[HN Gopher] Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
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Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
Author : Andrex
Score : 137 points
Date : 2023-07-21 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bigtechwiki.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bigtechwiki.com)
| thefounder wrote:
| I'm more concerned about Big Food as the new Big Tabacco. You
| don't get cancer consuming tech products as much as you get from
| Big "food".
| drewcoo wrote:
| I'm seeing religion that way.
|
| It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from
| other tables, and even in LA most restaurants don't have no
| prayer zones yet. We have known for years that it's not good
| for anyone, but they have tough lobbyists, so getting rid of
| the problem just seems impossible. We all accept somehow that
| sports figures and celebrities endorse the product - they're
| adults. We accept that adults should be allowed to make their
| own decision. But just when we had religion-free zones for
| children, here comes the 10 commandments on the wall and
| creationism in biology class. No "this is your brain on
| religion" commercials yet that I know of. Etc.
|
| Just like there was never a "war on tobacco," there will never
| be a "war on religion." Just like tobacco, there's too much
| money in religion for that to work.
| eindiran wrote:
| I legitimately can't tell if this is satire or not.
|
| > [E]ven in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones
| yet
|
| No municipality in a region with a bill of rights providing
| freedom of religion is going to create no prayer zones.
|
| > It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over
| from other tables
|
| This makes me think this is satire...
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Huh? Where do you live that people pray at restaurants loudly
| enough to distract you, lol
| grammers wrote:
| There are similarities, just exchange lung cancer with suicides
| among teens. Big Tech must take its responsibility more seriously
| and not pretend it's not their fault.
| elpool2 wrote:
| The difference is that smoking is clearly linked with lung
| cancer, established by heaps of clear scientific data. The link
| between social media and suicide is pretty weak by comparison.
| jachee wrote:
| You and the author are both lumping all of Big Tech in together
| with Big Attention-Exploitation.
|
| The latter is the subset to which people's ire should be
| directed.
| losteric wrote:
| Amazon and Google are hardly innocent players. One could go
| on to point at the effects of Uber, Yelp, AirBnb, Palantir,
| so on... all "Big Tech".
| paxys wrote:
| Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS
| and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace
| and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells
| graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD,
| Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce
| sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various
| business services.
|
| Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of
| trillions of dollars of valuation - more than most other
| industries put together - having _nothing_ to do with social
| media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article
| is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the
| same.
|
| So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but
| equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such
| companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector
| is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence
| that is suggested.
| CPLX wrote:
| The most important word in the phrase is "big" not "tech".
|
| The problem with these firms is they have too much concentrated
| power, which they obtained through anti-competitive practices
| that are now cemented into the business model.
|
| This is bad for society and it's imperative on society to break
| up these entities and the power they wield as it's incompatible
| with a democratic society.
| enumjorge wrote:
| A lot of the companies you mentioned have non trivial
| investments in ads. I recently was surprised to find how big of
| an ad business Adobe has for example. Not sure that these
| companies would cease to exist if it weren't for advertising
| but ads do influence these companies' products.
| paxys wrote:
| _Everyone_ has an investment in ads. Think news media,
| movies, TV, fashion, your local grocery store, a bus with a
| billboard on its side. That 's just how the world runs. If
| you want to hold it against them then you are basically
| ranting against all of capitalism rather than anything
| specific to "big tech".
