[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

being snarky about it doesn't change the fact that you, despite having a number of options, opted to give one of the most inhuman corporations in the world a lot of money for a luxury brand device assembled by quasi-slave laborers.

so yes, it is rather absurd to demand radical changes from the society when you are unwilling to endure even minor inconveniences yourself.