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.

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. 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.

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)

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.

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.

so it doesn't give people confidence that the tech industry is doing anything that benefits the average person; mostly they're just looking to make as much $$ as possible and screw everything else, including our planet's future. basically Gordon Gekko's of the 21st Century.

Also:

1. Tech is full or arrogant assholes who thing they know better than everyone. That leads to things like ham-handed attempts at gaslighting. It's especially grating when it's coming from some 25 year old kid.

2. The whole "making the world better" facade has fallen away. It's pretty clear a lot of them are selfish, greedy fucks. See: jamming AI and everyone's face and all the variations of "stop hiring humans."

It’s probably naive to assume a different system would cure all our ills. But I do wonder - if humanity acted for the collective good instead of individual self-interest, how different would our technology be? And how different would we be because of it?

Link to the article for those interested: https://graceblakeley.substack.com/p/what-you-hate-about-ai-...

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?

2. Tech companies are built on eating someone else’s lunch, mostly, and it’s not usually a fair redistribution of value.

A few things stand out:

The social isolation of the digital age. We spend more time staring into phones than looking each other in the eye. The polarization created and amplified by social media platforms. The spread of disinformation, radicalization, and algorithmically optimized outrage. A developer and founder culture that is still heavily male-coded, often morally shallow, and too quick to treat empathy as weakness or inefficiency. The hype-and-hustle economy that startup culture has helped normalize inside American hyper-capitalism. The robber barons of earlier generations have been replaced by tech bros, growth hackers, and social media personalities who are often rewarded more for manipulation than for building anything durable. The erosion of the middle class and the normalization of unstable gig work, especially for Gen Z and millennials, leading to a lower standard of living for many younger Americans. Crypto, and the amount of fraud, speculation, and wasted energy that came with it. Now AI: not just the technology itself, but the way it is being funded, marketed, and deployed, often with little regard for human creativity, labor, consent, or meaning.

Yes, this is a negative list. Technology has obviously produced enormous good as well.

But it says something important that many younger people increasingly experience modern tech not as liberation, but as addiction, surveillance, manipulation, and spiritual exhaustion.

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.

Social skills, friends, short term memory, dating, sex, intelligence etc

Tech intentionally exploits regular people for its own gain, intentionally breaking peoples brains for techs profit.

In short "tech" doesn't care about anything but the "bottom line" its the same as the military industrial complex- people break, people die, genocide happens and we empower it... who cares we're getting rich.

No one sees the faces of the military industrial complex but tech CEO's(the faces of the industry) proudly smile for the camera's and rub their billionaire lifestyles in the publics faces.

In short people hate the "tech industry" because it has taken everything away from everyone while enriching a few- and its all public.

1 it seems like every successful company is headed by self centered assholes 2 enshittification

And besides, the hate isn't even universal. Normal people like Google and Apple and Amazon and Netflix. These brands have high favourability. In fact, what I've noticed is that people with all these strong opinions about what are mundane realities to most people have a tenuous grasp on reality. As an example:

> ...even if data centers look at you really funny when you want to colo a box as a random individual these days...

This is and has always been nonsense. Monkeybrains will let you do it at $75/1A at 110V (expensive but no one is looking at you funny) and Hurricane Electric has deals for people who are using very little (half-cabinet even). I myself have hardware in a colo. When I went there, I had trouble with some rails and just asked one of those guys for help. It was like the old days. My wife helped me and we picked up my mum and daughter at the playground after.

And really, "what we've done in the last 10 years"? Dude, the usual suspects were protesting that tech companies provided buses for their employees over 10 years ago. One guy puked on a bus in protest.

The whole post has taken a false premise (tech is generally hated), layered on some bad history (in the last 10 years something happened), and added some other bogus facts (colo facilities will look at you funny for going in by yourself). The whole thing has the taint of "lives entirely in a tech bubble and thinks that HN/Reddit is the real world". This entire genre of content that is purely created from Internet interaction with nearly zero real-world grounding is strange, and oddly it is consumed almost exclusively by all these other people who also have near zero real-world grounding.

Just total nonsense.

(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.)

1. Tech is our "new money". New money is always hated, by every generation

2. Tech represents change and the human animal dislikes change. Most people are okay with everything that exists when they turn 25 and dislike everything that appears after

3. Tech represents capitalism in a pure form. Creative destruction reigns; companies and apps can rise and fall overnight. Ways of life are precarious and the constant churn bothers people

All three really come down to people disliking change. Instead of hating/fearinf change and dynamism, people should look inward. Establish a routine. Exercise. Garden. Read. Cook. It's more within your power than ever before to decide what you like and pursue it at your own pace. But don't expect the external world to meet your desire for stasis.

This is and always will be incorrect and just the go-to excuse and/or justification. People do care but their brains are too muddy from stress, lies, ambiguous information and the lack of time to separate truth from campaigns/propaganda/proprietary agendas.

This can be interpreted as people not actively caring, as in the infamous "nobody cares" and "nobody can do anything about that anyway" but it's actually passive carelessness that has it's origin in a conspiratorial kind of treatment of lower classes by upper classes. But that's boring.

What's exciting is that it holds true upwards. Top 10% earners "don't care" if they "loose" 50000 dollars due to fraud by people "above their pay grade".

Hop, hop, hop ... people hate the tech industry because they somewhat expect that skilled and/or smart people with resources, opportunity and time do things the right way ... because they can, because they say "we can" and "we will" and "the people" a lot in various ways.

It causes at least a little nausea to suddenly realize that young or middle aged or seasoned engineers and business people behave like aging placeholder representatives that were picked because they are "representative enough".

This, of course, partially stems from several cognitive fallacies about the things that evolution and expertise seem to imply but don't.

In the end, it's not hate but recurring disillusionment and disappointment ... that the tech industry is no better than 13 year old drug dealers getting the teens next door hooked on punched bullshit or violent pimps and malpracticing doctors.

"It's a shame, really."

That said, the tech industry is doing it's job and delivers and it's human nature to expect "more" from capable people as well as to be disappointed when they don't--especially when patterns of malicious intent emerge and become systematic and systemic ... which has been halpening over and over again ...