1. I saw a Reddit post that was titled something like "The 90s were peak humanity. Enough tech to make life comfortable, but not so much that it had totally taken over the focus." It was a video of a packed mall around the holidays filled with generally happy people socializing in public.
2. That viral quote that was making the rounds, "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I just feel there has been a growing chasm over the past 25 years where tech is no longer solving pressing human problems (generally, obviously not true in all areas e.g. decarbonization tech) but is more concerned with just rent-seeking value extraction.
Now, whenever something new comes out, my first thought is: “how is this thing going to suck up my personal data and monetize me?” And my second thought is “how is this going to wreck some part of life and/or humanity and turn it into profits for the rich?” You can’t be a techno-optimist anymore. Everyone is working on a similar, but slightly different wealth-siphoning Torment Nexus these days.
My opinion is that "the big sellout" happened when apple introduced the iphone and the apple app store.
and it basically came down to a couple nuances in their policies...
#1 apps have unfettered network access
#2 apple would never approve security apps like a firewall (because #1)
and when a big player sets an example, it normalizes the situation for everyone else.
I think it was seen (or sold) as "advertising will fund everything" just like television, radio and print advertising did in the past.
Except the old advertising was one-way. Advertising today means ubiquitous surveillance and dossier building on every person on the planet.
It's been ~ 17 years of this iphone BS, and now behavior is creeping into every app, device and platform. Look at microsoft breaking new ground in appalling behavior with each software update.
Thank goodness for linux, open software, open hardware and people coming up with great hacks all the time.
While the past 30 years have absolutely put the "personal" into "personal computer", I'd rather have a personal assistant than a personal overseer.
You can be, we're just getting old. LLMs are very exciting! WASI (and a bit older WebAssembly) is a bold idea! Rust is a breath of fresh air and ancient tools are finally being rewritten! Edge computing may change the way we write programs! Hardware is finally ready for VR!
Now, I'm quite sceptical and pessimistic about all of the above. But I think this says more about me than about the world. Younger me would be prototyping a LLM in Rust and compiling it to webassembly to use in his VR game right now. Current me thinks similarly to you.
This may just mean that early adopters are now signaliing that they are getting bored with software/tech and the rest of the market may soon follow that opinion.
You can't? Just yesterday, Waymo opened their self-driving taxi service to the general public in San Francisco. We now have self driving cars. You draw a stick figure and the computer draws the rest of the fucking owl. I have an AI that I talk to on my phone and I tell it about my life's bullshit and it guides me through it. It helps me with my writing and my programming. Robots are getting better and better. Pretty soon we'll have humanoid robot companions to help around the house. I earnestly believe that I'll live to see the singularity.
Two routes have been discovered and milked to high heaven -
Financial engineering - this is where if you accumulate more capital and faster than the next guy you win. Add to that globalization ie arbitrage on interest rates/tax rates/forex/labor cost/rent/real estate/govt regulation in generating capital.
Demand engineering - related to capital raising - since attention is finite - who spends more on marketing/ads/pr captures more attention faster than the next guy.
The creatives/engineers/scientists haven't spent enough time coming up with a response to either. So they all end up dependent on the financial and demand engineers.
This will change with time as people come up with ways to respond.
Maybe the watering down of the term started with "social engineering". Engineers build things that do things and/or are built to last.
Honestly if you did make tech work for you, not too much has changed. But yes, since people always opt for the easy solution, more engineers will supply their demands.
Not to mention the whole SEO industry that pushed off smaller, high quality websites for gargantuan mess of word salad articles.
And finally now the present generation of developers are slavishly solving leetcode to get a high TC (total compensation).
We need a whole new generation of hackers to take us out of this mess.
There are some clues, in the Patron, open source, community. I just hope kids make useful software for them and their friends.
I'm not sure where that leaves today's kids - there's nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements; further, nearly no-one will be impressed with filling a screen with random characters in the same way adults and kids were impressed back when there were 9 computers in the entire school and 4 didn't work.
