[HN Gopher] The techlash that never happened
___________________________________________________________________
The techlash that never happened
Author : tim_sw
Score : 49 points
Date : 2023-05-14 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eriktorenberg.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eriktorenberg.substack.com)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| And the media learned a hard lesson: Success against tech
| requires long-term criticism; but they turned everything into
| clickbait and put many criticisms behind paywalls. Nobody was
| interested after more than a week, because nobody had the
| attention span or interest in paying for stories about a personal
| squabble.
| hughesjj wrote:
| "in an alternate reality" (/s) some media conglomerate invented
| equivalents of YouTube, reddit, and Twitter, and they never
| have to ask for permission to use your content in their pieces
| because it's part of the TOS for those sites anyway.
|
| Kinda glad they didn't
| mnkv wrote:
| Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously
| wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the
| political aisle".
|
| So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just
| recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides.
|
| And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any
| Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.
| blululu wrote:
| What? Internet companies are up there with trade unions and
| Hollywood in donating to the left:
| https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan...
|
| Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse
| on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA?
| whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at
| Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make
| dashboards to help visualize uptime metrics for cloud services.
| Nobody at Apple is ashamed to tell their friends that they
| can't talk about whatever they do for work.
| CPLX wrote:
| Depends on what you call the left. If you mean the modern
| Democratic Party then sure.
|
| If you mean the division of contemporary politics that is
| associated with advocacy for the rights of workers and
| diminished power for the managerial and capital owning
| classes then they most certainly do not do that _at all_.
| [deleted]
| mxkopy wrote:
| There are dozens of us!
| [deleted]
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Oh, for sure. Peter Thiel was an advisor to Donald Trump!
| Maciej Ceglowski (the person who operates Pinboard) has done a
| bunch of threads on Twitter cataloging the extensive donations
| of big tech companies to politicians on both sides of the
| aisle: https://twitter.com/search?q=donation%20from%3Apinboard
|
| I also love the tacit admission that Clarence Thomas is acting
| as a partisan, rather than an unbiased member of an ostensibly
| apolitical institution.
| xwdv wrote:
| Facebook is like Jupiter, absorbing the heavy hits so us
| smaller players can operate unscathed.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Silicon Valley is 15% Republican and 53% Democrat [1]. Tech is
| a highly skewed industry. 98% of Netflix employees donated to
| Democrats in 2020, 77% of Amazon employees. Overall 84% of
| political donations in major tech companies goes to Democrats
| [2].
|
| https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/governance/civic-en...
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/big-tech-employees-donate-overwhelm...
| c22 wrote:
| If you look at the chart over time it looks like 'no party
| preference' is eating the republican side of the graph. It
| looks like the republican party is fracturing, which is great
| because we need more than two political parties. I wish the
| other side would break up too.
| bitwize wrote:
| Having a more-than-two-party system would require
| restructuring the Constitution entirely.
|
| So let's do it. Start with South Africa's constitution as a
| model.
| hgsgm wrote:
| As soon as elected officials agree, it will happen. 99%
| of aaod officiala are in one of the 2 major parties.
|
| Unless non elected-officials win a revolution.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| They live very comfortable lives with the current two
| party system. If we had one party only they would have to
| take responsibility for what's happening. With a two
| party system you always have the other side to blame.
| With more than two parties you start losing power. The
| current system is just perfect for putting on a good show
| for the plebes to keep them fighting each other while the
| powerful pull the strings in their own favor.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This is just a chart for Silicon Valley. The Republican
| party fractured in California since the 70s, that much is
| certain. The Democrats have enjoyed a supermajority
| monopoly in that state for quite some time. But this is not
| an indication of the country as a whole. Of course, in
| other areas, the Republican base got stronger since the
| 70s.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > I wish the other side would break up too.
|
| At least in recent years independents (in Congress) have
| caucused with Democrats, but not Republicans. This is
| evidence that the Dems are slightly broken up already.
|
| To get more fine-grained, each party has sub-divisions
| (e.g. "Freedom Caucus" in the Republican party). The real
| problem is that these sub-divisions basically don't cross
| over to allying with the other party on particular issues.
| If they ever do do that, and do it consistently (not as
| one-off decisions from individual representatives) then the
| US will effectively have a more than two party system.
|
| But even if that happens, the actual people getting elected
| will almost always only have an R or a D after their name.
| First past the post, as it is done in the US, can't really
| sustain more than two competitive parties.
| andromeduck wrote:
| This is starting to change in SF
|
| https://www.brionessociety.org/
| owlbite wrote:
| That doesn't stop them spending in such a way that they
| achieve their aims regardless of which color of tie is more
| dominant in the corridors of power.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| supporting democratic candidates while working for companies
| that exacerbate the problems they supposed want to fix makes
| it hard for me to call someone a democrat unambiguously
| erikto wrote:
| which problems are you referring to?
