
Dear Tech: A letter to the deadbeat teenage son at the end of a tough year - SirLJ
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/tech-as-deadbeat-teenage-son.html
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rdiddly
This is what I like to see from the folks, a bit of gumption! Take some of
that gumption, use it to learn a smidgeon about the technology you use every
day, and steer it whichever way you want it to go! Take a look at those
companies doing annoying crap, and compete against them!

Oh too hard for ya? Well by default that kind of means you're content to let
someone else be in charge and to remain a hapless piece of passive audience
meat, who takes whatever's dished-out to you. Though it would be nicer for
everybody around you if you'd do that more quietly.

Help the homeless! Great idea! It should dovetail nicely with your current
efforts. Wait what's that you say, that's _tech 's_ job? You're too busy
making the Toyota payment and doing pottery in the basement? Too busy paying
for a basement you don't need, in a subdivision nobody cares about, so you can
do pottery in it?

Even so, it's good you're finally kicking tech out of the house. I didn't say
anything that whole time you were spending every waking moment paying
attention to tech, coddling tech, worshipping tech, making tech into the
spoiled monster it is today. I just hope you can follow through. Your request
for the WiFi instructions doesn't bode well, or indicate a lot of conviction,
or speak much to your usefulness as a role model or a man. A real grown-up
would say "no tech" and that would mean "no tech" and they wouldn't go asking
for the WiFi instructions like a lil' bitch!

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keyboardhitter
yeah, okay. as if it's possible for tech to be "kicked out" and "forced to get
its shit together". reading this was awkward, I think it encourages looking at
products or corporations as a single entity that should have a moral compass
or sense of responsibility. if people want to ditch tech, fine, but I wish in
these comparisons it'd at least be acknowledged that corporations mainly exist
to make money. I suppose it would require a large amount of humility to do
that though as it would also be admitting to succumbing to advertising, and
being "tricked" into expecting "real life change and support" from a product,
or something like that.

Thanks for posting this.

~~~
madhadron
Actually, it's quite possible for tech to get kicked out.

Facebook and Google are financially viable because keeping mass profiles and
leveraging them for profit is legal at the moment. There's no intrinsic reason
it should be.

Uber is regularly kicked out of places, usually with justification. Its
business model is to spent huge amounts of money undercutting the taxi
industry until it is destroyed and no one has an option left. Then they hike
the prices. This ignores the fact that municipalities can just take Uber's
drivers under regulated rates and make Uber irrelevant again.

Amazon's AWS is funding the rest of the company in their march to destroy all
competition. It's the same model as Uber, but more viable, since you can't
just legislate logistics into existence. All it would take is an antitrust
action that breaks up Amazon in any way that separates AWS from the rest, or a
law that voids Amazon's preferential treatment from carriers, including
themselves, making shipping a common carrier.

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subjectsigma
TL;DR: The "tech industry" as a general concept does things I don't like and I
want everyone to know. Period.

I'm getting really tired of reading stuff like this - endless, tongue-in-
cheek, vapid complaining, without any real solutions or call to action. Seemed
to be a staple of 2017. I would also like to note how ironic it is for the
media to complain about Facebook and Twitter propagating fake news when
they're just as bad. For all the complaining about the tech industry,
journalism seems just as morally deficient, but journalists are losing their
credibility at a faster rate. Insult, meet injury.