I know there's projects out there that attempt to capture that magical spark of all of those 6502 and 808X machines just had by merely existing.
I’m enjoying the diffusion model art. My wife is a creative director and illustrator and it’s loads of fun for us to play with. Besides I have a washer/dryer and a dishwasher.
80% of Americans are happy with their personal lives so why is everyone so miserable online? One should never forget the 1/9/90 rule of interaction.
Technology is fantastic. Today it’s amazing. Without it my wife and I would struggle to have children. Nah, this is the Golden Age.
I think it's fair to point out that this number (actually 78% who say they are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their lives) is "near a record low".
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2024/02/12/american-...
But I do agree, the "miserableness" online seems much greater than "the real world", but that's also kinda my point. So much tech is designed to addict you (i.e. doom scrolling), that I find I'm happiest when I get rid of tech from my life (leave my cell phone at home, go for long walks in nature, etc.) This wasn't the case for me in the 90s primarily because lots of tech was a nice diversion but not a constant negative distraction.
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
I was a teenager during the 90's, and I do have fond memories of things from that decade, but it would do well to keep your nostalgia in check.
Even when we restrict ourselves to the realm of tech, a lot of things back then sucked horribly. Large tech companies already showed their rent-seeking tendencies, there was crazy hype for shit ideas (the dotcom bubble popped for a reason).
In fact, I think that the current mindset of people being increasingly jaded, skeptical, and mistrusting of tech is healthy. It shows that at least some people are learning their lessons, even if this mindset is somewhat restricted to bubbles like this.
To be clear, since I feel a bunch of comments are taking that "90s was peak humanity" quote overly literal (another commenter pointed out there were still horrible wars during the 90s), I'd point out that it was about the expectations of how tech would improve human lives.
Most specifically, there was a very broad belief that things like the Internet would bring people closer together. But by lots of objective metrics (measures of loneliness, polarization, pessimism for the future, youth mental illness, etc.), not only did tech not "bring us closer together", it actively helped rip us apart. And I think if you time traveled back to the 90s and explained those outcomes, the vast majority of people would be genuinely shocked and surprised.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-peo...
For a while now, I've been struggling with the realization that I may need to just leave this industry entirely as a dev.
The tickle in my brain that tells me that as an industry we have ceased to be a force for (on the whole) good and have instead become a force for profit extraction above all else is getting too loud for me to ignore.
It seems to me that the tech that I've been helping to build for decades has been repurposed and weaponized against people instead of helping people and improving everyone's situation.
Somehow money ruins everything. The internet just made it easier for people to extract money from everything.
We developed machines that would do your laundry and dishes decades ago. The current trend is to make them less and less functional over time.
Laundry and dishes is a standin for all things that technology does very well and we appreciate it for doing that for us.
It is just not a trivial problem, to solve.
The number of people in tech grew in absolute terms. That also means the fraction of people giving back to open source also grows and we are getting better open source software. Many however don't give back, they just take.
Was there? I remember the 90s as an intermittent software dark age we had to crawl out for the next decade until things started to improve around 2010. The unbearable OOP hype, turds like CORBA and Itanium, UML, "Enterprise scale" software development with Java, the first big VR hype cycle, the worst of the desktop operating systems won (Windows), and I could go on and on... there was also the same amount of human bullshitters in important positions.
We are much better off today than in the 90's in that good stuff can actually win traction (at least as long as no money is involved - once there's money involved, the bullshitter will home in like flies on a pile of shit).
From the consumer's point of view, the parent is completely right. In the 90s/early 00s there was a real feeling that tech was trying to improve your life and make it easier without necessarily controlling every aspects of it.
&c
Except this quote is just...internet clickbait. As though technological development is a straight line with easily predictable outcomes. Hell it's even engaging in a bait and switch argument: "I want to art and writing" -> well, AI isn't stopping you from doing those thing versus the reality of creative work for hire -> "I want to be paid to do art and writing".
