alt.hn

4/1/2025 at 9:06:14 PM

Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)

 https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/

by Apocryphon

4/2/2025 at 4:24:21 AM

> This, to paraphrase Portlandia, is one of the dreams of the ’90s — that our work selves and our true natures could be one and the same.

I have always wanted to achieve this (to no avail so far). To live for something bigger. To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.

It may sound like, but is not, workaholism. Workaholism is escapism. Workaholism, like alcoholism, roots from a certain sad history one wants to avoid. This is not workaholism, but a conscious pursuit of perfection, of "Godhood", as one may say as an atheist.

by markus_zhang

4/2/2025 at 4:47:12 AM

Even Epsilons can be useful in this brave new world of finding purpose through your job.

by j4coh

4/2/2025 at 11:59:17 AM

Kifflom!

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

4/2/2025 at 5:00:26 AM

You will be a functioning part of an egregore whether you like it or not!

by MomsAVoxell

4/2/2025 at 1:08:55 PM

This still strikes me as escapism.

by stevenae

4/2/2025 at 1:56:20 PM

What are you escaping from in this case?

by narratives1

4/2/2025 at 3:26:09 PM

Awareness of your mortality

by fullshark

4/2/2025 at 10:48:37 PM

You have to do something with your life anyway, right? I always envied people who have a calling they are good at and work on essentially until they die (especially in academia and art), since I'm not sure if I have one and if I do (designing 4x God sim games?) I'm unlikely to be paid for it even if I was good, which is itself also unlikely.

Then there's also the case where following your passion is near impossible without a large organization, anything from space to medicine.

But even forgetting all that, there is no reason engineering challenges, team dynamics and sense of accomplishment at a work project can't be higher than for the personal projects you'd do by yourself. Granted, most jobs aren't like that (for myself or for most people) but some of my most challenging and exciting projects were at work.

If you're gonna spend time until you die doing tech things you might as well get paid for it. The less you need the latter the pickier you can be, with your own thing becoming /another option/ at some point.

by sershe

4/2/2025 at 11:24:15 AM

Unfortunately, wage labor as our primary labor structure has a tendency to produce Severance far more frequently than it does a meaningful marriage between work and personal purpose.

There are a lot of people that argue that if you were to eliminate wage labor, and distribute goods as equally as possible or at least take care of basic needs for free through universal income or some other means that people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true. As your post illustrates, working and producing is just as essential of an aspect of human life as consuming is—people want to produce, they just want it to be meaningful! They want to work on stuff that aligns with their own interests and beliefs. Ironically the people that claim that this isn't the case are probably the few that actually would prefer to never work (they want to keep wage labor in place so that they can extract capital from laborers while they relax and "lead" instead of produce themselves).

by voidhorse

4/2/2025 at 1:19:31 PM

> people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true.

Confusing especially when most people do tens of hours of work outside of paying labor already. Sometimes another 40, or more. Perhaps with UBI et c. some folks would drop to merely 50-60 total hours of work, doing wage labor for only 20-30 of it.

But we only call the other things work when a rich person's paying someone else to do it for them (grocery shopping, lawn care, home maintenance, child care to include things like night time care when they're young ["night nanny" is a thing], meal planning, cooking, shuttling people places in cars, navigating healthcare, elder care, repairing clothes, and so on) because if money's not changing hands it doesn't count, I guess.

by alabastervlog

4/2/2025 at 3:03:20 PM

You’re last line is correct, it certainly counts less if money isn’t changing hands.

Not because money is some sacred object, but because money changes hands when you’re doing work for others. Money is just a lubricant that allows you to contribute your work to society and society to contribute to you in a generalized way rather than a village system where everyone returns the favor in kind.

Imagine we’re in a village, I’m a farmer, youre a tailor. If you want to get fed, you have to either grow your own food or you have to trade clothes to me the farmer because I’m the only one who can trade food back. As soon as you’ve traded with the farmers and we’re all set on clothes, now how are you going to eat? The result is everyone has to be a self sufficient subsistence farmer and only a few non farmers can be supported.

Money just abstracts that labor. It keeps the score on how much you created value for others and people pay you money that they received from the value they provided others.

Work you do for money is work you did for someone else. Picking up your groceries didn’t contribute to anyone else. It’s certainly necessary, nothing morally wrong with it, but society generally should be organized to incentivize contributing to society

by narratives1

4/2/2025 at 3:05:15 PM

A bunch of those things are work for others that's not paid. And that was far from an exhaustive list.

