I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better

Came here to say this. I will never be compelled to install an app on my phone by an eatery the first time I go there. That is severely hostile design. Don’t willingly inconvenience yourself just to freely provide them your tracking info to sell.

Or.. ask the staff for a menu, order with them, respectfully let them know how you feel about the qr/app thing (unlikely it was their decision to implement but they can pass on the complaint), and if they're unwilling to take your order (which is hopefully unlikely at this point) feel free to make a little stink (if you feel inclined) and walk out. Still ok to complain on your blog about being spammed with the app but I'd rather try the obvious options first rather than expect the owners to heuristically discover via non-returning customers that we really don't want the app.

That is, if the coffee/food/service is good, otherwise yea fuck em

Tech speeds things up. If you want to do good, it'll help you do it faster. If you want to do evil, it'll help you do it faster.

I think the real problem is the drive to monetize so much of the technology. For instance, product owners continually try to increase engagement in their stupid apps and continually move things around and add new widgets that people don’t want, or use, all while continuing to degrade the experience of the features that they do use.

I think when most people say something like “technology is making the world worse” they mean the technology as it actually exists and as it is actually developing, not the abstract sense of possible futures that technology could feasibly deliver.

That is clearly what the author of the piece meant.

If the main focus of people who develop most technology is getting people more addicted to their devices so they are easier to exploit then technology sucks. If the main focus is to generate immoral levels of waste to scam venture capitalists and idiots on the internet then technology sucks. If the main focus is to use technology to monetize every aspect of someone’s existence, then I think it is fair to say that technology, at this point in history, sucks.

Saying “technology is neutral” is not super insightful if, in the present moment, the trend in technological development and its central applications are mostly evil.

Saying “technology is neutral” is worse than unhelpful if, in the present moment, the people who want to use technology to harm others are also using that cliche to justify their antisocial behavior.

I didn't find the article particularly insightful but I don't like your way of thinking about tech. Technology and society make each other together. Obviously, technology choices like mass transit vs cars shape our lives in ways that the pens example doesn't help us explain. Similarly, society shapes the way that we make technology. Technology is constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint. The leftover space (i.e. the vast majority) is the process through which we embed social values into the technology. To return to the example of mass transit vs cars, these obviously have different embedded values within them, which then go on to shape the world that we make around them.

This way of thinking helps explain why computer technology specifically is so awful: Computers are shockingly general purpose in a way that has no parallel in physical products. This means that the underconstraining is more pronounced, so social values have an even more outsized say in how they get made. This is why every other software product is just the pure manifestation of capitalism in a way that a robotic arm could never be.

I think I basically agree with you and the author here. People applying technology have a responsibility to apply it in ways that are constructive, not harmful. Technology is a force multiplier, in that it makes it easy to achieve goals, in a value neutral sense.

But way too many people are applying technology in evil ways, extracting value instead of creating it, making things worse rather than better. It's an epidemic. Tech can make things better, and theoretically it should, but lately, it's hard to say it has, on the net.

I think a clear distinction to make might be:

“Tech” as used in this sense is the industrial complex around mobile and web technologies dominated by a few players who might just be evil.

“Technology” is, of course, everything you mentioned and more. A rock that fits nicely in your hand becomes technology when used to crack a coconut.

It’s a weird linguistic murkiness, isn’t it?

Technology is not neutral, and philosophers have known this since the middle of the 20th century. See for example Heidegger, Ellul, Arendt.

Technology makes us relate to the world and others in a distorted way. Instead of speaking to you directly, and see your face and features, I relate to you through pure text... A whole lot of important factors disappear as I do. Compare this then to politics, earth, society, where technology have the same effect

Or like the death ray!

(Futurama reference)

Good God you people are deep in the sauce. Just straight up ignoring the fact that tech enabled propaganda to be spammed in people's faces 24/7. It's so obviously a net drag on society at this point. But don't dare take away my dopamine rush.

Atomic bombs are also tools with no moral compass of their own.

The original use of what we now think of as a "spoon" originally had nothing to do with food.

1000 years ago they would chain slaves neck to neck. They'd use the spoon to carve out everybodies eyes except the first guy in the line. Slaves don't need to see. They just need to carry heavy shit. The first slave can see. The rest just need to go where their neck drags them.

