Today the business model has made every products and contents to be enshittified.
We've optimised for the wrong thing and not only the common people hate the tech industry. Even I no longer feels the joy of working in tech.
It's more about the fact that at a sufficiently large scale any platform faces the same issues. Some creators are terrible without breaking the rules, people argue, etc.
If the AI bubble pops and drags down the economy with it, we will approach peak hatred. Depending on how much worse things get materially (yes - materially - the gross real world that tech ceos are trying to escape).
Don’t say you weren’t warned, you elitist out of touch Bay Area scumbags.
I think the real error was the notion that they could sell this story to investors without the rest of the population noticing.
But as a PR person I can guarantee you it's not possible to go around such perception shifts through money alone.
(1) Addiction engineering, and the fact that the tech industry found a way to transform what was supposed to be a machine to improve human education and cognition into a digital version of tobacco or a casino. I am personally disgusted by this. If you're working on a pop "social" app or a game and designing it to have a "compulsion loop," you are doing mind control and you suck.
(2) The fact that a huge number of people in tech have been "pilled" with hyper-elitist fascist-adjacent ideology. This one was a huge shocker to me as I watched it happen, especially because I read the texts and blogs that seemed to be driving it and was like "you people are smart... why are you falling for this?" I am by no means a hard leftist either, used to self-describe as a libertarian back when that meant what it sounds like it means. ... Then I realized that tech is full of nerds who (like me) got picked on in school, and that wound makes "you are aCkTuAllY a member of a cognitive master race" a powerful hook. It's not unique to nerds -- all humans are vulnerable to this pattern. You see it in groups of people who have been mass-abused through genocide or persecution for instance.
(3) A small number of people in tech have gotten rich to Gilded Age levels, and that burns in what I think is a stagflationary environment (we aren't calling it that, but for the "regular economy" we are basically in stagflation). If everyone was doing well and things like housing were affordable, I don't think people would care as much. I know personally I don't care if there are quintillinoaires out there somewhere as long as I am doing well and I can pursue my dreams... but if I'm not, it creates emotions of envy and hostility. This is natural hard-wired brain stem stuff.
Those are all rational reasons IMO and they all make sense.
I think the AI backlash builds mostly on #3, since AI threatens a lot of jobs in a stressed economic environment. The environmental stuff around AI (data center power etc.) is mostly exaggerated (except water in some areas), but its prevalence is driven by the fact that people want to find something to hate about this industry.
As evidence I submit the fact that artists, in my experience, are the most visceral AI haters. I get it. I do not believe AI is a threat to "true art." Not at all. But it is absolutely decimating the boring "potboiler" work artists used to use to make a living while they worked on the former, and it's always been brutally hard to make a living as an artist. AI also threatens programmers, but in that case we're talking maybe being knocked down from upper middle class to middle class not from lower middle class to bankruptcy.
(Total tangent -- I ran some numbers. If you telework 1-2 days a week, depending on your commute, you more than make up for using something like Claude Code heavily all day long. Same goes for skipping that DoorDash order. Cars use insane amounts of power if you really look, much more than data centers on an amortized per-user basis.)
If I could I'd toss my TV I bought a decade ago into the garbage can after all of the updates it keeps receiving making it more and more intrusive with advertising. But then I'd have to pay extra for a non-smart TV.
Re the linked piece, I'm concerned about people saying "they hate us" when they really mean "they disagree with us" or "they seem skeptical of what we say." It can easily become click bait.
The language changes, sure ... but equating disagreement with the emotion of hatred? Maybe that language change is a bad idea? Just spitballing here.
I posit that the reasons are
- the need for conservatism and slowing down progress is inherent in people. Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology. Its the same mode of opposition, people just don't like chaotic progress.
- people who have good jobs and high status want to _conserve_ it and not lose position - tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again
- for some reason cynicism is seen as signalling a more mature worldview while optimism is seen as childish when the historical trend points to optimism instead
¹ using the term "algorithms" here in its colloquial non-tech sense.
1. Tech is associated with a lot of the issues affecting society right now, while other business sectors often aren't. Data centres and the rising price of computer components, social media addiction, gambling apps, surveillance, etc. These are all things in the news or affecting people's daily lives, and the 'tech industry' tends to get the blame for them.
2. Many of the people involved tend to have a bad reputation, even compared to other industries. Musk is the obvious one, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and others like them don't exactly have a great reputation with the general public.
3. As much as I can't blame them sometimes, the media absolutely hates the tech industry and the companies operating in it. Thanks in part to the large social media platforms all but annihilating traditional journalism as a business, there's a lot of hatred aimed at the companies responsible as a result. If you see any news article about a tech related topic that isn't a product announcement (and maybe even then), it's probably going to be a negative one about the dangers and issues with tech.
There are, of course, some good people/companies/projects in the tech industry, but think about the overall impression of the industry as a whole: careless and malevolent.
The tech industry and its figureheads have
- Lied consistently about their capabilities
- Brazenly flouted the law
- Shoved ads and planned obsolescence and surveillance into everything
- Increased prices again and again
- Supported oppressive governments and war crimes
- Gleefully attempted to remove many people's livelihoods
- Predicted that they would end the world, and then doubled down on the same path
- Deployed bots everywhere, polluting online communities
- Pushed technology with the primary aim of CSAM or deepfake pornography
I could keep listing, and again, this isn't every single person in the tech industry. But if you group them all together, you have to take the bad with the good, and there's a lot of bad.