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > Everyone has an investment in ads. ... That's just how
| the world runs.
|
| Sure and some people take issue with aspects of how the
| world runs and want to discuss it.
|
| > If you want to hold it against them then you are
| basically ranting...
|
| Bold to state that making a critique of the status quo
| automatically amounts to "ranting".
|
| > ...against all of capitalism rather than anything
| specific to "big tech".
|
| It is not unreasonable to critique capitalism.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Thank you. I've always been bothered by this lack of
| seperation.
|
| The 'dirty' parts of tech: * media * social media * PII
| repackaging and unethical sourcing * targeted ads
|
| Neutral or clean parts: * e-commerce * business automation *
| technical and educational information
| gumby wrote:
| That ship has sailed. "Tech" is simply a positioning or
| branding term.
|
| Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing
| technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or
| Apple) but nowadays "tech" merely means at best "online". Most
| so-called "tech" companies don't actually develop any
| technology at all, often being less technical than a non-"tech"
| company like, say, State Farm.
|
| The term has become so denatured that a new term, "deep tech"
| has been coined to mean what "technology company" used to mean.
| beebmam wrote:
| I don't think it's sailed. I think the classes of people that
| feel like they're falling behind resent success. It doesn't
| matter where that success comes from. The solution isn't to
| try to disarm the agitated language. The solution is to help
| the losers succeed, too.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| WeWork tried to brand itself as a "tech" company. I agree
| it's possible to sus out what companies are actually in the
| technology space but the label is thrown around far too much.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| My personal test for this is: what percentage of the
| company's total value is comprised of the intellectual
| property their software source code holds.
|
| The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you
| are - the lower the more "traditional" you are.
|
| No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other
| assets that are worth money and even a company that sells
| software as its main product might have lots of value tied up
| in their brand or their sales book of business.
| sgammon wrote:
| big oil: yes we love this keep going
| parentheses wrote:
| I "Big Tech" incorrectly categorizes the problem. The problem is
| social media products that monetize attention.
|
| Meta, Twitter and other companies that build deep social media
| products are in this group.
|
| Netflix is not. Microsoft is not. Google is not.
|
| I don't like that just because you're a large tech company you're
| immediately demonized. This is demonizing success in this field
| rather than "wrong" doing.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Netflix does not monetize attention?
| akomtu wrote:
| Oh, it's far more than that. Virtual technodrugs, or addiction,
| is one arm of the emerging new order. The second arm is control:
| fine grained and invasive censorship, history rewriting and so
| on. The third arm is a much faster discovery of knowledge to
| empower the few. All three arms will derive their power from AI.
| It could be used for good, but the current state of things in our
| society don't favor such application of AI.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Yep and the two big limitations are:
|
| 1) What content would be interesting to the mark
|
| 2) Generating the actual content for the mark to view
|
| And AI can easily do both.
| RyanAdamas wrote:
| You have the GenX "Hack the planet" types to thank for that.
| They are the ones who helped these people build their
| panopticon of terror.
|
| Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will go down as authors of a new kind
| of tyranny.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > GenX
|
| > Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
|
| Both of those two were born in 1955, making them solidly
| Boomers. Don't blame us for their shenanigans.
| uoaei wrote:
| Gen X bought the hype mostly uncritically and helped to
| justify and normalize the techniques that are now
| widespread today. Especially the end-of-history techno-
| utopianism of Clinton et al.
|
| Boomers were too late to the game but rode the wave once it
| was normalized. Millenials recognized the ills and tried to
| criticize to undo the justification. Gen Z never understood
| the world any differently and so are little more than
| victims.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| We can draw parallels, but you've never developed lung cancer
| doom scrolling twitter.
| z3t4 wrote:
| You don't get lung cancer by injecting. Its just that everyday
| life sux in comparison.
| Andrex wrote:
| Sharply increasing suicide rates among teens due to social
| media isn't something to just shrug off, either.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Do you know what had the largest impact on suicide rates of
| teens in recent years? Them returning to schools after covid.
| Could it be that things can, at the same time, have both
| positive and negative effects on people?
| teej wrote:
| Something also not caused by doom scrolling twitter.
| nimbleplum40 wrote:
| Sure, Instagram though...