I say all this to agree with you. Technology isn't the source of corruption and evil. It is just a tool. Just like a spoon. I use my spoon to eat cereal. Others use the spoon to carve out peoples eyes. The spoon is not evil. The spoon is a tool.

For many things I completely agree.

That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family --- for free, essentially! --- is astonishing. And it's not a big deal, not something we plan, just, "hey let's say hi to Gramma and Gramps!"

When I was a kid, videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance phone call, we'd sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this was on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend "across the pond" whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.

I think technology that "feels like tech" is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There's some pretty amazing stuff there.

They're conflating tech with tech bros.

Tech can and does make lots of things that make our lives longer and better. Just not most of the consumer level shit that is constantly peddled by snake oil sellers. That tech is not meant to make your lives easier, it's meant to get more money out of you without giving it up to the little people at service level.

The problem isn't the tech, it's the people who are controlling the tech.

I feel this every time I just want to see a restaurant's menu and instead I have to pretend I'm making an online order.

Tech has made things more efficient - the rewards of such are simply being funneled from the average person to the wealthy.

Yeah, just watch what AI does. The generation after Gen Alpha is going to be unable to imagine the concept of being self sustaining, and problem solving without machines. The same way Gen Z today can't imagine the concept of just NOT having internet. Or any internet connected devices.

More specifically, it's capitalism that is the problem, not tech.

Agree. It's not the tech it's how it's used and how business owners drive the product development and timelines.

Yep, technofeudalism is here.

Yeah but parking has always been bad.

You had to carry change. Meters were always out of order or would just eat your change without issuing a ticket, and the people checking never gave a shit and would give you a fine anyway.

My only complaint is the app, everyone should offer a website or an app, but if you're going to park there a few times an app does make sense.

Yet more benefits to cycling then. Just lock it to any reasonably sturdy object.

I had to give up using the lockers at the post office when they started requiring an app that my phone at the time was too old for. (I don’t really care about phones; I use other people’s hand-me-downs.) Too much of all this cleverness is just making the world more complicated, complex, and expensive. Meh. I can use my tablet now but still resent these swipey-wipey ad delivery devices.

Times change. I see nothing wrong with it. Same as you used to be able to park without paying, then you started to pay, and now it's moving from those machines to phone apps. And in the future there may be other form of pay, or maybe parking is directly forbidden o who knows what but there will be a change, for sure. Because things change.

It's just nostalgia working. Things change. You were more capable of dealing with change at a younger age and that's why you see the older the people get the more they complain about everything.

But is just a change, like many other that came before that.

I would say Tech with a capital T includes not just physical or cloud tech, but the whole process, down to shitty Product Owners and business teams, delivery crap features to customers.

Transmetropolitan had in-dream advertising. I think you got it from breathing in some sort of gas when walking around in public.

The most unrealistic thing about the Transmetropolitan series was the fact that Spider was able to make a living as a journalist.

..always with the verification cans.

Tech itself is not the issue. How it’s applied is the issue.

At this point, I would argue that technology is the issue. Or, at least, the current iteration of it.

Internal Combustion Engines, always-on internet connections, and digital financial systems are generating real physical hazards that stretch beyond their benefits. This isn't just an issue of use. There is no "proper" method of employing - for instance - cryptocurrency or single-use plastics or a statewide surveillance network that doesn't result in a degradation of quality of life for the population at large. To take a more dramatic angle, there's no safe application of a nuclear bomb.

When the iEye app notifies you that the enzyme is running low, simply crack open an ice cold, refreshing can of Tesla Cola Zero to refuel your device for another two hours. Need to sleep? We got you.

Except this isn't a technological innovation, its a Science Fantasy. iEye isn't a real thing. Tesla Cola Zero isn't a real thing. Not needing sleep isn't a real thing. You're not a cyborg and you will never be a cyborg.

But the science fantasy is still having its own cost. People are making real material nationally-transformative (or de-transformative) decisions based on the fantastic promises we've been sold about Tomorrow. We're underdeveloping our mass transit infrastructure and relying entirely too much on unregulated air travel to speed up travel. At the same time, we're clinging to old bunker-fuel laden container ships and decimating the aquatic ecology, because we refuse to adapt proven nuclear powered shipping that's over 60 years old at this point. We're investing more and more and more money in digital surveillance and personal tracking. We're off-loading our ability to collect and process information to unreliable digital tools (LLMs being only the latest in overhyped AI as a replacement for professionalized human labor). And then we're trying to justify the bad decisions we make as a result by claiming secret wisdom inherent in machines.

