HN is the builder side of the conversation, and in my experience, few safety people congregate here.

The safety side of tech is a PTSD inducing shit show. Governments are more than happy to champion age verification laws, because parents, around the world, are clamoring for anything to pump the breaks on the social media experiment.

Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat.

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ang_cire 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Social media is old hat now.

As someone on the "safety side of tech", social media is being exploited to increase surveillance and government control precisely because its actual social influence is heavily on the wane, and capital is happy to sacrifice what's left to increase the profits of the expanding public/private tech surveillance industry (with "protect the children" controls on social media like age verification being the usual backdoor route it always is).

Society may be growing tired of Tech, but governments aren't, and in fact they're heavily expanding their back channel reliance on not-traditionally-military Tech as an extension of their Defense spending.

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intended 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Cyber security has the maturity that trust and safety hopes to achieve at some point.

Social media was being exploited from inception. Palantir had sales documents for sock puppet management software back in the PHP era.

I don’t disagree that Government is interested in tech, but I will push back on the dismissal of child safety that is inherent in your comment, intended or not.

For all that some people in the firm may have tried to do the right thing, Social media firms have created bad outcomes for children, and executives were briefed on the harms they were going to cause.

This is the dismissal that concerns me, because it ends up miscalculating the level of anger and unhappiness amongst the voting populace, and therefore the political will to pass regulation to reign tech in.

	▲	ang_cire 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The political will is already captured and redirected. There are numerous bills to limit AI access for consumers, to combat deepfakes hurting children. There are no bills introduced or passed to prevent AI being used to target dronestrikes that kill children abroad, or surveil children domestically. What the public wants doesn't actually matter right now, only what the government will allow to let pass, which in this case is additional internet surveillance. Under a future, better government this may change, but (sadly) nothing is going to sink tech's dominance right now. The anger and unhappiness against tech is good, and hopefully someday they'll burn down all the data centers and I'll never have to hear the words Cloud Computing again, but (to paraphrase a famous Eve Online interaction) it's not going to be today, and it's not going to be us.

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dofm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat.

I don't think anyone in tech is really truly engaging with how quickly the shine has come off the tech industry. Except maybe Apple, who even so still have some work to do.

	▲	malfist 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Technology and science is the intersection that is supposed to make our lives better, easier, more prosperous. The last decade or two what marvelous technology has came from silicon valley that hasn't served primarily the billionaire class and made life worse for the common people. The yoke of silicon valley is feeling heavy. People might just throw it off.

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thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat.

s/Tech/Tech Companies

Tech did it to themselves. People like and want technology. What they don't like and don't want more of is enshittified, user hostile technology. The answer is out there, but our collective school systems failed to teach computing irt free software/open source and instead schools themselves all bought in on enshittified, proprietary tech, or even just dumped trying to teach computing at all outside of "how to login to google classroom and google docs"

I grew up lucky, in that my dad was a dev, my first PC as a kid ran red hat, my high school had an intro to programming class (in BAISC lol). It shaped how I approached computing growing up, and my values. It makes me look at the things we have now and think "No, you're just repackaging community free software and selling it back to me, I'll pass on that."

That experience isn't available to anyone born after that specific era, instead their tech experience is shaped by walled gardens, vendor lock-in, and straight up hostile and manipulative software, so its no wonder they are tired of it. They don't even know a different world (of software) exists.