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It's kinda sad considering the real technological push these last few years is not consumerist but medical technology, yet at the same time we have a eugenics fascist in charge of the nation's health 😐...

pew should update this

I really really really think Congress and the Executive being asleep at the anti-trust switch for decades is a huge part of how we got here. I think even just a handful of major break-ups using anti-trust and some laws mandating open interoperability could've staved off so much of this

Tech companies and the Billionaires that own them only want to extract as much wealth as possible. They don’t want to improve people’s lives.

One among numerous broad, massive shifts in the U.S. - also from being an advocate for democracy, pro-science/research, pro-education, pro-immigration (with caveats) to being the opposite of these. Of course, these latter changes are administrative actions much more than public opinion swings.

I think the enshittification of the Internet has a lot to do with it.

By now everyone has been through multiple enshittification cycles and knows that every big update will take away useful features if they don’t make them subscription-only, but never improve anything. Tech only ever gets worse as they try to monetize their locked-in users.

In most European countries people don't worry about medical and the have a decent social safety net. Here if you lose your job you're screwed with medical and there is a strong voice calling everyone who gets government assistant a leach. So yeah we don't trust republican donors on this issue.

time machine, we are giving ralph nader a nice island far away from here and replacing him with elizabeth warren life model decoy of ralph nader

Also you can "be bad" provided you're not "evil"

I guess twch delivers cool new stuff if you are… of a certain persuation and ate all there for everything crypto, web3, metaverse, and now AI. Very few people i know personally are but that might be selection bias.

What do you expect from a country who had an political body who thought when Georgia was attacked by the Russians, Alabama would be next?

Screwing up phone service really soured people on post-Gore telecommunications policy.

I’ve always loved technology and gadgets, but these days, with enshittification, mass surveillance, fucking ads in everything, and the subscription-only proliferation, I’m much more wary of new tech than I used to be. Now I get why IT folks have always liked to stick with analog stuff.

Video games have come a lot way since then. Cheap big screen TVs. Apple TV letting us stream video instead of having to deal with a DVD collection. Streaming audio. There have been a few. But you're just off in your time frame. Say 10 years and it's a lot harder.

but I don't think it was core to the American identity as to be able to say that sort of forward looking tech optimism was "its brand".

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI...

bookmarked because I also hope someone has links

But while still betting big on tech, investing in it (corruptly), and inhaling all tech propaganda giddily.

I would love a book on how various kinds of tech have been received

I think much of this shift can actually trace back to how antivaxxers won the covid war

Yes, this isn’t just about AI. Public trust in big tech companies was tanking well before ChatGPT became available in 2022. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

I think that it's largely that we haven't had anything new and fun since the 3rd or 4th iPhone. I think we'd be much more in on AI if all of the easy automation wins we had around 2000 were just happening now, like if Claude were making air travel easier.

Why must it be linked?

Yeah it feels like it's kinda been brewing and building for a while and the brazen idiocy of the AI guys has finally broken the dam. And even though I think some things about it are fascinating and cool and groundbreaking, the people running the frontier labs are visibly insane

Find yourself some data when you conflate my well earned mistrust of the scumbags running Silicon Valleyand my lifelong embrace of medical science, please.

Longer than that. At least back to the Centennial Exposition in Philly.

the entire tech industry has been taken over by people that like robots more than humans and sci-fi books more than reality.

It's pretty much the transition from modernism to postmodernism

Probably most of the 19th as well

The current Silicon Valley brand of tech is not the thing from the 20th century. The Saturn V, the 747, medical tech, mass automobiles, house appliances... all of that vs Facebook, Palantir and ChatGPT? No wonder people loved the former and hate the latter

Yes and the perceived economy / wealth gaps have a lot to do with people's attitude towards things that are billed as job destroyers Maybe having social nets is an overall positive for society - provides security and peace of mind

Tech has pissed away its reputation in the last decade with crypto, unregulated gambling, surveillance and whatever mess AI is. (I work in AI and I'm deeply ambivalent about a lot of it.) Combine that with bottomless greed, misogyny, and cozying up to Trump and you have Tobacco 2.0.

by tech 'is out to get them' they mean tech 'is a tool steal from them' by 'talk about' they mean 'confess'

They use us. They give free apps and suck personal data in exchange. Now they want us to pay never ending and always be increasing monthly fees to have our data stolen.