We're eating our seed corn after being told technologists will eliminate our need to eat ever again.

This is a direct result of technological developments we have made (or promised to make and failed to deliver) over the last twenty years. Revolutions in racial profiling, viral marketing, planned obsolescence, military expansionism, and genocide have not improved our quality of life in any material sense.

The cow has not benefited from industrial agriculture. And the prole has not benefited from de-skilling of labor.

It didn’t have to be this way; in a different kind of society it could have been a boon to everyone.

Please continue to espouse this viewpoint even under serious argument from those opposing it. Technology isn't inevitably shit. There are other types of software we can write, and other types of technology we can develop that isn't the result of some sweaty CTO hovering over our shoulders demanding that we make the world shittier for the sake of the shareholders.

We have to imagine the worlds we could've created through better choices. We have to imagine that we can change the course of things.

Thanks Adam Smith...

I do think you're right. Friendster and MySpace were pretty much the peak, then when real social media took over, it all went to shit. Since then, tech exists not to perform some function but to justify its existence specifically to earn money.

I think in terms of cultural exchange of ideas and the enjoyment of being on the internet, 2005-2015 or so was probably the best. The barrier to entry was lowered to where almost anyone could make a meme or post a picture or upload a video or write a blog post or even a microblog post or forum comment of a single sentence and it might go viral through the power of word of mouth.

Then when there was enough value in going viral people started gaming for that as a measure of success, so that it no longer was a reliable metric for quality.

But plenty of things are now better. I think maps and directions are better with a smartphone. Access to music and movies is better than ever. It's nice to be able to seamlessly video chat with friends and family. There's real utility there, even if you sometimes have to work around things that aren't ideal.

This era was before smartphones and always-online lifestyle. Being always online is a prerequisite to the attention economy.

So, yes, you're right that the best internet was back then. Back when we could leave it at home and go out into the world knowing everybody else had also left it at home.

Laptops are an obvious exception back then, but almost nobody took their laptop to the bar with them, or to a concert, or on a hike, or to the grocery store. And the trouble of pulling it out and trying to find WiFi meant that it wasn't easy enough to distract the majority.

I was thinking about this the other day, while loading music onto my modded iPod. If I could go back in time and stick a pin in tech growth, it would be 2006, before the iPhone came along. Don't get me wrong, I think the explosion in smartphones that came after the first iPhone is broadly good and has the ability to be democratising. But that's not really what shook out.

The world in 2006 had digital cameras and small, portable music players. We had SMS for easily staying in touch with each other, and we did have smartphones - just not as smart as they are now. From a communication perspective, we mostly had what we needed. Hell, by 2006 3G connections were pretty universal, so we could do video calling if we had a phone that supported it. Having a bunch of devices that all did specific things meant that we spread our reliance around a number of companies. Now, with our camera, MP3 player, computer, and communication device all being controlled by one company, if that company turns to shit we have to jump to a less shitty firm, but we have to abandon all of the conveniences to which we've grown accustomed.

As someone who recently jumped from 15 years of iOS to GrapheneOS, this last one is particularly painful.

And sure, everything has gotten a lot faster since then, but there's a part of me that kind of enjoys the inconvenience of slower, finicky hardware that sometimes needs a nudge in the right direction.

I hear you, but the writer isn't concerned with "can": If you replaced "can have the answer to any question in seconds from my a tiny device in my pocket" with "must" then you can see their dissatisfaction.

if I went to a restaurant and was told that I had to install and use their app to order their food, I would fucking leave. If it was the only restaurant left in town then I'd have much less choice in the matter. The insidious nature of technology is that it changes "can" with "must".

I agree. Tech is like fire, handle it responsibly.

lunch pause

car brakes automatically if I'm distracted

These two lines paint a very sad picture.

"La science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme"

Agreed, but things act differently at scale and it's not like there's 10 billion+ hammers being used at the same time, almost all of the time, for years on end

You could say the same thing about splitting atoms.

I feel like that's the entire point of the article. These technological "solutions" are being forced on us more and more and they are often I'll conceived. Like QR ordering only systems.

People forget that technology is agnostic to morals and ideals. Which is a big part of why I support FOSS. It is tech with goals that do aim for accessibility and making the world better. I am not a huge donator as I don't make much money, nor can I code well, but I donate and contribute where I can.