Setting aside the obvious "when your hobby becomes your job it tends to cease being your hobby" which so many Twitch influencers discover, the headline argument is as though someone has overtly set out to build generative AI and not "done the obvious thing of making a laundry and dishwashing robot" (while you know, also ignoring that technically we have both those things and built them almost immediately - literally washing machines and dishwashers).
The complaint is...well frankly classist as hell. "Why should lower myself to manual labor? Take those other people's jobs away first". It sounds profound but says nothing: Twitter in a nutshell.
It is entirely about the prospect of technology serving people by freeing their time from chores to pursue luxury activities. Instead of that expectation, the reality of technological advancement that AI has given us so far has been to do those pursuits of pleasure for us, while we still have to do mundane, unfulfilling chores in our daily lives.
It's purely a tongue-in-cheek quip about our daily lives. It follows the standard formula for pretty much all one-liners jokes. Some technology- vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, laundry machines- eliminated many hours of work. Instead of advancing this kind of benefit for people, the technology took the benefit for itself.
Setup, juxtaposed by punchline.
I don't think it's a statement about "classic" at all - it's a statement that people generally enjoy writing and making art, and people generally don't enjoy doing their dishes or laundry. Tech used to be about making the "hard drudgery easier".
1. The obvious thing is that technology (and various things we’ve called AI over time) actually has given laundry robots and dish washing robots. Her follow up tweet said of course she knows and that she's joking, but the joke/criticism relies on those things not existing. I kinda think she just forgot, as we all do, as we take technology for granted.
2. Second takeaway was the same as you, with all the free time we have now—and the free time we hypothetically would get with laundry AI—hard to believe we’re really going to start our great American novel.
3. Her follow up was something like “I don’t actually mean laundry and dishes, I mean it metaphorically”. This just read to me as "I just want things that I want. And don’t want things I don’t want. Don't ask me what those things are." We all do, but it muddles any potential wisdom in the quip if we can just swap laundry, dishes, writing, and art for whatever.
So basically a nothing burger about what AI is today or should be, but loud expression of that nothing anyway. I thought it was more like a spitball take (albeit a tad clickbaity and trolling) and had it gotten lost in the wind it would have been fine, but it going viral said something about current opinion.
You live at the cusp of an inflection point. Something potentially to consider and be grateful for.
Yeah, sure. At the same time a large European country was falling apart in a bloody and cruel war that saw many innocent people outright murdered or displaced.
I don't literally think it was "peak humanity", worldwide (to be clear I was just quoting from this post, https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/1dbsgnc/90s_...) Yes, there were still wars and genocides.
But, as it relates to the article here, the other part of the title, "Enough tech to make life easy, not enough to become life" is very relevant, and that's the negative change I feel like a lot of us who remember the 90s well can identify with.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t analyze the meaning of your work, but he seems fairly un-anchored
I agree - with rose tinted glasses, there was a period that lasted all the way to shortly after the release of the iPhone where it was reasonable to be (and much of society was) excited about the possibilities of technology.
Those times are dead. Financial engineering and the monetization of every piece of user data, ever flat surface, every eyeball, from birth to death have left me a sad husk sitting in a chair typing for a paycheck. My solace has been the kind of creative activities now undermined by generative AI.
So many great artists got their start at the entry level - whether as a mall portrait photographer, an understudy at a newspaper, or what not. With those roles killed by AI, where will innovation or even passion come from?
But it can be, namely because it’s one path to finding motivation to do good. Not saying it ends up there for everyone, but it certainly can be for some.
That kind of thing weighs one’s soul down, even if it’s not “evil” in a grand sense.
I imagine the author found themselves approaching their job like many of us here would approach a highly paid job where you have to write COBOL or caricaturally bad entreprise Java all day.
Sometimes your own soul becomes the victim that affects you the most.
I think part of the comfort one could enjoy when working for the Reich is that you are working for your own government and you are part of a large network of people that are actively telling the same lies you are. You might also assume that large parts of the population know you are lying, but you're lying "patriotically," so you feel much less guilt or confrontation over it.
> are on the lesser evils side I think.
