Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)(sevarg.net) |
Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)(sevarg.net) |
(1) Addiction engineering, and the fact that the tech industry found a way to transform what was supposed to be a machine to improve human education and cognition into a digital version of tobacco or a casino. I am personally disgusted by this. If you're working on a pop "social" app or a game and designing it to have a "compulsion loop," you are doing mind control and you suck.
(2) The fact that a huge number of people in tech have been "pilled" with hyper-elitist fascist-adjacent ideology. This one was a huge shocker to me as I watched it happen, especially because I read the texts and blogs that seemed to be driving it and was like "you people are smart... why are you falling for this?" I am by no means a hard leftist either, used to self-describe as a libertarian back when that meant what it sounds like it means. ... Then I realized that tech is full of nerds who (like me) got picked on in school, and that wound makes "you are aCkTuAllY a member of a cognitive master race" a powerful hook. It's not unique to nerds -- all humans are vulnerable to this pattern. You see it in groups of people who have been mass-abused through genocide or persecution for instance.
(3) A small number of people in tech have gotten rich to Gilded Age levels, and that burns in what I think is a stagflationary environment (we aren't calling it that, but for the "regular economy" we are basically in stagflation). If everyone was doing well and things like housing were affordable, I don't think people would care as much. I know personally I don't care if there are quintillinoaires out there somewhere as long as I am doing well and I can pursue my dreams... but if I'm not, it creates emotions of envy and hostility. This is natural hard-wired brain stem stuff.
Those are all rational reasons IMO and they all make sense.
I think the AI backlash builds mostly on #3, since AI threatens a lot of jobs in a stressed economic environment. The environmental stuff around AI (data center power etc.) is mostly exaggerated (except water in some areas), but its prevalence is driven by the fact that people want to find something to hate about this industry.
As evidence I submit the fact that artists, in my experience, are the most visceral AI haters. I get it. I do not believe AI is a threat to "true art." Not at all. But it is absolutely decimating the boring "potboiler" work artists used to use to make a living while they worked on the former, and it's always been brutally hard to make a living as an artist. AI also threatens programmers, but in that case we're talking maybe being knocked down from upper middle class to middle class not from lower middle class to bankruptcy.
(Total tangent -- I ran some numbers. If you telework 1-2 days a week, depending on your commute, you more than make up for using something like Claude Code heavily all day long. Same goes for skipping that DoorDash order. Cars use insane amounts of power if you really look, much more than data centers on an amortized per-user basis.)
On (1) I do like "Annoyance Economy" as an extension of that (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/business/annoyance-econom...)
One example. Berkshire Hathaway has $400 billion dollars in the bank that they can't invest because they need high returns. So the capital is locked up. (The banks who hold the funds are restricted in what they can invest in).
Multiply this by loads of other companies. Add in funds stashed in tax havens. And just plain individual savings of people terrified about being poor in their old age.
My point is that the rich problem is not restricted to tech. Although it is quite visible
In theory, all other things aside, it is true. I mean, look up at the stars. For all I know there are functionally immortal super-minds out there who have not known pain for millions of years. Their existence is not a problem for me.
But "we live in a society," and unfortunately other peoples' extreme wealth can cause problems for me.
One is by bidding up assets. The super-rich park their money. Parked money goes into things like PE. PE can't find enough stuff to do with it, so they do shit like buy up housing and hold it off the market to profit from real estate appreciation. That makes it harder for me to find a good place to live. That's just one example.
I actually coined a term for the above: financial pollution. Financial pollution is any time someone else's money being invested does harm rather than helps, usually by driving up asset prices, massively distorting a market, or being invested in the creation of rent-seeking schemes. A classic example of financial pollution would be the real estate market in cities that allow a lot of overseas investors to park money in real estate.
Financial pollution is the opposite of productive investment that does things like creates jobs and builds things.
