I remember graduating in 2004 and ingesting the message from the [current] BigTech companies that, "this time it'll be different!" and "we aren't like those other companies!" I ate it up, of course. I didn't have the experience to see that the promises were hollow by the nature of the arrangement.
Fully expect a new crop of companies to make the same pitch, and people to fall for it again.
To be fair, it was different for a while. Those companies started out with visionary product designers and engineers who cared about creating a great product that genuinely helps the customers. But once the product is out in the market the culture inevitably changes over to one of patent trolling lawyers, stock buyback schemes, layoffs, outsourcing, dishonest marketing, squeezing the customers with difficult-to-cancel subscription models, etc.
It is incumbent upon those of us who want better to build companies that do not do this. You don't need to be a unicorn startup, you can be a small company that employs a small handful of like-minded individuals who want to build good products for people, who reject the ravenous growth machine that plagues tech today.
What people don't seem to realize is that the business cycle today mirrors your average ponzi scheme.
The company has a product, gets loans based on said product. The terms are front-loaded according to your standard S-adoption curve which under some representations mirrors a Ponzi curve.
The debt taken must eventually be repaid. The bankers know this which is why they loan to these entities to begin with, and I'm sure they get kickbacks when the debt defaults as it almost always does from market manipulation. Then someone comes in buys everything up for pennies on the dollar to enhance their monopoly.
Non-reserve debt issuance is money printing. The business either fails later when it should have failed overnight, or it becomes or gets acquired by a silent state actor that can be coerced.
This is the ugly reality. Bankers get rich off the usury, and bailouts, the market shrinks and dies. Eventually products vanish, and once you realize the game as an actual producer you stop playing into their hands.
When the entire environment is disadvantaged from the get-go, you stop participating, you withhold your intellect, and strike. Keeping the fruits of your mind for yourself, and others of like mind.
You are not imposing destruction by doing this, you are getting out of the way, because eventually the bill always comes due, and parasites kill their hosts and then die themselves.
Yep, we want to be seduced. The completely hollow moral core at the center of global capitalism is an unpleasant reality we want to avoid while we give hours of our life to our employer.
If invading on privacy was evil they have been doing it for as long as they have been saying it. Even before the start of Android vs iPhone. There were bits and pieces around it but MSM never wanted to go and report it, at least not at the scale of what they are today.
Ultimately the facts and evidence are all there at least since 2005. We just all turned a blind eye to it.
Just writing this I cant believe it has been 20 years. I still remember the day when rumours started Google is doing their own browser and worried Firefox may not be funded by them anymore.
It took the world another 15 years before they were cynical enough to admit something is wrong.
Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly. It is a big win for the public discourse if people start applying cynicism where warranted.
In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited. Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.
> Between this for new media channels and the breakdown of trust in old media channels there is a lot of reason to be hopeful about the future of the US. One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly. It is a big win for the public discourse if people start applying cynicism where warranted.
Instead, people are outsourcing their thinking to people like Joe Rogan and political YouTubers who exploit that cynicism for sponsorships, ad revenue and their own product lines.
Say what you will about corporate media, and I'm also a big critic of it and even PBS, but at least something like PBS isn't pure brain rot and can be informative. I highly doubt Mr. Rogers or the News Hour radicalized anyone.
These days terrorists are literally putting internet memes in their manifestos, along with shout-outs to their favorite YouTubers and internet pundits.
> In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited
The "real change" was the Arab Spring era and powers all over the world quickly learned to not let that happen in their own backyards.
We are currently experiencing a duality between domestic powers doing their best to stifle or direct change for their benefit, and external powers doing their best to generate unrest elsewhere to their benefit. The internet as it exists enables both to extents the world has never seen before.
> Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.
Manufactured consent has modernized, it's happening right now all over the internet. Tech has become the modern Skinner box for owners to manipulate users, and social media has absolutely warped the minds of at least one generation in favor of their owners, too.
I wish I had your optimism, and I did like ~20 years ago, but man, the internet is pure poison for the unprepared mind. And I think we're all varying levels of unprepared for the highly optimized digital manipulation on the internet.
But what might be even worse is headline reading. Like you don't read articles like you use to. People read the headlines which are rage bait and click bait. Realtime rage on "developing stories" than nothing when the boring conclusion is known weeks later. People are going insane.
The death of the boring news paper is about as a big problem as Instagram. Modern newspapers just plainly sucks and are mostly rehashes of agency news anyways.
I think we need to figuratively pull the plug on the internet. Like make it some sort of loser thing to be hooked on social media and light minded news.