What's confusing to me is this notion that if we ease up a little on the stick of "your life will be ruined and you may actually die", the carrot of more money will stop working because people are just that lazy. No, they're not, they do tons of work for no pay.

by alabastervlog

4/2/2025 at 5:37:53 PM

no not so simple. Another underlying fear is that many people are predators. Universal income would enable unwanted predators. Of course, successful predators have already implemented long term income for their groups that is satisfactory to themselves and their chosen members. Many successful examples show that membership must be earned, showing some basic positives. Freeloading is also a fear, but it is related to gluttony. Successful people are also often gluttons, so that is not solved. Rivalry means "it is not enough to succeed ourselves, the opponent must lose" .. and gluttons tend to be rivalrous of other gluttons.

by mistrial9

4/2/2025 at 12:26:31 PM

You should travel around the world (or even your own country) a bit more. There is a lot of such people in various cultures and places, but you won't see them if living in any sort of success bubble (ie SV).

One of main reasons communism always failed - it never took this basic human nature into account, rather working with some idolized Star trekkish human with strong desire to work on bettering oneself and society, incorruptible, not selfish at all and so on.

by jajko

4/2/2025 at 1:32:20 PM

Sure, but you do realize the alternative is basically to impose artificial scarcity to force people to work for their survival and do jobs that they don't want.

I can't see how that is at all morally superior to communism, or how it is any less of a capitulation to the worse tendencies of human nature (hoarding resources for yourself, imposing destitution upon others to get them to do what you want, believing other people are worthless and lazy and that you alone have the wherewithal to be a true hard working human and thus you deserve the extra capital you extract).

All these arguments about "human nature" are bogus. Back then we were not as technologically advanced as we are today. Today we effectively have the means to ensure the goods of society are evenly distributed as a baseline and we also have the means to effect that distribution (think that's not true? Look at amazon. It is basically a privatized version of this idea). The thing holding us back today are these straw man bs arguments that point to ghouls and ghosts like "human nature" and "lazy people" that try to argue that the degradation of society is a natural consequence of equality. No. It isn't. You are witnessing the degradation of society in some countries right now and in almost every case it is because they are grossly unequal and people hoard resources for themselves.

by voidhorse

4/2/2025 at 1:58:03 PM

> the alternative is basically to impose artificial scarcity to force people to work

No, the alternative is reality: people pay each other to do things they want done and for things they want to buy from them. There's no artificial scarcity. There's a vast amount of intricate, well-priced effort to reduce or remove scarcity.

by robertlagrant

4/2/2025 at 10:50:51 PM

this ignores that the role of some players in this current monetary game is to print new money in their basement...

by attila-lendvai

4/3/2025 at 8:12:44 AM

Yes, inflation is a big problem. You want the people who get to take your money to have a well-defined role that doesn't grow over time.

by robertlagrant

4/2/2025 at 5:29:46 PM

Yet all the money belongs to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk...

by freejazz

4/3/2025 at 8:12:07 AM

No it doesn't. Can you say a true statement that contradicts what I said?

by robertlagrant

4/2/2025 at 2:33:47 PM

> Today we effectively have the means to ensure the goods of society are evenly distributed as a baseline and we also have the means to effect that distribution

We arguably had the means even back then, but it obviously still failed and would likely fail again. Even in the west, hyper-rationalists took various forms (Keynesian economics, urban planning, etc), but it mostly ended up in failure.

The main issue is that there was and is not a static distribution or demand of goods. We can't just decide to give everybody 4 apples/week, etc. Even if we could, demands will always shift in unexpected ways. New products can shift demand in ways planners can't possibly foresee. A new apple desert could come, or people could just plain get tired of apples.

Right now the best and most successful mechanism we have is price signals. When it is said that communism failed because there were bad incentives, people assume that it was because there was no incentive to work hard. While this is somewhat true, the main issue was actually that planners and the whole communist economy could never rationalize supply and demand because they ignored price signals, meaning they often actually induced demands with artificially cheap prices, often resorting to rationing (either formal or de-facto in the forms of long lines).

Even worse, people were rewarded for hitting planning targets, even if the results (successful or not) were often not their fault. The result was people lied, making actual planning nearly impossible. A shoe factory would get bad leather, but make the shoes anyways, even though they fell apart sooner and then (outside of the plan) induced demand for new shoes. There are even stories of cab drivers lifting their cars and running it in reverse to continue working because they otherwise hit the "max" driving they were expected to do.

So "human nature" does in fact play a role, but not in the "I'm to lazy to work in communism" that most people think it is. Amazon doesn't evenly distribute anything, they have a highly sophisticated planning system that at the end of the day responds to price signals, either via bringing in more revenue or reducing costs.

by hylaride

4/2/2025 at 5:31:16 PM

So how is the Amazon-economy a more moral choice than communism?

by freejazz

4/2/2025 at 7:39:34 PM

This question is a false equivalency. Amazon is not an economy. Comparing the two, morally or otherwise, is a fools errand. It's like comparing the morality of a TV network versus an actor.