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| And big tobacco hasn't brought the Nazis back.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Big tobacco killed more people than the Nazis. Fact.
| xethos wrote:
| Nazis are more likely to have unwilling victims though -
| quitting applies to smoking (difficult though it may be),
| not being a target for Nazis
| [deleted]
| shpx wrote:
| If being a smoker decreases your life expectancy by 10 years
| and you live 80 years, then if you're wasting 1/8 of your day
| on screens (2 hours/day if you don't count sleeping 8 hours)
| then it's sort of like smoking, if we equate wasting your life
| with not living at all.
| tech_ken wrote:
| I'm not sure if this logic really holds up. Lot's of things
| "waste time". By this definition both television (before
| scrolling people would easily spend 2+ hours watching "the
| boob tube") and traffic (many people drive 45+ minutes each
| way to and from work, which is time fully "wasted") are both
| equivalent to smoking.
| advsavsdvav wrote:
| I know its HN and bashing big tech/ad-tech is what almost
| everyone agree on here, but come on, is it really the same as
| tobacco.
|
| Even if we focus only on big ad-tech, many of the ad-based
| companies provide very useful products. That's why their
| business models work. Think google - maps alone is one
| incredible product or think Meta, Whatsapp has helped me save
| thousands of $ I would have otherwise spent on international
| calling, and I am so much closer and engaged to family and
| friends because of it, Martketplace has helped me buy/sell
| lots of stuff and saved me lot of money too. And the list
| goes on.
|
| I do not disagree there are problems with these companies and
| products but its just simply incorrect to equate it to
| tobacco. There are tons of products that these companies make
| that are actually very productive and useful.
| UberFly wrote:
| I don't really think this is anything new in the corporate world,
| but the explosion of sources and easy access through devices is
| what's made this stuff so potent. It's tough enough as adults to
| resist the bombardment.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://publicknowledge.org/is-this-really-big-techs-big-tob...
|
| tldr; The testimony of one of the Facebook "whistleblowers" drew
| the analogy to Big Tobacco from Sen. Blumenthal back in 2021.^1
| But in 1995 Congress took action after Wigand^2 testified. None
| of Big Tech's leakers so far have triggered action by Congress.
| Even more, in the 1990's there was at least 10 years of
| litigation before there was legislative action. Suing Big tech is
| more problematic. IMO, it's mainly because they can continue to
| hide behind Section 230. Was 230 was intended to protect
| corporations with trillion dollar market caps. Big Tobacco had
| nothing like Section 230.
|
| 1. Even earlier Salesforce guy was comparing Big Tech to
| cigarettes.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-...
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigare...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Wigand
| Thoeu388 wrote:
| > Republicans and Democrats began to view Big Tech in the light
| ...
|
| And current parties are somehow separated from big-tech? Media
| controls information and help swing elections. Laptop from hell
| was banned on all social media during election, today there is
| proper plea bargaining...
|
| Big Tech is not Big Tobacco. It is more like Military-industrial
| Complex. They will start wars and crisis, to sell more weapons
| and cover their corruption.
|
| Big Tobacco leaves you freedom, they just sell fire sticks that
| slowly kill you. What we have now, wants to control every aspect
| of our lives!
| tech_ken wrote:
| Many industries have massive negative externalities and a
| stranglehold on regulation through lobbying, loose campaign
| finance laws, and regulatory capture. I get that scrolling can
| become compulsive for some people, but I think comparing it to
| Big Tobacco or even like the firearms industry kind of overstates
| the case. Magazines and print media clearly led to high
| prevalence of eating disorders and other behavioral health
| problems in the pre-internet era, did the publishing industry
| ever have it's "Big Tobacco moment"? What about the auto
| industry, which has absolutely trashed the air quality in our
| cities and towns? The meat industry is a horrorshow of
| environmental destruction, negative health effects, and labor
| abus, where are it's big showy hearings and investigative
| committees? Instead we shower it with government support in the
| form of grain subsidies.
|
| Ad-tech is sleazy, and no doubt needs to be reined in, but the
| problem is that private corporations in general need to be better
| held accountable, not "Big Tech" specifically.
