Falling out of love
Dear visitor,
You must be so tired of coming here. Every post is the same cynical view about technology. Where's the joy? Where's the love? Where's the wonder of future-thinking companies and clever people doing wondrous things?
Where indeed.
I read an article over the weekend about how Amazon's sales strategies are becoming increasingly cynical. Aha! I thought. Another example for the wondrous museum of technological cynicism on ben daubney dot com! But it's an article about how a successful retailer gets sales. It's depressing, sure, but it's a company being a company. Why the need to catalogue it?
What struck me while reading that article was the final two paragraphs:
Do you love Amazon anymore? For that matter, do you love Facebook, Google, or Twitter? Interactions like the one I’ve detailed above are starting to chip away at that presumption. Personally, I’ve gone from cheerleader to skeptic over the past few years, and I’m broken out into full-blown critic over the last twelve months. I no longer trust Amazon to have my best interests at heart. I’ve lost any trust that Facebook or Twitter can deliver me a public square representative of my democracy. I’ve given up on Google delivering me search results that are truly “organic.” And YouTube? Point solution, at best. I can’t possibly trust the autoplay feature to do much more than waste my time.I feel precisely the same. I remember excitedly ordering difficult to find albums on Amazon back in 1999. I remember how astonishing Google was compared to Yahoo, and later on how much free space was given for free with Gmail. I urged friends and family to take up tweeting. Technology seemed like a cheerful force for good.What’s happened to our beloved tech icons, and what are the implications of this lost trust?
I stopped using Amazon some time around 2012 when I noticed every other online retailer starting to close. Since then I've moved away from every major platform, though admittedly Twitter's been tough to ignore.
Something feels wrong. It's not that control of important things is in the wrong hands, more that there's no sense of what those important things actually are. Twitter's not suppressing hate speech or effectively preventing the platform being gamed by malicious actors. Google's given up any pretence of not being evil. Amazon is the de facto online marketplace and can crush any company who dares to stand up to it. And this is excused as creating better market share, having more monthly active users, better value for shareholders.
But undoubtedly, unquestionably, they're creating a worse society. We're being divided and we're being conquered. We're being examined, quantified, and gamed.
I am out of love with what the web has become.
But I am not alone.
This week, the World Wide Web Foundation launched a new campaign. For The Web aims to make a universal contract for the web, making sure it's open, accessible, and safe. Services like the wonderful Protonmail are built around being what something like Gmail is not - it's email that's yours and yours alone. Journalists and even technologists are sceptical about where we are and where we're going. Hell, even Apple's introduced tools to stop users from staring at their phones too much.
There are dissenting voices, and they're starting to get through. They're kicking against the orthodoxy and it's far from certain they'll get through. It's easy for me to be cynical and out of love, but it feels like there's a shred of optimism.
I think it's right to point out what's going wrong, but I'm nowhere near as positive and optimistic as I should be. There are good voices, and I want to highlight more of them.