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Epic games beat Google and the state of big tech adulation
Last night, I saw the news of Epic Games beating Google over their anti-competitive, so Apple-like rule for skimming 30 percent of all in-app purchases. I won't describe the finer points, I am not a lawyer, never good to misrepresent things. There is an almost rosy perception of big tech online, partly because they have cannibalised and own all of the internet. There are beliefs about finance wagies being soulless ghouls who do it for a quick buck, but hey, not our tech bros, they fight the good fight.
Lets look at some of them, I dont even need to write much about them, apple is against your right to repair or use a decent os like a linux distro over whatever garbage they mandate in their walled gardens, microsoft will cannabalise games and has anti trust lawsuits before, google wants to be apple going by this lawsuit and meta, despite making something far less useful than any of these has been involved with literal spyware app, now offering billions for vaporware, whose revenue might as well be less than the total comp llm engineers make.
I get that rationalists are based in SV. You can go on Hacker News and see people posting accounts of x founder being better than y, how Steve Jobs was a hero, even though his daughter's book would have you want him banished, given the extent of abuse. Power/status/money corrupts, I get the drill, what I do not get is the level of adulation people have for firms, founders, products, and services. We have entered into a territory where financial houses are worried about the AI bubble bursting since most of ChatGPT's revenue is still paid users, not api calls. For the layman, API call revenue is a business using ChatGPT's service for their own product that a supposed consumer will pay for, vs paid users, which is you paying them 20 dollars a month. I post this not to chide LLMs, which are a good piece of tech, the internet was great, even though dot com bubble happened, however, we walked into this one way faster for technology that demands money anytime you scale up, though I will leave the bizarre spending decision to a later thread.
Paul Graham, the old wholesome man of the internet, writes glowing essays that are mostly truthful whilst laundering the reputation of these people. Google/Meta/Apple/ whatever is amazing. Here is my account of their hard-working, smart founder who fought evil incumbents, deliberately ignoring the inescapable spyware we are forced to deal with. The internet is worse now than 15 years ago, increasing numbers of smaller entities get bought off to create this monopolistic hellscape, where the people who hurt you are shown as benevolent people who create value. Not against startups, I am not a communist, this is not a post out of envy.
Last night, I tried deleting my Snapchat account. Well, once you click on delete my account, it shows you a bullshit error and makes you try again after three days, just that the error never gets resolved. Snapchat does not even have a customer care email; the only way to raise a ticket is to dm them on Twitter, get them to send you a custom url and hope that they actually generate a real ticket.
There are no real heroes; we have mostly choices between competing factions of shades of black, all of whom have grown so large that they are competing with each other despite starting off in different industries. The worst part is that they have zero power beyond what the zeitgeist tells them. Zuckerberg flips between a guy who loves China and a libertarian nerd hero. Investors on Twitter suddenly discovered the truth of 2010s Republicanism, and some Sam Hyde references were added to not seem totally fake. Israel exists to serve Israelis, the British Empire existed for Britain, and these firms don't even have any loyalty. The UK recently started an age verification for internet usage that these people complied with.
Politicians are usually seen as ruthless, evil people, which they are in every case. I am not here to cry about "libs are silent" but for the valley champions, there are many who have similar inklings that get quashed by media brainwashing. My writings skills are pedestrian on my best day, seeing the rot of what I was told to admire would have helped me.
All big tech is evil. Monopolies are bad; they are amazing if you are a founder. I would love to start one and get an exit, it would still be a bad deal for society. Rationalists online, there are plenty I see over on ssc and even at times on sneerclub who are pro some xyz founder. I would be wary; Stallman's criticisms are correct in most cases for these services. I do not have to agree with his communism to see the presience in his warnings, the same way I do not have to be a white nationalist to see why people take issues with east asians posting dinner table photos bragging about their college degrees.
Edit - will add links
I don't disagree with anything you've said. In fact, I would have thought that "big tech is evil" is pretty much conventional wisdom - though that might be a product of the circles I move in. Nonetheless I would be shocked if most people on the Motte have positive opinions of Google, Meta, or Apple.
Thankfully, they do not, writing is a way to mke things more concise, I wish to give a summary of how prevalent it is as the dark patterns keep getting shoved more and the states battle out to make it harder for you to have any freedom. I had a very positive view of the tech world whilst growing up since my dad's students were engineers, over time I saw the entire field shift from a sort of change from the old world to more normified conultant like existence.
Rats are people who matter. Scott and co hang out with such kinds regularly, the thing is that big tech is unfortunately worse than we think. A very good friend of mine said that these are empires of the New World that are unmatched by any of the past, as they have no boundaries. I disagree, they also have no values or things they protect beyond whatever the nation they try to leech off of them recommends to them. Zuckerberg is just as powerless in front of XI as you or I. I have long had this hypothesis that large valuations have made the internet and computers or related things, worse since they inflate the senses of the people who work on them. He may be super rich, his kids may move in better circles, but he is still not sovereign. In a wierd way, you are less sovereign, you can only get hurt in bad ways and never get away with doing anything that the cathedral does not want.
Stallman did the FOSS thing because he stood for something. Indian undergrads paste AI code in GSoC because they want an internship; it is not wrong to want a job. I do not want everything to be just seen as an aid for that thing. East Asians and Indians also grind out Olympiads to get better, more prestigious degrees, even though these are exams that should be left for those who really like math. Programmers were better when this profession was low status, people who did it because they liked it. Now its just a means to make a firm that might make you rich, it usually does not solve real problems or advance the world in a good direction.
Most people my age instead idolise a lot of the people who founded these firms, as they won, even if it meant the world taking a loss. I draw a line there. We make tech to make the world better, whether plumbing or electricity, not to con fellow man. My previous startup experience exposed me to the newer sort of thinking where the goal is to raise fast and sell; it was never about doing anything real. The pathology is never worded out directly, hence my feeble attempt.
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