Another is that extreme wealth distorts politics. One of the libertarian things I like in theory is the idea of separation of economy and state, but in practice that's a brutally hard thing to achieve... much harder than separation of church and state. It is true from a social contract and legal point of view that money is not the same as physical coercion, and the state has a monopoly on the latter, but if you have loads of money you can buy the people who run the state and therefore obtain direct access to physical coercion. That's the problem. The super-rich can buy the government and then use force to maintain their status or pursue their own personal cultural, religious, or national peeves and hobby horses.
1. Tech is our "new money". New money is always hated, by every generation
2. Tech represents change and the human animal dislikes change. Most people are okay with everything that exists when they turn 25 and dislike everything that appears after
3. Tech represents capitalism in a pure form. Creative destruction reigns; companies and apps can rise and fall overnight. Ways of life are precarious and the constant churn bothers people
All three really come down to people disliking change. Instead of hating/fearinf change and dynamism, people should look inward. Establish a routine. Exercise. Garden. Read. Cook. It's more within your power than ever before to decide what you like and pursue it at your own pace. But don't expect the external world to meet your desire for stasis.
This is and always will be incorrect and just the go-to excuse and/or justification. People do care but their brains are too muddy from stress, lies, ambiguous information and the lack of time to separate truth from campaigns/propaganda/proprietary agendas.
This can be interpreted as people not actively caring, as in the infamous "nobody cares" and "nobody can do anything about that anyway" but it's actually passive carelessness that has it's origin in a conspiratorial kind of treatment of lower classes by upper classes. But that's boring.
What's exciting is that it holds true upwards. Top 10% earners "don't care" if they "loose" 50000 dollars due to fraud by people "above their pay grade".
Hop, hop, hop ... people hate the tech industry because they somewhat expect that skilled and/or smart people with resources, opportunity and time do things the right way ... because they can, because they say "we can" and "we will" and "the people" a lot in various ways.
It causes at least a little nausea to suddenly realize that young or middle aged or seasoned engineers and business people behave like aging placeholder representatives that were picked because they are "representative enough".
This, of course, partially stems from several cognitive fallacies about the things that evolution and expertise seem to imply but don't.
In the end, it's not hate but recurring disillusionment and disappointment ... that the tech industry is no better than 13 year old drug dealers getting the teens next door hooked on punched bullshit or violent pimps and malpracticing doctors.
"It's a shame, really."
That said, the tech industry is doing it's job and delivers and it's human nature to expect "more" from capable people as well as to be disappointed when they don't--especially when patterns of malicious intent emerge and become systematic and systemic ... which has been halpening over and over again ...
It's not really bad as such that the tech industry want to attempt to make a smart home, or add software to a product, but it's increasingly being done without consideration for the users.
People hate the tech industry, and that includes those who work in it, because it's pretty clear that the industry really doesn't give a shit about it's users, because the users are rarely the customers anymore.
This is going to be controversial, but I feel that ChatGPT has improved my life.
Also e-bikes, 3D printers, and wireless earbuds really took off in the last ten years. Some of these were invented more than 10 years ago but saw significant improvements that brought them into the mainstream.
The hilarious thing is that the EU decided that the assisting must be mandatory, and so now every time you turn on your 2024 or newer car, lane assist and "you're speeding!" warnings are turned on.
At least there's still a way to turn them off/getting in the car means sit down, seat belt, mirrors, turn on the engine, go to settings and switch off the nanny modes...
https://electrek.co/2026/07/06/tesla-cabin-camera-fsd-identi...
and maybe:
https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-featu...
The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product.
Plus the monopolies..
In terms of consumer benefit in tech we've been at stasis for a long time. My computing experience isn't that much different now than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Sure, my computer and connectivity are far faster now, and thanks to Apple Silicon I can go whole days at conferences without plugging my laptop in, but those are incremental improvements not sea changes. We did fine with 4-hour laptops in 1999.
Also a number of "improvements" just aren't, like smart home devices and IoT crap. Virtually none of those things have made good on the marketers' promises, and 100% of them require some tech family member to end up sysadmining the TV or the thermostat or the light switch, and having to do that kind of crap for things that used to Just Work in the most basic sense is insane.