> Instead, people are outsourcing their thinking to people like Joe Rogan and political YouTubers who exploit that cynicism for sponsorships, ad revenue and their own product lines.
Joe Rogan didn't lie us into a disastrous $6 trillion war that destabilized the middle east, created all sorts of knock-on consequences such as mass immigration into Europe from the Middle East that we're still living with two decades later. Joe Rogan didn't spend decades cheerleading immigration, outsourcing, and globalization policies most Americans never wanted (e.g.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...).
Joe Rogan is popular because people can tell that his gut instincts and general world view are consistent with their own, which makes them trust his takes. If your alternative to that is people who believe in their hearts that the U.S. should bring democracy and human rights to the world, or take on millions of immigrants, you'll never get peoples' trust, just as you probably wouldn't trust someone who thinks the rapture is coming soon.
A society where people can trust each other and each individual has enough integrity to not violate that trust is, in my opinion, the closest we can get to a thriving utopia.
The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves.
Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on.
So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.
The US might be much closer to an authoritarian lurch than 20 or 30 years ago, but don't romanticize the recent past. My understanding is that polls around the time of the Kent State massacre... Where unarmed students were shot in the back by the military for the crime if protesting the Vietnam war... had almost 50% of the population supporting the military and saying the kids had it coming. Nixon had tons of support right until he resigned. There was never any level of social cohesion, the divisions just hadn't metastasized yet
The trust was built on basking in the glory of WW2's victory and fear of nuclear annihilation. Maybe part of it too was the quality of life for 80+% of the generation was better than their parents in clear ways beyond "our TVs are better."
The first two I'd like to avoid something analogous for a new order based on trust, but maybe the last one we can bring back if our leaders start to have a larger vision beyond focus on GDP, Stock Market returns, inflation, and unemployment rates.
"The good old days" is a worn trope, but there may be a point.
Women's employment and/or compensation in the United States peaked approximately two decades ago, and has since declined. Xi Jingping wasn't China's dictator yet, so China was a bit more free. Crimea hadn't been annexed yet, and Russians had much more access to the internet. The alt-right was still in its infancy. Brexit hadn't happened yet.
Hence, when a British think tank claims freedom is falling across the world, I'm inclined to believe it. And levels of authoritarianism are inversely correlated with trust.
On the flipside, a whole generation of people across many of the poorest parts of the world have experienced increases of standards of living due to globalization.
I would say that you go back to the past two sets of prez debates and tell me that the "lie" ratio wasn't 10:1 or 20:1 between the two candidates. I would trust most HN people to revisit those and give a reasonable estimate. I think that's why I'm skeptical of "two-sides" most of the time.
American society was only "refined" if you were part of the accepted classes. The US has whitewashed our history with rose tinted glasses. It's always been pretty bad, just the winners get to tell the story.
Too much cynicism just leads to paralysis. We do need some way to identify a way forward. Top-down centralized corporate media wasn’t it, but this algorithmic social media stuff isn’t great either. The former amplified voices that could pretend to be serious. This current thing amplifies voices that pretend to be stupid.
Centralized media at least gives you an entity to rally behind or against. If a news network is pushing propaganda it's easier to say "this place is a problem". With social media it's much more nebulous. Opinions on the source of the problem range from the big tech companies, the algorithms, the concept of social media as a whole, foreign influences, etc.
It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons. Trust institutions (arguably had been the right choice), and society can move in lockstep forward together.
> It's the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.
I think it is worse. We only need to look at popular authoritarian countries. Talk to the peoples that grew up there. Where they fear their neighbors. And that is the point, that is part of the control, you don't know who will "turn you in" for speaking up, so you don't. So you live in fear, you stay quiet for so long that the thoughts become even quiet to yourself.
Trust is a necessary part of a society. Trust, but verify. But you still need trust. Without trust, the burdens are far too great. The world is too complex for one man to know everything. We have so much information and there is so much to know, one man is unlikely to even truly know one thing. Look at those with PhDs for an example. How narrow the research is. How narrow their expertise is. Do one yourself and you'll see that there are deep rabbitholes even in what appears to be a very simple topic.
Trust has to be earned and kept. You can't force trust.
More important than mistrusting institutions is how you mistrust them. Understand their incentives, their patterns of behavior, their past actions, and hold them up against the theoretical ideals they set for themselves.
Far too often I see people mistrusting institutions on lazy, poorly thought out grounds - "government bad, regulations bad, taxes bad, press bad" etc and so forth.
You can move in lockstep with the mob if you like. I will scout ahead, and tell anyone openminded enough to listen, if there's a minefield or cliff coming up.
