Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
Growing resentment toward the tech industry is tied less to gadgets themselves than to how they’re funded, built, and deployed: users feel surveilled, manipulated, locked into rent-seeking platforms, and treated as the product rather than the customer. Commenters point to addiction engineering, enshittified services, extreme wealth concentration, job threats from AI, and a cohort of high-profile CEOs seen as arrogant or indifferent to social harm. Others argue the deeper culprit is capitalism’s drive for scale and profit, or a broader discomfort with rapid change, but there is broad agreement that modern tech increasingly feels extractive rather than empowering.
Structural causes and capitalism
- Many see hatred of tech as a symptom of broader problems: capitalism, extreme wealth concentration, and inequality, not tech alone.
- Others argue similar concentrations of power existed in pre‑capitalist and communist systems; the core issue is concentrated wealth/power plus weak constraints.
- Concept of “financial pollution”: surplus capital from the ultra‑rich distorts housing and other markets and buys political influence, worsening everyday life.
Consumer experience and enshittification
- Strong resentment of “enshittified” products: smart TVs, cars, phones, IoT, software updates that add ads, dark patterns, forced logins, subscriptions, and feature removal.
- Users feel treated as products, not customers: ad tracking, lock‑in, “you never own anything,” hostile cancellation flows, planned obsolescence, firmware crippling.
- Tech is accused of addiction engineering: compulsion loops in apps/games akin to casinos or tobacco; “annoyance economy” that monetizes friction and irritation.
AI, jobs, and PR
- AI founders publicly promising job destruction are seen as pitching to investors (labor cost savings, trillion‑dollar markets), not the public.
- Some believe these leaders genuinely aim to eliminate large swaths of work and don’t care about public hostility.
- Others frame it as panic‑baiting and hype, but note that even optimistic “productivity” messaging implies fewer workers.
Social, psychological, and cultural effects
- Complaints about social isolation, polarization, radicalization, and outrage‑optimized feeds; tech platforms blamed for amplifying bigotry and culture‑war politics.
- Tech is seen as stripping away human capacities (memory, social skills, local community) and selling them back as metered services.
- Artists and lower‑income workers feel especially threatened by AI; programmers fear income downgrades rather than total displacement.
Tech elites, image, and power
- High‑profile CEOs are described as arrogant, sociopathic, or cynical, undermining claims to “make the world better.”
- Perceived abandonment of “noblesse oblige”: extreme wealth, tax games, datacenter fights with local communities, and political capture fuel anger.
Is hatred universal? Any upsides?
- Some argue hatred is overstated: many people still like major tech brands and voluntarily adopt new devices/services.
- Others counter that adoption ≠ life improvement; many in tech themselves feel disillusioned and miss earlier, more empowering, less extractive eras.
- A minority highlight genuine benefits: tools like spreadsheets, some AI assistants, medical tech, e‑bikes, and other hardware that still clearly help users.