Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago. But we have so much of it and it is everywhere, that we re-calibrate and think that all this amazing, cool tech is boring. You can get a 3D printer for a few hundred bucks, build it yourself, build a better 3d printer, get some awesome tech for a hundred bucks or so, and then build a really cool robot. It's the tinkerer's dream right now. But because it is everywhere, we think it is boring.

It isn't! I'm Gen X and, if you let yourself, you can get re-engaged. We're the ultimate generation of apathy, so if I can do it, you can do it ;) Make sure some lifestyle choice isn't messing with your curiosity and excitement, though. Bad sleep, missing exercise, doom scrolling, too much booze or other recreational drugs, all that can suck the joy out of life and tech.

In the early 2000s, right after the Dot Com Bubble burst, I had a tech friend tell me, "I think all the great stuff has been invented, it's all boring now." That was in the web 1.0 days, before the web as we know it now existed. Before rockets that land on their end, before smartphones, before Deep Learning, before all this amazing stuff that exists now.

Oh, and you've just gone through a couple of churns of software ecosystem, it can seem same-y, but it is actually great in the long run. New situations mean old ideas that were discarded can become valuable, which can be odd. The complexity sucks, but ... shrug.

Cars have internet, but track your location, can listen in on your conversations, and optional features or the engine itself can be remotely disabled. Phones are powerful computers in our pockets, but are mainly intended for media consumption and data collection. They are also heavily locked down and controlled. Updates are automatically pushed to our devices and software with no notification of what's been changed and no way to decline anti-features and user hostile changes.

I still have some hope for the future of tech, but we need to find a way to get tech to work for us again instead of also being used against us. So far things look like they're going to get much worse before they get better. More spying, more restrictions, more consolidation, fewer choices for consumers, less ownership, fewer customization options, less access and less accountability for companies when data gets leaked or people get hurt.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did, back in the day. Your 'kind of useful but fun/dirty' hacker project either becomes ad-infested to survive or is too-useful and gets copied by a big-company. If your problem is cool enough and you can solve it, investors will throw millions at you in hopes of making a global success. Hard to say no to that.

There is no moderate success anymore. Economies of scale end up being all-or-nothing style situation. Just as local mom-n-pops places have gotten replaced by much cheaper national chains and building your own house is now a thing of the past because the costs for getting past regulation only make sense at scale.

The world is on board now so rapid tech changes aren't possible to market.

There's still crazy/genius if you look for it, but hobbyist only in most cases. NixOS, Urbit, any DHT or CRDT system, VR, Graal, WASM, mesh nets like ygssadril.

There were many silly startups in the late 90's/early 00's. Even the commonly sought after employers of FAANG aren't doing revolutionary things, their cash cows: advertising (F), giant ecommerce store (Amzn), makes phones/tablets/laptops & sells digital stuff (Apple), streaming video (Netflix), advertising (Google). Any cool tech coming out of those companies is mostly driven by them scaling the above named revenue pipelines to the Nth degree.

One could have solid arguments that many things tech has done have made things worse. Is tech/software eating the world driving a bigger divide between the 1% and poor people? You gotta admit tech contributes to that. If someone wanted to run a propaganda campaign about topic X, isn't social media the perfect platform to do it? You can reach millions upon millions of people with a few clicks of clever copy-writing to push an agenda. You can even target them directly.

When it comes to business, a lot of verticals have been monopolized and tech has shifted from making tools that users pay for to weapons of mass distraction where the objective is "growth and engagement".

I loved that scene because every new model meaningfully changed the way technology allowed me to interact with the world. Grayscale -> color, adding a camera, adding enough storage and pixels for media, etc.

Eventually smartphones became indistinguishable black rectangles, where a new year's hardware means nothing. Then smartphone software became so mundane that I don't really care whether I'm running the latest OS because I can't tell the difference.

Tech is maturing. We're no longer fumbling around, looking for new local maxima - we're getting closer and closer to the global maximum of what today's technology can accomplish. We're certainly not there yet, but the exploration phase is over until something new comes along to upend the game.

And technology has left enthusiasts behind. Normal folks don't want their smartphone to have an experimental hardware module with no clear use. They get excited that the latest social media app lets them play a better status game with their peers, or that a group scheduling app saves X minutes per week across their team.

I don't think there's a way out. Niche/fringe technologies can still be very exciting - the crypto crowd is having a blast, and PinePhone has some people excited. But if crypto doesn't catastrophically implode, it'll eventually mature enough that all the fun parts have already been solved and all that's left is boring, marginal improvements, where folks try to eek out another dollar.

The definitive answer is July 10, 2008; App Store opens, and ushers in this new age of garbage software.

I am just waiting for an opportunity to leave my current position to transfer into an non-tech sector as soon as possible... as for my personal use i have found my haven of sanity in the RiscOS community, there, things seemingly move in a very different direction (thanks to the stubborn brits!).

The stuff that I found very cool is found outside commercial space. I have few examples:

- Serenity OS project which builds whole operating system from the ground up

- some guy (I forgot his name) who hooked up his arm prothesis to modular synth and now he is literally able to play melodies using his mind

- completely free and open source Bespoke Synth DAW which appeared out of nowhere after 10 years of silent development

- youtube series about restoration of Centurion minicomputer

- you can change map projection on the fly with new version of Mapbox (see demo - https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections) (this one is actually commercial but very impressive)

I think the slow down start 10's ish. But it's not as much a slow down as more stabilizing. Innovation is still very much happening and much more advanced, groundbreaking and useful than it was, but maybe not as "new and shiny" as for example a motorola razr or nokia ngage. I think contrast is what's missing, from 0 to 100 is much intenser than 100 to 200. You can kind of predict what's coming so even though revolutionary, not as surprising or exciting.

But I still find tech very cool. The gadgets I have now are absolutely mind blowing if you think about it and they are actually useful, I pay with my watch, I have a laptop without fans and with a battery that runs all day, I talk to my watch to turn on the lights, I also work from home for a company in a different country with people spread across the world, I could go on.

The problem is that the industry has matured. And not in a good way.

Tech used to be largely about discovery and invention and making computers work to make people's lives better. Over the last decade, there has been a very rapid shift to tech being about exploitation and monetization and all the bad things that come with human endeavor.

I don't blame tech people for this. There exists an underclass of people — vultures or grifters, for lack of a better description — who wander from hot thing to hot thing trying to make money as quickly and unscrupulously as possible. I think of them as a collective of shady real estate agents and shadier used car salesmen, who follow the trends from one industry to another in order to "get my share" and destroy that industry as a result.

In modern times, it happened to banking. It happened to real estate. It happened to tech. It's happening in crypto. It'll happen to VR soon. Probably space flight shortly after that.

Tech is not inherently bad. But it's been made bad by the number of people who are in it for the wrong reasons outnumbering the number of people who are in it for the right reasons.

