There’s very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days, and very little doubt that a race to the bottom on all our worst impulses is a big part of that. But the causal arrow is trickier.
The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new).
So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor.
Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps.
Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off?
So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.
Also retrospective studies of areas that adopted smartphones well after the financial crisis showed delayed effects that make it implausible to tie them to the crisis.
Those rich people created the wealth. Wealth was not "transferred" to Bill Gates, for example.
Gates created products. He then sold these products to people, who believed those products were worth the money they paid for them - i.e. it was an equal value trade. That is how Gates made money. It wasn't a transfer.
Theft, taxes, donations, subsidies and welfare are examples of a transfer of wealth.
No he didn't. His employees did. The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't. So he pays them what they'll accept and keeps the surplus.
But if you're not convinced, consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers when it comes to "poaching"[1] and "noncompete" agreements[2]. These suppress salaries, with the goal of funnelling more money to the C-suite and shareholders instead.
Gates traded money for the work of his employees. It was a fair trade, as both parties freely agreed. (Pedantically, Gates wrote Microsoft's first product - BASIC.)
> The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't.
You imply that they were stupid. They certainly were not. And at any time they could have demanded more money. And at any time they could have quit, started their own company, and received the full value of their work. (Many did so, the PNW is full of them.)
Story time! I know of a very successful salesman at BigCorp. He generated vast quantities of sales for them, and was paid him well. He could walk into any company and be ushered in to see the CEO, and make a sale. He quit to join a startup and do the sales.
He was unable to close a single deal. He couldn't even get an audience from the decision makers in other companies, let alone see the CEO. He returned to BigCorp, who was happy to get him back.
The point is, it was BigCorp standing behind him that enabled his success. Without that, it just didn't work for him.
> consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers
I know about that. The cartel was a handful of employers. It did not cover the zillions of other tech companies, nor was it remotely effective in stopping startups that they could start.
Walter you know I hold you in tremendous esteem: your achievements are among the most noteworthy of any of the regular commenters and frankly of living hackers, and many including myself wouldn't be in this business without your contributions. So please know I say this with the utmost respect.
But I think you make an error when you say or effectively say via implication that market failures don't happen in way that impacts both the public at large and people in our business particularly (not especially, just germane to these threads). Collusion and cartel-style illegality routinely distort markets, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy and connected and almost always at the cost of working people who actually create most of the value. Bludgeoning everyone else out of the personal computer business by breaking the law isn't "creating" value, it's capturing value, via capture.
I don't think too many people frequent this site who don't fundamentally believe in markets as something to embrace, and that number probably rounds to zero for people with my join date, but markets and free exchange are only part of the story: people with ironclad obligations to anything from dependents to the IRS take what is offered in terms of wages and in the presence of market manipulation that is in no way a "free exchange".
I came of age as a hacker during the 90s: I remember exactly how badly Gates had to break the law to get the Department of Justice to go after a domestic economic Cinderella story with hammer and tongs. Those people go after terrorists and money launderers and child traffickers, you have to really color outside the lines to get them to put that on hold to muzzle a domestic company with geopolitical reach. Gates did so for the first time that got him deposed when he tried to strangle the Web in the cradle, and it's neither the first nor the last time he's dealt with regulators or attorneys who'd rather be chasing conventional bad guys around.
Going back even further, the reason why he was the one signing the small(-er) checks and cashing the big ones finds it's origin story in the fact that his parents organized and substantially financed his high school having an IBM mainframe in it at a time when probably a few dozen young people had any access to computers at all outside of maybe the clubs where the Steves were hanging out. By the time the personal computer revolution was taking off he had many years of head start. I hasten to add that I'm not advocating for some draconian policy of creating perfect equality of outcomes or any of that nonsense, but I'm likewise completely unimpressed that he "got there first", he was born down the block and his career from there was pretty much pressing that advantage with brass knuckle tactics until he basically had to retire from public life long enough to re-brand as a philanthropist. He's a really weird example to choose for the case I think you're making. His meme picture before we even called it that was him in a Borg suit.
The major players tried to break the back of the last upwardly mobile desk profession again in the 2004-2010 timeframe, when again the people who go after al Quaeda for a day job decided it was bad enough to slap them hard enough to back off a little, which coupled with Sheryl defecting and paying "market" wages in the 2009-2014 timeframe incentivized a whole generation of people to go into CS. Sheryl was paying 2-5x what Eric was, which one was "market"? It's a hard case to make the case it was the guy who said in email that we need to suppress wages.