There's been a lot of heavy lifting in the smart speaker space, and it IS true that my 86 year old mother enjoys being able to ask Siri to play any song she wants, but that kind of thing seems picayune compared to what middle-aged nerds thought the second quarter of the 21st century would bring us.
The only area that comes immediately to mind for ME that includes staggering advances is medical care. I had a hip replacement a few years ago that was an OUTPATIENT procedure. A dear friend of mine ignored symptoms and therefore only "caught" his colon cancer well into stage 4 -- and yet still lived 6 years with pretty high quality of life. Time was, a stage 4 diagnosis meant "uh, maybe don't renew your cable this month." Another pal has progressive MS; 15 years ago, there were no therapies AT ALL for it. Now there is one, and it's making a difference for him and his family.
Nothing on that scale has shown up from "the tech industry" in a long time.
Re the linked piece, I'm concerned about people saying "they hate us" when they really mean "they disagree with us" or "they seem skeptical of what we say." It can easily become click bait.
The language changes, sure ... but equating disagreement with the emotion of hatred? Maybe that language change is a bad idea? Just spitballing here.
For a normal person, when your day is pop-ups, cookie dialogs, dark patterns, auto-opt-in, <100-pages-of-legalese> + "Accept", subscriptions, smartphone-only ordering and customer service and endless-monetization...
...why use weaker words?
of course, if you're working or starting a tech company, you cannot use strong words. You might alienate your many funding sources.
Today the business model has made every products and contents to be enshittified.
We've optimised for the wrong thing and not only the common people hate the tech industry. Even I no longer feels the joy of working in tech.
1. Tech is associated with a lot of the issues affecting society right now, while other business sectors often aren't. Data centres and the rising price of computer components, social media addiction, gambling apps, surveillance, etc. These are all things in the news or affecting people's daily lives, and the 'tech industry' tends to get the blame for them.
2. Many of the people involved tend to have a bad reputation, even compared to other industries. Musk is the obvious one, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and others like them don't exactly have a great reputation with the general public.
3. As much as I can't blame them sometimes, the media absolutely hates the tech industry and the companies operating in it. Thanks in part to the large social media platforms all but annihilating traditional journalism as a business, there's a lot of hatred aimed at the companies responsible as a result. If you see any news article about a tech related topic that isn't a product announcement (and maybe even then), it's probably going to be a negative one about the dangers and issues with tech.
Nearly every major newspaper company is actively suing AI companies over copyright infringement. They have been quite outspoken that they see Google's AI overviews as an existential threat to their business.
Also:
1. Tech is full or arrogant assholes who thing they know better than everyone. That leads to things like ham-handed attempts at gaslighting. It's especially grating when it's coming from some 25 year old kid.
2. The whole "making the world better" facade has fallen away. It's pretty clear a lot of them are selfish, greedy fucks. See: jamming AI and everyone's face and all the variations of "stop hiring humans."
It’s probably naive to assume a different system would cure all our ills. But I do wonder - if humanity acted for the collective good instead of individual self-interest, how different would our technology be? And how different would we be because of it?
Link to the article for those interested: https://graceblakeley.substack.com/p/what-you-hate-about-ai-...
so it doesn't give people confidence that the tech industry is doing anything that benefits the average person; mostly they're just looking to make as much $$ as possible and screw everything else, including our planet's future. basically Gordon Gekko's of the 21st Century.
Social skills, friends, short term memory, dating, sex, intelligence etc
Tech intentionally exploits regular people for its own gain, intentionally breaking peoples brains for techs profit.
In short "tech" doesn't care about anything but the "bottom line" its the same as the military industrial complex- people break, people die, genocide happens and we empower it... who cares we're getting rich.
No one sees the faces of the military industrial complex but tech CEO's(the faces of the industry) proudly smile for the camera's and rub their billionaire lifestyles in the publics faces.
In short people hate the "tech industry" because it has taken everything away from everyone while enriching a few- and its all public.
