Majority of US teens have lost trust in Big Tech

It is incumbent upon those of us who want better to build companies that do not do this. You don't need to be a unicorn startup, you can be a small company that employs a small handful of like-minded individuals who want to build good products for people, who reject the ravenous growth machine that plagues tech today.

It is incredible how much unearned good will this generated over its lifespan.

Nowadays you could not get away with it. But once the meta shifts again there may be another timespan in which it is possible to run with it.

> Programmers don't fully control what they work on when employed by an entity seeking profits.

But they do tend to control what entity they are employed by, and sometimes what team within that entity they work for. Let's not defend programmers as helpless cogs who are forced by their evil managers to program bad things. We all have agency, even during bad hiring times and bear markets.

If my boss asked me to build the Torment Nexus, I'd resist up to and including quitting. A disappointingly high number of us wouldn't even put up a fight.

That's not true. The actual number for that question that said they would trust most/always is 23%.

You're just assuming there were only two options for that question and making up a number.

Yeah, I had to spend a bit of time inside to understand the process. I hope everyone knows about it now.

A majority of HN commenters believe the capitalist free market will shut down profitable products because it harms users.

This type of magical thinking is unfortunately endemic to humans

It's worse than that, if we're being entirely realistic most (all?) companies would kill you if they could profit from it.

Proof? Cigarette companies, Dupont, and others were happy to do that.

Believe it or not, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where Big Tech meant Microsoft selling boxed copies of MS Office at retailers, in exchange for money. And if the KKK happened to buy Microsoft Office to do their word processing - well, it's no different to them buying a typewriter.

If the KKK wanted to put their stuff online, it certainly wouldn't be hosted on Microsoft's website, surrounded by Microsoft branding and ads that pay Microsoft - there were no "platforms", they'd have to make their own HTML and upload it to their own hosting provider.

And the nearest thing to "Social Media" was hundreds of tiny phpBB forums, IRC channels and suchlike, administered by genuine human beings, and for minimal reward. Censorship meant blocking mentions of viagra and cialis, which everyone knew were obvious spam. You can't put profits before users when there aren't any profits. And of course the guy with ops in the #north-west-london-anime IRC channel is going to look out for the users, they're his buddies.

Algorithmic news feeds hadn't been invented; the front page of Slashdot was whatever CmdrTaco and Hemos decided to post. Clickbait? Ragebait? Parody story mistaken for real? Dupe of a story from yesterday? They just wouldn't post it, simple.

Into this unbelievable environment came a tech company whose goal was to "organise the world's information" with the guiding principle "don't be evil" and such was the hope and optimism at the time, people treated such claims as literally true.

Centralized media at least gives you an entity to rally behind or against. If a news network is pushing propaganda it's easier to say "this place is a problem". With social media it's much more nebulous. Opinions on the source of the problem range from the big tech companies, the algorithms, the concept of social media as a whole, foreign influences, etc.

> Instead, people are outsourcing their thinking to people like Joe Rogan and political YouTubers who exploit that cynicism for sponsorships, ad revenue and their own product lines.

Joe Rogan didn't lie us into a disastrous $6 trillion war that destabilized the middle east, created all sorts of knock-on consequences such as mass immigration into Europe from the Middle East that we're still living with two decades later. Joe Rogan didn't spend decades cheerleading immigration, outsourcing, and globalization policies most Americans never wanted (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...).

Joe Rogan is popular because people can tell that his gut instincts and general world view are consistent with their own, which makes them trust his takes. If your alternative to that is people who believe in their hearts that the U.S. should bring democracy and human rights to the world, or take on millions of immigrants, you'll never get peoples' trust, just as you probably wouldn't trust someone who thinks the rapture is coming soon.

Algorithmic feeds are pure poison for the mind.

But what might be even worse is headline reading. Like you don't read articles like you use to. People read the headlines which are rage bait and click bait. Realtime rage on "developing stories" than nothing when the boring conclusion is known weeks later. People are going insane.

The death of the boring news paper is about as a big problem as Instagram. Modern newspapers just plainly sucks and are mostly rehashes of agency news anyways.

I think we need to figuratively pull the plug on the internet. Like make it some sort of loser thing to be hooked on social media and light minded news.

https://youtu.be/Ho9M-q_kcn8

> stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered

--William F. Buckley Jr to Gore Vidal in 1968 on ABC television

Buckley also hosted a show on PBS at the time.

The internet makes you stupid.

The US might be much closer to an authoritarian lurch than 20 or 30 years ago, but don't romanticize the recent past. My understanding is that polls around the time of the Kent State massacre... Where unarmed students were shot in the back by the military for the crime if protesting the Vietnam war... had almost 50% of the population supporting the military and saying the kids had it coming. Nixon had tons of support right until he resigned. There was never any level of social cohesion, the divisions just hadn't metastasized yet

"The good old days" is a worn trope, but there may be a point.

Women's employment and/or compensation in the United States peaked approximately two decades ago, and has since declined. Xi Jingping wasn't China's dictator yet, so China was a bit more free. Crimea hadn't been annexed yet, and Russians had much more access to the internet. The alt-right was still in its infancy. Brexit hadn't happened yet.

Hence, when a British think tank claims freedom is falling across the world, I'm inclined to believe it. And levels of authoritarianism are inversely correlated with trust.

On the flipside, a whole generation of people across many of the poorest parts of the world have experienced increases of standards of living due to globalization.