Amazon is an organization/corporation that participates in a market economy (mostly - I won't get into a details rabbit hole over regulation, monopoly, etc) that ultimately responds to price signals in chase of a profit motive and cannot use violence to force people to live within it. Maybe Bezos would like to be able to, maybe he wouldn't, but he can't either way. You can only realistically (morally) compare it to other companies.

Communism (as practised on earth so far) is a centrally planned economy backed by a coercive, centralized state that has a monopoly on violence to competitors, mostly ignores price signals, and usually uses violence against those that try to leave or access alternatives. You can only realistically compare it to other economic and/or government models.

by hylaride

4/2/2025 at 7:42:58 PM

It's not literal and I have a hard time believing you couldn't figure that out when I used 'amazon-economy' and not just 'amazon'. No less so in the context of a thread comparing capitalism (which was represented by Amazon's existence, in the thread) and communism, which is of course, the question you didn't answer in your response to the previous poster.

Frankly, explaining communism in your response is just rude, even disregarding how pointed it is. But maybe there is a trend in your responses seeing as how you refuse to actually compare the results of capitalism against the results of communism, as was asked in the post you responded to yet didn't answer the central question thereof, so I put it to you again. I guess you could not answer the question a third time, but I would not expect a response from me if you continue with this obtuse path.

by freejazz

4/3/2025 at 2:56:46 AM

> Frankly, explaining communism in your response is just rude

Because you clearly don't understand communism and you need it explained to you.

If you understood communism, then you'd never ask to "compare the results of capitalism against the results of communism", because then you'd have to admit that the death toll from communism is over 100 million and the quality of life significantly lower, while for capitalism the death tool is multiple orders of magnitude lower and the quality of life higher.

by throw10920

4/3/2025 at 6:02:21 AM

>how it is any less of a capitulation to the worse tendencies of human nature (hoarding resources for yourself, imposing destitution upon others to get them to do what you want, believing other people are worthless and lazy and that you alone have the wherewithal to be a true hard working human and thus you deserve the extra capital you extract).

These are almost perfect summaries of how communism was indeed applied by the powerful oligarchy of bureaucrats who ran it with an authoritarian, sometimes even totalitarian fist in the countries where it was the applied form of government.

As a summary of market economics, your breakdown is a grossly misguided caricature on the other hand. While there are exceptions and inefficiencies, most wealth in the market economies isn't created by hoarding anything after having taken it from others, it's instead created by cleverly using limited resources to deliver something to others who want to hand over their money inn exchange for the alternative value you provide, and also finding more capital-efficient ways of doing more of the same on a greater scale.

A market economy doesn't impose destitution on others or force them to do what it wants. The opposite is true, through price mechanisms and mutually advantageous trade, it reduce scarcity while slowly improving options. It has its many flaws, but far fewer of them than the extremely crude and often brutal parodies of the same that were the case under the communist systems (which essentially replicated markets for their subjects, but under a form of central planning that was terribly inefficient and truly subject to the legal whims of a small coterie of oligarchic leaders)

You draw an almost Leninesquely crude image of how markets work despite all their complexity in which you yourself are a participant and a beneficiary.

by southernplaces7

4/2/2025 at 12:49:46 PM

There are, without a doubt, a lot of jobs nobody wants to work. Not sure anyone wants to clean restrooms in fast food establishments, for example.

So, if we allow people to choose their jobs and don't have any mechanism that weeds out people who aren't good at what they chose to do, no incentive to work jobs nobody wants to do... we'll probably starve before the we die of lack of sanitation.

Communism had this core ethical belief that everyone should contribute as according to their ability and should be served according to their needs. I'm not sure if Marx believed this to be possible in the physical universe, or was it something that we should approach as much as possible given the constraints of the physical universe. But, countries pursuing communism so far all ran into the problem with lack of motivation, corruption and the need to build a police state in an attempt to counter the two.

So... maybe basic income isn't such a bad idea in the world where ambition can be more rewarding, but I still don't know who's going to work "bad" jobs if the alternative is to live off the basic income.

by crabbone

4/2/2025 at 1:26:27 PM

Technology is the answer. Automate as many of the "bad" jobs as possible and for those we can't, find some additional incentive structure to reward those who do them. I'm not calling for complete elimination of incentive structures, but I do think we can work off an equitable baseline today. Keep incentives around as a bonus —everyone has their basic material needs accounted for, you want to live a little better than your neighbor? Work this job that we cannot fully automate yet and that is unpleasant. If all the arguments from human nature and about behavioral tendencies that people use against "communism" are valid, this sort of approach will work and should offset any concerns people have about "who will do the dead end jobs if we don't effectively force people to do them to survive?" (by the way, I hope it's not lost on anyone how perverse that is—the argument for capital is effectively the argument that the only way to have humans do dirty work is to impose scarcity and artificially withhold their means of subsistence to force them to do so)