It is interesting that this _often_ takes a much larger toll on people than those working in war. More interesting that people think a little moral relativism is the obvious cure. "It could be worse. You could be a Nazi."
> Who is the victim of manipulation there? VCs?
Did you read the article? This person clearly believes that VCs are poisonous entities that pervert the original vision of the founders they invest in so that they may see larger and faster returns on their speculative investments.
So.. probably.. the entire industry?
Of course, there’s no lack of hype and BS in NYC/DC/Boston, but there seems to be a much more developed culture of criticism and analysis than in California. And so the default attitude on the East Coast is a bit more cynically pragmatic, which is both good for the above reasons, but also less imaginative and more restricted - which is why SV has more “dreamers” that do crazy things.
Hope I’m not firing off too many East Coast vs. West Coast battle shots here :)
I raise you British cynicism and the sarcastic piss taking that pervades our every day conversation. Frankly we are truly a world and culture away from California.
A lot of this was parodied pretty effectively by the Silicon Valley TV show.
That's the problem. Computing has become a branch of the ad industry.
What we need is a big tax on advertising and marketing. In the US, it doesn't create more demand, because most people are spent out. It just moves demand around. So much of that effort is a net lose that pushes prices up.
(This might be politically possible during an "anti-tech" Trump administration.)
Micro-payments have been tried a few times but most people did'nt like to pay for stuff that they used to get for "free". Since everyone is now locked into a few big tech platforms, they can now supplement their ad income by charging users, too.
Which is why it's something to tax. As opposed to more productive endeavors.
The optimism and buy-in that excited people about tech from the debut of the iPhone until fairly recently was a function of PR and technology marketers-- like the author-- doing their jobs very well. For any industry, generating interest and excitement is more than a purely descriptive process. The magical venture doesn't just appear and then the marketers have the simple job of describing it. Marketers/strategists/PR people play a very important role surveying the project and then articulating a compelling vision. That vision then becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy since stakeholders (both creators and users) have bought into the promise of worth.
If strategists aren't able to see a path forward, to survey the field and identify the things that make the project worthwhile, exciting, sustainable, tactical, etc... then they're just not great at their job.
Admitting that you haven't really believed in anything you've worked on as a marketer is a bit like an actor admitting that someone else is reading their lines. A good marketer, like a good actor, lives in their promises like they are already real. The realer and more convinced you are, the more you can speak your vision into reality.
PR was not how tech overcame that. It was charismatic founders (who often broke the rules of PR at the time) and massive break-throughs in adoption by winning customers over directly.
It’s honestly amusing that so many believe that marketers were the reason users decided to love tech. By and large, market-speak was the anti-thesis of what would win over the early adopters of tech. Like most sea change movements, tech was very punk at the start. To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value.
Doesn’t feel like it today, but most of the people I know in tech are still coming from a place of wanting to build things of genuine value, usefulness, and helpfulness. Those intentions may not be enough, but there’s not much to be gained in discounting them either.
>To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value.
Positioning yourself as punk, as pro-consumer, as an alternative to the corporate hegemony... This was all carefully developed by marketers and brand strategists to grow their vision of selling tech. You are not immune to propaganda, it was not some granola revolution that gave the people iPhones. And that's ok! It's ok to admit that marketing is an important force that should be leveraged for change and innovation.
Wow. Don't you see the problem with selling something that doesn't exist? There's a thin line between making up a story to make people buy a product, and straight up scamming people with a nonexistent product. Elizabeth Holmes was a genius marketer, but is that really somebody you want to idealize?
Theranos is an example of a failed project through and through, but even something unarguably successful like the iPhone was built through market strategizing-- not just technical engineering. Identifying what consumers wanted, conveying that vision, shaping a compelling brand, these are all things that can easily be written off as "fake" by people who cannot buy into the vision, but when done well they are just as important as the technical innovations.
> At least I have my integrity.
And I may be throwing stones from a glass house but, in my opinion, they have 6 months of integrity on a backdrop of <unknown number> of years of quite specific non-integrity.
