Re:The tech utopia fantasy is over
by quickslowdown on Saturday November 23, 2024 @03:44PM
(#42223751)
My catchphrase for a while has been "business ruins everything it touches." And before someone swoops in to try and convince me otherwise, save your breath. I'm not interested in hearing the positives of business, I will ignore outright anything pointing to "you wouldn't have THIS without business!"-type replies, and I don't want to reduce this thought further.
From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.
I get your point, though to me, there's way too many babies per cubic meter of that bathwater of yours.
My own general explanation of why everything sucks is more like this: we don't know how to stop. The market can't stop itself from over-optimizing, over-exploiting.
The evolution of any product, service, company or technology, can be to a first approximation plotted as a bell curve:
total value provided to society
^
| ....
| .. ..
| ... ...
| .... ....
| ..... .....
------------------------------------> time
The market always goes all the way to the right. What it should do, what we need it to do, is to stop at the peak of the bell curve. Alas, there is no mechanism that would get people to say, "yeah, this is the best it could be, let's go do something else"; the market demands they move to the right, all the way to diminishing returns.
Re:The tech utopia fantasy is over
by UncleSlacky on Saturday November 23, 2024 @05:14PM
(#42224353)
I'd replace "business" with "capitalism".
Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.
"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.
Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.
For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).
> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.