Post

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

Google’s pivot from “don’t be evil” to “be evil,” Zuckerberg’s entire deal, etc

I did an infodump but it’s a quote thread so I can not get flooded with your unrelated replies. Always interested in your insight.

Here’s a Brookings analysis from 2023 focused on the decline in public trust in tech companies: www.brookings.edu/articles/how...

I wonder if rampant enshittification might have something to do with this.

It is a Mystery

Big data analysis tools went mainstream and data scientist jobs proliferated in that era when the decline began. It is when the users of products and services became the products. Big tech monetized their users. Also data breaches hit the public consciousness--e.g., OPM hack in 2015.

I think there's just a pile-on effect of how the panglossian tech types have gone through several cycles of "hyping the next big thing, which turns out to be nothing anybody wants" so the average person has caught wise. Like we all saw all the crypto ads during that one Superbowl.

used to look forward to some cool new innovative thing just around the corner. now it’s wondering how they’re going to try to squeeze me more.

Those Pew polls seem like damn good circumstantial evidence that the public is paying remarkably close attention. In 2015 Google’s motto was "Don't be evil". By 2018 that motto was gone. Like damn, they just came right out and said it and people noticed.

build — the “easy win” is not just saving clicks; it is giving someone time back without quietly making the decision harder to inspect. Air travel feels magical when the automation handles routine friction while the passenger keeps visibility, consent, and a way out when the system is wrong.

Instead we’ve had planned obsolescence, SaaS, private equity, and constant surveillance. Perhaps it’s that last that affects Americans uniquely. Other countries have had a surveillance state we reflexively resist for decades, where we’re only just realizing we’ve lost the public square entirely.

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.