Our technological capabilities vastly outpace those of even just a few decades ago. Communism did not fail because of "human nature" or some other nonsense boogeyman people want to set up as a straw man, it failed for the simpler reason that we did not have sufficient mastery of material or recourse to automations. Today, that is no longer the case and what is actually holding us back are faulty arguments based on the existence of ghosts like "invisible hands" or "universal human nature".

by voidhorse

4/2/2025 at 2:47:15 PM

I was born and lived in USSR for quite a while... life wasn't pleasant there, and technology was not the culprit really. They ran out of carrots a very long time ago, and were left with just the stick to try and enforce the ethics advocated by the communist program.

There was a joke that I didn't quite understand at the time:

    --What are the benefits of group sex?
    --You may slack off.
The idea was to say that in order to optimize almost every aspect of industry, everything was centralized, gigantic... which also created a situation where most people could only see a very tiny fraction of what they were working on. Virtually nobody knew what their individual effort contributed to the whole. And in this situation, say, you come to the factory and during your shift you cut a thousand of bolts... or ten thousands... or just ten. The system is too big to adequately respond to your individual input. You just don't know whether your extra bolts were smelted again to make more nuts, or whether some other department in your factory was sitting on their hands waiting for more bolts to come.

People who enjoyed their work usually worked outside, or even against the establishment because the system couldn't provide them with adequate reward, not even in a form of recognition.

by crabbone

4/2/2025 at 10:31:24 AM

>To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.

A wolf walking half the Europe or an Arctic fox crossing the Arctic, and you think you have the drive to push, to evolve and to throw away the old self.

by trhway

4/2/2025 at 4:14:28 AM

Computing was less annoying before it became a branch of the advertising industry.

by Animats

4/2/2025 at 7:15:41 AM

This shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising — since this is what happened to every mass communication technology over the past few centuries: print, then radio, then television. The OG computing folks at Xerox PARC indeed foresaw all this, and McLuhan wrote about this in the 50s/60s.

by ssivark

4/2/2025 at 5:21:09 AM

There were a lot of annoying detours.

A lot of the bad parts of computing originated in hollywood. They wanted certainty that you could only play "protected" music or video.

This sort of thing made it "necessary" to lock bootloaders and eventually with the iphone... The ship of theseus didn't belong to theseus anymore, it was just a license.

now lots of devices are cash registers, surveillance devices, e-meters and pop-up generators.

by m463

4/2/2025 at 8:18:17 AM

Don’t forget our final and most essential technology - the slot machine.

by germinalphrase

4/3/2025 at 8:05:37 AM

HN was also better before the advert and sales people flooded it.

by TwoNineFive

4/2/2025 at 7:54:21 AM

Advertising is a cancer on society. It corrupts all forms of media, ever since the invention of publishing and broadcasting. The internet is its most lucrative victim yet. It's where they've taken the sociopathic ideas pioneered by Bernays to their maximum expression. It is the most powerful global psychological manipulation machine, influencing everything from what we spend our money on, to how we think and act. It is unequivocally a major cause of the sociopolitical unrest and conflicts we see today. The really insidious part is that most people don't consciously realize they're being manipulated, and are happy to exchange that for some "free" products and services. This has, of course, made many companies very rich, by operating in a dark data broker market exchanging the data we've given them, and more prominently, data they've stolen or inferred from us.

To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.

by imiric

4/2/2025 at 9:06:59 AM

If somebody works for tobacco or predatory lending they are stigmatized. Perhaps we should extend it to people working in advertising or anything causing the major problems in society today. From sugar drinks to algorithmic timelines.

by alecco

4/2/2025 at 11:36:47 AM

I can assure you that the employees of Altria at least are not stigmatized in their community.

by Coffeewine

4/2/2025 at 10:59:13 AM

It's well trodden ground already. Bill Hicks had it worked into his routine 30+ years ago.

by tjpnz

4/2/2025 at 9:26:10 AM

Advertising is like pollution. Normal people realize they’re getting poisoned, but they still get to where they need to be, so don’t bother to change it.

We need to make collected data and metadata public. If a cabal of advertisers is considered an ethical steward of the information, a public database can’t be much worse. Scare the bejeezus out of moms and pops and watch the tide shift.

by _factor

4/2/2025 at 12:12:06 PM

I disagree, the problem is the race to the bottom in advertising.

Drugs ads being able to show 30s of the one positive side effect and then spend 0.5s speed talking through all the negative ones is not a fair description of the drug.