I'm in the process of combining my two hobbies, my love of music, and my love of game design. Here's a music visualizer I'm working on. https://youtu.be/2dv2cjJIh2s

Doesn’t stop you from doing something new. Something hard. Something interesting.

It doesn't have to be technology, you could probably say the same thing about most things in your life, "I don't know what happened. I used to like hanging out with my friends, riding my bike, listening to music. But then things changed and now I've got a job, a mortgage to worry about and it's all about money and I never have enough time to do the things that I want to do".

But you have an internal contradiction. You're nostalgically looking back at a time when you optimistically said, "Wherever I looked at the world's problems, more technology seemed to be the answer" but then say that, "Today's startups are solving the most boring problems imaginable.".

More technology is not the answer to most problems and most problems are boring.

Also there are hardly any revolutionary/significant improvements in hardware, we still use crappy baterries as 10 years ago, they are just larger, I'm still waiting for graphene baterries.

There are no new useful/interesting devices since capacitive touchscreen smartphone, one could actually say we are going backwards with horrible devices like electric scooters/hoverboards and all these companies litering public space with their rental business which has nothing to do with sharing.

And don't get me started on military drones and military dogs, so we can be under even bigger control.

I think I should read again Unabombers manifesto after many years, it's more relevant than ever.

Yes, the upside of what's possible has moved higher. No doubt. But the entry level has moved higher as well. Going from knowing nothing to creating an application used to be much, much easier. And that meant a wider berth of people were trying to create software. People used to create web pages or a MySpace page. No one does that anymore.

You think it's age? Ok, so... where are the hot startups? Where are the revolutionary ideas? Where are the wild, crazy new platforms and programming languages? What are people buzzing about? Exactly. Nothing.

I've been on HN from almost its inception. And I've watched it go from a hotbed of exciting topics and startups and ideas -- to an obituary page, the maintenance documentation, of what once was.

I used to think that if only everyone had access to all the information, they would make better decisions. It turns out that given access to all the information, lots of people just want to do social things that reinforce their tribal membership. And some people make better decisions, some of the time.

In short, structural social problems are hard.

"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

There's a lot of truth in that.

Something I noticed in myself is that I'm weary of consuming content/software/gadgetry and find more of a spark in trying to create it myself these days. Maybe look into the maker movement, 3D printing (mentioned in a peer comment), or Arduino and similar entry-level hands-on stuff. Or at least have a browse through, say, hackaday.com and see if anything there floats your boat.

The drought is going to to be over when a new fundamental shift in platform occurs which will kick off a new generation of startups, frameworks, applications, wonders and terrors.

Technology has always been a means to an end -- I say that as someone which has always been fascinated by tech, due to my attraction to understanding, creativity and invention.

---

I am working with a friend on a system to better reward websites and technologies without requiring advertisements. Think a small payment going to every website you visit, every service you use automatically. You would get some control over how to distribute those payments. Maybe we could set up worldwide funds that reward software based on their contributions to society. You could have local institutions suggesting and supporting funding projects -- distributed, democratic, rational, fair, .

Jane Goodall has been saying all humanity needs to flourish is to get 'the head and the heart' to work in harmony -- which I think means to say we need a society where our work, and our tech, and everything is contributing to make the world awesome -- to promote sustainability, to make healthy happy lives, to make rich amazing existences.

We kind of have the tools at our disposal... this century is a very decisive one, where we show that we are capable of growing and achieving an amazing civilization (and not collapse due to environmental ruin, greed, conflict).

Tech is still cool. I'm not young, so I don't think that age is a factor.

Just this morning I while waiting for a call to start we were talking about the tech behind the Russian drone on the news today. I have always had a passing interest in 'Long Range Fixed Wing FPV), which is pretty amazing tech. That is something that is accessible to the modern equivalent of "Tom's Hardware lurker". Commercially, remote operations (including industrial) is cool.

The accessibility of microcontrollers is pretty cool. The languages are a bit old, but how easy it is to do stuff is interesting. Real Time Operating Systems are still cool to tinker with - especially if you pair it to accessible electronics.

Agritech is pretty cool. As consumers, we don't see it much, but what farmers can do with so few workers is astounding.

Energy grids sound boring, but are pretty cool. As we generate more renewable energy and have to match it with substaintial demand, such as EV delivery vehicles, is not a boring problem.

I have customers that do pretty cool stuff at the nanometre scale. X-ray crystallography, CCDs that can detect a single photon of light. I've seen systems that are build to cool to, and operate at millikelvin.

There is so much cool tech! Getting a scrollable feed on a smartphone is a bit _meh_. You need to broaden your definition of 'tech'.

> Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles

I wouldn’t say this exactly, though advancements may have slowed due to less or no low-hanging fruit. The trend now is programming languages and frameworks that better control or eliminate effects (and with them attack surface, security vulnerabilities, and undefined behavior).

Rust is probably the poster child for this with its growing popularity and frameworks, though progenitors like Ada, Haskell and others in the ML and functional families count as well.

Then there’s the whole emerging field of quantum computing and quantum computing programming languages. That isn’t practical for garage hacking yet, but imagine when a future Steve Jobs or Bill Gates makes and markets the first desktop quantum computer. We’ll have a whole new field with low-hanging fruit.

This is why it’s critical for societies to continue large-scale investment in high-risk, high-return scientific research, to maintain a pipeline of new fields and their attendant low-hanging fruit for commercialization and innovation-driven economic growth.

1) robotics are amazing right now

2) self driving cars

3) satellite systems, like starlink

4) drones and drone meshes

5) artificial limbs/prosthetics, including eyes, ears, spinal stimulation etc.

6) genetics and genetic analysis, protein folding, etc.

7) DIY - 3D printing/raspberry pi/arduino

8) crypto/blockchain and decentralized networks

9) virtual reality

Yeah if you are trying to sell more cheap chinese products or do social media, that kind of sucks.

Getting a wireless router for the first time was a religious experience for my household. Now I know exactly how it works and what will improve/worsen its service area and reception and it is decidedly less magical.

One of the worst parts of growing up in the tech industry is that very few things are able to surprise you anymore.

There are quite a few wrong turns in Unix that spread because it was just “the way it’s done”. And HTML + Javascript is a terrible way to make client server applications, but constant additional complexity slowly smooths out the worst of it until nobody really thinks there’s a better way.

There is, but the effort to start over just to get to the current level of functionality is far too much to bother.

But that’s the fundamental difference, in the early days every path was equally available for exploration. Now you’re pretty constrained in how you can do what you want to. Still lots to explore from there, but the complexity of the underlying implementation means it’s not quite so fun any more.

I'm watching my younger brother get into software right now for the first time, and it's delightful. Every day there's something new that he's thrilled about.

What's funny is that he's having a blast playing with the same types of tech that I make a living using and get bored by. A few weeks ago it was getting his hobby website up on the real internet with his own VPS and his own domain. Last week he was ecstatic when he got MongoDB hooked up properly to back the project so he could save things. This week it was getting nginx configured to properly work with Vue router so that refresh works. These tools seem outright boring to me today, but his excitement is infectious.

