Never Forgive Them

Zitron is pretty unforgiving in this excellent essay. I think I am even less forgiving though. He thinks that the current state of what he calls The Rot Economy has sort of emerged out of the pursuit of infinite growth that drives all modern companies and especially tech companies. I am not sure that is the whole story. If this year has revealed anything about the tech billionaires it is that they have a very specific philosophy other than just growth and that philosophy is malicious.

Not only do many tech leaders seem to hold this very malicious philosophy, they also seem determined to spread it, to convert people. I suspect it would be giving them too much credit to assume they are smart enough to build that into the design of their products, but it is a mindset they cultivate, and encourage in subordinates, and that shapes these products in very specific ways that aim not just towards growth, but very specific types of growth with specific conditions and considerations about the user.

We can see it, most recently, in the discovery that OpenAI defines Artificial General Intelligence (the sci-fi, it is basically a person, kind) as when the system can earn $100 billion dollars. This isn't accidental but a sort of judgement call on how these companies think about intelligence. It's the same as prosperity gospel Christians. If making money is good then it is good to make money therefore the person who makes the most money must be the most good. This is the tech billionaire philosophy: if smart people make money then making money means you are smart, therefore the people with the most money are the smartest and therefore they should be in charge.

When you approach technology with a boss who has this mindset and pushes it on to the people who are under him (it is pretty much always a him), and all the way down the chain people are hearing this philosophy, it informs how products are designed.

Zitron talks about how apps are infested with "growth hacks" as part of this rot. But rot happens when you leave food out to long.

Rot happens by accident. I don't believe the current conditions are accidental.

I don't think we can really take on the obstacle of, let's call it more accurately, the scam economy without acknowledging this is all part of the design. They think they are richer than you and therefore you must be stupid and because you are stupid you should be controlled, you should be squeezed for dollars like a cow udder squeezed for milk.

The design of tech coming out of modern tech companies isn't just squeezing you for maximum growth with all the downstream effects. It doesn't respect you. It hates you. It thinks you deserve to be controlled because the people in leadership of big tech companies think they should be in charge.

Don't forgive them for letting the internet rot under the leadership they think they deserve to have.

It isn't just a cancerous philosophy of growth directing tech companies to produce these anti-user products, it is also a philosophy of control. It is because the tech billionaires, and their hanger-ons and wannabes, think that because you aren't as wealthy as they are you are less than human.

Don't forgive them for believing that you are not worthy of respect and designing software with that principle.

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.