This article really resonated with me. Unfortunately I think things aren't going back. What the article doesn't appreciate--and we techies don't either--is just how much the scale of today's tech market absolutely dwarfs the scale of the tech market back in the days before the internet.
The market wanted growth. Early tech companies, like Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and then Google, went from zero to huge in a very short period of time. But companies like the FAANGs kept up the absurd levels of growth (20+% YoY growth in the case of Google) that Wall Street got hooked on, and it's been on a drug binge ever since. The result is that we have multiple trillion dollar companies that will...never not want to be a trillion dollar company.
The total amount of money in the PC market was miniscule compared to today, and the internet and its online retail plus ads bonanza even dwarfed that. The PC software market, the video games industry, everything--it was all so much smaller. As the internet swallowed the world, it brought billions of users. And those billions of users can only use so many devices and so many games and spreadsheets and stuff. They had to be made into cash cows in other ways.
The tech market just has to keep growing. It's stuck tripping forward and must generate revenue somehow to keep the monsters' stomachs fed (and their investors too). We will never be free of their psychotic obsession with monetization.
And advertising is soooo insidious. Everything looks like it's free. But it isn't. Because our eyeballs and our mindshare is for sale. And when they buy our eyeballs their making back those dollars of us--it's the whole point. So whether you like it or not, you're being programmed to spend money in other parts of your life that you wouldn't otherwise. It cannot move any direction but falling forward into more consumerism.
I'm afraid I'm a doomer in this regard. We're never going back to not being bothered to death by these assholes who want to make money off us 24/7.
It is the legal system that hasn't caught up with how tech scales seemingly small damage.
What were small conflicts of interest before (a little trash here or there, a little use of personal information for corporate instead of customer benefit here or there, ...) now scales to billions of people. And dozens of transactions, impressions, actions, points of contact, etc., a day for many of us.
That not only makes it more pervasive, but massively profitable, which has kicked in a feedback loop for sketchy behavior, surveillance, coercion, gatekeeping, etc., driven by hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue and trillions in potential market caps.
Things that were only slightly unethical before, now create vast and growing damage to our physical and mental environments.
It should simply be illegal to use customer information in a way not inherent to the transaction in question. Or to gather data on customers from other sources. Or share any of that data.
It should be illegal, to force third party suppliers to pay a tax to hardware makers, for any transaction that doesn't require their participation. And participation cannot be made mandatory.
Etc.
One commonality here, is that there is often a third party involved. Third party gatekeeper. Third party advertisers. Third parties introduce conflicts. (This is different from non-personalized ads on a site they have relevance for, which are effectively two independent, 2-party transactions.)
Another commonality, is the degree to which many third party actors, those we know, and many we never hear of, who "collude" with respect to dossiers, reaching us, and milking us by many coordinated means.
> It is the legal system that hasn't caught up with how tech scales seemingly small damage.
Most administrations are squishy-soft on corporate crime. If there were regular antitrust prosecutions, violations of Federal Trade Commission regulations were crimes, wage theft was treated as theft, forging safety certifications was prosecuted as forgery, and federal law on warranties was strictly enforced, most of the problems would go away.
In the 1950s and 1960s, all that was normal. The Americans who lived through WWII were not putting up with that sort of thing.
The economy was also wildly different back then - there were massive, fundamental, competitive advantages the US was continuing to reap due to being on the winning side of WW2 (in every way).
For instance, nearly every country was paying the US loans back, in USD, or was having to depend on the US in some way.
Nearly every other country in the world had their industrial base (and often male population) crushed in the war.
Etc.
Those things cost money/effort, and require a consistent identity and discipline.
In some respects, I agree. Yet I don't think we have to put up with it all of the time. Most of the technology in our life is either frivilous or has a workable alternative. It is not as though we have to abandon technology in, or even current technology in pursuit of the personal. Yes, it involves making more careful decisions. Yes, it will likely be limited to people with technical knowledge. On the other hand, that was true of computing in the 1980's and largely true of computing in the 1990's.
In many respects, we are also better off than we were in the 1980's. There are more of us, we are connected globally, and the tools that we have access to are significantly better. We also have a conceptual framework to work within. Technically speaking, Free Software may have existed back then but few people even knew of it. People were struggling with ideas like public domain software (rarely with an understanding of what that meant). If you wanted to make money, outside of traditional publishing channels, you were usually toying with ideas like shareware (where you had pretty much no control over distribution). If you wanted to spend money of software, outside of traditionally published stuff, chances are that you had to send cheques or cash to somebody's house.