It's easy for us to say that tech today is boring, or the barrier to entry is too high, because we're now experts. My brother's excitement in the mundane makes me reevaluate my own nostalgia and cynicism.

I think Jonathan Blow made a decent argument that we're in a decadent age of software. In a decadent age, the civilization still does and can do the thing, but has started to lose a grip on the fundamentals, so it's on the way out. A decadent age is a kind of end, doesn't necessarily feel like the end, it kind of feels like a stagnant bumbling.

How many programmers do you know that can write assembly code? How many layers of abstraction between a web app and the silicon? Processor, OS, probably a byte-code VM, probably a framework... leaking a little bit all of the way.

He makes a good point--where's the evidence that we can write good software? It seems possible, but it doesn't appear, so really, the feeling that maybe we could is just a feeling, not evidence.

However, today it's worse. I still don't like buying stuff, and I now see hardware as future waste. What changed in me is the ecological perspective which I didn't have that much before. I also see hardware as things that take place in my home. Not attracted at all. I want less things around me, and less waste. What gets my interest now is hardware enabling free software and that lasts.

Still very much interested in things related to programming. Computing also gained a political dimension to me. It's everywhere, and there's this constant fight to keep it non hostile and useful to people. Nowadays I weakly advocate for free software and privacy, including to people who are not especially interested in computers.

Back in 1980, if you sat down at a computer and did something with it, you were special, because very few people did that. Today, when you sit down at a computer, you are just one of the many suffering multitudes whose time and attention are eaten up by systems that either deliberately or inadvertently own you. It has become a treadmill, and making that stuff has become a treadmill too.

I'm reminded that 100 years ago, there was a huge workforce of "clerks" who were basically human information processors. Tech workers are today's clerks.

In 1980, your tech life wasn't worth anybody else owning and controlling. Today it is.

I can go right back to that world by stripping away the gratuitous complexity and control. An Arduino can entertain me for days.

In Mexico/Colombia/South America people are both envious and hate tech nomads, mostly because they have high salaries and can seemingly do whatever they want and afford it all.

I think the association with wealth and marginal taste is the reason people dont like people who work in tech.

When it started was the second tech bubble in silicon valley bay area and the rise of 'digital nomads', alot of it is warranted and alot of it is jealousy.

- Obama is elected with significant help from new social media tactics. Powerful interests realize that tech will shape the future of politics. This leads to less "technology for technology's sake" and more of its use to achieve sociopolitical goals.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/o...

- The financial crash heats up resentment against elites. While it may seem like the East Coast media and financial set are opponents of Big Tech, to the average person, they're both out of touch elites. Tech stopped being cool when it stopped being the underdog.

> Gadgets are a snoozfest. Programming languages and frameworks seem to be running in circles.

3d printing, arduino, nodemcu, rust? I'd say we are at the golden age of gadgets. The stuff we can create today seems limitless.

I still cannot get over how much I like programming microcontrollers with rust. I took it as a hobby and ended up with some real products.

I have some lora modems in my desk that I'm constantly eyeing and I cannot wait for some free time to start playing with those.

We're out of sync. We're unaligned. We've lost that magic feeling because we aren't consistent.

This lack of consistency seeps into our work and the whole industry loses confidence. Just look at the sad state of software reliability and performance, despite the numerous advancements in hardware.

That's not to say we haven't made progress with technology too. I just don't care about a lot of it. Procedural art is a neat bar trick, but ultimately doesn't strike me as a viewer unless it's explained crisply. Cryptocurrency is a scam at best, or a force for destabilization at worst. Digital currency has been a thing for years, but has gotten slower and more cumbersome in my personal experience recently. Social media is a well accepted problem. Video games seem to be in a rut, as with Hollywood (maybe I'm living under a rock as per usual?). My love for computing hardware has waned; my phones torment me, my USB ports and dongles are duds or act sporadically. Wireless tech is wrought with interference and power issues. Must I continue?

These probably sound like the rummagings of an aging man, grown discontent with the kids these days. To some extent that's also probably correct. But, I think it's worth noting that I do find a lot of excitement in this world still... Just with lower tech hobbies. Ice skating, woodworking, ultimate frisbee, music, and more still dominate my thoughts. As does the horrifying world of trying to date post-college. Maybe, just maybe, it was the hyper-focused tech driven world of the past that was the problem. Maybe, it's this new post-covid era we're entering which will show us that there's more to life than disruption and the "next big thing" every week. I can dream can't I?

It's time to settle in, buckle up, and refine what we know we want, what we have, and what we ultimately need in life.

As you gain more experience and become familliar with any system(digital, political, social), you start to recognize the frameworks behind the hype, the recurring patterns repeating ad nauseum and the hidden hands that manipulate spaces. Just accept the fact that life will wear you down and make a bitter old person out of you, eventually.

J/K, sorta. Life is an accumulation of experiences & learning, that changes you & the way you see the world around you. The 'new' things become old and the newest often resembles a rehash of the old. Find your zen wherever you can, there's lots of options.

As always, YMMV.

2. You are right that a lot of startups are working on stupid "problems", it frustrates me too. We don't need yet another social network / image sharing service / funny face manipulator software.

3. There are an insane number of real problems nobody is solving (yet) with software. People need to find those problems FIRST, not the other way around (have an idea not solving a real-world problem.)

4. In a sense, a lot of problems are solved, yes. For example, the world don't need "site builders" anymore, because of Wordpress and no-code tools.

Tech isn't boring, we are oversaturated.

Environment. I know most people don't care about the environment on HN, but the toll of consumerism, including tech gadgets, is huge on the environment. I restrain from buying new devices for that reasons.

Profit. It has always been about profit, but never to that extent. It's all about selling new stuff that we don't need, getting our attention, making us addicted. And it's the same on the workplace. I used to work on weekends because I loved what I was doing. Now it's all about trying to pass the next performance evaluation.

I'm going to focus on this, because to some extent this is a real problem. But it's also one that can be worked on.

The thing to keep in mind is that most startups are solving problems that a small number of people can handle in a small amount of time. 3-5 people in less than a year for a pre-A MVP sort of project, 50-100 in 2-5 years with funding before you need to have it cracking.

Now think back to every geek's first or third love, the history of physics. Back in the golden age of experimental physics, the guys all of our units were named after were making their discoveries solo using a length of wire and a homemade battery or a handmade telescope. Now, we have hundreds or thousands of researchers collaborating on nation-spanning super colliders or telescope arrays.

Why? Because anything that two people in a garage lab could figure out has already been figured out.

1990's Google was proof-of-concepted by a team of two. But to build a 2020's search engine you need teams of hundreds, if not thousands. Some of your favorite video games of the 80's were the work of, if not one person, a team you could fit in a small room. Modern flagship games have more people working on hair physics.