There are, of course, some good people/companies/projects in the tech industry, but think about the overall impression of the industry as a whole: careless and malevolent.
The tech industry and its figureheads have
- Lied consistently about their capabilities
- Brazenly flouted the law
- Shoved ads and planned obsolescence and surveillance into everything
- Increased prices again and again
- Supported oppressive governments and war crimes
- Gleefully attempted to remove many people's livelihoods
- Predicted that they would end the world, and then doubled down on the same path
- Deployed bots everywhere, polluting online communities
- Pushed technology with the primary aim of CSAM or deepfake pornography
I could keep listing, and again, this isn't every single person in the tech industry. But if you group them all together, you have to take the bad with the good, and there's a lot of bad.
Frankly, the real question is why don't more people hate the tech industry?
1 it seems like every successful company is headed by self centered assholes 2 enshittification
A few things stand out:
The social isolation of the digital age. We spend more time staring into phones than looking each other in the eye. The polarization created and amplified by social media platforms. The spread of disinformation, radicalization, and algorithmically optimized outrage. A developer and founder culture that is still heavily male-coded, often morally shallow, and too quick to treat empathy as weakness or inefficiency. The hype-and-hustle economy that startup culture has helped normalize inside American hyper-capitalism. The robber barons of earlier generations have been replaced by tech bros, growth hackers, and social media personalities who are often rewarded more for manipulation than for building anything durable. The erosion of the middle class and the normalization of unstable gig work, especially for Gen Z and millennials, leading to a lower standard of living for many younger Americans. Crypto, and the amount of fraud, speculation, and wasted energy that came with it. Now AI: not just the technology itself, but the way it is being funded, marketed, and deployed, often with little regard for human creativity, labor, consent, or meaning.
Yes, this is a negative list. Technology has obviously produced enormous good as well.
But it says something important that many younger people increasingly experience modern tech not as liberation, but as addiction, surveillance, manipulation, and spiritual exhaustion.
I posit that the reasons are
- the need for conservatism and slowing down progress is inherent in people. Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology. Its the same mode of opposition, people just don't like chaotic progress.
- people who have good jobs and high status want to _conserve_ it and not lose position - tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again
- for some reason cynicism is seen as signalling a more mature worldview while optimism is seen as childish when the historical trend points to optimism instead
1. All about lock in. Trap customers and their data.
2. No purchases, only rentals. You never own anything.
3. Agreements are worth nothing. Today's feature is tomorrows premium feature.
4. Gamification adds an extra edge of badness on the hopes that you'll get what you want.
5. "Updates" rarely help, but almost always harm, in the name of "security"
6. Mergers and acquisitions means nothing is ever safe. Purchasing BigCo (exit) can mean operations cease tomorrow.
7. Enshittification rules always rule how the service will degrade, but not at what speed
8. Easy click to subscribe, but show up in person wearing all black clothing to the basement hidden office behind the no-trespassing sign to the cigarette man to unsubscribe.
9. And even if you THINK you own hardware in your physical possession, firmware updates maintain the real owner and cripple functionality. (PS3 OtherOS, etc)
Linear growth is a failure; only infinite, exponential growth is acceptable.
Or rather, every economist reads the first 20 pages of Smith's Wealth Of Nations, and basically skips everything afterwards.
Like... This gem: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
If the AI bubble pops and drags down the economy with it, we will approach peak hatred. Depending on how much worse things get materially (yes - materially - the gross real world that tech ceos are trying to escape).
Don’t say you weren’t warned, you elitist out of touch Bay Area scumbags.
If I could I'd toss my TV I bought a decade ago into the garbage can after all of the updates it keeps receiving making it more and more intrusive with advertising. But then I'd have to pay extra for a non-smart TV.
We got:
- A: "AI helps in automating tedious tasks"
- B: "Your workforce can be more motivated and productive"
- C: "You can do more with fewer people"
Why not advertise A → B, stop there and let their customers do the reasoning for B → C themselves? Why go straight to a hyperbolic A → C and swallow all the hate that comes with it?