| jchw wrote:
| I worked at Google for a few years and moved back to the
| Midwest afterwards. At first I was afraid to mention it even if
| it came up directly, but honestly I've come to realize that
| this perception that everyone hates tech companies so much that
| there's a stigma against it is probably more paranoia than
| truth. Whenever it does come up, I think people are put off by
| how much I preface it as if it's something terrible. I've since
| stopped doing so.
|
| The truth is, even if some of this could be explained by social
| pressure, I really think most people in the world just don't
| care as much as you think they do.
|
| More than anything most people just seem annoyed by tech
| companies.
|
| Actually, now that I think about it, the most unwelcome I've
| ever felt for working in tech was _in California_.
| Phiwise_ wrote:
| >Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most
| obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of
| the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any
| single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard
| for both sides.
|
| Wider data seems to suggest it's not that simple:
| https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
|
| >And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any
| Facebook employee how people react when they say where they
| work.
|
| I don't know firsthand, but the impression I've gotten,
| especially more recently, from silicon valley is that Facebook
| and Zuckerberg is the sacrificial goat the rest of the industry
| hopes to lay their sins on and drive into the desert. How much
| of the hatred for facebook employees is perpetuated, or at
| least was seeded, by tech itself rather than the general
| population? Do Uber employees get the same reaction? More
| politically apples-to-apples, do Google, or specifically
| Youtube, employees? If not, could it be because they use
| Facebook to distract from their own actions the rest of America
| wouldn't approve of if they were more in the media spotlight,
| and didn't have the scapegoat to point to?
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| I think you're on to something here. I myself as a tech
| employee have scapegoated FB, but the reality is, every small
| startup I've worked for has has questionable ethics. That's
| just how business people work, they don't see things the same
| as us regulars. Hence why they get so rich.
|
| I do think that tech workers have something, morally, to gain
| from lambasting FB. But the wider US sphere of influence
| does, as well. US tech makes the US super strong, and super
| rich. If we just forget about Google's sins, we can keep
| being rich and powerful.
|
| Tech workers, politicians, heck even normal people receiving
| Google accounts, all have something to gain by denying
| reality.
| majormajor wrote:
| The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue
| surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite
| and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented
| here are pretty weak.
|
| E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of
| "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way
| instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on
| filter bubbles too. Same with Juicero.
|
| And the "economic attack" on Hollywood, for instance, is hardly
| so - the initial investor-money-burning decade of streaming
| talked about here was WONDERFUL for most of Hollywood. You get to
| make way more shows, and they aren't supposed to all be lowest-
| common-denominator reality stuff? That was a bonanza for actors,
| writers, directors.
|
| I'd also want to see media sentiment of TV, streaming; ad revenue
| comparisons of that, and all the other options in the world
| between a binary "newspaper" and "tech" in that one graph.
|
| Not to mention some research on _consumer_ sentiment not just
| media sentiment. Does the author really believe the average Joe
| wasn 't getting more negative about FB over that time span? Where
| was "Tech" on that "people think the president should do
| something about" list five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? 40%
| is lower than oil and airlines; what's the rate of change? (One
| might say "yes, the public got more negative because the media
| pushed the narrative" which would be a pretty interesting
| argument, but it's notably _not_ what this article is saying -
| the author is saying that the public "Techlash" basically "never
| happened" outside the media. (But that's not really new, right -
| Tech criticizing the "media" [or slices of it] is also a decades-
| long well-established practice. This ain't a one-way street.)
|
| Yet spend a week on HN and you'll see that even in the industry,
| there's a LOT of organic negative sentiment against certain tech
| companies. I would agree with a claim that the media is
| oversimplifying that to "frustrating with tech," I don't agree
| that it's not a real trend with real causes independent of media
| reporting. We all use these products, we can all see the gradual
| shittification of them - FB, TikTok, Snap, Google Search...
| novok wrote:
| If you dig in more into the techlash, you also see a lot of...
| biased behavior on the NYT. Other newspapers also have this
| demonstrated behavior too, but the NYT is the most well
| researched.
|
| It's not just FB article sentiment analysis, it's everything
| they've written. If you look at all sentiment & word usage of
| all articles you'll notice sudden shifts . The NYT also has a
| narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles
| towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or
| phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative.
| And because people that work in these industries do not want to
| be informally blacklisted explaining this, in an industry where
| it's hard to get work, there isn't much in terms of good
| investigative journalism into the behavior of media itself, so
| it has to come from outsiders often. If you can get an NYT
| journalist drunk and talk about the right things, your eyes
| will start getting realllllllyyyy wide.
|
| The NYT explicitly decided to generate the techlash as their
| current narrative, it wasn't an emergent behavior because of
| events in the world.
