Trust, trade and mutually-beneficial coëxistence need not go hand in hand.
Their side is benefiting a lot more than ours, and the few benefits that we might end up seeing come with a good amount of harm inflicted by them.
Do you really need a list of ways how Big Tech has harmed society? If things like "Surveillance Capitalism" is not enough, maybe:
- the collapse of quality journalism, because SEO and content farms made impossible to maintain a financially sustainable team of independent reporters?
- The absolute destruction of people's ability to read a piece of text for longer than 15 seconds?
- The mental health crisis in teens and even young adults caused by social media?
- Planned obsolescence and the removal of our right to repair things on our own?
- The normalization of the "gig economy" not just for young kids who are looking for some extra cash, but as the main source of income for grown up adults, with actual families to support?
- (Google and Facebook mostly) adopting the absolutely anti-competitive practice of "when we get a competitor, we buy them out as early as possible or just keep offering our stuff for free until they eventually run out of money"?
- Apple outright refusing to let people install alternative app stores, because they know that without this artificial scarcity they would not be worth 1/10th of what they are today?
Seriously, get out of SV bubble.