| superkuh wrote:
| This is such a terrible take. Nicotine is physiologically
| addictive in the "directly screws with reward motivation" sense
| in addition to causing physiological dependence through
| adaptation. The stimuli we perceive through screens are in no way
| addictive.
|
| Conflating a normal stimuli with something that's actually
| addictive is more dangerous than the thing it intends to stop
| because it justifies the use of force in a situation where
| there's no force used. Not even implicitly like with cigarettes
| being addictive. If you look at the DSM5 you'll see the _only_
| behavioral addiction disorder is "gambling disorder" and that's
| grandfathered in.
|
| These modern memes about how screens are addictive being taken
| seriously are themselves the danger. Just like with "porn
| addiction" or "curing homosexuality" the people pushing it in
| serious contexts are generally ones running for-profit private
| "detox" centers or expensive "treatments".
|
| I'm no fan of "big tech" but I can easily chose not to use it.
| And if I have to use it for work, it in no way forces me to use
| it at home. Big tech is bad but this line of argument is nearly
| as bad.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Big Techbacco
|
| I don't think it's wrong. "Stupid" random information is
| addictive and has neurological effects and we're bombarded with
| it.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I think a better comparison would be to big oil, steel and
| manufacturing in the early 1900s. Big tech has its problems but
| provides significant tangible benefits to people and the world.
| Tobacco is purely a negative, not innovative, and relies on the
| chemical addictive properties of a plant to offer a needless
| service.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| It's not a popular opinion, but I think the negative impacts of
| social media are overstated and unconvincing. You can get a big
| dopamine hit from meditation or as a response to stress but you
| don't see kids running to Buddhist monasteries in droves or
| rushing to the stress of public speaking.
|
| It's probably not healthy to live your entire life online, which
| is what youth are encouraged to do by everyone around them, and
| that alone is enough of a problem and I don't think technology
| companies are to blame.
| m1117 wrote:
| Make us inhale all the toxic fake news and ads.... They should
| print pictures of exhausted ad consumers on google packages.
| WJW wrote:
| Warning: consumption of social media can lead to jail time.
| <Picture of the Proud boys guy in court>
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Gonna risk the downvotes and qualify that I am a parent who keeps
| social media away from my kids: what big tech is peddling is IMHO
| _not_ on the level of addiction, carcinogenicity and all cause
| mortality as smoking. It 's up to me to raise a mentally
| resilient kid, _part of which_ is limiting their screen time, but
| it is not something I cut out altogether. It 's not like I have
| some special parenting power to protect their lung epithelia.
| tomcam wrote:
| I made a terrible mistake with my children at the dawn of
| social media. I would love it if you contacted me because I
| think you're generally on the right course.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Been saying this for years, the only reason these companies'
| execs aren't in prison is because they grease all the right
| palms, and provide enough "studies" those greased palms can use
| to plausibly justify their behavior.
| pjscott wrote:
| In prison on what charges?
|
| In the US it's illegal to imprison someone based purely on
| vibes, and you can't make things crimes retroactively. (See
| Article I, Section 9 of the constitution; in particular the
| parts concerning _habeas corpus_ , bills of attainder, and _ex
| post facto_ laws.)
| api wrote:
| This is true for the parts of tech that run on addiction: most
| mobile gaming, most social media, cryptocurrency gambling,
| straight up gambling, etc.
| danzer420 wrote:
| can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big
| tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have
| brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world.
| hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small
| businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our
| fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago
| unimaginable.
|
| tech is like humanity's one hope.
| isodev wrote:
| There is also Reddit, Google... I mean, do we really need to
| list all the companies that need perpetual increase of
| "engagement" to power their business model?
| pyrale wrote:
| > tech is like humanity's one hope.
|
| It's funny, because despite constant warfare, plagues, nasty
| ideologies, etc. the last time at which mankind was basically
| guaranteed to endure was before the industrial use of tech.