Almost every product advertising being here's a celebrity (who has no idea how the product works) using the product without any real description of what the product does. Imagine a car ad that had to show you had to pump gas!? It's like one of the most common things you do with a car.

And other product advertising being 100% vibe based. We're the company of tomorrow! The fuck does that even mean?

Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology? The problem is that current advertising only teaches you the existence of something and not what it does.

by lesuorac

4/2/2025 at 1:29:03 PM

> Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology?

Check in with trade organizations or whatever? I mean, fundamentally, this is what a sales catalog for a retailer is. That can be, and has been, one of the functions of a store as opposed to a manufacturer selling directly.

I don't think any sane ban on advertising would prevent people from requesting information about new products (which could functionally be ads) which could well include uncompensated reviews in interest magazines or newspapers or whatever.

"This store exists (on your maps app), here are their hours and the category of thing they do, and a link to their website" and once you're on the site, they can go nuts telling you about what they offer.

There is very nearly zero value provided to society by advertising.

by alabastervlog

4/2/2025 at 1:11:19 PM

I disagree. Who decides the relevant use cases for a given product? How does one handle the unforeseen use cases and advertise those?

In my opinion, ads should be much more limited to brief, factual information to satisfy the “learn about new technology” piece.

“This message is to inform you of a new product, X, made by company Y, intended to do A and B without the side effect of C.”

by theoreticalmal

4/2/2025 at 9:25:18 AM

OK great, taking what you've said as true, what's your solution?

How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

by disgruntledphd2

4/2/2025 at 10:17:44 AM

> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.

Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.

by rapind

4/2/2025 at 12:06:30 PM

Be careful what you wish for. I hate the current data collection paradigm but advertising allows media to pay their own way and remain independent.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

4/2/2025 at 2:23:47 PM

I guess one other model that seems to beat out advertising is billionaire ownership for influence peddling. Still remains to be seen if this model will remain successful in the long term. We should probably eliminate billionaires though just to be safe.

by rapind

4/2/2025 at 10:04:50 AM

It's not my place, nor am I smart enough to propose a solution. But if you ask me, I would start with much stricter regulations regarding company transparency, data collection, and data privacy. There are two things making this very unlikely, though:

- Governments and companies are in symbiosis. Companies can influence which laws are passed and how they apply to them, and governments depend on these companies both financially, and practically for their services. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where actual CEOs are now running the country.

- The general public doesn't really care about these issues. For most people their data and privacy isn't a concern, and even when it is, it's not a large enough of a concern that they would be willing to stop using these services, or use alternatives. Since advertising/propaganda works on a subconscious level, they're literally brainwashed to not see a problem at all.

So I realistically don't see a way out of this. It would require changes in deeply rooted sociopolitical systems just to get on the right path, and then years of effort to keep us there. And without unanimous public support for all of this, it will never come to pass.

As for alternative business models, that's the least of our problems. Technical solutions for this exist today, and wouldn't be difficult to expand and build upon, but the actual challenge is changing the public perception of what "free" means. The solution likely wouldn't be as profitable for companies as advertising currently is, which is why we would need regulations to force it. When weighing the success of another billion-dollar corporation against our society's mental health and stability, the choice is obvious to me.

by imiric

4/2/2025 at 12:06:46 PM

> Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

If there's not enough consumer demand for a service, and it's not a public utility that's worth funding through taxpayer money to maintain equal access for everyone, the logical, supply-and-demand-based, hundred year-old solution is to just admit it's not a good business idea and move on.

If their leadership teams can't come up with an offering worth paying for, well, tough luck, the list of neat ideas that just didn't atract enough customers is perpetually open.

by alxlaz

4/2/2025 at 10:11:21 AM

If (under our current economic system) it is impossible to run generally useful services like that without subjecting their users to advertisements, then clearly, there's something wrong with the economic system itself and we should start investigating alternatives.

by AegirLeet

4/2/2025 at 9:49:56 AM

The current situation incentives advertising as the only way to monetize something so it's no wonder you want advertising to exist. The fundamental way is always going to be a peer-to-peer network, where you can contribute in so many different ways apart from paying. The majority of the web is filled with people who has no idea on what the original web stood for and frankly, they couldn't care less which is why we are in such a bloated mess

by udev4096

4/2/2025 at 6:16:40 PM

At low cost, like Craigslist?

by Animats

4/2/2025 at 12:45:24 PM

Businesses not being able to find a sustainable business model is not my problem.

