concerns far more). But if
you _do_ look at information technology, _that_ field can largely be divided
in two: media, directed at collecting and directing information from and to
people, and cybernetics, directed at monitoring and managing non-human systems
(including technical, engineering, financial, and governmental systems).
Looking at each of these more closely even those distinctions start
disappearing over the underlying similarities.

But the upshot is that a tremendous amount of what "technology" is is really
the new "media". And yes, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Wordpress,
Spotify, Snapchat, and similar companies are largely _media_ or
_communications_ companies in the same sense that Western Union, AT&T, RCA,
CNN, or Time-Life Publishing, are. But bigger, faster, and with orders of
magnitude more audience.

And the less-directly-media-oriented companies -- Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft
-- still have media-like components, though they play in other spaces as well.

4\. The current tech giants didn't invent disinformation, misinformation,
distraction, propaganda, and manipulation. But they've made it vastly more
powerful, targeted, sophisticated, large, and rapidly-evolving. They've also
denied this up and down and blue for years, with all the credibility of the
lead, asbestos, tobacco, automobile, CFC, coal, and oil industries. Which is
to say: nil.

Not _inventing_ a problem doesn't mean you're not embodying or exacerbating
it.

------
diyseguy
meh. individuals will eventually figure it out for themselves. we don't need
nannies. something tells me this sort of argument will get used to prop up
anti net neutrality arguments.

------
lowglow
I wonder how many commenters here work for/with big tech.

~~~
chickenfries
Amazing that this is downvoted while all the other points are accusing David
Brooks of... shilling for the nyt? I dunno

------
ab89b176cb5d
"Tech" is not technology. Nobody hates TCP/IP or neural networks. What people
rightly fear is unaccountable power held by software companies.

If you are an engineer, you can help by respecting the people who use what you
build. Show people the content they want to see, not the content that
maximizes revenue. Refuse to experiment and collect data without the informed
consent of the people you target. Build systems with the knowledge that every
centralized service will eventually be compromised. Even if it's harder to
build, harder to debug, and harder to monetize, build technology that is
"good" instead of "evil" and the world will be better off.

