If you are actually looking for an article on "How the Tech World Turned Evil", you are going to be sorely disappointed.
This article is, as you might expect, the usual cast of villains and the usual cast of saviors. The villains only act like villains, and the heroes only act like heroes. Never once are the heroes actions suspect, and never once are the villains actions sympathetic.
If you support the heroes of this article, and your dopamine lights up when your opinions are echoed in a publication, then you may love this article. Having said that, I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
> I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
Is it possible that we read it so often because it's obvious and undeniable?
In fairness, I do agree with your assessment that the moralizing of figures like Musk and Zuckerberg has gotten old. But it's old because we've been criticizing them for years and nobody responds. Elon and Mark are net-negative fraudsters that manage to stay liquid by spiting humanity. They do not bristle at the thought of invading your privacy, surveilling you or deceiving you through complex marketing campaigns. We have seen the same behavior from Nadella, Pichai, Cook and just about every other executive capable of redirecting their respective business.
In the interest of discussion, I'd challenge you to defend this trend instead of downplaying it. Why shouldn't we prosecute anticompetitive and misanthropic market abuses? Help me understand the sympathetic angle.
I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it, which the article promises but doesn't deliver.
To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece. The article lays out clearly the negative desires of the villains, and the positive desires of the heroes, but do the heroes have any negative aspects? Does the EU simply want to protect consumers or is there an argument that they are the law to unfairly targeting American companies? What about the villains, do they have any positive aspects? Does Musk want humanity to keep existing to the point where he is willing to put capital on the line to give our species a backup planet?
The point of this comment isn't to defend the villains or vilify the heroes, its to recognise that these issues are not simple as defined by the article, and in presenting them as simple you don't end up with an understanding of the core question: "How the Tech World Turned Evil".
> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.
I disagree.
To properly understand this, you need to focus not on the specific people who happen to have ended up on top of it, but the systems that enabled them to get there.
And to (probably over-)simplify it for the sake of a short post, I believe the root cause is in Ronald Reagan's deregulation and gutting of antitrust. With a robust antitrust regime through the '80s and '90s, we would not have had the kind of tech behemoths we did then, leading to the unstoppable tech juggernauts of today.
> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.
The possibility of EU betrayal or Musk's saviourdom is speculative, and also entirely subjective as to whether you think it's fair or righteous. I don't think either of those topics could be meaningfully explored to explain resentment towards American tech.
Consumers do not evaluate businesses with a reciprocal mentality, they don't need an absolute good to identify evil. This is a pretty poorly-written article that would not be improved with both-sidesing.
The irony of tech is that reducing friction (such as the Internet making it easy to go to one provider or another) also makes it easy to go straight to the “best”.
By being consistently 0.1% better in the early days, many of these companies earned themselves an unassailable lead. Why go to the little guy when the big guy is big and safe and familiar (yes we at HN don’t operate this way; we aren’t normies and are a minority so we don’t hold sway en masse)
Thanks to a lot of hard work to make great products, big tech has (earned!) market power but still has a mandate from shareholders - and even if not legally required via fiduciary duty it IS the current culture - to find growth at all cost.
When there’s no growth to be had by being nice, but you’re still being told to grow.. well, yeah.
Seems like they mostly stayed the same, just media perception changed once they realized it's more profitable to hate on tech, and safer than hating on established bad industries like Oil and Gas, malpractice in farming, corruption and fraud in politics, whatever is going on in the medical industry.
Not as much as the article (and especially headline) suggest. It most certainly hasn't been frozen in time but I'd wager there are more people trying to use tech to make the world a better place now than ever before (though there has been a massive influx of people who make almost no attempt).
In my experience tech changed the way it is displayed in this article. Tech products really degraded in the past year.
YouTube is now unwatchable because of ads every 4-5 minutes, google search is similarly un-usable (I switched to Bing and it is ok for now, but if it gets worse I already know its replacement).
I used to love using Excel-it is now unusable as well (I switched to libreOffice on my work computer where I get Excel for free).
I am typing this on my iPad and how I regret inadvertently “upgrading” to Liquid Glass.
My family still watches Netflix but I stopped and the alternative is, well, you can probably guess what it is.
My next project is installing Linux on my Windows desktop.
All of this in 2025/2026. For me 2025 was the end of an era.
Industrial empires naturally have this tendency, once their power level is putting them in the same playground as small states, they become different entities, fighting for their own survival.
The concentration of power of bureaucratic structures, no matter their nature, will always be in tension with individual freedom.
This is exactly why I don't understand the libertarian right in the US. Large corporations are just as capable of the unaccountable abuses that large governments are.
How can anyone look through that list of the author's articles and voluntarily choose to consume this author's writing? It's nothing but partisan extremism.
My uninformed opinion of it all is that certain companies have been blessed or anointed by the intelligence agencies for many decades and they've been acting on their behalf every since. Google, Apple, Amazon, Reddit, Microsoft, Elon's stuff, the Telcos and so on. Backdoors, direct access and so on. Same for all the major crypto on/off ramps.