As time goes on in any field, the easy problems get solved, and it takes more and more people to do interesting work. Raising the bar like that makes it hard for start-ups, with their limited funding and head count, to compete.

But in tech, unlike physics, hope is not lost for new golden ages: new tech comes along and changes what one developer can do.

Take games -- sure, flagship games might have hundreds of developers, but we're in a golden age of indie games, in no small part because modern frameworks and distribution have come together to let small houses do more than they could before while reaching more customers than they previously could.

If you want to promote more startups doing more interesting things, that is the lever to push on. What technologies are too expensive for a small team to develop, that they could use as a springboard? How could you make it easier for tech startups to get paid?

You grew up through the introduction of the smartphone, social media and digital cameras, as well as the incredible development of computing power. When you were born, the most advanced piece of electronics in the average household might have been a TV. Now, everyone has a little box with a phone, supercomputer and camera in their pocket. That was a huge and exciting change.

But now, much of that burst of transformation has slowed down and any developments in tech are an incremental improvement as far as everyday life is concerned.

But personally, I love learning about the technology in other industries, particularly manufacturing. Look at the everyday objects around you and the process that was used to make them. The sewing machine that stitched your clothes and the mechanism it uses to do it. The machines that produced the yarn and the machines that turned it into fabric. Look at how metals are extruded into a housing for some electrical device or parts of your house. Look at how CNC machining is used to create high-precision parts or how sheet metal is processed to mass-produce low-cost parts.

There's so much technology around us that has been quietly doing its job for decades and even if the change it induced is taken for granted now, the technology itself is still an impressive achievement.

We've come down from that high and looked around at the physical world and technology is not progressing at the same pace, it is a little depressing. Real progress is still being made but we got used to the fast pace of exploring and filling the connectivity gap and it's a rough transition.

I've also written about half-a-dozen apps that somebody later took and made into a super cool startup. I don't say that to brag. Ideas are cheap. Execution intelligence is where it's at.

I mention the apps I've written because you really have to establish more context if you're going to lament about tech's coolness death. Is tech not cool anymore? Or is it just not cool to you? I feel like I've written a bunch of cool stuff over the years. It's always been cool to me, for whatever that's worth.

Given that setup, I will answer using my own definition of cool. Software ate the world, and that was awesome. It also had a bunch of side-effects nobody wanted to think about, and that sucked. But because it ate the world, ie became an integral part of human existence, tech became incestuous. It's so prevalent in our daily experience that it became impossible to talk about what might be cool or not.

We ended up with a bifurcation. Path A talks about tech only in terms of people creating and sharing content with one another, whether that's a cat pic or instructions to use CPR to save lives. Path B is just concerned with mechanics regardless of impact: how do we set up that identity server template in kubernetes?

I find the endgame of both sides of this bifurcation to be extremely boring. I can solve most tech problems I'm given using tech. Yay. I can explore creating interesting content in various genres given some rando platform. Also yay. But at some point along both of those paths, it seemed like it became a race to the bottom. It all devolved into mindless, manipulative crap. Even if I became a rock star on the tech path or the content path, so what? There'd be a million new folks coming along next year doing it better, and in 50 years nobody would care.

I decided that to me, it was the visceral feeling of integrating tech with creativity that brought the most life satisfaction. That's the feeling I got when I was writing my first apps for a local business at 16. It was the feeling I had architecting big systems that took off and still provide value. You can't separate one path from the other and expect any sort of long-term satisfaction. At least I never could.

So we have bunch of VC funded "startups" burning billions for their own leisure and salary, while butchering the tech

I'm currently "playing" with openai tools gpt/clip etc... and my mind is blown every 5 minutes

So if you’re willing to really replicate that, then its blockchain, crypto and various distributed file storage systems.

Fire up an Ethereum full node and contribute to the coding and testing the merge, or any dozen of Layer2’s or completely different paradigms that have scifi goals.

I don't think that's true. It might be true for the richest people in the world, but there are still lots of people in the world that lack tech, either because it hasn't reached them or because it hasn't been developed yet.

* Virtual/Mixed Reality platforms pre-mainstream and growing.

* Massive advances in machine learning AND

* No corresponding advance towards AGI

* Huge power and flexibility available via cloud and containerisation.

Tech is as cool and as open to opportunity - using the facilities and exploiting the gaps in things like the above - to the small scale and independent developer as it's ever been IMO.

Everyone is a rapper these days, everyone is a rockstar these days, so no-one is.

Edit: Truly disruptive technology will never stop being cool and magical. But there's another clue - even the word disruptive is cringe these days, because it's been abused by the aforementioned horde of muppets.

tech in the 80's went obsolete....but it didn't stop working because you stopped paying Atari a subscription....and it didn't suddenly decide to censor and block previous content through an 'update' cough downgrade*

In the past, there seemed to be so many cool possibilities. That coolness infected the tech itself, so the tech looked cool too. But now a lot of those possibilities have been explored already. It's not the Wild West anymore, we've got plenty of interstate highways and railways crossing that space, and we've witnessed the not-cool parts as well.

Fortunately, this also helps us see where we might still find coolness. Just do something cool, regardless of tech. Who cares if your cool project doesn't involve any new tech? Who cares which frontend framework is the best when you're building a tree house for your kids, roasting a steak, whipping up a sexy cocktail, putting up a simple HTML form to help neighbors in need, saving the Earth, exploring the seas, the mountains, and the outer space? There's always more coolness out there. :)

Now JavaScript and other web technologies have made it so easy to build full blown games in the browser. Ironically because it’s less constrained it’s harder to make something good.

When everyone has access to technology creativity matters more. I like Nintendo’s philosophy, find cheap off the shelf technology and make something fun. Because they are not competing in a graphics arms race they focus on gameplay. The goal is “fun” not “technology.”

I echo other comments about age factoring in. When tech is a thing to play with its fun, when it’s work it’s not fun. We all have that inner child inside, the challenge is finding ways to bring it out.

We still work with text files, line by line. Programming languages unspool and lose their state upon encountering an error and deciphering pages of stacktraces is left to the programmer. State cannot really be saved and resumed. Everything needs to be desperately backwards compatible even when that means dragging problems along from version to version. The cool things are mostly academic and don't make it into the mainstream.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

I would prefer to inquire as to when tech became net negative for society

But you touch on the real thing here.

>Wherever I looked at the world's problems, more technology seemed to be the answer.

The more you get into just what and how those problems are, the less will it seem that technology is an answer to anything. Technology can cure my loved one but I'll lose them some time nevertheless. Give people something to eat yet not solving starvation. Elevated the lives of many yet haven't eliminated even extreme poverty. Technology reshaped the world but we're still the same humans we always were (terms and conditions apply) - and so, our fundamental problem were, are, and will ever be the same.

