Why we hate the tech industry even though we love tech
So many of us love tech yet have fallen out of love with the companies which comprise the tech industry.
But how can that be?
Data
We're tired of tech companies exploiting our data.
'If you're not paying for the product, then you're the product' suggests you stop being a product once you start paying, but that's not always true. Often, we're paying to be the product as the tech companies mine and store our data. What are they doing with that data? What information is within that data? How secure is it? What happens to that data if the tech company shuts its doors?
Bricked products
Our tech products need to be separated from the companies themselves as much as possible. The tech companies should do as much as they can to limit the number of products that go offline if a tech vendor goes out of business.
For an example of what I mean, look at Fisker EVs, which are basically the largest and most expensive paperweights of all time, as they can't be used now that the manufacturer has filed for bankruptcy. To make matters worse, the cars can't even be ported to a new server.
This story shows one of the major flaws of SaaSification, as the SaaS model keeps tech products and services tied to the tech vendors.
DRM
DRM (digital rights management) via services like Kindle and Steam ensures you don't own media—you own only a license with little recourse if that license is revoked by the other party. (The tech vendor can likely remove the licensed product from your gadget without your knowledge.)
Right to repair
The right to repair the products you buy is increasingly at risk.
Apple has a long history of fighting right to repair. Then they endorsed it. Then they backtracked.
Even farmers aren't safe as John Deere made sure users couldn't repair their tractors without going through the approved channels. Farmers appear to have the right to service their own equipment for the time being, but who knows how long that'll last.
What are the implied rights of ownership? What rights do you enjoy, and which can you exercise?
These are only a few of the reasons people are now disenchanted with tech and are now skeptical of anything the industry is peddling.
At the end of the 20th century and early into the 21st, we fell in love with tech due to two chief promises: convenience and productivity.
On one hand, tech delivered in terms of convenience. But convenience didn't benefit only the user. It also benefitted the tech companies as new services made it more convenient to spy on customers and extract and exploit their data. If anything, gathering all that data made it easier for the tech companies to inconvenience us with wave after wave of personalized distraction.
But did tech make us more productive? That claim is called into question by assertions that the tech revolution increased productivity by only 0.5%.
And don't forget the promise of the cloud, which proposed simplifying operations by letting businesses outsource their tech infrastructure rather than maintaining it themselves. But more and more businesses are asking if the move off-site was worth it.
And now the tech industry insists we all need Generative AI. Don't get left behind, they tell us, but it's unclear what we're missing out on by refusing to adopt their over hyped, half-baked 'solutions'. Why should we trust tech when they say there's something for us to gain? For the companies rushing out to fuse generative AI into their processes, what's the total cost? What liabilities are they opening themselves up for? How will businesses stand out from their competitors while they're all using the same technology?
This criticism is not a call for Ludditism. It's not a call to go back to the 'good old days', back when mobile phones were in big bags and had to be plugged into your car's cigarette lighter port and cost $4 a minute to use. This criticism is instead a plea for the tech industry to work harder to deliver on more of its promises and stop certain practices (like the misuse of our data), which make our relationship with tech so adversarial.
Not so long ago, tech was fun and exciting and full of such potential. But it now feels like an industry devoid of any good ideas.
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