Agreed. For instance, 99% of people including myself cannot prove to themselves that vaccines are safe. The full explanation of vaccine safety down to the lowest level would be beyond my understanding. Trust in the authority figure is required.
> One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly.
> It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.
The parent comment you are responding to is appropriately qualified, and you are throwing away that qualification. Trusting institutions that taking advantage of you to look out for your interests is worse than not trusting institutions at all (example: the institution of slavery, justified by racist pseudoscience, when you are not a protected class). Yes, the existence of institutions that can be trusted to look out for your interests (example: food safety regulators wrt. hygiene) is important, if that is what you are trying to say.
What you see as hope in the future just looks like doom and gloom to me. Yeah people dont trust the institutions, now they trust Tiktok trends and whatever their favorite youtuber says. Except these trends and youtubers are still controlled by the big money media companies.
Its not their fault, but the next generations simultaneously doesnt trust anyone and is also too gullible.
Its as if we, as a world, are losing our grip on reality because of the internet. Flooded with constant streams of information, our brains cant make sense of it, so we default to going be how things feel. But we all know what feels right is usually wrong
I'm not sure I share your optimism. If kids don't trust institutions, who do they trust? The answer is friends and celebrities (=influencers). Maybe they don't trust Big Tech companies per se, but you still need them to facilitate the content of whichever parties they find trustworthy. Decaying trust in institutions is just more ground for a total fantasyland where everybody can justify whatever they believe in. If the NYTs and gov't agencies of the world aren't deemed more reputable than the Andrew Tates of the world, we're on a path to a worse society.
Well, big tech companies are busy to push Andrew Tates of the world on kids accounts. If you open a new account for a young boy, algorithms will feed him Tate kind of philosophy in about a day.
You can't trust anyone. No even yourself, since whether you are insane or not may not be solvable, though you can aim to remember that you couldn't know & stress less.
It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on!
Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow.
Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes.
Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it.
On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast.
Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim.
Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule?
Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition.
The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation.
To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.
I wonder if we're moving into the full "regulatory capture" part of the cycle. Huge companies which no longer produce value need some way to shield themselves from smaller competitors with better value propositions.
I share this sentiment, however I don't see anyone really building alternative channels. Just people creating content for big tech platforms, and ultimately chasing short term rewards (money) via short term engagement boosts. Sure we don't trust institutions so naively anymore, but sitting around talking about how everyone sucks gets us no where as a society unless we move forward.
It's going to take people interested in more than just money, and the number of people willing to work for more than just money has seemingly never been smaller.
It's one part of the change required but a complete shift will not happen without economic structural changes.
As long as the average person is beholden to a corporation to earn enough to provide for basic existential needs, nothing will change. The corporation retain full control and capital dominance, and they are still able to leverage that capital dominion for political gain via horrid mechanisms like lobbying.
It doesn't really matter how much the people recognize the BS in the media when those holding the cards can still force policy makers to do their biding.
This was the point behind theoretical marxism that people (thanks to those lying media outlets) tend to miss. You are not free until you control the production mechanism and the generators of value. Until that happens, you will always need to bow to those that actually hold and hoard value at the expense of everyone else and at the expense of establishing a truly free society.
I would agree with you if 90% of the "new media" wasn't absolute clickbait trash. So many takes that are in a rush to get it out before their competition that it's usually unverified speculation that is at best a guess and worst an made-up-on-the spot lie. Other takes are just being controversial to be controversial or to serve special interests like "no matter what thou shalt be loyal to the democrat/MAGA literature, f the truth"
This report was published by Common Sense Media, an advocacy organization with a clear interest in pushing this message as part of their lobbying efforts. Maybe their intentions are good (they seem to back some good bills!), but it’s not a neutral source of information.
If you look at polling data published as part of generic political surveys, you find that companies like Amazon and Meta are among the most trusted of U.S. institutions[0] (Amazon loses out only to the military).
Trust is multi-faceted and although I trust Amazon to deliver me a toaster, i don’t for a second trust them to handle my audio or video in a manner I’m comfortable. This survey is talking about the latter kind of trust, not the former.
I trust them to deliver “a toaster” but, like, not necessarily the exact one I ordered, right? Either the one I ordered or a knock-off copycat that made it into the bin.
Ye. The surveyees (is that a word?) probably interpret the question very differently.
I mean up until 5 years ago I trusted Microsoft and Google to handle my mail, since I though I was too unimportant and it would to much of an effort to read my mails for them. But I in no way trusted them.