There's not even a solution to this, as a feeling. You "just" need to move on with life. Tech can be exciting again but that won't come from the outside.

2) Tech is a bit like food. Nutritious food is often perceived as being boring to eat. Profitable software is often perceived as being boring to develop and consume.

3) The elephant in the room is that commercial software tends to run into the same issues: coupled code, slow queries, bad stack choices, etc. Tech debt is endemic in the SaaS world.

As a consequence, there is a high probability you will run into the same problems again and again regardless of switching from some NLP SaaS to a bleeding edge fintech (just an example of two distant exciting fields). And usually you won't be empowered to solve those issues unless you are a staff engineer or above.

You grew up.

The other part is that we are, in my opinion, coming out of a period of hyper growth and technical advancement where we were picking all the "low hanging fruit" of tech, which was exciting to see.

Now that, to one degree we're "done" with that, what's left is either the commoditisation of all of that (making existing more affordable and accessible) which is much less exciting, or companies desperately throwing shit at the wall to try and invent "the next iPhone", which can be quite depressing.

Nowadays, I got a phone that can just get a 4k or hd copy at speed. I can cast it to my hd tv no problem. Now I can watch nearly any movie I can think of immediately.

Nowadays if I look at a tech magazine (heh) or any given gadget website. Everything is slightly faster or smaller. But I'd say most of my everyday tasks are already handled. Everything is pretty great, but the magic is gone. But that's ok.

I despise the incentive structures modern VCs create. Exponential growth is always inherently time-limited and thus it's fundamentally at odds with building a sustainable company that creates great technology over the long term.

That said, tech companies and most of the people on HN do seem a lot less cool to me than they used to…

My initial take on social media was that it would be a place for free expression. It took me a long time before I realized that people expect what you say on social media to be consumable by them, otherwise it makes them wonder and that makes them cringe. It surfaced more judgement than anything. Now its just accepted that social media is a cringefest and that type of judgment has become embedded in how we look at everything (not just social media posts).

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27483207

I would add though that exponentially increasing complexity adds a separation between the ubiquitous tech around us and the hobbyist tech we can just enjoy. It's hard now to find something cool, get your hands dirty as a hobbyist and have it be comparable to the majority of tech finding application in the real-world. The best you can do is dabble in the superficial applications and software abstracted away from the real underlying tech.

It started when we as a society let the tech cos get too big.

...Why does that matter? All the talent decided its better to get paid by the big tech cos and work a job instead of starting their own tech co. In fairness trying to compete with the big tech cos is a fools errand. Right now we're in a weird period of history where it just doesn't make financial sense to go start a novel company when you could live the cushy Big Tech Co life for roughly the same amount of money, yet substantially less risk.

When is it going to end? When a butterfly in Africa flaps its wings.

Yes it's partially growing older on my part, it takes more effort to surprise me now. But I also feel there has been a shift. The good news is everything has a cycle so I'm sure we'll eventually break out of the current rut and get some more excitement into science and sci-fi at some point

In fact I had also been working for some time on actually cool tech and was looking forward to go into the office as early as possible and stay late. But as I "progressed" I worked on more and more boring problems and products. The by far most exciting tech is what I use in my free time.

Also it seems that only a small fraction of tech products nowadays are driven by tech geeks.

There’s also 4 Star Trek pipelines, 5 Marvel pipelines, 3 Star Wars Pipelines and all movies of a certain range have been completely wrapped up in rental fees.

More and more people are all doing more and more at the same time, and very little of it is really new.

One the one hand, this is great news! We already have all the technology we need to provide for everyone while we stabilize the Earth's climate and start colonizing the galaxy.

On the other hand, this means that our problems are now psychological or spiritual rather than physical. Those issues are less amenable to scientific/technological solutions. (At least so far.)

At the same time, hardware vendors stopped taking risks in developing their own consumer products. It was easier to slap Android on an MP3 player or a watch or a TV instead of developing your own UI and interaction patterns.

Personally, I like where tech is headed. Hope I can be on the frontier of some of these new tech.

Welcome to the next phase of a technologists career.

Why do we build so many things if no one’s going to use it. Or if no one knows how to use it?

^^^ coding for the sake of code, for the “flow state” high, is partly why we have a lot of useless software.

When we build these software tools and the tools are useful to build other stuff - application of these technologies is actually really fun!

Until we exhaust that to a good point, more code is t going to do much.

Opinions my own and mine alone :)

For context, i'm generationally Xennial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials) and was lucky enough to have access to PC's from the mid 80's.

You think it's not because of some combination of you getting older, accepting the cultural zeitgeist (currently very negative in general and anti-tech in particular), not paying attention to things, not learning new things, etc.

It's extremely hard to look at recent advances in space, neural networks and robots with fresh eyes and not be dumbstruck by their awesomeness.

Somewhere around 2008.

> and when is the drought going to be over?

Sometime after we stop bailing out the economy. When money is easy, people take the easy route. When money is hard, people have to be inventive.

If you're old enough you'll remember that is hardly the first time tech has stopped being cool. It always stops being cool when there is little incentive to build anything cool.

There's also this thing that tech is sanitized for "idiots first" because apparently if you don't appeal to billions you're a failure

I love dancing, and I love teaching dancing. But as a job, it really sucks. Customers and bosses ruin everything. At least with tech, the job pays well, unlike teaching dance.

You're only looking at the surface.

This kind of boring stuff has always been around. As has the pursuit of money and the use of tech in that pursuit.

Tech is more accessible now, and thus you will naturally get more noise.

It does not follow that there are fewer signals, just more noise to filter out.

You can still mod videogames, but I get not wanting to look at a computer after your 9-5 of looking at a computer all day.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/8/14549342/beyonce-magic-lea...

I think it has to do with consolidation and greed. Novelties are fun but they don't make you billions of dollars. It's just a constant incremental churn of boring but profitable walled garden junk from megacorps.

Look at how easily and quickly you can learn something new from a short video that you have free access to. This is only going to improve.

This opens up even more opportunities for tech to evolve.

The "tech" that people get enamored with are sets of tools. What you do with them is the most important thing. They have no intrinsic transcendent value in themselves. There's a part of our brain that is "tickled" by solving problems. But that stimulation only takes you so far.

Insofar as "tech" has changed the world it's really that capitalism has transformed the world in its image, and part of what we call "tech" is the ideological framework that has helped make that happen. Everything from bar code scanners in supermarket checkouts in the early 70s, to the earliest CPUs in the F-14 fly-by-wire flight system (same era), to Uber drivers using an app to manage their gigs -- the development of microprocessor technology was driven by the need for market efficiencies, not the other way around.

There's always been money in computing, but I'm talking about really huge money and serious political power. I'm talking about nation-state-scale money, elections hinging on social media meme wars, countries creating troll armies as part of new cold wars, etc.

When the stakes go up, the fun goes away. Serious players get involved, not to mention lots of hard-core psychopathic types that are not fun at all to deal with.