The trust was built on basking in the glory of WW2's victory and fear of nuclear annihilation. Maybe part of it too was the quality of life for 80+% of the generation was better than their parents in clear ways beyond "our TVs are better."

The first two I'd like to avoid something analogous for a new order based on trust, but maybe the last one we can bring back if our leaders start to have a larger vision beyond focus on GDP, Stock Market returns, inflation, and unemployment rates.

I see what you see.

But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster.

Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.

Mostly I agree with you, but politicians should be insulted and ridiculed. I’ve had enough nauseating bipartisan back-slapping for one lifetime.

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  > It's the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.

Trust is a necessary part of a society. Trust, but verify. But you still need trust. Without trust, the burdens are far too great. The world is too complex for one man to know everything. We have so much information and there is so much to know, one man is unlikely to even truly know one thing. Look at those with PhDs for an example. How narrow the research is. How narrow their expertise is. Do one yourself and you'll see that there are deep rabbitholes even in what appears to be a very simple topic.

Trust has to be earned and kept. You can't force trust.

More important than mistrusting institutions is how you mistrust them. Understand their incentives, their patterns of behavior, their past actions, and hold them up against the theoretical ideals they set for themselves.

Far too often I see people mistrusting institutions on lazy, poorly thought out grounds - "government bad, regulations bad, taxes bad, press bad" etc and so forth.

> lockstep forward

Those words are the problem. Why even have a democratic system if everything is done in “lockstep”? Moreover, “forward” is a highly opinionated term.

Perhaps we can all, in lockstep, take a Great Leap Forward.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

You can move in lockstep with the mob if you like. I will scout ahead, and tell anyone openminded enough to listen, if there's a minefield or cliff coming up.

Agreed. For instance, 99% of people including myself cannot prove to themselves that vaccines are safe. The full explanation of vaccine safety down to the lowest level would be beyond my understanding. Trust in the authority figure is required.

> One of the big problems of the past was the insane level of trust in institutions that were at best credulous and more realistically just lying continuously and brazenly.

> It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.

The parent comment you are responding to is appropriately qualified, and you are throwing away that qualification. Trusting institutions that taking advantage of you to look out for your interests is worse than not trusting institutions at all (example: the institution of slavery, justified by racist pseudoscience, when you are not a protected class). Yes, the existence of institutions that can be trusted to look out for your interests (example: food safety regulators wrt. hygiene) is important, if that is what you are trying to say.

And when your lockstep forward = my lockstep backwards?

Lockstep is never a good thing. And institutions are absolutely not trustworthy.

Well, big tech companies are busy to push Andrew Tates of the world on kids accounts. If you open a new account for a young boy, algorithms will feed him Tate kind of philosophy in about a day.

Welcome to the shift show.

You can't trust anyone. No even yourself, since whether you are insane or not may not be solvable, though you can aim to remember that you couldn't know & stress less.

It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on!

Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow.

Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes.

Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it.

On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast.

Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim.

Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule?

Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition.

The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation.

To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.

I wouldn’t trust a poll published by Facebook or X about how popular they are either!

I trust them to deliver “a toaster” but, like, not necessarily the exact one I ordered, right? Either the one I ordered or a knock-off copycat that made it into the bin.

Ye. The surveyees (is that a word?) probably interpret the question very differently.

I mean up until 5 years ago I trusted Microsoft and Google to handle my mail, since I though I was too unimportant and it would to much of an effort to read my mails for them. But I in no way trusted them.

Concerning Amazon I guess most trust they will have their toaster. Like the same question about Walmart would be about food safety and quality.

Not corporate culture or long term political influence.

> they tell me how difficult it is to navigate the modern world without them - doctor offices who want to send a text or MFA or the like.

But that just requires any cellphone that can text, and cell phones have been common for 25 years. Are there some specific examples of where you have to have a smartphone?

And completely ignoring my second link. No one is forced to be on social media.

yeah i hate when i have to IG dm my doctor for an appointment

A very smug comic.

It misses 2 main points:

1. The system we have seems to have done a pretty good job, since people are choosing its products, rather than products created by another system.

2. A lot of people will rarely make a larger sacrifice than maybe quitting Twitter for a while despite spending a huge amount of time trying to preach to other people about how important their cause is. Which makes it seem like the noises they make are often just posturing.

To be fair, the mid 00's was the transition time from the open web to the platform times we live in now. There was no immediate reason to distrust a social media site based on the social media sites that had come before it. After all, you were just writing inside jokes on each other's wall at the time, before News Feed.

I think your perspective may have been different if you grew up seeing it weaponized and your data constantly being stolen

Well, back when drug use only affected “the inner city” the country use to say it’s because of lack of morals, not putting God first and “absentee fathers”.

There is a revealed preferences of use vs non use.

You can only reveal a preference among available choices. A closeup magician can show you a deck of cards, get you to pick one, and it will be his choice of card not yours.

Is anyone forced to use social media?

What percentage of Meta or Google do you suppose is actually working on technology?

Yeah sure they have little moonshot side projects involving quantum computing or whatever, but data centers and surveillance and browser malware has all been around for decades. They've been moving the needle hardly any all.

These are ad companies, or propaganda companies, or attention companies. They have malicious intent, and calling them technology companies confuses people into thinking that technology itself has malicious intent.

I didn't forget. That was just PR.

at the time they were the underdogs, even after they reached massive success... they were making data widely available and free and easy to find! this upset so many traditional industries

now that they're at the top — they vacuum all the data up, give you shit results, and sell more data than you probably even know about yourself to advertisers