Concerning Amazon I guess most trust they will have their toaster. Like the same question about Walmart would be about food safety and quality.
Not corporate culture or long term political influence.
And Facebook and X are not advocacy organizations vehemently pushing an agenda? The fact that there is an organization looking to speak for teenagers and their rights to privacy in the face of the aggressiveness of FAANG lobbying should be the best news you hear today. Organizations like CSM and EFF are the last points of light in an ocean of darkness.
There is a marked difference between trusting an institution to deliver a predictable experience for you, vs. trusting it to be able to go beyond its current practices to do something values-driven that you might want it to do.
Trying to collapse both definitions into a word “trust” in a headline is, well, the type of thing I expect of modern editorial practices where good journalism is given inane titles by click-optimizing editorial staff, and thus something that causes my “trust” in the headlines vs. in the reporting itself to diverge.
The data you're presenting doesn't limit those polled to teens though. The specific question asked also appears to be different. If you have an issue with Common Sense Media, please make a coherent argument. Don't be disingenuous.
Add the majority of people I know to the pile. As a programmer, I don't think we're in control anymore, and haven't been for quite some time. Money and economics dominates almost every conversation when it comes to tech.
Programmers don't fully control what they work on when employed by an entity seeking profits.
Programmers _do_ have control in the world of open source. Unfortunately efforts are spread out thinly[0] enough to prevent many ideas from reaching the tipping point to being better than a profit driven entity's solution.
Imagine what would be possible in OSS if all work in a similar domain was concentrated.
> Programmers don't fully control what they work on when employed by an entity seeking profits.
But they do tend to control what entity they are employed by, and sometimes what team within that entity they work for. Let's not defend programmers as helpless cogs who are forced by their evil managers to program bad things. We all have agency, even during bad hiring times and bear markets.
If my boss asked me to build the Torment Nexus, I'd resist up to and including quitting. A disappointingly high number of us wouldn't even put up a fight.
Need a paradigm shifting technology and be one of the few technologists that understand it in order to be in control as a programmer. Hence crypto/AI hype gets pumped by engineers with zero interest in genuine self-reflection.
I talk with elderly people who do not have smartphones, and they tell me how difficult it is to navigate the modern world without them - doctor offices who want to send a text or MFA or the like. That we have a Google/Apple monopoly (or any nationwide Verizon/AT&T monopoly, with maybe one or two smaller players) is not much of a gotcha. I have more faith in the wisdom of the youth than your neoclassical theories of political economy.
Of course virtually everything is an oligopoly nowadays. UMG, Sony, Warner own at least 65% of global music. Media, accounting, advertising, breakfast cereals, go down the list - most commodities are sold by an oligopoly of four or less companies. A theory of political economy where somehow consumers are "choosing" this system is what is bankruptcy, not the understanding of the working youth who resent this.
> they tell me how difficult it is to navigate the modern world without them - doctor offices who want to send a text or MFA or the like.
But that just requires any cellphone that can text, and cell phones have been common for 25 years. Are there some specific examples of where you have to have a smartphone?
1. The system we have seems to have done a pretty good job, since people are choosing its products, rather than products created by another system.
2. A lot of people will rarely make a larger sacrifice than maybe quitting Twitter for a while despite spending a huge amount of time trying to preach to other people about how important their cause is. Which makes it seem like the noises they make are often just posturing.
Preferences change before behavior changes, especially where network effects are strong. Preference has to become strongly negative before you'll see the change in behavior. But then the change can happen fast. A social network can suffer the social equivalent of a "Minsky moment." Or as Hemingway said, they can go broke two ways, first slowly, then suddenly.
None of those stats mean they trust the platforms though. Just that they consider them to be an indispensable part of life.
Which is revealing in itself! But when I think back to my first days using Facebook the thought never occurred to me that I couldn’t trust them. Naïveté in my part for sure but I think it’s notable that todays young folks have wised up.
To be fair, the mid 00's was the transition time from the open web to the platform times we live in now. There was no immediate reason to distrust a social media site based on the social media sites that had come before it. After all, you were just writing inside jokes on each other's wall at the time, before News Feed.
I think your perspective may have been different if you grew up seeing it weaponized and your data constantly being stolen
This has a 'if they're so poor how come I see them having iPhones' kind of vibe.
I have a smartphone that I hate, because I can't get rid of the "Big Tech" part of it. It's where I end up because the bank cartel where I live has an identification service that only supports MICROS~1 and Intel ISA on laptop and desktop systems.
Now, I'm not a teen, but I'm pretty sure things aren't different for them, they are likely forced into "Big Tech" under the threat of misery.