There's no better place to see this than the computer underground. Hacker (pop culture sense) culture used to be fun, exploratory, and cool. I was really into it as a teen. Now I wouldn't let my kids near it. It's loaded with serious and dangerous criminals, incredibly toxic ideology, real prison sentences if you get caught, and actual harm as opposed to pranks and exploration. Today's "hacking" (black or grey hat) involves destroying peoples livelihoods with scams and ransomware, attacking democracy and civil society, and even killing people.

Guns, armies, and serious crime have come to what was once a neat little bubble of pure thought and exploration.

Bitcoin, Electron, Web3, CGI/Real time 3D keeps progressing, latest Macbooks have 120hz, etc.

I think there's your "problem". There was a time (I'd put it 94-2004ish, but only because I'm too young) where there were major shifts every year. So if you were interested in that space... 286 - interesting, 486 - interesting, the first Pentiums - eh, kinda interesting ;), 3dfx - VERY interesting, and so on.

You could replace your hardware every year and the latest games would hardly run on a 1-2y old model/gfx card. Now compare it to "today". I last upgraded in 2019, from a 2012 CPU (with a 2015/16 gpu) and it was mostly "eh, about time, this is one of my main hobbies" and not because it was strictly needed. Now the machine is 2.5 years old and I can run everything I throw at it at 2560 with max details and I think this will hold up for a bit.

TLDR: If you're thinking about the same timeframe it was just a weird outlier of tech breakthroughs in the narrow field of personal computing/games every year. +20% more CPU performance is simply not exciting if the game already works.

The difference is, old people are the only one who knew it at the time. And now you are old. Congrats!

Welcome to the real world. It sucks.

People born today aren't going to see the leaps in technology that you saw because we're approaching the physical limits of transistor size.

It will become cool again when it produces something that teens find cool.

I'm guessing you have become numb to what is exciting - we're advancing majorly in energy storage, virtual reality is still growing, the M1 chip is freaking amazing, GPUs are getting insane, the watch on my wrist has an EKG, self-driving cars, drones are a commodity these days ... What did you have in mind?

That all says nothing about mRNA vaccines and other insane medical tech that has sprouted up in the last decade.

This is mine -> https://www.monero.observer/

take some wood a 2" display and pi zero and build something

tech has never been a solution to anything

We have replaced personal computing with ultra-scale industrial computing. Instead of soft, flexible systems we can play with & explore, we have hard, fixed, far off & remote inflexible systems that we are end users to. We're all just chumps with some tiny slice of the mainframe, again.

Computing needs to get back to "soft"-ware. We need to make things malleable & flexible, need to allow people in, let them play with the technology more freely. We need to put actual people back at some kind of helm, let them free, let them explore & learn & fiddle/tweak & build. We have diminishing returns because it's only giant companies exploring & trying things.

We need a new starting place for liberatory/libre technology. Open-source is still kind of stuck inbetween the old FreeDesktop / personal-computer world and the new all-connnected networked age. We haven't really got many future-facing architectures or practices for what software might look like when connected. We have lots of toolkits for building client-server systems, for making ReST & graphql & other... but this kind of software tends to be much harder to run, less hackable/free in form. It risks granting us connectivity, but at the mortal cost of being "hard" not soft, & of asking a lot of our users.

We need both lightweight & fun & hackable, AND connected. How we make connected & hackable viable for end users, how we make it so people can easily get/create persistently available online connected systems- which are the table stakes these days- is very much up in the air, is unknown. More radical p2p is probably smarter/better/essential, for availability & resilience & connectivity/networking reasons. We have some interesting p2p, but it's still so To-Be-Determined what software architecture we'd use in these worlds, it's still so new.

To be honest, the One Laptop Per Child's DBus-over-XMPP system (Telepathy Tubes) is one of the most visionary & still promising interesting dots there is on the grid, to this day. There was a lot of research interest in the past in "mobile ambient" computing & mobile agents... this was one of the easiest to author, most "normal" paths I've seemed that semi-matches up, that was semi-pursuant to what seemed like a clean logical/conceptual framing for online computing.

Personally, today, I still see ActivityPub & ActivityStreams as the thing that's slowly opening the door, that's re-enchanting us & opening possibility. The aughts were a buzz of APIs and connectivity, but the tens were a massive undoing, a collapse, with so much diversity & vanguard efforts falling, collapsing, being rolled back. The internet hasn't had new internet shit in a long time. Getting people connecting with each other in new interesting ways, finding new basis for interoperation, interconnection, internetworking is 100% necessary to break us out of this take-over-by-the-giants, to create something adoptable & growable & enriching again. We need some basis for value creation, and right now, we technically don't have that: everything is hard set, hard fixed, gelled into place, inflexible. New protocols, new systems can help untie us.

But that's just the start- making things re-hackable, making it all soft, making online systems as personable as the personal computer was... that's the real challenge. We need a shared base, with well defined possibility & potential, and we need a landscape of tools/systems/implementations that makes covering this terrain fun & interesting. A new cyberspace will emerge, again, once again connected, but this time not ran/hosted entirely from inside the firewall.

The world was already full of appliances, but computing, for a time, was different, was more engaging: returning to something in which we can genuinely engage & immerse ourselves, learn of it & mold it: that is key. The way we do software right, alas, is focused on corporate platforms for building consumer applications/appliances, and that has made tech uninteresting, uncool, has reduced it to the level of toasters & bread slicers.

What's so boring?

* bitcoin price jump in 2017

it won’t be over, the cat’s out of the bag

Things were awesome in the 90s though. Computers really doubled in speed every two years or so. It was incredible. The internet was new and totally anarchic. Linux kept winning and winning. Little sites could get to the top of search engines. Google and Facebook advertising were super cheap and effective. Things got better every year.

After 2016, probably because Trump won and tech got all the blame, things started to go downhill. Trump winning was like the tech version of 9/11 to the people who like to take the fun out of tech. That's when all the tech censorship and heavy political scrutiny started. Things had already been deteriorating for some time, but all the Stallman hacker ethos free speech energy started quickly draining away and getting replaced with fear of saying the wrong thing. That's when code of conducts started showing up and you had the woke invasion of all the big open source projects. Tech, which had previously been an independent island above politics, now had an influx of gatekeepers and paranoid "ethics" enforcers. People were scared that tech was too powerful and could do too much.

There's still crypto at least. Anything that has a heavy top down control element in crypto just falls flat on its face because the community rejects it. That's where the next Linux and internet will probably emerge from. That's the only thing these days that feels like the early BBS and online days in the early 90s currently. The people making things suck are always watching though. For example, consumer 3D printing is likely about to get killed in its infancy because of ghost guns.

The other thing is smartphones. They are better than any old gadget. But they don't have the cool factor exactly.

SaaS is the other thing. SaaS might be practical but it is never "cool". It goes away when the internet does, and can be cancelled at any time.