Open source analytics tools are still pushing for ad-driven business models that make the world (and the content) worse. Open source LLMs still waste computational power and pollute. And the list continues. Some open source technologies serve a good goal, some contribute to make the world as bad as some non-OSS.

I'm tired of big tech deciding when we should upgrade because they deliberately create things that break, degrade and becomes obsolete far shorter than whatever should have.

I think about Apple quite a lot in this regard. Not because of planned obsolescence or anything so nefarious, but because they genuinely make some of the best consumer hardware you can buy, and because it's so good it costs a decent wedge. Then, five years later, when that good hardware is still as good as the day you bought it, they quietly drop OS support for it because they need you to buy another one.

And most people will smile and thank them for the trade-in discount they'll get to help them spend more money, while that older, still perfectly usable hardware is shipped off to a massive shredder to take it off the used market.

I use Macs, I understand this process very well. But I've also done my fair share of putting OCLP on older hardware in order to wring a few more years out of it, and of putting Linux on even older Macs because they still work perfectly well. I mean, I have a 2011 MacBook Pro that's running Linux Mint so well that you wouldn't have any idea that it's a 14 year old laptop.

The second best thing Apple are good at is convincing their customers that the equipment they own is old and knackered. And that's kinda sad.

Yeah I think blanket statements either way are misguided. Some tech does help the disabled, other tech makes their lives much more difficult. It's like any other tool, when it's used at scale by something aiming for optimizing profit it will have terrible side effects

Agree. I think a lot of tech just isn't directly visible to consumers in most cases. I'm specifically thinking of medical applications, robotics, manufacturing, etc. Some more visible applications would be transit (maglev trains are in trials now) and a number of similar things. There's also biotech stuff about which I know little.

My mouse recently developed an issue that had me looking at potential replacements and again almost nothing currently available matches it or was even close.

I used the exact same Logitech MX518 mouse from ~2009 until ~2020. Then I went through one every 9 months or so until they succumbed to same problems with the scrollwheel failing until I finally had to stop buying their crap.

I just take my brick phone out and say that I can't use their app on this. Although once went to the pub after work and it meant I didn't need to pay for any of my drinks which was nice.

because you know servers don't need that shit.

No. Dead wrong. It's precisely the frontline staff who need customer feedback, and if makes them uncomfortable then so much the better.

It's the rank and file's job to pass criticism of the service offering on in team meetings, culture surveys, etc. My job sucks this week because I have to do x and yet the customers all hate it. Staff will drive change to policy when it's their ears copping the response day-to-day.

'I couldn't possibly bother the floor person' is code for 'I am going to tolerate in silence any corporate policy no matter how obnoxious', and line management and the executive know it.

You see, it actually did still save you time from finding a local shop that sells it and interacting with your neighbor

Honestly? Cool that you are asking, but I just want a coffee, not a conversation.

Yes, I'm German, how could you tell?

Not everyone wants to socially interact. That's something to respect.

I tend to prioritize not-human services, as social interaction exhaust me.

When I used to work with customers I really didn't like when people starting talking about unnecessary staff. The less I had to interact the better for me.

Tech was ruined in the 90s

40 years later

Pick one. I'm 41 and was born in 1983.

The dissatisfaction is in regards to the imperative that you use all forms of tech in all aspects of your life. It is with the fact that all tech is designed around making money, not improving life. If your video games were designed around bringing joy and entertainment, then you would probably like them even more, and get more benefit from them. Instead there are loot boxes and gambling in nearly all large games.

Yes and no. It’s objectively true that things like streaming services, food delivery, and online communications got worse not better over time. It’s not true for all things but there are definitely things that simply got worse for profit

Is it a shocker most people in tech are selfish, short sighted, and self-aggrandizing?

If only the goal of the tech firms was to make the world better while making enough money to achieve this, rather than their goal being to make as much shareholder value as possible while ekeing out improvements on a schedule that fits their need to maximise profits.

Wait. Is this satire? Like these suggested versions have been generated by running through a LLM AI?

This is weird take on an op-ed. OP didn't alter the title. The only ways I can conceive of a headline being "misleading" is when it declares a falsity (this doesn't; it's an opinion) or doesn't match the content of the titled text (this doesn't; it matches the text).