Would you say the same thing about heroin users? That they have “revealed” a preference for heroin by continually using an addictive product?
And if so, how morally bankrupt are we as a country that we throw kids to the wolves that is AI-induced addiction rather than, I don’t know, regulating the industry? I got into tech because I like programming and making cool things, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with cold blooded abuse of kids to make a dollar.
Well, back when drug use only affected “the inner city” the country use to say it’s because of lack of morals, not putting God first and “absentee fathers”.
Your argument there is specious - tempting to see an implied point but on closer inspection doesn’t hold up. Only your first link about phones reveals any preference in the economic sense, and it’s irrelevant to this article. Your link about social media does not demonstrate the economic concept of revealed preference at all, since the subjects aren’t making an exclusive choice, they can and do use multiple sites, since social media doesn’t cost money, and since these are sites with very different social functions. It doesn’t make sense to ask whether kids prefer YouTube to WhatsApp, it’s like asking whether you prefer eating broccoli to playing piano to people who do both.
What are the conditions that must hold for "revealed preference" to be a relevant measurement? In an economy dominated by cartels it would not seem to convey much information relevant to preference, given lack of consumer choice.
This concept isn't useful in a scenario in which owning or associating with something has become a near-necessity. This is "revealed control." Very few teens (or even adults) have the luxury of going the Stallman route.
Pet peeve, we can't stop thinking just because an idea in the past has a specious connection to now.
You can only reveal a preference among available choices. A closeup magician can show you a deck of cards, get you to pick one, and it will be his choice of card not yours.
> In economics, there is a concept of “revealed preference”.
What's your point?
If it's "you teens actually love and trust big tech," I don't think you can make that leap from "revealed preference" data. People buy things for a lot of reasons, and buy from people they don't trust if they have no other realistic option.
The alternative to an iPhone is an Android phone. They are both big tech, but one is built by a fairly invasive anti-competitive villain, while the other is build by the flagship company of surveillance capitalism. No good option, but one is clearly worse, right?
I don't know. Apple does place significant barriers to open source software. And this isn't just an innocuous thing, it means you're likely to have more trouble locating a free and safe application to do some simple task and likely to be steered toward adware. And Apple keeps their hands clean on paper but they make a lot of money off of adware on iOS.
People own mobile devices because they must in order to function in contemporary society, not because they trust the agents behind them. I can't do banking, park my car, buy transport passes, etc. without a mobile device. That doesn't mean I trust any of the tech actors behind the programs I use on it. In fact, using it regularly makes me more suspicious of them than I already was.
Believe it or not, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where Big Tech meant Microsoft selling boxed copies of MS Office at retailers, in exchange for money. And if the KKK happened to buy Microsoft Office to do their word processing - well, it's no different to them buying a typewriter.
If the KKK wanted to put their stuff online, it certainly wouldn't be hosted on Microsoft's website, surrounded by Microsoft branding and ads that pay Microsoft - there were no "platforms", they'd have to make their own HTML and upload it to their own hosting provider.
And the nearest thing to "Social Media" was hundreds of tiny phpBB forums, IRC channels and suchlike, administered by genuine human beings, and for minimal reward. Censorship meant blocking mentions of viagra and cialis, which everyone knew were obvious spam. You can't put profits before users when there aren't any profits. And of course the guy with ops in the #north-west-london-anime IRC channel is going to look out for the users, they're his buddies.
Algorithmic news feeds hadn't been invented; the front page of Slashdot was whatever CmdrTaco and Hemos decided to post. Clickbait? Ragebait? Parody story mistaken for real? Dupe of a story from yesterday? They just wouldn't post it, simple.
Into this unbelievable environment came a tech company whose goal was to "organise the world's information" with the guiding principle "don't be evil" and such was the hope and optimism at the time, people treated such claims as literally true.
And the answer, unless government regulations force them to, is always and forever no. In no world will a sociopathic CEO do anything to protect someone over gaining a single dollar more in profit.
What percentage of Meta or Google do you suppose is actually working on technology?
Yeah sure they have little moonshot side projects involving quantum computing or whatever, but data centers and surveillance and browser malware has all been around for decades. They've been moving the needle hardly any all.
These are ad companies, or propaganda companies, or attention companies. They have malicious intent, and calling them technology companies confuses people into thinking that technology itself has malicious intent.
This is normal in business. Now that tech dominates they use that market position to setup monopolies. If we had functional anti-trust laws then it wouldn't feel so dire. Allowing monopolies in a capitalist system is the worst economic policy since socialism.
