[frankest]

This seems like a throw back in time - as if one of the Communist propaganda arms of Eastern Europe wrote it. This article doesn’t understand tech or modern evil. It just spews worker vs equity owner arguments.

Any engineer today could start their own business. They could instantly become equity owners. Especially with AI. Many giants paid salaries and equity packages to the best, to keep them from starting competition.

En engineer can also leave a tech giant and in California, unlike NY, non-competes don’t apply. Tech work scales infinitely - so you can make a product for millions of users with your own two hands, unlike manual labor workers, who are limited by physics.

The evil not recognized is when the scalability of tech and AI is used to create and power up addictions that drain human brains, instead of giving them bycicles of the mind. Leaches on the brain. Industries where you can do well by the customers but you make a LOT more money if you do badly by them: Advertising (pumping ad impressions by refreshing pages, putting ads under common buttons to create unintended clicks that charge small businesses dollars per click, not delivering traffic or real audiences and making the small business pay even more thinking it’s their fault). Making gambling and games with horrible dark patter dynamics that wake users at night and expose them to chronic sleep depravation and wallet draining just to keep them addicted or with some status or in some league.

If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource - think about how much of it is killed by true evil. VC funding won’t be needed when AI is used to build things without the need for much funding anymore. What truly matters is not building evil things.

[fluoridation]

>If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource

But it's not, though. Human brain time (just in general, with no additional conditions) is pretty worthless, that's why people piss it away in idle activities. Just look at services like Mechanical Turk. The so-called attention economy is not about the attention itself. It's about getting the brains that give the attention to spend money.

[frankest]

The brains are being skewed with the content making fears disproportionate to reality and raising anxiety which disables rational thought and constructive activity.