Exiting the speeding-train-with-no-brakes saves you. Helping to stop the train has at least the chance to save others, which earns integrity.
Write an (anonymous?) blog describing how to recognise the bullshit, what the strategies are that you, yourself employed to convince the rubes. Expose your methods so that others who are employing them are made toothless.
There lieth integrity.
Edited to add:
This kinda thing, it's good to see the reversal: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/techs-accountability-tantrum-...
In those 10 years I realized how fake it is. Basically product advertising is proof that product is not good enough to be sold on market. Good product is advertising by itself. With this honesty, you cannot participate in fake indistry.
There have been a few times in my life where I put everything on the line (or so I felt then) for a value I deeply held. Risking friendships, letting go of money, deeply uprooting behaviors… all for abstract (yet impactful) ideas like honesty and kindness.
I in no way regretted those choices, ever, and found that after a few weeks or months my position was strengthened. Integrity has this effect — it closes feedback loops. The result is a deep empowerment.
I praise the author and wish them continued courage.
More people in this industry should realize that there are large sections of it that are deeply toxic to humanity, and reconsider whether they want to be a part of that. For all the "disruption" caused by "unicorns", has it really had a net positive effect on our lives? Big Tech companies keep building technology that is designed to extract as much value from their users by any means necessary. Most of the startup world revolves around growing companies based on this premise, in the hopes of one day making it big as well. There are still companies that ignore this rat race and try to do the right thing, but they are hard to come by. Those are the real unicorns, IMO.
I realize the irony of this opinion on a VC forum. But this needs to resonate here more than anywhere else.
I would not, my bank account really matters Integrity might sooth my soul, but not my retirement.
Life increasingly feels like a trade off between integrity and living in modern society.
Pretty sure anyone can do this. The setup is not in the writing of the story but in the things you just listed...
The way I see it, "tech" is simply the area where a very old pattern is playing out.
In another era, the dreams being peddled would involve gold from transatlantic expeditions, Dutch tulips, textile machines, railroad networks, etc.
I am one of the tiny wheels in the corner of this industry in an organization not built on top of loose bullshit from the start with the speed of light but made to build useful tools for engineers decades ago. However along the road the 'do whatever that looks good' overruled the 'do something good' in the competition with the pretentious capitalists and their servants wandering in all corners of the industry now poisioning good places with attitudes they learned and grown with in bad places and now being considered 'experts of the industry', not to mention the need of survival pushes you in this direction, the must pick up the indutry trends or die panick makes you do things you hate, and all this sweeped in to my low level of building parts so I have to make things that look good with degrading quality tools and degrading quality operating system built to look good to sell instead of helping the user so my every day, yes, every day work is a piss in headwind uphill. The products of the industry serves itself rather than the users, we can do a lot very fast that we wouldn't need to do if things were made right not pretentious. The life got difficult on a whole different level, not easier, with the products of the industry. I see little option than getting out, it is poisioned to all parts now. I have two babies so it is hard and very risky but I will need to show example to them soon and this is not something to show with integrity. Not to mention that staying is also risky when you are increasingly handled as commodity (Human Resources is a very hones title indeed!!). The previous personality of yours made this happen with the likes but still thank you for not doing it anymore and for spreading your story. I might never be in a position to work with you but if I will I will recommend you.
Yup, and Bill and Dave are probably the last two that I can really point at to say that’s what they had. True ethics and a genuine desire. Probably also the Fab 8. It may have stopped there.
“The tech industry has a long memory.”
Nope. I think it has no memory and zero penalty for failure. That’s, of course, a double-edged sword.
It has been finally admitted.
The entire VC grift that was seen through unfounded valuations was purposely executed to gloss over the issues and positive spin to unprofitable startups and startups generating little to no revenue for years rather than necessary scrutiny in their business models.
> I would lie awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling. My life was slipping away, and I had nothing to show for it
Perhaps the bullshit industrial complex just accelerates this realization. I think I'm a bit older than the OP. I work on notionally quite pro-social software and still wake up thinking the same thing.