| comex wrote:
| > The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly
| crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example
| and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the
| current target narrative.
|
| Citation needed.
| elefanten wrote:
| Idk that economic "attack" is good phrasing but the bundling of
| video content combined with tools/platforms/monetization for
| user generated video content _absolutely_ had a devastating
| effect on legacy video media. Maybe, in your words, the
| _initial_ money-burning provided a lift, but now Hollywood
| writers are striking for more pay and Netflix is one of they
| key bogeymen.
| hikawaii wrote:
| The bit about ad revenue was actually specifically called out
| here as probably not the story.
|
| The interesting part to me is the overall positive sentiment
| towards tech in general, because you are right - at least for
| specific companies, sentiment as reported by a local poll of
| people I play games with, Elon and FB are the literal devil.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| I felt the same way about the article. Large amounts of
| conspiratorial conjecture presented, little to show for it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think I generally agree that the media often reports on its own
| feelings as though they represented the vox populi, when they
| don't. We all make that attribution error, but (good) journalists
| are expected to be more aware of it.
|
| Another thing I think is _generally_ true is that, even if people
| hate tech, ultimately tech is just giving them what they want.
| Nothing will change until what people want changes, and any
| hypothetical Techlash would be mostly performative in practice:
| bad publicity without real consequences.
| Zetice wrote:
| Just off the top, I'm seeing a common logical misfire here,
| specifically:
|
| > If you asked the average American on the street about tech,
| they would tell you they like to use products like Airbnb,
| DoorDash, Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and many other supposedly
| maligned companies.
|
| It's actually a bit of a giveaway when you say "on the street".
| Most Americans _aren 't_ on the street at all.
|
| I dunno what the quality of this source is, but I found that
| Doordash delivers to 20 million consumers in a given month[0],
| which if true, accounts for 6% of Americans! 94% of Americans do
| _not_ "like to use" Doordash.
|
| Even Uber, which according to the same random well-SEO'd source,
| has 93 million monthly platform consumers[1], which means only
| 28% of Americans use Uber.
|
| I'm not sure if there's really a larger point to make here, or if
| I'm just quibbling with terminology, but it's a giant mistake to
| presume "most Americans" do nearly _anything_.
|
| [0] https://backlinko.com/doordash-users
|
| [1] https://backlinko.com/uber-users
| cavisne wrote:
| The Uber example seems like a stretch. If 28% of america uses
| it monthly, its probably comfortably a majority when you
| stretch to yearly (ie airport trips). Especially if you extend
| it to include Lyft.
|
| Rideshare has comfortably replaced taxis, likewise Doordash +
| competitors have comfortably replaced the alternative (which
| for most of the country was pizza delivery).
| Zetice wrote:
| I don't think you can say with any certainty at all that
| "comfortably a majority" of Americans use Uber, especially
| given that _relatively_ paltry 28% monthly. I understand some
| people use Uber infrequently, but I think you 'll need
| something more substantial than anecdote to demonstrate that
| moves the needle more than a percentage or two overall.
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| Bubbles are super common, and even more common on the internet.
| I find this phenomenon fascinating.
|
| For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely cannot
| comprehend why people prefer single family housing, with a
| yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered writing an
| article from my perspective, about why I prefer low-density
| housing.
|
| The ratio of commenters to lurkers is super low, and (speaking
| from experience), commenters often have mental problems, which
| drives them to post excessively.
|
| The vast majority of Americans are absolutely nothing like the
| drivel we read online. I waffle between thinking this is caused
| by "terminally online" folks like myself, and bots aka astro-
| turfed corporatism. Either way, the opinions we read online do
| not reflect reality. Historians will have a hoot interpreting
| our society and describing it from the perspective of the
| Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal.
| hughesjj wrote:
| > For example, there are many people on HN who absolutely
| cannot comprehend why people prefer single family housing,
| with a yard, and a car. So much so, that I've considered
| writing an article from my perspective, about why I prefer
| low-density housing.
|
| Personally, I've never seen a lack of understanding for the
| desire of SFHs, but rather the factual realization that SFH
| housing is not an economically sustainable path for the
| majority of Americans and the world.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > Even Uber, which according to the same random well-SEO'd
| source, has 93 million monthly platform consumers[1], which
| means only 28% of Americans use Uber.
|
| Looking at month to month stats like this seems like a poor
| proxy for "likeable". Something like Uber tends to have a core
| set of heavy users with a long tail of more infrequent users.
|
| I and most people I know use Uber every few months and often in
| spurts e.g. I travel a few times a year and don't rent a car at
| my destination. My uber use spikes during this time but is
| otherwise close to zero.
|
| Similarly, some people seem take a "uber in an emergency
| approach" to the service. This is something I certainly
| appreciate about the service as well.
|
| None of this actually tells us how "liked" the service is
| though.