Regardless, I block all of their ads anyway.

by DrillShopper

4/2/2025 at 8:04:54 AM

Forcing people to fork out money for any product or service they used also made many companies very rich. See Microsoft, Oracle... A very long list. But you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.

by ghaff

4/2/2025 at 9:28:03 AM

There's a world of difference between broadcasting true capabilities of a product or service, and embedding subconscious thoughts into the minds of people to associate a brand with a feeling, in the form of "lifestyle brands", "torches of freedom", etc. The former is informing people about something that exists, while the latter is psychological manipulation straight from propaganda playbooks. Please read about the life and work of Edward Bernays, and this distinction will be clear.

Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't. The story that marketers tell themselves that they're simply informing the public about a product or service they might not know about is absolute BS. If it were true, large companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't need to advertise at all. The truth is that it's all about constantly molding the public perception of a company in a way that makes them associate it with a positive feeling, so that they will subconsciously choose to give them their money. These are the same tactics used in propaganda, but instead of making people part ways with their money, it makes them think or act in any way that's beneficial to a specific cause.

The language I use is not hyperbolic, analogies aside. It's the only way of describing the insanity of the world we live in, which now resembles in many ways the fictional world novel authors have been writing about for decades. If you want to engage in the discussion, you can start by refuting anything I've said.

by imiric

4/2/2025 at 11:01:42 AM

> Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't.

Same with political parties that don't take corporate money (except in sane countries, where this is recognized and forcefully limited).

by mandmandam

4/2/2025 at 8:43:36 AM

> you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.

No they aren't.

The situation is just so absurd and extreme, yet normalized, that accurately describing it makes people sound weird. That's why Chomsky speaks in that extreme monotone, to counterbalance the very real horror and extreme nature of the things he is saying.

by mandmandam

4/2/2025 at 9:26:17 AM

How does the belief that advertising drives major behaviour change square with 50+ years of psychological research showing that behaviour change is really difficult?

by disgruntledphd2

4/2/2025 at 5:38:24 PM

What on the face of those two statements is a conflict?

by freejazz

4/2/2025 at 10:52:05 AM

Long term behaviour change is difficult. Short term behaviour change; not so much.

To take a classic example from the "sociopathic" mind of Bernays himself:

> The targeting of women in tobacco advertising led to higher rates of smoking among women. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold; in 1929 that percentage increased to 12%, in 1935 to 18.1%, peaking in 1965 at 33.3%, and remained at this level until 1977

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

And there's far, far more to it all. Sometimes you don't need people to change their behaviour, you just need them to be confused (say, about climate change, or who to vote for), and sometimes you just need media corporations to go soft on you because they like your money.

Sometimes you're advertising to kids, because childrens brains are more malleable. They form habits early.

Advertising made smoking cool; it made diamonds valuable; it greenwashed fossil fuel companies that sold our species future for short term profit. If you don't call that behaviour change, what do you call it?

by mandmandam

4/3/2025 at 10:46:15 AM

> Advertising made smoking cool Nicotine is incredibly addictive, so one would suspect that that addiction made the change stick better.

> it made diamonds valuable

This one is interesting, in that diamonds are valuable for a one off high value purchase (i.e. wedding rings). I'd need to think about this a bit more, but on the face of it is a good counter-argument.

> Long term behaviour change is difficult. Short term behaviour change; not so much.

Can you provide some evidence for this?

Context: I have a PhD in psychology, and have read so many behaviour change meta-analyses that show really, really small effects so my prior is pretty strongly against this.

Additionally, I worked at a big tech on ads, and while one could definitely see changes in conversion rates due to ads, the incremental changes (i.e. measured by experiments) were much, much lower such that a good model of Google/Facebook etc is that they show ads preferentially to people who were probably going to convert anyway (it seems to work well in situations where there is no awareness of the business, but for larger businesses it's all about taking your competitors customers).

So my thesis is more that advertising re-allocates the dollars spend between (mostly) interchangeable products, which is consistent with the psychological research.

by disgruntledphd2

4/2/2025 at 11:36:05 AM

One small beacon of hope, perhaps, is that I see perspectives like this becoming more common over time. A few years ago there were (anecdotally) way more true believers in the current MO of pervasive profit seeking to the detriment of all else, true believers in the "free market" etc.

It's easy to see how absurd the practice of advertising is if you think about the actual dynamic.

As human beings we all have intentionality. When we want something, we seek it. "Hey, I really need to cut the lawn, let me find a lawnmower"—I'll go out and research lawnmowers to find one that helps me accomplish my intended goal.