That sounds frustrating when you just need a service appointment. A booking assistant should identify itself, make reaching a person easy, and pass along what you've already explained. Simulated office noise doesn't help you get your car booked. Were you able to reach someone?

It isn't paranoia when they are out to get you.

I don’t know how the rest of the world views privacy, I guess? Like, on the one hand, it was somewhat okay when stores I patronized knew what kind of diaper brand I preferred back in 2009, but now digital marketing has gotten out of control. These days, retailers *hunt* consumers.😬

It was cool 😭

Like I know we complain that the term enshitification is overused but setting aside AI that is a huge reason IMO. Most tech has just gotten less reliable/more obnoxious to use the last decade, from Facebook to refrigerators.

Yep. Nearly every consumer electronics magazine has shifted from product reviews and starry-eyed wonder at a better future that is just around the corner to grim documentation of surveillance and societal collapse. The Futurology subreddit is the same way.

We need to sell people on solarizing everything as a patriotic project.

Tech is promising to take all of our jobs while our politics seems utterly incapable of delivering a vision of the future that shares the prosperity.

The environmental impacts are most definitely concerning if not devastating. Managers and professionals allowing AI to do their jobs for them is concerning and to a lesser extent annoying.

Also, if you don't start integrating this new technology into your current job and your home life, you're falling behind and killing your children's hope for a future. You can do nothing absent the ever watchful eye of this emergent and very unprofitable technology.

FWIW I’m do development as a hobby. I love programming and creating stuff. I hate AI and most large tech companies. And maybe even the software developer community, largely. 💀 It’s…not great out here.

But also, if you've been in any office job you've gone through multiple tech systems, failed upgrades, bullshit vendors, and multiple times at that. If civil/structural engineering ran like software we'd have roofs caving in on the reg, and parking garages pancaking.

Go figure - bsky.app/profile/leba...

Also, banks in general but definitely anyone directly involved in 2008 and Boeing need to be in my initial list... At this point I can hardly think of an industry Americans are broadly positive about besides weed.

People don’t want these data centers in their backyards because of noise, light and air pollution and having to foot the bill and ration water and electricity. Tech overlords make millions off these communities without ever giving a cent back to what they destroy.

The same is true with most of our industries which have become very predatory

Flying cars are a terrible idea! But at least they made us feel optimistic.

I think the top 200 tv shows that's been going around has something to say here. The cynicism, greed, dysfunction, and darkness as intrinsic and unstoppable parts of the world reflect something very real about where American culture has gone.

bsky.app/profile/leba...

Another way to say this is that it's really sad that a group of shameless villains abused America's trust, optimism, and support for tech in order to build an adversarial culture where tech is usually out to get people.

You’re welcome! I’ve had this since August 2020 and it’s been a touchstone for me

With our shields or on them, sir. With our shields or on them

Is there anything to be optimistic about? Seems like we’re slowly going into a cyberpunk dystopia.

Well the nazism and fascism certainly was not an uplifting expierence.

The Cambridge Analytica debacle turned me against Big Tech. Zuckerberg used his fun, cool Facebook app which made him obscenely rich into a info weapon to fucking burn us. He was burning us prior to that, but we didn't grasp the effects until that revelation. And I'm a techie, so it sucks more.

Wait, you're saying marketing a product shouldn't include wild-eyed predictions of doom, and warnings of death and destruction with blinking red lights when introducing said product? What do they teach you in Marketing 101, anyway?