| ghaff wrote:
| My usage probably breaks into use it pretty much daily or at
| least close, use it/consider using it in spurts, and
| basically never use it. I suspect my never use it (or at
| least once in a blue moon) bucket would make me seem like an
| alien in some demographics.
|
| Uber/Lyft is probably my main thing in the middle bucket. I
| mostly only use on fairly occasional trips by plane and not
| frequently even then.
| Zetice wrote:
| For sure, but I think the point stands. 93 million is a huge
| number, but it's not even a third of "Americans".
|
| I don't think there's any measurement you could use that
| would show Uber used by even half of Americans.
| [deleted]
| Sprocklem wrote:
| And even those that do "like to use" those products may still
| take issue with those companies on moral grounds while
| continuing to use them, either because there is no meaningful
| alternative for their purposes or because the convenience
| overrides their moral objections.
| [deleted]
| unending_ wrote:
| Right, the founder of the biggest social media on earth pivoted
| to a company destroying hobby project because he is afraid of
| govt regulation of his platform. No tech lash lol.
| wunderland wrote:
| It's a good argument, but have they considered that tech
| companies are actually evil? There is a lot of evidence to
| support this and they don't really explain that away very well.
| rcpt wrote:
| wrt to the NYT specifically, it was an intentional top down
| decision
|
| https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
|
| Context:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221104205605/https://twitter.c...
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| Does anyone know why the original tweet was deleted by Matthew
| Yglesias?
|
| From some cursory searches, I haven't been able to find a
| specific reason like a retraction, and it doesn't look like he
| did a general wipe of his history around 2022.
| comeonbro wrote:
| I'm surprised that the article didn't mention this, given the
| company the author apparently keeps I would have thought he'd
| have been among the criminally few people who witnessed and is
| aware of it, and it's both narratively aligned and the single
| most important piece of background information.
| rcpt wrote:
| I left a comment on his post (I think, substack commenting is
| a bit confusing)
| erikto wrote:
| Oh I forgot that one. Good catch.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| The top graph (Gallup 2017 Business & Industry Ranking Net
| Positive Scores) is 6 years old. 2022 results can be found here:
|
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-...
|
| Computer Industry is now 3rd and the Net Positive has gone from
| 67 to 35.
|
| Internet Industry has gone from 5th to the bottom half of the
| list and the Net Positive has gone from 41 to -2.
|
| Perhaps the Techlash was just a little late.
| csallen wrote:
| I don't disagree with the trend you're point out, but it also
| has to be put in perspective:
|
| 1. That chart lists 25 industries, and "computer industry"
| still ranks #3 in terms of how positive people feel about it.
| It's ahead of almost everything. "Internet industry" is right
| in the middle of the pack. So tech is scoring somewhere between
| average and wayyy-better-than-average. Doesn't sound like much
| of a techlash.
|
| 2. Net positive sentiment has dropped in pretty much _every_
| sector. The most popular industry, the restaurant industry, saw
| a drop from 65% to 45% net positive. The second most popular
| industry, agriculture, saw a drop from 58% to 43%. In 2017
| there were only 4 industries with net negative scores, but in
| 2022 there were 12, a 3x increase. So a big part of tech 's
| apparent decline in popularity is really just a universal
| decline.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| For the 2017 results I think it was disingenuous to ignore
| the "telephone industry" ranking when talking about "tech" in
| general. The "telephone industry" did improve its relative
| placement in the 2022 results.
|
| I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio
| industry" should be considered tech, or not.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and
| radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.
|
| That's the thing. They're all tech industries, at this
| point.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| As an easy rule of thumb I kind of draw the line for when
| computer and information technology is an enabler of the
| industry or just a facilitator. For telephones we've
| passed the point for the majority of the population. For
| radio I don't know if it has yet reached that point. And
| for television I just don't know, but from the complaints
| about smart TVs we may have.
| reillyduncN wrote:
| [dead]
| repsilat wrote:
| > _just a little late_
|
| It fits with the article's explanation really. The media hate
| tech, propagandize against it, and they eventually win people
| over.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I really don't understand why tech companies don't play
| hardball with them. Tech controls their distribution, so
| without their help they would just be screaming into the
| void.
| eastbound wrote:
| What if the media represented a single large family of
| traditional wealth, while the tech were the new rich, and the
| media tries to dampen the tame of the new rich so that they
| can keep their dominance in the long term?
| cavisne wrote:
| A lot of this was manufactured, it came out recently that NYT has
| a top down editorial policy that tech cannot be portrayed in a
| positive light
|
| https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
|
| I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger story at the time. News orgs
| will obviously have a bias based on who they hire. But
| historically they always try and appear to be balanced at the
| editorial level, ie Fox News has a few token left wing people,
| CNN has/had a few conservative punching bags.
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