In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
He doesn’t really propose effective solutions, though, I don’t think. Like, yeah you can tell people that the internet sucks because some assholes made it that way. But if it wasn’t these assholes, it’d be some other assholes. And we’re not going to get most people to care about things.
The problems are structural.
The megacorps need to be broken up, at the very least.
The ultra rich need to not exist anymore. Either because they were taxed down to size, or they met the guillotine.
Without touching those parts of the problem, nothing’s going to get better.
Yeah, I don’t really think the prescribed response of talking more shit about tech founders is going to be very productive.
I think a better way to think about it would in terms of, what is holding back the people who actually want to make technology that is good and helpful rather than crappy and exploitative?
Right. And that probably leads to criticism of capitalism (the owners want to make more money more than anything else). Or at least the primacy of money (this small developer put ads in his app because he needs money or society will let him die)
I think a lot of people have internalized parts of our society and don’t really look hard at them anymore. Like, “if you don’t labor you’ll be allowed to die of exposure” is kind of fucked up. So is “you don’t have to labor if you have enough money. Then you don’t need to do anything at all, and you can live a nice life”
Zitron’s posts are generally pretty good.
He doesn’t really propose effective solutions, though, I don’t think. Like, yeah you can tell people that the internet sucks because some assholes made it that way. But if it wasn’t these assholes, it’d be some other assholes. And we’re not going to get most people to care about things.
The problems are structural.
The megacorps need to be broken up, at the very least.
The ultra rich need to not exist anymore. Either because they were taxed down to size, or they met the guillotine.
Without touching those parts of the problem, nothing’s going to get better.
Yeah, I don’t really think the prescribed response of talking more shit about tech founders is going to be very productive.
I think a better way to think about it would in terms of, what is holding back the people who actually want to make technology that is good and helpful rather than crappy and exploitative?
Right. And that probably leads to criticism of capitalism (the owners want to make more money more than anything else). Or at least the primacy of money (this small developer put ads in his app because he needs money or society will let him die)
I think a lot of people have internalized parts of our society and don’t really look hard at them anymore. Like, “if you don’t labor you’ll be allowed to die of exposure” is kind of fucked up. So is “you don’t have to labor if you have enough money. Then you don’t need to do anything at all, and you can live a nice life”