Readit News
Fully expect a new crop of companies to make the same pitch, and people to fall for it again.
The company has a product, gets loans based on said product. The terms are front-loaded according to your standard S-adoption curve which under some representations mirrors a Ponzi curve.
The debt taken must eventually be repaid. The bankers know this which is why they loan to these entities to begin with, and I'm sure they get kickbacks when the debt defaults as it almost always does from market manipulation. Then someone comes in buys everything up for pennies on the dollar to enhance their monopoly.
Non-reserve debt issuance is money printing. The business either fails later when it should have failed overnight, or it becomes or gets acquired by a silent state actor that can be coerced.
This is the ugly reality. Bankers get rich off the usury, and bailouts, the market shrinks and dies. Eventually products vanish, and once you realize the game as an actual producer you stop playing into their hands.
When the entire environment is disadvantaged from the get-go, you stop participating, you withhold your intellect, and strike. Keeping the fruits of your mind for yourself, and others of like mind.
You are not imposing destruction by doing this, you are getting out of the way, because eventually the bill always comes due, and parasites kill their hosts and then die themselves.
Ultimately the facts and evidence are all there at least since 2005. We just all turned a blind eye to it.
Just writing this I cant believe it has been 20 years. I still remember the day when rumours started Google is doing their own browser and worried Firefox may not be funded by them anymore.
It took the world another 15 years before they were cynical enough to admit something is wrong.
Nowadays you could not get away with it. But once the meta shifts again there may be another timespan in which it is possible to run with it.
In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited. Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.
Instead, people are outsourcing their thinking to people like Joe Rogan and political YouTubers who exploit that cynicism for sponsorships, ad revenue and their own product lines.
Say what you will about corporate media, and I'm also a big critic of it and even PBS, but at least something like PBS isn't pure brain rot and can be informative. I highly doubt Mr. Rogers or the News Hour radicalized anyone.
These days terrorists are literally putting internet memes in their manifestos, along with shout-outs to their favorite YouTubers and internet pundits.
> In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited
The "real change" was the Arab Spring era and powers all over the world quickly learned to not let that happen in their own backyards.
We are currently experiencing a duality between domestic powers doing their best to stifle or direct change for their benefit, and external powers doing their best to generate unrest elsewhere to their benefit. The internet as it exists enables both to extents the world has never seen before.
> Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.
Manufactured consent has modernized, it's happening right now all over the internet. Tech has become the modern Skinner box for owners to manipulate users, and social media has absolutely warped the minds of at least one generation in favor of their owners, too.
I wish I had your optimism, and I did like ~20 years ago, but man, the internet is pure poison for the unprepared mind. And I think we're all varying levels of unprepared for the highly optimized digital manipulation on the internet.
But what might be even worse is headline reading. Like you don't read articles like you use to. People read the headlines which are rage bait and click bait. Realtime rage on "developing stories" than nothing when the boring conclusion is known weeks later. People are going insane.
The death of the boring news paper is about as a big problem as Instagram. Modern newspapers just plainly sucks and are mostly rehashes of agency news anyways.
I think we need to figuratively pull the plug on the internet. Like make it some sort of loser thing to be hooked on social media and light minded news.
Joe Rogan didn't lie us into a disastrous $6 trillion war that destabilized the middle east, created all sorts of knock-on consequences such as mass immigration into Europe from the Middle East that we're still living with two decades later. Joe Rogan didn't spend decades cheerleading immigration, outsourcing, and globalization policies most Americans never wanted (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...).
Joe Rogan is popular because people can tell that his gut instincts and general world view are consistent with their own, which makes them trust his takes. If your alternative to that is people who believe in their hearts that the U.S. should bring democracy and human rights to the world, or take on millions of immigrants, you'll never get peoples' trust, just as you probably wouldn't trust someone who thinks the rapture is coming soon.
> stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered
--William F. Buckley Jr to Gore Vidal in 1968 on ABC television
Buckley also hosted a show on PBS at the time.
The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves.
Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on.
So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.
The first two I'd like to avoid something analogous for a new order based on trust, but maybe the last one we can bring back if our leaders start to have a larger vision beyond focus on GDP, Stock Market returns, inflation, and unemployment rates.
Women's employment and/or compensation in the United States peaked approximately two decades ago, and has since declined. Xi Jingping wasn't China's dictator yet, so China was a bit more free. Crimea hadn't been annexed yet, and Russians had much more access to the internet. The alt-right was still in its infancy. Brexit hadn't happened yet.
Hence, when a British think tank claims freedom is falling across the world, I'm inclined to believe it. And levels of authoritarianism are inversely correlated with trust.