And then there is communicating with likeminded people. We may like to complain about things like Discord or Reddit, but they are not the only players on the block. Plenty of people still run small or private forums. Yeah, they can be hard to find. On the other hand, that has more to do with the noise created by the marketplace rather than their lack of presence.
The problem with the nimby/ecofascist/exclusionary perspectives is the obvious retort is always "okay, yes there are too many people in this domain. The solution then is for you to quit, not me." And substitute whichever group doesn't encompass you which usually falls along racial, gender, or class lines. At the end of it, no one wants to fall on their sword for everyone else.
The thing is the older I get, the more it does seem like at the very least we are not growing pie in a number of areas (the example at the top of my mind is academia) and sometimes it just seems like an easier solution is to decrease the numerator. But I don't know how you can do that and justify it morally, both to society and to yourself.
It's time we give up on the majority of people who don't care for freedom and focus on the few that do.
Unfortunately at the time we need them the most pretty much every pro-user organization is imploding because everyone and their grandmother wants to turn them into vehicles for whatever their pet cause is.
Also, even if they're not, they're getting squeezed out. It's hard to stay afloat trying to just do a thing without your eye on the "prize" of getting bought out by Google et al.
I think it's easy to forget that computing technology is a tool. Of course it was bound to be huge today, because it's supposed to be a tool in the toolbox of every company. It wasn't as big back then because not every industry could incorporate it right away, knew how to, or was interested in doing so.
It's not bad that it's big. It only needs to grow because the rest of the economy needs to grow.
I am also afraid you're a doomer in this regard. You don't think the bigwigs with their fax machines in the 1980s wanted to make money off of us 24/7? Of course they did.
Tech is scary in the sense that it's now gone quite a bit beyond the understanding of the average joe. Even most of us on this site probably don't fully understand how much detail data can paint a picture of a person. There are companies that probably know something about me that I don't even know.
I guess I don't know how to alleviate that feeling, and maybe it's the correct default assumption to be a doomer. It certainly would be very helpful if the US treated the situation more like the EU treats the situation.
Is the free thing really an issue? TV and Radio were free for decades and both still are. TV switched to cable, through broadcast still exists, but radio is still free. I'm not convinced advertising is insidious. Maybe because I grew up with it. I used to pay for ads. Magazines in the 80s and 90s had ads and we bought them not just for the article but to see what new products were being announced. You can go look through them on the archive. They're 70% ads and yet we loved them.
>What the article doesn't appreciate--and we techies don't either--is just how much the scale of today's tech market absolutely dwarfs the scale of the tech market back in the days before the internet.
I understand it and know it. But I don't appreciate it either (in the sense of liking it).
I mean, the solution is inside your definition of the problem. Infinite capital growth isn't possible. They will either finally make their products unusable or collapse. When they have collapsed enough and we have reached the plateau of innovation someone will make some basic device interoperable with everything and leave us be to count their millions instead of billions.
Its just another bubble, one predicated on mining the users rather than expanding the product.
The market wanted growth. Early tech companies, like Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and then Google, went from zero to huge in a very short period of time. But companies like the FAANGs kept up the absurd levels of growth (20+% YoY growth in the case of Google) that Wall Street got hooked on, and it's been on a drug binge ever since. The result is that we have multiple trillion dollar companies that will...never not want to be a trillion dollar company.
The total amount of money in the PC market was miniscule compared to today, and the internet and its online retail plus ads bonanza even dwarfed that. The PC software market, the video games industry, everything--it was all so much smaller. As the internet swallowed the world, it brought billions of users. And those billions of users can only use so many devices and so many games and spreadsheets and stuff. They had to be made into cash cows in other ways.
The tech market just has to keep growing. It's stuck tripping forward and must generate revenue somehow to keep the monsters' stomachs fed (and their investors too). We will never be free of their psychotic obsession with monetization.
And advertising is soooo insidious. Everything looks like it's free. But it isn't. Because our eyeballs and our mindshare is for sale. And when they buy our eyeballs their making back those dollars of us--it's the whole point. So whether you like it or not, you're being programmed to spend money in other parts of your life that you wouldn't otherwise. It cannot move any direction but falling forward into more consumerism.
I'm afraid I'm a doomer in this regard. We're never going back to not being bothered to death by these assholes who want to make money off us 24/7.