| Since then we've had world wars, the atomic bomb and its scare,
| global warming, accelerated biodiversity collapse, and it seems
| we can't pass a new day without discovering a new things which
| we rely on that is endangered.
|
| Sure, I'm having lots of fun with tech, and I hope we can
| leverage it reasonably to improve our condition, but this
| technological religion that puts tech on a pedestal above
| critics really causes more harm than good. Many other
| technological advances that came before have required heavy
| regulation, and from the point of view of users, that evolution
| has been a progress rather than a regression.
| lclarkmichalek wrote:
| Bronze age collapse wasn't exactly great though.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Mankind will endure. Maybe in fewer numbers than today, but
| it's hard to imagine anything that would completely wipe out
| the human species worldwide, even if things collapse back to
| hunter-gatherer survival.
| bufio wrote:
| Prosperity?
| troupo wrote:
| > big tech is driving many of the technological advancements
| that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth
| to the world.
|
| Companies that actually do that are rarely _big_ tech. And Big
| Tech as term colloquially refers to Facebook, Google etc.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There are tons of educational videos on YouTube. And maybe
| Facebook too, or connections being made there, I don't use it
| though.
|
| Either way, I have learned how to do many things from
| watching instructional YouTube videos, and it does not seem
| anyone else has been able to make the economics work like
| Google has.
|
| Sure, there's bad too along with the good, and maybe the bad
| outweighs the good, although I would need convincing that is
| true.
| [deleted]
| politelemon wrote:
| Prosperity does not equate to betterment of humanity. The
| prosperity of concentrated to a small section of the
| population, at the expense of the majority.
|
| It is nowhere near the deliverer of hope you're making it out
| to be, it's an enabler of great negative paradigm shifts that
| is slowly starting to be recognised. Social media is starting
| to be recognised as a harm on society but slowly... It'll
| probably take a few decades for wide retrospective agreement
| (in other words when it's too late)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There are poor people in villages around the world that now
| have access to information they never would have been able to
| get had it not been for the development of smartphones, web
| browsers, the internet, and mobile networking technology.
|
| That is prosperity. It might not be perfect, yet, but it is
| in the right direction.
| [deleted]
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure the poor people in villages watching the
| world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and
| fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your
| notion of prosperity. That's why they're drowning en masse
| in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border,
| or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant
| detention facilities around the world. Because they're so
| "prosperous" now.
| pjscott wrote:
| Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a
| decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started
| plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here
| are some cheery graphs:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
|
| That doesn't mean that everyone is rich, but it is
| actually a _really big deal_. Next time you 're tempted
| to write a phrase like "watching the world becoming ever
| more desperate" when talking about poverty, please take a
| moment first to remember that the opposite is true.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| My point is exactly this misguided view of the world,
| that the global north can live lives of insane decadence,
| built on its history and continued plundering of the
| global south, while expecting them to find a reduction in
| extreme poverty as ameliorative. Your comment only
| reminds me that liberals are people who believe that
| luxury can exist without the suffering of others.
|
| There is no path in the current Capitalist world order
| that will allow for a rise in the global south to
| current, western levels of development. The resulting
| increase in labor and resource costs would face immediate
| armed confrontation from the global north, as already
| happened with the myriad US-backed military coups during
| the past century.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| I think your worldview has been poisoned too much by news
| and social media, which demonstrates exactly why I avoid
| it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You can also refer to "they" as the ones who now have
| access to more accurate information about their health,
| or weather, sex education, math, science, etc. There are
| 8 billion people in this world, surely there are a wide
| spectrum of experiences being lived.
| parentheses wrote:
| Prosperity gives access to more people. "Betterment of
| humanity" sounds like "human growth but by my own standards".
|
| Prosperity is what's made it possible for anyone to survive
| and have varying levels of access to thriving. Humanity is
| moving forward and we're figuring things out.
|
| Pointing at a big category of businesses to demonize them is
| not "betterment of humanity".
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