It's not uninformed, you're just working with what you've got. Snowden credibly condemned American tech businesses as being conjoined at the hip with the NSA, without exposing all of the blackmail material that the fed had on them. It's overwhelmingly likely that their relationship has only deepened, we've seen no evidence that FAANG is serious about detaching itself from US influence.
10 years ago you'd probably hear some spiel about Bitlocker being "safe enough", or the iPhone's many virtues as a private enclave. Fast-forward to today, and it's hard to see American tech as benign.
> The slow death of journalism and consequent dumbing down of the electorate are largely the fault of Section 230
What? The death of print journalism seems to have been due to craigslist killing classified ads and google/doubleclick (and the rest of awful web advertising) killing magazine ads.
The comment about dumbing down the electorate is interesting. How is this measured over time, and according to that measurement how has it varied?
They still are bringing power to the people. Including people like Musk on this list is frankly ridiculous. Sure the man has issues, but before his takeover of X, it was impossible to say anything online without threats of government intervention for 'wrongspeak'. Yes yes yes, I know there still are government threats for wrongspeak with the new administration, but luckily, no one is going to take down your post right now
They still are bringing power to the people. It just turns out a lot of the media types don't really like the people. And honestly, I can't really blame them... a lot of people are awful. However, if you claim to want to return power to the people, then you should want to return it to all people. Otherwise, just be honest and admit you're a believe in oligarchy and aristocracy -- there is nothing wrong with that; most countries are aristocracies.
Dubai has cracked down on anyone reporting damage in the city from the war with Iran. That incident about their "7 star" hotel being hit is being played as "minor damage". That the hotel has now closed for an 18-month renovation is just coincidental. Trump keeps trying to sue media organizations. He's trying to prosecute a member of the U.S. Senate for insisting that US troops obey US laws of war. China has severe Internet censorship, of course. So does Russia, although it's less well organized.
If you are actually looking for an article on "How the Tech World Turned Evil", you are going to be sorely disappointed.
This article is, as you might expect, the usual cast of villains and the usual cast of saviors. The villains only act like villains, and the heroes only act like heroes. Never once are the heroes actions suspect, and never once are the villains actions sympathetic.
If you support the heroes of this article, and your dopamine lights up when your opinions are echoed in a publication, then you may love this article. Having said that, I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
> I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
Is it possible that we read it so often because it's obvious and undeniable?
In fairness, I do agree with your assessment that the moralizing of figures like Musk and Zuckerberg has gotten old. But it's old because we've been criticizing them for years and nobody responds. Elon and Mark are net-negative fraudsters that manage to stay liquid by spiting humanity. They do not bristle at the thought of invading your privacy, surveilling you or deceiving you through complex marketing campaigns. We have seen the same behavior from Nadella, Pichai, Cook and just about every other executive capable of redirecting their respective business.
In the interest of discussion, I'd challenge you to defend this trend instead of downplaying it. Why shouldn't we prosecute anticompetitive and misanthropic market abuses? Help me understand the sympathetic angle.
I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it, which the article promises but doesn't deliver.
To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece. The article lays out clearly the negative desires of the villains, and the positive desires of the heroes, but do the heroes have any negative aspects? Does the EU simply want to protect consumers or is there an argument that they are the law to unfairly targeting American companies? What about the villains, do they have any positive aspects? Does Musk want humanity to keep existing to the point where he is willing to put capital on the line to give our species a backup planet?
The point of this comment isn't to defend the villains or vilify the heroes, its to recognise that these issues are not simple as defined by the article, and in presenting them as simple you don't end up with an understanding of the core question: "How the Tech World Turned Evil".
> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.
I disagree.
To properly understand this, you need to focus not on the specific people who happen to have ended up on top of it, but the systems that enabled them to get there.
And to (probably over-)simplify it for the sake of a short post, I believe the root cause is in Ronald Reagan's deregulation and gutting of antitrust. With a robust antitrust regime through the '80s and '90s, we would not have had the kind of tech behemoths we did then, leading to the unstoppable tech juggernauts of today.
> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.
The possibility of EU betrayal or Musk's saviourdom is speculative, and also entirely subjective as to whether you think it's fair or righteous. I don't think either of those topics could be meaningfully explored to explain resentment towards American tech.
Consumers do not evaluate businesses with a reciprocal mentality, they don't need an absolute good to identify evil. This is a pretty poorly-written article that would not be improved with both-sidesing.
The irony of tech is that reducing friction (such as the Internet making it easy to go to one provider or another) also makes it easy to go straight to the “best”.
By being consistently 0.1% better in the early days, many of these companies earned themselves an unassailable lead. Why go to the little guy when the big guy is big and safe and familiar (yes we at HN don’t operate this way; we aren’t normies and are a minority so we don’t hold sway en masse)
Thanks to a lot of hard work to make great products, big tech has (earned!) market power but still has a mandate from shareholders - and even if not legally required via fiduciary duty it IS the current culture - to find growth at all cost.