Frankly, the real question is why don't more people hate the tech industry?
It's not really bad as such that the tech industry want to attempt to make a smart home, or add software to a product, but it's increasingly being done without consideration for the users.
People hate the tech industry, and that includes those who work in it, because it's pretty clear that the industry really doesn't give a shit about it's users, because the users are rarely the customers anymore.
The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product.
Plus the monopolies..
1. All about lock in. Trap customers and their data.
2. No purchases, only rentals. You never own anything.
3. Agreements are worth nothing. Today's feature is tomorrows premium feature.
4. Gamification adds an extra edge of badness on the hopes that you'll get what you want.
5. "Updates" rarely help, but almost always harm, in the name of "security"
6. Mergers and acquisitions means nothing is ever safe. Purchasing BigCo (exit) can mean operations cease tomorrow.
7. Enshittification rules always rule how the service will degrade, but not at what speed
8. Easy click to subscribe, but show up in person wearing all black clothing to the basement hidden office behind the no-trespassing sign to the cigarette man to unsubscribe.
9. And even if you THINK you own hardware in your physical possession, firmware updates maintain the real owner and cripple functionality. (PS3 OtherOS, etc)
Agree.
But it empowers them to vie for attention in mostly the worst ways possible and, overwhelmingly, has led to a lot of bad content. There's some gems too. But, by and large, YouTube is less desirable for me to use than it was 10 years ago and I think it's because of the transformation into an industry, rather than an indie platform that also paid out.
It feels like it went from a farmer's market with a lot of local farmers selling their goods to shopping at Walmart.
For consumers, YT is not empowering. It fulfills a need, well enough to tie them to the platform. But it is obviously not set up to hand them any more power than to serve that goal. You want to shield yourself from wasting time here? Sorry, not sorry, our goal is to steal your attention and entertain you just enough that you keep scrolling.
If you've been leaning hard on programming and lack the people skills to join the business class, that's on you. Things are going to get very hard for you in the near future, if they haven't already. People skills are the new moat.
where did i say that I've been solely leaning hard on programming and not focusing on the people skill?
Have the people with money considered doing more charitable acts/events for the people with less money to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?
I think the problem is that the tech industry in large is just here to extract wealth from the many and transfer it to the few. That's why it's focused on scale.
People aren't dumb, and most of the time they can see when they're on the receiving end of an extractive relationship - even if there's lots of PR work going on to hide that reality from them.
Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say "of course it won't unemploy people (wink) it may even create more jobs (snicker)."
AI founders are OK with people hating them, because people truly absolutely dont matter.
If you haven’t read it already, I can recommend “Careless People”, this is a constant theme in the book.
One example. Berkshire Hathaway has $400 billion dollars in the bank that they can't invest because they need high returns. So the capital is locked up. (The banks who hold the funds are restricted in what they can invest in).
Multiply this by loads of other companies. Add in funds stashed in tax havens. And just plain individual savings of people terrified about being poor in their old age.
My point is that the rich problem is not restricted to tech. Although it is quite visible
In theory, all other things aside, it is true. I mean, look up at the stars. For all I know there are functionally immortal super-minds out there who have not known pain for millions of years. Their existence is not a problem for me.
But "we live in a society," and unfortunately other peoples' extreme wealth can cause problems for me.
One is by bidding up assets. The super-rich park their money. Parked money goes into things like PE. PE can't find enough stuff to do with it, so they do shit like buy up housing and hold it off the market to profit from real estate appreciation. That makes it harder for me to find a good place to live. That's just one example.
I actually coined a term for the above: financial pollution. Financial pollution is any time someone else's money being invested does harm rather than helps, usually by driving up asset prices, massively distorting a market, or being invested in the creation of rent-seeking schemes. A classic example of financial pollution would be the real estate market in cities that allow a lot of overseas investors to park money in real estate.
Financial pollution is the opposite of productive investment that does things like creates jobs and builds things.
Another is that extreme wealth distorts politics. One of the libertarian things I like in theory is the idea of separation of economy and state, but in practice that's a brutally hard thing to achieve... much harder than separation of church and state. It is true from a social contract and legal point of view that money is not the same as physical coercion, and the state has a monopoly on the latter, but if you have loads of money you can buy the people who run the state and therefore obtain direct access to physical coercion. That's the problem. The super-rich can buy the government and then use force to maintain their status or pursue their own personal cultural, religious, or national peeves and hobby horses.
On (1) I do like "Annoyance Economy" as an extension of that (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/business/annoyance-econom...)
kgwxd•1h ago
bananaflag•33m ago
harimau777•29m ago
speed_spread•12m ago
ymolodtsov•18m ago
worldsayshi•30m ago
vrganj•29m ago
automatic6131•5m ago
It doesn't matter, all you need to replicate the same problems is concentration of wealth and power and the ability to direct it.
vrganj•1m ago
luco17•28m ago
l337h4x0rz•24m ago
ymolodtsov•18m ago
jknoepfler•12m ago
petcat•15m ago
YetAnotherNick•7m ago
If I were to guess, I think what you mean interacting with them not the money extraction part?
Jtarii•10m ago
People will have some criticisms of each of these but the average person probably appreciates them more than dislikes them.
windward•9m ago
But that demand could have been turned into real power. Now it's too late.
GuB-42•9m ago
I think that farmers are somehow immune despite having their fair share of evil because we all understand that without them, we would all die.