I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better
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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.
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I'm tired of pretending companies are making the world better.
See:
The corporation
The new corporation
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This past month has felt like two years.
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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.
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Why don't you live in a cave then & why are you even posting this ?
Be the change you want to see bro/sis ? -
Paying 80 for a product that is worth 100 and have ads is standard practice nowadays, to the point that not doing this puts you in competitive disadvantage. You are than asked to pay the remaining 20 or put up with ads.
You see this in every lemmy discussion about smart TVs. People complain that TVs have ads and there's always someone that suggest getting a "dumb" TV but complain that they are more expensive. It's almost like ads subsidize the purchase price or something...
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I feel the same. Find it annoying when in the US the waitress introduces herself, asks where I'm form, etc. Do you work for a diner or the CIA? Just bring me a steak with fries, medium rare, please and thank you.
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I disagree, I think the removal of ads is often painted as a benefit that had inherent value. Look at YouTube premium or Prime video. Both haven't actually improved their offering, just made it worse by introducing ads and insisting users that don't want to see ads have to pay for the privilege of not being advertised to.
This means the total price adds up to higher than 100% of the product value, because it's a 'premium' version that comes without advertisement inconvenience.
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I disagree about such a generalization.
There are very few instances where people decide to be dumb and use technology for it but in general my life is much better thanks to technology.
My job exists due to technology, the Internet allows me to work from home, a washing machine washes my clothes, I can order food in the middle of a meeting and have it delivered on my lunch pause, I can speak to my family half a world away everyday, with video, for free, I can have the answer to any question in seconds from my a tiny device in my pocket, my car brakes automatically if I'm distracted (and heats up before I sit down in the morning)... you get the deal.
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factory example
Thanks. I think I get it now. Besides physical constraints (availability of resources, natural laws and the knowledge of them), society's inherent values and rules (like work safety, minimum wage, worth attributed to a group of people/ the environment / animals) affect the way things are done.
If work force is cheap and abundantly available and the workers' health or wellbeing isn't considered as too relevant the resulting solution to achieve something is very different from one with different preconditions.
computers ... because they're so general purpose, more cultural values get embedded. Like in the example above, there are decisions that aren't determined by the goals of what you're trying to accomplish, but because computers are so much more open ended than physical robots, there are more decisions like that, and you have even more leeway in how they're decided.
The moral/ social/ economic decisions which are made are affected by the opportunities which a technology has to offer? OK, yes.
The versatility of computer technology makes it a tech which can be used in many harmful ways. The potential for harm is bigger than let's say with the invention of the wheel or the plow but not as big as with nuclear fission.Responsibility for the usage of a technology and finding common rules for its usage and enforcing them... hmm.
Technology and what we do with it can't be viewed as independent aspects?
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The field of language, the meaning of words in different contexts... Communication in general, they wrote books over books about it...
Yes. Murky.
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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
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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".
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Yep, I also been growing older and I have nostalgia for old times. But I'm well aware that grass is only greener on my memory, as it has always been.
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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.
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.
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You can just answer "fine" and I'll be satisfied though, it's really easy to sus out who wants to chat up their barista and who just wants to go in, order, get out. I'm not seeking to force anyone into a conversation they don't want, I just want a faint acknowledgment of my humanity, you know?
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I agree. Tech is like fire, handle it responsibly.
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Prime video I don't know so well, but YouTube was free without ads in the beginning, for something that is incredibly expensive to run. They had to introduce any monetization or shut down the service. They went with ads because 99% of users prefer that to payment. Later they gave the option to pay to remove the ads, only as an extra, because very few people are ready to do that.
There are some ad-free video platforms out there but they have a tiny fraction of the user base of YouTube. Most people couldn't even name one, let alone considering using it, when YouTube is "free".
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Not everyone wants to socially interact. That's something to respect.
I tend to prioritize not-human services, as social interaction exhaust me.