The other thing is set and setting, and tolerance. I know basically nothing about drugs, but any material thing that gives you a dopamine hit is often thought of like a drug.

We don't remember the amazing quality of video games, even though that was better too. We remember split screen multiplayer, staying out to get stuff on launch day, lan parties and the people we went there with, and all kinds of other stuff.

If I was into HAM, I think I'd be in it for field day, conversations with the elmers, learning about history, maybe vague ideas of preparedness, etc.

The current philosophy of products in general is minimalism. We have elegant restaurant focused entirely on the food, not rainforest cafes.

We focus on things by themselves, as isolated standalone things, trying to build the platonic ideal of a chat app or a text editor.

But... tech and food and money and drugs and clothes and everything else like that is just kind of OK. Context is everything as far as emotional impact, and it has a role in practicality too, the most useful software is often not a pure ideal of some function, it's designed around a common real world issue.

Tech is now advanced enough to do things entirely virtually. The setting is gone. You don't haul a box to a lan party.

Also, saturation and competition.

Tech used to seem like something where buying some gadget made you able to do things nobody else could. If you got a camera, you were a photographer, because they were expensive and hard to use and there was no Instagram.

The high barrier to entry made fame and success seem like it was a matter of dedication that you could achieve by saving up and studying some books, rather than random chance, being good looking, or being born with world-class talent.

You could still do something new and interesting without spending ten years and 100k on it. 99% of the startups these days seem to be an existing thing, but worse, with NFTs.

There was also almost no true clickbait. Much more of the internet content was made by users.

I believe the "Golden age" was probably from about '83(Just a guess, I wasn't here yet), to about 2006, with the transition completed by 2010.

Once endless scrolling and phones all day took over... Where's the market for any other tech? Only a few specific things are still relevant in a world where life is mostly on a screen, with just ten minute long interludes in physical space.

Since you mentioned Star Trek, I've been a lifelong enthusiast of Trek. The new stuff (junk) notwithstanding, I'm totally over Star Trek. I've seen every episode who knows how many times. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt.

Tech is no different, or at least specialized facets of tech are no different.

This is exactly why I have recently pivoted from web development to working on a hardware project and using C++. It provides that same excitement I had back when I was first learning to code. Though right now it's just my own thing, I'm solving a tangible problem and get to learn things like writing native code, designing circuit boards, working with a microcontroller, using OpenSCAD, and so forth. Even if it goes no further than a toy prototype, it's been a lot of (albeit expensive) fun. Just the moment of receiving a shipment of PCBs that I designed, that were now manufactured at a factory, that actually worked upon assembly, was an exquisite feeling.

Tech is many things. I think if anyone is bored and there's nothing like family obligations holding them back, they should consider branching out into something else that might satisfy that itch. If you've just stuck to things like JavaScript and Ruby, don't think that you can't do something like program microcontrollers with C++.

On the other hand, I really do think that the concept of "web scale" has made the field far less fun. We all love to scoff at buzzwords, yet we are the greatest purveyors of buzzwords and cargo-culting technology.

Kubernetes or GTFO. Rust or GTFO. Who uses Wepback anymore, bruh? I think my grandpa used AngularJS. Aren't SPAs a thing from like 2006? There's no way a Rails app can scale, bruh. Do you even BDD, bruh? Who seriously doesn't use Typescript nowadays? Every successful startup uses blockchain now with AI. Microservices are pointless without microfrontends. You mean you're not even using LiveView?

/s

It's like we no longer believe that you can just write something however you want and then do the work to scale them up if the time ever comes. Everything needs to be shiny new cool-tech out of the gate and compete with as much traffic as The Google.

Yeah, it was always kind of that way, but I think it's a lot worse than when I first got into the field.

Oh, and there's also the possibility that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get startups off the ground without already having revenue to start with. What happened to the garage-startup? You don't really hear about those anymore. Granted, I've yet to start a startup, but my impression is that nowadays investors are playing the game so safe that Jobs and Woz might have never achieved velocity.

We need to get over ourselves a bit, which is why I think it would actually be a good thing if the tech world could see another correction. We haven't had a meaningful correction since the dotcom bubble.

Programming languages are still exiting - say what you want about slow Electron apps and slow ReactJS websites, but I think that Javascript itself is fucking exciting. It is highly performant, continually getting upgraded, has a low-barrier to entry, and is pretty ubiquitous - where ever someone has a browser (in their phone, desktop, laptop) they've got this super-powered javascript engine that they can just jump in and use for anything they can think of thanks to rich APIs available in all modern browsers (and even non-browser runtimes e.g. node & deno still have a lot of APIs they can call on). I am very excited about the future of javascript.

And of course, the more recent (last 4 or 5 years ago anyway) ML stuff is pretty cool. You can just spin up a ML inference model now with a few lines of code and do what would have been impossible just a few years previously (e.g. the classic xkcd comic about the bird in the photo). The shame with ML is that there seems to be a preference to use Python a lot which is a real shame because its shit.

Likewise cloud computing is now a thing - you can just easily spend a few bucks to "borrow" a server for whatever. No sales calls, no minimum contract periods, no paper work - just put in your payment details and you are away for as long or as short as you want it. Maybe you dont even want a server? perhaps you just need to host a single function? Or just store some files somewhere, perhaps run a DB. All doable now. That is exciting and a great liberator to individuals to try stuff out and do exciting stuff.

Finally, Raspberry Pi has been a smash-hit and has transformed kids access and interest in tech. I am genuinely excited for my kids to get into this - Raspberry Pi foundation has been doing absolutely great work - we do loads of work/volunteering with kids using RPis and scratch etc and they absolutely love it. This is really exciting that a whole new generation of kids are growing up learning to programme from an early age. A certain cohort of kids got a similar experience in the early 80s, but there were a couple of decades in there where youngsters were "locked out" of the basics, so it is great to see this coming back. As a bonus us grown-ups can now get a $15 "disposable" well-supported linux computer for any random thing we can think of (put it in a balloon, put it around a cat's neck as it wanders around, hard-wire it into your car, perhaps make a digital microscope out of it, run a web server off of solar in your back garden - you name it)

Another answer can be that you now see past the veil that technology raises in front of itself. You now know the technical background, you understand the cold hard facts that form the software that you use and consume.

I think though that reality is a lot more complicated. The big reason for that is money and capitalism.

Let's say you are coming up with an idea for something, an app, a movie or book. You now have to get some money to make it because it's non-trivial, but you're committed to getting this idea off the ground. You put in your blood sweat and tears and after a long agonizing period to have something you're proud of which you then share with the rest of us. Here, one of the stories that always comes to mind is the first Matrix movie. I am sure that a similar story has unfolded in a lot of other fields, creative or technical. Now that creation took everything from you and it might yield some financial results, let's say 10% ROI. Maybe more, but let's say it was 10%.