When there’s no growth to be had by being nice, but you’re still being told to grow.. well, yeah.
> When there’s no growth to be had by being nice, but you’re still being told to grow.. well, yeah.
Don't be evil sets a limit to growth.
Seems like they mostly stayed the same, just media perception changed once they realized it's more profitable to hate on tech, and safer than hating on established bad industries like Oil and Gas, malpractice in farming, corruption and fraud in politics, whatever is going on in the medical industry.
You really don't think the tech industry has changed?
Not as much as the article (and especially headline) suggest. It most certainly hasn't been frozen in time but I'd wager there are more people trying to use tech to make the world a better place now than ever before (though there has been a massive influx of people who make almost no attempt).
In my experience tech changed the way it is displayed in this article. Tech products really degraded in the past year.
YouTube is now unwatchable because of ads every 4-5 minutes, google search is similarly un-usable (I switched to Bing and it is ok for now, but if it gets worse I already know its replacement).
I used to love using Excel-it is now unusable as well (I switched to libreOffice on my work computer where I get Excel for free).
I am typing this on my iPad and how I regret inadvertently “upgrading” to Liquid Glass.
My family still watches Netflix but I stopped and the alternative is, well, you can probably guess what it is.
My next project is installing Linux on my Windows desktop.
All of this in 2025/2026. For me 2025 was the end of an era.
Try Kagi for a search engine. It is a small monthly fee. But so worth it.
If you look at an individual like Mark Zuckerberg, the media reputation went all the way from heroic savior, to fairly negative.
I'm sure they've changed as a person, given the amount of time that has passed, but I don't feel their behavior has changed that dramatically.
Industrial empires naturally have this tendency, once their power level is putting them in the same playground as small states, they become different entities, fighting for their own survival.
The concentration of power of bureaucratic structures, no matter their nature, will always be in tension with individual freedom.
This is exactly why I don't understand the libertarian right in the US. Large corporations are just as capable of the unaccountable abuses that large governments are.
Well, you don't have to be Stallman to have seen this coming. Or did anyone seriously think that this time it will be different?
The accompanying artwork is really something: https://images.newrepublic.com/580ae26a8830e8fa8f2f054ca3232...
https://newrepublic.com/authors/timothy-noah
How can anyone look through that list of the author's articles and voluntarily choose to consume this author's writing? It's nothing but partisan extremism.
An article with this title needs only three words in the body: Too much money.
My uninformed opinion of it all is that certain companies have been blessed or anointed by the intelligence agencies for many decades and they've been acting on their behalf every since. Google, Apple, Amazon, Reddit, Microsoft, Elon's stuff, the Telcos and so on. Backdoors, direct access and so on. Same for all the major crypto on/off ramps.
Once you start to have a large influence on the world, people come knocking.
This really is the crux of it. If democracy rules, then power lies with the demos and by extension controlling their windows to the world.
It's not uninformed, you're just working with what you've got. Snowden credibly condemned American tech businesses as being conjoined at the hip with the NSA, without exposing all of the blackmail material that the fed had on them. It's overwhelmingly likely that their relationship has only deepened, we've seen no evidence that FAANG is serious about detaching itself from US influence.
10 years ago you'd probably hear some spiel about Bitlocker being "safe enough", or the iPhone's many virtues as a private enclave. Fast-forward to today, and it's hard to see American tech as benign.
> The slow death of journalism and consequent dumbing down of the electorate are largely the fault of Section 230
What? The death of print journalism seems to have been due to craigslist killing classified ads and google/doubleclick (and the rest of awful web advertising) killing magazine ads.
The comment about dumbing down the electorate is interesting. How is this measured over time, and according to that measurement how has it varied?
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They still are bringing power to the people. Including people like Musk on this list is frankly ridiculous. Sure the man has issues, but before his takeover of X, it was impossible to say anything online without threats of government intervention for 'wrongspeak'. Yes yes yes, I know there still are government threats for wrongspeak with the new administration, but luckily, no one is going to take down your post right now
They still are bringing power to the people. It just turns out a lot of the media types don't really like the people. And honestly, I can't really blame them... a lot of people are awful. However, if you claim to want to return power to the people, then you should want to return it to all people. Otherwise, just be honest and admit you're a believe in oligarchy and aristocracy -- there is nothing wrong with that; most countries are aristocracies.
> it was impossible to say anything online without threats of government intervention for 'wrongspeak'
[citation fucking needed]
Dubai has cracked down on anyone reporting damage in the city from the war with Iran. That incident about their "7 star" hotel being hit is being played as "minor damage". That the hotel has now closed for an 18-month renovation is just coincidental. Trump keeps trying to sue media organizations. He's trying to prosecute a member of the U.S. Senate for insisting that US troops obey US laws of war. China has severe Internet censorship, of course. So does Russia, although it's less well organized.