This is the type of comment that makes you look either like a privileged elite that is part of Big Tech, or just a clueless moron whose day at the barrel is yet to come.
Do you really need a list of ways how Big Tech has harmed society? If things like "Surveillance Capitalism" is not enough, maybe:
- the collapse of quality journalism, because SEO and content farms made impossible to maintain a financially sustainable team of independent reporters?
- The absolute destruction of people's ability to read a piece of text for longer than 15 seconds?
- The mental health crisis in teens and even young adults caused by social media?
- Planned obsolescence and the removal of our right to repair things on our own?
- The normalization of the "gig economy" not just for young kids who are looking for some extra cash, but as the main source of income for grown up adults, with actual families to support?
- (Google and Facebook mostly) adopting the absolutely anti-competitive practice of "when we get a competitor, we buy them out as early as possible or just keep offering our stuff for free until they eventually run out of money"?
- Apple outright refusing to let people install alternative app stores, because they know that without this artificial scarcity they would not be worth 1/10th of what they are today?
I'm not in SV and was trying to think of ways it had harmed me personally.
I haven't really been affected by any of the above. Maybe the app store thing a bit as I wrote an app and dealing with Apple was hard work. But then I wouldn't have been able to make an app without some company making the device for me to do it on.
Re society, I grew up pre internet and I'd say there are pros and cons. On the plus side you have access to the world's information and video and text communication for free across the planet which you didn't have before. On the minus side that's led to people spending a lot of time staring at their devices and less interacting with each other. Nothing's perfect I guess.
> I wouldn't have been able to make an app without some company making the device for me to do it on.
If you are not asking yourself why should you need to ask permission to develop an app, I'm sorry but you are lost beyond repair. Stockholm's Syndrome is real.
> If you are not asking yourself why should you need to ask permission to develop an app, I'm sorry but you are lost beyond repair
We should get out of our bubbles…and make transportation decisions…based on our preferences as developers. Mobile app developers. We’re in the SV bubble…
Their side is benefiting a lot more than ours, and the few benefits that we might end up seeing come with a good amount of harm inflicted by them.