Now in order for you to make that thing, you had to give everything. But what if someone copies your recipe for success and pumps out 5 or 10 similar creations. What if someone decides to make some ripoff or to catch the wave and flood the market with replicas. Or even worse, what if the people that bankrolled your first creation now own the IP for the creation and they decide that you now need to expand or follow up your story. What if your amazing Game 1.0 now is followed by Game 2.0 (which copies most of the same and ads very little content, yet generates a much higher profit margin?). Then Game 3.0. By Game 4.0 they decide to just remake Game 1.0 so they call it Game 1.0 Remastered - All the original content in 4K. Or Movie 1.0. Or Avengers 7.

I think the big problem is that our creative and technological mediums have been flooded by people coming into it for the money. How many articles do you find with "learn to code and make beaucoup bucks!!!"? Similarly, how many new, up and coming directors and actors do you see that create something as culture shocking or defining as American Beauty, Fight Club, Batman (1989 one...)? You don't. Because people join tech for the money, because no one studies creative writing, directing, but our STEM universities are flooded. The humanities are flooded by a different group of people, no longer willing to push the envelope, to explore what makes us unique, crazy, weird and interesting.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that money has corrupted tech. It corrupted the creative arts and it has corrupted us. So we have tech that can generate revenue, tech that can provide that ROI and that steady growth. We have "art" that at best replicates a long lost era or a cultural trend to make some quick cash.

Tech will not be cool and will stay uncool for as long as people are in it for the money solely. It will not be cool for as long as a VC expects to get it's money back + something extra. And why is the VC there? Because it's hard to compete against the giants without extra funding...

Sorry for the scattershot post, I am still refining a lot of my arguments here, but I hope the main point comes across...

It’s not, it has the same problems that it did before, possibly fewer because effort has been put into acknowledging and correcting them.

Things today are objectively better than what came before. The difference is PR. It’s no longer “cool” to report on technology. It’s cool for people with little to no background in technology to trash technology for the amusement of other, similarly uninitiated, people.

The current anti-tech media trend started with the show Silicon Valley [0]. It exposed some tech non-sense to non-tech people and gave them effective tools to make fun of the nerds they didn’t like anyway. Instead of generating empathy or sympathy for the good people stuck in or trying to change those systems, it made it ok to paint every person working in tech with the same brush you’d reserve for its worst actors.

It’s like Blockchain and NFTs. All the sudden people started getting up riled up about them. But, when you ask them how they feel about the dark implications of HTTP they don’t have much of an opinion. An opinion hasn’t been given to them. You can usually swap out Blockchain for HTTP and their arguments would still make perfects sense.. But then, who’d listen?

It’s hard to become a competent workaday programmer. The people who know how to program are able to generate and accumulate wealth at a rate unattainable by most non-programmers. With the fabric of our society wearing thinner and thinner the gulf between an engineer at DoorDash and a delivery person contracted by DoorDash is widening. There’s something inherently unfair about what’s happening today. We can all feel it. But, the answer isn’t to burn everything down and start over with a NEW ANTI-CAPITALIST UTOPIA. It’s to correct course.

I’ve worked with anti-capitalist people in media. The way they treat each other is shocking, only slightly better than the way they treat everyone else. Instead of seeing laws, corporations, and technology, as how people interact and engage with one another, they see evils that they refuse to master. Instead of empowering themselves by understanding the systems of the world and making them accessible to others, they’ve decided that it’s easier, and more profitable in the short-term, to rail against these inherent evils and their practitioners. They’ve concluded that the system is corrupt, the board needs to be flipped, and anything short of that is heresy.

Hating on tech and tech people is something that the cool kids do now. I’d wager that you feel the way you do in part because you’re being bombarded with messaging about the evils of technology as stand-ins for almost every problem the world is facing. Sometimes the criticism is nuanced and thoughtful. It’s usually not.

[0]: Which is fantastic.

We didn't "win" the Cold War. Rich people did; working people lost. The rest of us are worse off than we were beforehand, and in the former Soviet bloc this is especially true: the Russian 1990s were even worse than the American 2020s (so far).

I'm no advocate for the Soviet system. It was deeply flawed and its eventual failure was not entirely caused by imperial aggression. That said, the USSR's existence was a boon for the American middle class. Whatever you think of communism, this is an objective fact. One of the reasons is that, during the Cold War, we needed research supremacy.

Both sides of the conflict were so scared of the other, they invested heavily in building a middle class, because that's where most of the research talent is going to come from--even if you're a staunch elitist who actually buys into upper-class meritocracy (a belief refuted, in the US, by any contact with the actual upper class), the middle class is so much larger, so any society that wants to excel in R&D is going to treat it well. Both the USSR and the West deliberately engineered middle classes that they protected from the failures of their systems.

Tech was "cool" because our society gave a certain set of highly talented people R&D jobs in which they could pretty much work on whatever they wanted. You weren't guaranteed to get rich working for DARPA, but you'd have a solid middle-class lifestyle and lifetime financial security, and basically have free rein in your choice of projects. So, there was a lot of innovation, because people could work on things that might not drive revenue in the next quarter.

Of course, we "won" the Cold War in late 1991 and the Soviet Union is no more. The elites of the West no longer need a huge middle class. In the EU, there has been some political resistance against dismantling it; in the US, there was almost none. We had a few good years when we were able to coast, but after 9/11--and certainly after 2008--it was clear that the same people from the First Gilded Age were back in charge. And now tent cities and mass preventable death by infectious disease and even slavery (prison labor) are fully back. Yay capitalism?

So, these days, tech is no longer about expanding human capability; it's about enriching the already rich (and careerist middle managers). Almost all of the money in technology is made in these seven things:

1. Unemploying people (evergreen, alas). 2. Spying on people to unemploy them, or to squeeze more out of workers (also evergreen). 3. Dressing up old rent-seeking businesses as "tech companies", thereby allowing them to run at a loss for ten years (dumping) while they try to outlive existing players. 4. Speculative nonsense investments like badly-drawn pictures of butts. 5. Usury (evergreen) and myriad technologies and tools necessary to support an economy that runs on it. 6. Killing people for the benefit of various private entities (a nation's supposed "economic interests"). 7. Wanton exploitation of tech nostalgia, often through mediocre accomplishments. In the late 1960s, we sent people to the Moon. In 2021, a CEO whose workers pee in bottles spends millions (billions?) to take a piss 70 miles over our heads, and we treat that as a real accomplishment because it's "private spaceflight". SMFH.

These are all shitty, not at all cool, and the culture follows. Consequently, we flooded by the refuse of other industries--the people who fail in private equity or aren't smart enough to become traders all go West and boss nerds around, earning $500k (or more) in jobs that involve teabagging H1-Bs and teenagers with their Agile Scrums.

If we want tech to be better, we have to take back our industry. This will be hard, and we will face opposition--possibly violent opposition, seeing as people are physically harassed and blacklisted even now on the suspicion of union sympathies.