On the flipside, a whole generation of people across many of the poorest parts of the world have experienced increases of standards of living due to globalization.
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But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster.
Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.
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It is a difficult problem.
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Trust is a necessary part of a society. Trust, but verify. But you still need trust. Without trust, the burdens are far too great. The world is too complex for one man to know everything. We have so much information and there is so much to know, one man is unlikely to even truly know one thing. Look at those with PhDs for an example. How narrow the research is. How narrow their expertise is. Do one yourself and you'll see that there are deep rabbitholes even in what appears to be a very simple topic.
More important than mistrusting institutions is how you mistrust them. Understand their incentives, their patterns of behavior, their past actions, and hold them up against the theoretical ideals they set for themselves.
Far too often I see people mistrusting institutions on lazy, poorly thought out grounds - "government bad, regulations bad, taxes bad, press bad" etc and so forth.
Those words are the problem. Why even have a democratic system if everything is done in “lockstep”? Moreover, “forward” is a highly opinionated term.
Perhaps we can all, in lockstep, take a Great Leap Forward.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
Lockstep is never a good thing. And institutions are absolutely not trustworthy.
> It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.
The parent comment you are responding to is appropriately qualified, and you are throwing away that qualification. Trusting institutions that taking advantage of you to look out for your interests is worse than not trusting institutions at all (example: the institution of slavery, justified by racist pseudoscience, when you are not a protected class). Yes, the existence of institutions that can be trusted to look out for your interests (example: food safety regulators wrt. hygiene) is important, if that is what you are trying to say.
Its not their fault, but the next generations simultaneously doesnt trust anyone and is also too gullible.
Its as if we, as a world, are losing our grip on reality because of the internet. Flooded with constant streams of information, our brains cant make sense of it, so we default to going be how things feel. But we all know what feels right is usually wrong
It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on!
Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow.
Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes.
Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it.
On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast.
Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim.
Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule?
Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition.
The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation.
To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.
Have no idea what it will look like, but I think it'll be the 9/11 of another era.
It's going to take people interested in more than just money, and the number of people willing to work for more than just money has seemingly never been smaller.
As long as the average person is beholden to a corporation to earn enough to provide for basic existential needs, nothing will change. The corporation retain full control and capital dominance, and they are still able to leverage that capital dominion for political gain via horrid mechanisms like lobbying.
It doesn't really matter how much the people recognize the BS in the media when those holding the cards can still force policy makers to do their biding.
This was the point behind theoretical marxism that people (thanks to those lying media outlets) tend to miss. You are not free until you control the production mechanism and the generators of value. Until that happens, you will always need to bow to those that actually hold and hoard value at the expense of everyone else and at the expense of establishing a truly free society.
(a) immediately throw out the bathwater without checking for a baby: discredit all the output of the institution
(b) select an alternative source and then become completely credulous about it: discarding mainstream news for places like Infowars or Tiktok
(c) everyone is now in their own differently wrong bubble happily consuming all sorts of propaganda and grifter nonsense
The result is not an improvement, it's a low-trust society where you get things like an anti-vaxxer being appointed in charge of health.
If you look at polling data published as part of generic political surveys, you find that companies like Amazon and Meta are among the most trusted of U.S. institutions[0] (Amazon loses out only to the military).
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OgPzcB75uxXiFmTjUUb-ITIr7BF...
I mean up until 5 years ago I trusted Microsoft and Google to handle my mail, since I though I was too unimportant and it would to much of an effort to read my mails for them. But I in no way trusted them.
Concerning Amazon I guess most trust they will have their toaster. Like the same question about Walmart would be about food safety and quality.
Not corporate culture or long term political influence.
Trying to collapse both definitions into a word “trust” in a headline is, well, the type of thing I expect of modern editorial practices where good journalism is given inane titles by click-optimizing editorial staff, and thus something that causes my “trust” in the headlines vs. in the reporting itself to diverge.
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Programmers _do_ have control in the world of open source. Unfortunately efforts are spread out thinly[0] enough to prevent many ideas from reaching the tipping point to being better than a profit driven entity's solution.
Imagine what would be possible in OSS if all work in a similar domain was concentrated.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42821332
But they do tend to control what entity they are employed by, and sometimes what team within that entity they work for. Let's not defend programmers as helpless cogs who are forced by their evil managers to program bad things. We all have agency, even during bad hiring times and bear markets.
If my boss asked me to build the Torment Nexus, I'd resist up to and including quitting. A disappointingly high number of us wouldn't even put up a fight.
