Reflections on Big Tech

> ...How many hours do you spend staring at a screen, looking at something on the internet? I’m guessing countless hours. Maybe double-digit hours in some cases. It’s not your fault.

> ...We are slaves to a system we didn’t create.

> ...I don’t know how much of this is a technology problem versus a people problem, but what I do feel is that something needs to change.

> I don’t know if Big Tech will ever change. I think we will continue to see these empires rise. We will continue to see the likes of OpenAI and others fight for our attention. But it’s our attention, and we can take it back.

As the attention economy rolls on, a theme I'm noticing pop up more often is that some folks seem to be uncomfortable with the choices others make.

If we're talking about adults, these adults have the choice to engage in social media and other things that consume attention. Just like folks are allowed to eat however much legally obtained food that they want.

What are we going to do, tell Americans how much TV they can watch, books they can read, or little screens they can look at?

We've been "wasting" time for a long time. There's nothing new here. It's just a higher magnitude of the same concept.

Americans want to look a little screens.

Big tech in this sense is just giving the people what they want.

The best thing I think we could do at this point is introduce legislation that would gradually make advertising online illegal. Unfortunately, I don't foresee that ever happening.

This hits hard:

> We are slaves to a system we didn’t create. Yet I’m here to tell you, it’s our duty to do something about it. Life isn’t about endlessly scrolling X, TikTok, or whatever else holds your attention. There is real purpose to this life. And part of that purpose is for us to rectify a wrong when we see it. A lot has happened in the past two years. A lot has happened in the past decade. But what’s really become clear to me is, we can’t keep letting ourselves be beholden to these things that are just corporations feeding off our attention to make money. There is a justification that they are building technology that helps humanity, and yet all I see is massive levels of addiction, inequality, and unhappiness. We are depressed. We are in a horrible state. We are as far from what it means to be human as we can be.

"Old man yells at cloud".

Information distribution on the web still mostly works. We have no good way left to do discovery. Classic search has been overwhelmed by SEO and promoted links. Social media is feeds of what someone wants you to see, and social media operators now have more agendas than they used to. There's government pressure in different directions from different governments. The federation people can't get cross-site discovery to work well. LLMs are vulnerable to both SEO and new kinds of attacks.

I give more of my attention than I'd like to admit to Twitter these days. But before that it was Hacker News, and before that it was Reddit, and before that it was Digg + Gawker-family blogs like Lifehacker.

I think the impulse to scroll is a feature of my own psychology, not something inculcated in me by Tech, and small web properties with simple feed algorithms are capable of feeding it perfectly well, often better than Big Tech and its data science armies.