Is Big Tech Facing Its “Big Tobacco Moment”? - Tech giants including Meta, Google, and Apple are facing increasing popular resentment and losing more and more major court battles.Yet their profits an…
a day ago by sanitation to c/technology
these are billionaires surrounded by yes men. Idiots like Elon Musk used to have smart PR but then their ego and narcissism took over and they built some weird cult of personality where if you disobey you lose your source of income, so they're surrounded by followers.
I've been relatively close to a techie who became a CEO and it corrupts them. They think that shit lasts forever and start acting like how they think heartless money worshipping CEOs should act.
People like Zuck don't realize that luck is half of what made them that big, that it's not genius level business maneuvers. They were just lucky entrepreneurs. When they put money where their mouth is, you get the Metaverse, the cyber truck, stupid shit driven by ego.
Now that Facebook elders are dying off, they get "AI layoffs" which arent actually ai related, and courts that are no longer in favor of them.
They were just lucky entrepreneurs.
Who also happened to have nothing against exploiting other people. You don't get that rich unless exploitation is your business model. Or if you're a nepo baby (something something small loan of a million dollars something something).
“Big Tobacco” moment? You mean when they collectively paid a fine, then went on to continue making billions of dollars selling an incredibly deadly product to this day?
I don't want to make any assumptions about your age, but I think a lot of people in north america have forgotten or weren't alive to experience the smoking world.
You used to just get handed an ashtray at a restaurant. You would just smoke at your desk at the office. Basically there were ashtrays and lighters within arms reach at any moment. Industrial design was to cater to the reality that everyone was smoking pretty much all the time.
If you went back in time and told someone from 1950 that you couldn't smoke inside, what the cost adjusted price of cigarettes were, that cars don't have ashtrays or lighters... I think they would genuinely think we had lost the cold war.
So, yes, they're still making money. But they went from an active participant in the engineering of society to merely an industry selling a product. I think there are very compelling parallels.
As a kid, I remember flipping open and closed the armrest ash trays on the backseat doors of our car while running back and forth across the seat because we didn't have to be buckled in or in child seats. I didn't think about what it meant then, because ashtrays were everywhere. I also remember being proud to make a pottery ashtray in school for my grandpa. We were encouraged to encourage our elderly to smoke more!
Now I live in CA where smoking isn't allowed most places, even outdoors, and traveling to Europe is so jarring because people smoke everywhere outside.
Don't forget that they lied about the cancer it causes to the entirety of America in front of Congress and nothing happened to them. Just like the Business plot. And the Civil war.
We have a long tradition in America of letting Wealthy White men get away will literally everything, up to and including high treason.
Did you miss the "Yet their profits and power look about as secure as ever" bit?
The "popular resentment" is only mentioned in the headline and there's no proof for it in the article. They just talk about lawsuits which are lead by individual users or consumer groups. People are not actually leaving those services. Kids are as addicted to them as before and any plans to change this are met with opposition, even here on lemmy. If this is in any way "big tobacco moment" it's the very beginning when everyone was still addicted, everything smelled like cigarettes and governments struggled to pass even the basic regulation like non-smoking areas in bars and restaurants. But I guess it is possible we will slowly get to the point where big tech is in the same place as big tobacco today: making more money then ever, still having big chunks of society addicted and operating with no oversight in developing countries.
It’s so hard to fathom this dependency as a Xennial who did multiple degrees without cheating. I’m not fond of multiple guess tests but not everything can be an essay test. Even so, either is good.
Then, this week, I saw this posting re kids in school not being able to read, more so than usual. Reading a paragraph is teachers “asking too much” and more to that effect. I’m sitting on that line we’ve been in when you hear a batshit post about Trump and initially think, no, no one is that…and then acknowledge that it could be true.
If true, the AI dependency is not surprising.
Betteridge's law.
a single pinguin can top them off. #leave
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They might not think about it yet but they don't see how this looks like self sabotage. Do you want to be hated by everyone? Because this is how you piss everyone off. Vibe coding windows 11 updates... You can already tell AI is being incorporated because everything is breaking down.
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