Has technology been progressing or regressing in the venture capitalist era, let's say the last 15 years?

I think it is clear that technology has had a net improvement on life in the Western world. I also think it’s clear that said improvements have come at varying levels of cost, some of which were unexpected and unanticipated.

Amend Wm. Gibson quote to "Improvement is here; it's just unevenly distributed"
Someone out there is getting their chronic disease gene-edited out. Meanwhile the average t-shirt turns into holey rags as if durable clothing was a lost art like smelting some feudal era katana.

software has gotten worse for sure

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Technology covers an enormous territory. For example, solar cells have become more efficient, more reliable, more available, and much cheaper. LED lighting is fantastically efficient.

Against those trends you can cite cryptocurrency mining and the proliferation of fucking enormous data centers that between them are driving electricity demand to where much new generating capacity is being squandered in pursuit of nonsensical and/or trivial activities.

On the whole it feels like for every step forward we take one step back. The most that can be said about technology is that it is churning the economy (and society) more rapidly than ever before, yet few people seem any happier for it.

i think this is a bad question for a few reasons. one of them is that people's answers always fall along the same basic lines. another is that 'technology' is always whisked away from the rest of the social apparatus. it makes me want to yell "TECH SERVES PEOPLE". not in the sense that it serves you and me, in the sense that society encompasses tech. tech serves and amplifies society. people now are increasingly pulled apart from each other and from the possibility of relating to each other because of material circumstances. so while driverless cars may bring a little bit of 'gee whiz' gloss that has been missing from tech for a while now, it has no bearing on quality of life separate from the ability to answer the question 'do people have the means to survive and/or thrive today.' and that question is actually answerable and the answer is, no, not as much as they did about 70 to 50 years ago.

there is a mirage element to tech that i think queer people especially fall for, and sometimes for the lucky few that mirage element becomes real and leads to a better life - emphasis on "few".

but to reiterate, the most pernicious thing about this question is how it completely shoves material reality, the economic circumstances of people, and class relations off the stage - when that is what should be center stage with tech a little anecdote on the side.

specific recent technological changes, especially in terms of media and communication technology, have been very bad. i am thinking of algorthimically driven social media, which i think is very clearly fueling mental illness by trapping people in solipsitic echo chambers. the scariest part of this is the fact that the most "engaging" content isn't even the most enjoyable. people are addicted to like anger chambers not happiness chambers.

but again, like map says, this isn't so much about the tech itself as the uses it is being put to. (addicting people in order to sell ads and gather data).

generative ai seems like the next big thing on the horizon and like algorithmic social media it seems like it is going to have bad effects. it is already undermining making my job as an english teacher almost impossible.

the most dystopian element of this thing, though, is that the people *selling* it are using scare tactics in their marketing, claiming it will elminate all white collar jobs by 2027 or whatever --- maybe even destroy humanity. i get why they are doing this. it makes their technology seem powerful and revolutionary. but it is very strange and also fills me with dread.

i think a part of what's happening that i don't see discussed often enough is we're running out of resources. i think that's why ai is kind of sticking in people's craws more than, like.. i don't know if this is the best example, but remember in the 2000s when tech was talking about putting everything "in the cloud"? that just sounded so effortless and magical! when what that really meant was "take files that you actually own in a material sense and give them to companies instead" which dovetailed with SaaS etc. which is a big part of the story of software becoming worse. i think that there is a primordial thing happening here where global capitalism is running out of resources, running out of frontiers to exploit, and so the capitalist class grows ever more brazen and desperate to 1) sustain growth, which increasingly means "steal shit from the public" and 2) try the same old tricks of "golly gee whiz bang gillakers" it always has to manufacture consent, which are starting to look more and more insane with every passing year. definitely from my pov but i think more and more people are sensing that too.

oh wait, we're not actually running out of resources - we just need to turn the whole world that isn't a city (1/3 urban theme park for the rich and 2/3 favela, sometimes on top of each other as in the case of san francisco) into an open mine pit and maybe we can keep this growth shit going for another 50 years barring a bloody mess in the global south that cuts off supply chains much earlier than that of course...

https://archive.ph/ip0Ga

Whether the tech is good or not isn't even the issue.

"The issue, he argued, is that a general partner at Sequoia "visibly entering the end-of-days culture wars as a pundit" indicates that Sequoia might not just be following the money. "He actually is saying out loud what is coalescing into a real capital structure." The sectors Maguire invested in — cyber, space, crypto, defense tech — are part of "this new military-industrial complex which Sequoia is very much in the middle of.""

lol I set this up to complete on my birthday, as a treat, what a fucking idiot, oh well. poll void.

It's not a new military-industrial complex. It's the same old one, pulling in new technology as the money bait. The main trick is to become the sole supplier of ultra-expensive mil-tech to the DoD or else one of a duopoly of suppliers. Once you've lined up the critical patents the rest falls into place pretty easily.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Fair and balanced. System reports. You decide.

lol I set this up to complete on my birthday, as a treat, what a fucking idiot, oh well. poll void.

― Proust Ian Rush (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, July 22, 2025 5:13 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Happy birthday!

i honestly wasn't expecting so many 'tech is shit' votes, wtg team.

0 techno utopians on this board now

xxp thank you! I am spending the day in London covering for a sick teacher, despite also being sick, thankfully tomorrow is a WFH day so I'll pretend it's then instead.