Now they're at it again, no the mass layoffs followed by record-shattering EPS beats weren't a coincidence or because of COVID hiring, in fact they're hiring a bunch of those people back now that it's clear that GPT-4 isn't obsoleting the regular Internet in the imminent future, though wages haven't recovered and plenty of veteran hackers are still burning savings to make mortgage payments that were predicated on the comp packages they signed up for (a decidedly asymmetrical situation). I can't prove this because everything I know about this that isn't plain as day was said off the record, but I also don't make shit like that up.
I'd petition you as someone people look up to (I certainly do) to examine why you feel so strongly that markets are generally free, employment is generally truly at will at truly "market" wages, and the status quo around all this is something we should all accept?
Thanks for the kind words. I'll provide a decent reply tomorrow. Right now I'm about to turn in, and learned a long time ago that I should not write or program when I'm tired :-/
Gates attended Lakeside school, a private school that had a computer. Gates and Allen took advantage of that to learn how to program. None of the other students did.
Then they went to Harvard, which also had a computer available to students. I expect most universities at the time did. They took advantage of it to develop a Basic interpreter. Nobody else at Harvard did, nor did any other students in the country who had access. Basics were developed for other processors by other people.
IBM came to Gates to get a DOS for their PC. Gates didn't have one, and sent them to Gary Kildall. Kildall failed to recognize the opportunity, and sent them back to Gates. Gates didn't have to be presented with opportunity twice. He still didn't have a DOS, but figured he could get one. He bought one from Tim Patterson for $50,000. Patterson also failed to notice the opportunity.
And the rest, as they say, is history. What is clear is that Gates/Allen were hardly the only one who had opportunity, but they were the only ones to recognize the opportunity. Nobody was cheated. Money was not extracted from anybody. It was all fair deals.
A couple years later, Steve Jobs also saw opportunity where nobody else did. We all know the result. Woz wrote a Basic without access to any other computer, showing this was hardly impossible.
I also had those opportunities, but I FAILED TO RECOGNIZE them, and so missed out on being a multi-billionaire. I was not rooked out of opportunity. Nobody oppressed me. I'm not angry about it. I, and tens of thousands of others, simply failed to see the opportunity, and/or lacked the guts to take the risk and to the hard work needed to take advantage of it.
I also competed straight up with Microsoft in the 1980s, and was fairly successful at it. I recognized the opportunity that C++ offered (finally I bet on the right horse!), and capitalized on it, doing very well by having the only native C++ compiler that worked on DOS. Until Microsoft and Borland belatedly got into that market, and yet I still prospered with it.
Microsoft and Borland never tried to bury me with any tactics, they eventually outcompeted me. Microsoft did try to buy me out at one point, but I declined as I thought the offer was too low. I turned out to be right on that one, too. Borland tried to hire me, too, but the offer was insufficient.
Microsoft was a tough competitor, sure, and if you wanted to compete with them you had to bring your A game. I've seen a lot of their competitors frankly whine about it, when they were making obvious missteps that were the actual architect of their demise.
At no point did Microsoft ever force anyone to work for them or force anyone to buy their products.
>very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days
Horseshit. I use Facebook and Instagram and love both. When I see something I don't like, I click the 'Don't show me stuff like this' option. I have an endless feed of old european castles, guitars and a couple other obscure hobbies & interests. I have learned things about my hobbies I never would have otherwise and practice them at a higher level.
Even what you describe is an incredibly poor method of consuming information. There's no reasonable way to say you wouldn't have otherwise learned about something just because you learned about it in the way you did.
I learned far more quality information about my hobbies when there were vast Internet forums of users dedicated to discussing them.
Facebook groups and other social media has supplanted most of those forums but presents the information in a much more inferior fashion. However it creates far more engagement by exploiting the same principles as gambling addiction or animal training. Variable expectation of results and the level of work required, scrambling the feed, burying information, creating an inconsistent expectation of experience. That in and of itself wreaks havoc on brain chemistry and brings forth depression just like gambling addiction.
The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new).
So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor.
Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps.
Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off?
So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.