My own presumption is that we got that strange fetish for optimization (C) and just don't trust our own ambitions to make the potential gain in productivity (B) work any other way.
Even if they did, would you believe them? Here's Zuckerberg on how he sees "Personal Superintelligence": https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
Compare that to the $1.4 trillion lawsuit now in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817682
Or compare Musk's promises to what's delivered. His self-driving timelines has its own Wikipedia page; how much he opined DOGE could save could be falsified by the top-level breakdown of the US federal budget. He used to be worried about AI, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon", now he's saying he wants more Tesla shares for the "robot army" which his SpaceX presentations say will be a billion* strong.
* though if you just naïvely apply the numbers here, that factory will also be "on fire": https://www.terafab.ai
But as a PR person I can guarantee you it's not possible to go around such perception shifts through money alone.
Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say "of course it won't unemploy people (wink) it may even create more jobs (snicker)."
Have the people with money considered doing more charitable acts/events for the people with less money to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?
If you haven’t read it already, I can recommend “Careless People”, this is a constant theme in the book.
I think the real error was the notion that they could sell this story to investors without the rest of the population noticing.
AI founders are OK with people hating them, because people truly absolutely dont matter.
they're not pitching to the average person, they're talking to C-levels, private equity, other ruthless billionaires, etc.
and when you have a solution that will eliminate the workers, why do you care about lying to the workers? instead of being lambasted about being blunt and evil you'll be lambasted about being duplicitous and evil
It's more about the fact that at a sufficiently large scale any platform faces the same issues. Some creators are terrible without breaking the rules, people argue, etc.
For consumers, YT is not empowering. It fulfills a need, well enough to tie them to the platform. But it is obviously not set up to hand them any more power than to serve that goal. You want to shield yourself from wasting time here? Sorry, not sorry, our goal is to steal your attention and entertain you just enough that you keep scrolling.
I'd argue the very expression "creating content" is a euphemism for producing shit, of which algorithm driven platforms like Youtube excel at promoting.
Agree.
But it empowers them to vie for attention in mostly the worst ways possible and, overwhelmingly, has led to a lot of bad content. There's some gems too. But, by and large, YouTube is less desirable for me to use than it was 10 years ago and I think it's because of the transformation into an industry, rather than an indie platform that also paid out.
It feels like it went from a farmer's market with a lot of local farmers selling their goods to shopping at Walmart.
If you've been leaning hard on programming and lack the people skills to join the business class, that's on you. Things are going to get very hard for you in the near future, if they haven't already. People skills are the new moat.
where did i say that I've been solely leaning hard on programming and not focusing on the people skill?
¹ using the term "algorithms" here in its colloquial non-tech sense.
Without social media you would have corners of culture getting stuck on whatever ideas they had from 2000 years ago. With social media these stale ideas get beaten by good ones.
Wut? None of those 3 things are like the others. This is gibberish.
or they're just idiots, but with 50% of the internet being bots who can say?
Maybe you could explain how tech is benefiting the lower and middle classes while exclusively hurting the upper middle class. You know, the class that holds significant amounts of stock in tech companies and may even work for said tech companies. Who have benefited immensely from the industry.
Edit: I do enjoy Noah Smith and neoliberalism. Good on you for getting it right.
The attacks on and hate of trans people are on the rise. There seem to be literal strategy of preventing blacks and women from career rise in military and government. And all of these are enabled and helped by tech. The radicalization and hate grows due to our algorithms.
> tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again
Tech industry is the status quo, it represents people with good jobs and high status looking down on everyone else. It was like that for decades now. Tech industry is all about creating monopolies, consolidating and killing the competition.
> when the historical trend points to optimism instead
It does not. We failed to manage climate change. The world is moving from stability to chaos, toward more wars. The politics of several countries is turning toward openly fascists. The powerful are less and less accountable, amassing more and more power. Corruption is at unprecedented levels.
Good times already were. We are going toward bad times and things will start improving only after they will get really bad first.