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80%+ of teens own iPhones
https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2023/apple-iphone-r...
And this is the percent of teens on various social media platforms
https://www.sentiment.io/how-many-teens-use-social-media/#t-...
I talk with elderly people who do not have smartphones, and they tell me how difficult it is to navigate the modern world without them - doctor offices who want to send a text or MFA or the like. That we have a Google/Apple monopoly (or any nationwide Verizon/AT&T monopoly, with maybe one or two smaller players) is not much of a gotcha. I have more faith in the wisdom of the youth than your neoclassical theories of political economy.
Of course virtually everything is an oligopoly nowadays. UMG, Sony, Warner own at least 65% of global music. Media, accounting, advertising, breakfast cereals, go down the list - most commodities are sold by an oligopoly of four or less companies. A theory of political economy where somehow consumers are "choosing" this system is what is bankruptcy, not the understanding of the working youth who resent this.
But that just requires any cellphone that can text, and cell phones have been common for 25 years. Are there some specific examples of where you have to have a smartphone?
It misses 2 main points:
1. The system we have seems to have done a pretty good job, since people are choosing its products, rather than products created by another system.
2. A lot of people will rarely make a larger sacrifice than maybe quitting Twitter for a while despite spending a huge amount of time trying to preach to other people about how important their cause is. Which makes it seem like the noises they make are often just posturing.
Which is revealing in itself! But when I think back to my first days using Facebook the thought never occurred to me that I couldn’t trust them. Naïveté in my part for sure but I think it’s notable that todays young folks have wised up.
I think your perspective may have been different if you grew up seeing it weaponized and your data constantly being stolen
I have a smartphone that I hate, because I can't get rid of the "Big Tech" part of it. It's where I end up because the bank cartel where I live has an identification service that only supports MICROS~1 and Intel ISA on laptop and desktop systems.
Now, I'm not a teen, but I'm pretty sure things aren't different for them, they are likely forced into "Big Tech" under the threat of misery.
And if so, how morally bankrupt are we as a country that we throw kids to the wolves that is AI-induced addiction rather than, I don’t know, regulating the industry? I got into tech because I like programming and making cool things, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with cold blooded abuse of kids to make a dollar.
Pet peeve, we can't stop thinking just because an idea in the past has a specious connection to now.
But according to HN, teenagers could always use an open source alternative to Android on their phone if they were so passionate about it.
Makes sense opposite "stated preference," but on its own it is just an obtuse way of saying behaviour or habits.
In any case you can be both a consumer and a critique. In fact, the most online people are often the most critical. Ironic, but...
What's your point?
If it's "you teens actually love and trust big tech," I don't think you can make that leap from "revealed preference" data. People buy things for a lot of reasons, and buy from people they don't trust if they have no other realistic option.
In the US*
You're just assuming there were only two options for that question and making up a number.
This type of magical thinking is unfortunately endemic to humans
If the KKK wanted to put their stuff online, it certainly wouldn't be hosted on Microsoft's website, surrounded by Microsoft branding and ads that pay Microsoft - there were no "platforms", they'd have to make their own HTML and upload it to their own hosting provider.
And the nearest thing to "Social Media" was hundreds of tiny phpBB forums, IRC channels and suchlike, administered by genuine human beings, and for minimal reward. Censorship meant blocking mentions of viagra and cialis, which everyone knew were obvious spam. You can't put profits before users when there aren't any profits. And of course the guy with ops in the #north-west-london-anime IRC channel is going to look out for the users, they're his buddies.
Algorithmic news feeds hadn't been invented; the front page of Slashdot was whatever CmdrTaco and Hemos decided to post. Clickbait? Ragebait? Parody story mistaken for real? Dupe of a story from yesterday? They just wouldn't post it, simple.
Into this unbelievable environment came a tech company whose goal was to "organise the world's information" with the guiding principle "don't be evil" and such was the hope and optimism at the time, people treated such claims as literally true.
Proof? Cigarette companies, Dupont, and others were happy to do that.
Yeah sure they have little moonshot side projects involving quantum computing or whatever, but data centers and surveillance and browser malware has all been around for decades. They've been moving the needle hardly any all.
These are ad companies, or propaganda companies, or attention companies. They have malicious intent, and calling them technology companies confuses people into thinking that technology itself has malicious intent.
Good old knight fighting dragon and becoming a dragon after all :(
The first dragon wasn’t the bad guy, but natural order. The new dragon now intends to usurp natural order.
Technology can still help us, but it cannot save us. And it cannot be everything. It is one tool of many more intelligent tools besides.