Advertising totally inverts this dynamic. Instead, apropos of nothing, some person I don't know and have no relationship with interrupts some other thing I am in the middle of intentionally doing to tell me all about their fancy lawnmowers. At its worst (and most effective) it short circuits my own potential formation of intentions and reshapes my intentions, manipulating me, and at its least effective it's just a completely annoying distraction from what I was originally trying to do. It's horrible and antithetical to any notion of respect and dignity you might ascribe to the limited time of other human beings.

by voidhorse

4/2/2025 at 6:21:45 AM

... or that the marketing and sales department is the real scaffold for enabling computing for those without university access.

by bigpeopleareold

4/2/2025 at 7:08:13 AM

I don’t remember any tracking or adverts on computers when windows 95 came out (there were adverts for computers, I used to jay money to receive them in the way if computer shopper.

the first real annoyances were Spam and Punch the monkey, both parts of the advertising industry.

by chgs

4/2/2025 at 3:10:36 PM

The average Windows 95 machine was loaded with bundled software all asking to pay for a full license. ISPs were advertised in connection wizards built-in to the OS.

by vel0city

4/2/2025 at 7:44:59 AM

Click the link and put in the fifteenth word in the third paragraph, then click "about" and put in the fourth word in the second sentence.

The good old days before cookies and trackers...

by genewitch

4/2/2025 at 10:30:52 AM

Microserfs has a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and really did a great job capturing the zeitgeist of working in tech in the 90s. It was more about the early 90s than the late 90s when I started in tech, but not much really changed until the dotCom bubble burst in 2000. A lot of us who didn't happen to work for GiantTech in the 90s shared the existential anxieties described in earlier chapters of the book, but without the upside of lucrative stock options. It's worth a read if you haven't. A lot of it is still relevant today.

by ryandrake

4/2/2025 at 12:17:16 PM

It nails the period. When the article later talks about Coupland’s follow-up J-Pod, I think it’s important to note that the naivety that the book reacts to isn’t just his own, really the entire zeitgeist was like that. Hence the magnitude of 9/11 as a wake-up call.

Po Bronson’s “First $30 Million” is also a classic that seems to have been memory-holed.

by Eric_WVGG

4/2/2025 at 10:59:32 AM

The Author, Douglas Coupland also coined the term: Generation X in the novel(?) of the same name. Edit: whoops, this is mentioned in the article.

by kristianp

4/2/2025 at 3:22:00 AM

God, I miss Grantland. It was some of THE best writing on the web at the time. ESPN killed it and Bill Simmons went on to create The Ringer, which he then sold to Spotify. The Ringer pre-Spotify was good, but not as good as Grantland was.

by vlark

4/2/2025 at 5:44:54 AM

Ah, thank you so much for reminding me of Grantland!!

by low_tech_love

4/2/2025 at 5:31:27 AM

I think we're in for a new multi-decade round of 'eating the world' .. and Im going to annoy everyone by suggesting that the microkernel of this new megascale world-changing engine of growth is actually the tiny garage startup using Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning to tackle some previously too-hard problem in engineering/logistics/robotics/medicine/industry.

We are in a boom and bust and boom ... the current moment rhymes with 1993 of the internet boom - lots of hype, lots of big money .. but also something new and useful is emerging.

Its happening faster this time around ... BUT I do see a capital-to-startup impedance mismatch problem - imo, we need smaller, faster, standardized early pre-seed rounds : to build the future we need angels to take 10 x 30k bets, not 2 x 150k bets.

We actually dont need to wait for AGI to achieve an incredible creation of wealth and improve our lives .. we can just _apply_ the tech that already exists in raw form today. The resulting growth will override a plateauing Moores Law, and use all those largely dormant many-cores on todays CPU/GPU/NPU hybrid chips.

Its the best of times and the worst of times - geopolitical and economic malaise coinciding with a Cambrian explosion of new technology.

I dont think most VCs have the background to recognize this new kind of startup .. but tech-founders who had an exit payout will be well placed to go fly fishing for them - Im hoping these people will step in and Angel invest, to build the future they see on the horizon.

by jgord

4/2/2025 at 1:08:13 PM

We don't live in a digital world and dont eat bits for sustenance. Go get a real job. Rikesh can keep your LDAP up to date for 1 gallon of water a day and a bag of flour.

by franktankbank

4/2/2025 at 6:05:30 AM

Angel investing is a chumps game

by paulddraper

4/2/2025 at 10:34:18 AM

I get the sense that the financial motivations - such as they are - may only be part of it; perhaps only a very small part of it.

I’d bet a lot of people do it for the status, because they want to be able to describe themselves as investors.

Whether or not that makes them chumps to people who actually do make real money as investors doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the target audience for the status message.