Attacks on trans people are on the rise because the poltical demands trans people make in the explicit name of trans rights necessarily entail enlisting the state to help destroy gender distinctions most people care about; and a lot of people have now realized this and are explicitly fighting back against trans demands.
Blacks and women have historically benefitted from explicit racial and gender preferences in government and military careers which usually entailed having explicitly lower standards for these demographic groups, because poltical activists for these groups fought against any standards-based advancement process that resulted in noticeably few women or blacks coming out the end of it. This has made enough people mad that they were willing to elect high level polticians who promised to destroy the gender and race-based affirmative action systems in government careers, which looks like "preventing blacks and women from career rise" from the perspective of a pro-affirmative-action person.
Both of these phenomena are contemporary American poltical currents, and don't have much to do with the tech industry in and of itself.
But that demand could have been turned into real power. Now it's too late.
https://order-of-the-engineer.org/about-the-order/obligation...
I think that farmers are somehow immune despite having their fair share of evil because we all understand that without them, we would all die.
If I were to guess, I think what you mean interacting with them not the money extraction part?
People will have some criticisms of each of these but the average person probably appreciates them more than dislikes them.
It doesn't matter, all you need to replicate the same problems is concentration of wealth and power and the ability to direct it.
Once you take VC money you might as well work in big tech. You’ll still be beholden to morons. I have no interest in making more friends in Silicon Valley than I already have.
The mode of opposition against culture change to benefit these groups is the same mode of opposition against technology. Both exist to preserve status quo - to keep the same hierarchies.
yeah there are some truly great creators but they're drowned out in the sea of piss that is the generic YT algo
AI is now taking those jobs, which I'm not sure if it is better or worse
"Your workforce will be more productive" sounds much less impressive than "OMG you will literally not need employees anymore!! 10x profits!!"
Musk's SpaceX TAM is roughly as you say, it's "subsume all currently existing desk jobs", which makes it simultaneously absurdly over-confident in the short term and treating this all as a zero-sum game where those jobs just go away and no new (potentially also automatable) jobs get invented, which in turn says he doesn't think anywhere is going to shift from primary and secondary economies to tertiary economies.
Zuckerberg may be full of himself, but does at least (pay someone else to?) write a vision that at least has growth-sounding phrases in it: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
"I learned something really important at college today. I don't wanna be there! Some people are meant to go to college, and some people are meant to go to beauty school. And I'm in beauty school!"
(who says AI is useless?)
I think the problem is that the tech industry in large is just here to extract wealth from the many and transfer it to the few. That's why it's focused on scale.
People aren't dumb, and most of the time they can see when they're on the receiving end of an extractive relationship - even if there's lots of PR work going on to hide that reality from them.
i can disagree with my neighbor's opinion that his wife is pretty or his kids are smart.
i hate entrenched capital that is trying to obliterate my ability to work, and which will leave me to starve, and which is very, very blunt about how little they care about us.
For the record I used to read noahpinion all the time. Then I developed critical thinking skills. It’s not a compliment that it was so easy for me to recognize you as a reader of his. You should learn how to think for yourself.
I still check his blog occasionally to see what the tech elite / alphabet boys want me to think. It’s become surprisingly easy to deduce their strategy.
I did answer your question. Are you saying the above quote is sarcasm?
You asked why I highlighted techs impact on the upper middle class. It’s because you singled them out as the primary opponents of tech multiple times.
I didn’t use any insults at all. Where are you seeing insults? I’m giving you valuable advice.
So you're going to need a more accurate diagnosis than simply capitalism
I'm pretty sure the commoners (and even more so, the slaves!) in Rome, Egypt or Imperial China didn't love the system either.
However, I think the average modern-day, communist Chinese person has seen such a rise in standards of living (one billion people pulled out from poverty!) that they don't really hate the system despite there also being high wealth concentration amongst party and business elites.
The gap is the problem, not the peak.
..
Have a good day. Or don’t. I really don’t care.