Less cynically, there’s also a motivation, at least amongst some, to help people building startups.

by bartread

4/2/2025 at 8:07:38 AM

I enjoy seeing geniuses who hit winning lottery tickets first go lose it all reinvesting in the lottery.

by blitzar

4/2/2025 at 10:23:28 AM

But I was sure I'd get rich off of Trump Coin!

by rapind

4/2/2025 at 8:46:16 AM

I know someone who, at least over the last decade of so, says that he would have done far better just putting money in a NASDAQ index than doing angel investing.

by ghaff

4/2/2025 at 3:03:56 PM

Over the last decade, that squares out. In the 1990s and then after the 2K crash, funding companies was easier as there was less competition. Now anybody investing in any AI venture is going to be competing with a bazillion other people trying the same thing. There is less room for error or experimentation and it becomes far more of a luck game - and it was still largely a luck game then.

by hylaride

4/2/2025 at 9:01:47 AM

fair enough .. how do we fund the next generation of tech development ?

Governments giving money as science grants ?

Are you against all VC investment in startups ?

Philanthropy donations ?

or.. would millionaires be the people starting new startups and doing science research to scratch their own itch ?

I guess the history of science and tech has examples of all of the above.

by jgord

4/2/2025 at 10:35:02 AM

> Governments giving money as science grants ?

I think there's a place for government to invest and incentivise startups for sure, but man do you ever need to watch it like an eagle or it will quickly devolve into malignant opportunism on the tax payers dime.

As an example, up here in Canada, we have the Scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) tax incentives program. Basically a significant business tax reduction that any company could get (including those that shouldn't), but it required a ceremony / lengthy and annoying process that was quickly outsourced for a percentage of the gains. So now we have businesses who's sole purpose is to get SR&ED for your startup.

So SR&ED is now mandatory for Canadian tech businesses since it saves you 30-50% in tax. We're talking big boys like Shopify too.

Implementation really really matters, and you need to constantly review these things for abuses or they quickly devolve into a transfer of wealth.

by rapind

4/3/2025 at 2:01:28 AM

yeah.. Ive noticed a kind of anti-pattern - governments funding various startup programs, which end up being totally useless to _actual_ startups, but great plays for the next level investors [ eg. the real estate investor who rents out the "accelerator space" ]

by jgord

4/2/2025 at 10:56:44 AM

My hope is that the actual next generation of tech development isn't going to be VC and hype-cycle funded. I hope that we will go back to bootstrapped smart people making actual things that people actually want, rather than VCs breathlessly hyping stuff like fake money and plagiarism machines that nobody wants.

by ryandrake

4/3/2025 at 2:15:09 AM

> making actual things ..

ahh, am trying to do that - largely self-funded RnD over 4 years -

Also trying to wake people up about the scope for ML to be applied to real engineering problems / processes ..

We hear of applied-RL/ML examples at the elite end, such as taming fusion plasma, weather prediction on a desktop, solving protein structure from DNA sequence etc..

Yet there are vast applications such as training robot hands to sort refuse for recycling, optimal heat flow in industrial processes, silicon chip layout, 2D photos to 3D models ...

My own startup domain is detecting geometry in pointclouds .. which is currently a lot of repetitive manual labor done for the construction industry.

It is frustrating talking to VCs .. because they really dont believe there is any other AI than LLMs.

My guess is the only people who will fund this kind of useful tech are post-exit technical founders.

by jgord

4/2/2025 at 5:17:32 PM

> Are you against all VC investment in startups ?

No.

Nor am I against angel investing. Except that I (personally) would never do it.

by paulddraper

4/2/2025 at 7:14:55 AM

> The important thing is the sense of manic excitement that pervades the Mutiny scenes this season, and the way it bleeds into the show itself. We know exactly where computers are and aren’t going, but it still feels like anything is possible.

This accurately describes being in a rising tech trend. The most common experience is knowing where things are going but failing to find a way to catch the wave.

by kelseydh

4/2/2025 at 9:44:13 AM

They didn't review halt and catch fire after season 2 which is disappointing. It was one of the rare shows which kept on improving after each season

by udev4096

4/2/2025 at 1:34:32 PM

Important to note this was written in 2015 likely during the airing of Season 2, which is hinted at with "in a recent episode" wording.

Boy, those early seasons of "getting so close to success before all the self-sabotage happens" were kind of brutal in a way, but I still highly recommend pushing through to the later seasons.

by neogodless

4/2/2025 at 5:33:55 AM

This was one of my favorite books growing up, something it seemed only I have read. I’ve never seen it talked about since. Might be fun to reread it now and see how it’s aged now that I’m on the other side.

by azinman2

4/2/2025 at 5:45:56 AM

What a beautfiul, human-made illustration at the top of this article!

by low_tech_love

4/2/2025 at 3:16:32 AM

> With Steve Jobs in exile and the Web’s billionaire boys’ club still a few years away, the Valley in the book is “a bland anarchy,” a kingdom “with a thousand princes but no kings.”

Yet it was the happiest time I remember in the whole saga.

by timewizard