Tech entrepreneurship and shifting sentiment
Yes, sentiment has changed.  And from within the tech industry, apparently, the blinders are still as strong as ever...<p>The quote about &quot;It&#x27;s hard to force a man to understand something when his salary is dependent on him not understanding it&quot; is relevant here.  If you&#x27;re in the tech bubble (and I use that term broadly to include &quot;Most tech companies and surrounding companies&#x2F;cities&quot;), and don&#x27;t regularly interact with people outside it, or pull back out of it and analyze it, you miss it.<p>&gt; <i>Startup fraud genre. ... The media frenzied around Elizabeth Holmes’ trial and sentencing.</i><p>No.  Most people outside the tech industry <i>don&#x27;t care.</i>  If they know anything about Holmes, it&#x27;s probably that the company outright lied about it was doing, repeatedly, over and over, across the board, and are pleasantly surprised to see that they actually faced consequences, because the normal tech industry path is that you lie to everyone, defraud investors, and still come away clean with your golden parachute.  Which is <i>utterly</i> unlike the rest of the world, in which there tend to be consequences for actions that most people would consider &quot;criminal.&quot;<p>You can only hear about how some new startup is going to &quot;disrupt&quot; some industry, based on what are pretty clearly absurdities to every normal person, before you expect the next one to go down in flames too.  Most people have the good sense to recognize that &quot;I&#x27;m going to sell you $10 of services for $8, but I&#x27;ll make it up in volume!&quot; either means you&#x27;re going to try for monopoly and raise prices, or you&#x27;re full of crap.<p>&gt; <i>The crazy rise and fall of crypto.</i><p>Again... what percentage of people were actually invested in crypto enough to even know or care?  Go do one of the &quot;Man on the street&quot; surveys and ask people what Bitcoin is worth, +&#x2F;- 10%, and you&#x27;ll go through a lot of people before you find anyone even close.  But, yes, a lot of people have heard the breathless hype about how Crypto Will Change Everything, and... it turns out to have been nothing much more than speedrunning the history of why we have various financial regulations.<p>&gt; <i>Past technology waves – mobile in the late 2000s, social in the early 2010s, and cloud in the mid-2010s – brought time and money savings to the average consumer and office worker.</i><p>They... sorry, what?  Having to buy a new phone every couple years and pay $100&#x2F;mo for a cell connection sure as hell wasn&#x27;t saving money vs the previous, and having your attention weaponized against you didn&#x27;t really win much goodwill, even as it was very profitable for a short period of time.  &quot;Cloud&quot; is, similarly, something that <i>most people</i> don&#x27;t know or care about.  And I&#x27;ll suggest that if you want to do anything serious, especially if you need a lot of disk or RAM, &quot;colo your own boxes&quot; is a far cheaper solution than cloud for quite a few companies.  Also harder to compromise than cloud boxes.<p>&gt; <i>Some of tech’s heros have fallen. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates’s marriages fell apart. Elon Musk did some weird stuff and got into the Twitter debacle. Even beloved founders like Jack Conte and Patrick Collison got some bad press.</i><p>Nobody cares about Bezos and his marriage.  Bill Gates is quite past many people caring about him.  Elon Musk, though... yeah, he&#x27;s gone from savior of the planet (through his companies that will be very profitable to him) to &quot;Loose cannon on deck.&quot;  And I guarantee most people outside tech circles have no idea who Jack Conte and Patrick Collision are.  I&#x27;m in tech, and I had to look them up.<p>&gt; <i>VCs funding unsustainable business models.</i><p>Yeah, when they go about &quot;disrupting&quot; things and leaving a hot mess behind themselves, people get a bit annoyed.  When &quot;E-Scooters&quot; get dumped by the thousands and end up broken and blocking sidewalks, or rusting in ponds, yeah.  You annoy people.  When the &quot;tech solution&quot; to something means that the old methods that work get ripped up, and then you&#x27;re left with something that half works, but is worse than old stuff, people might be annoyed.  And, as I mentioned earlier, most people outside tech have the good sense to recognize that while selling a $1 bill for $0.80 may rack up the &quot;unique eyeballs,&quot; the path to profit with that business model is pretty iffy.<p>=========<p>You know why people hate the tech industry?  Because they&#x27;ve wedged themselves into everything, and <i>made it suck more,</i> in pursuit of glorious advertising profits.<p>Because <i>everything</i> is now trying to be a &quot;smart device&quot; that has a short service life, that you can&#x27;t easily repair, and that exists to collect data on your behavior and shovel it into the mill that tries to influence your thinking so you {vote right, buy right, think right, etc}.  For someone else&#x27;s paid value of &quot;right.&quot;<p>Because they&#x27;ve shoved their noses into every part of life, trying to intermediate every single human interaction.  It&#x27;s not enough to be a useful tool.  You have to collect <i>all the attention</i> for your ads.  Ping.  <i>Beep.</i>  Check me!  <i>Look at ME!</i>  A modern phone, in the sort of &quot;default configuration,&quot; is horrible to use, because everything is constantly vying for your attention and streaming your behavior upstream, on a device you paid for, with a data plan you pay for.  Good deal, for someone.  Not the end user, though.<p>And then all the stuff about the ties with the government, with Twitter more or less jumping to service at the whims of various three letter agencies, the data flows to police, etc... doesn&#x27;t make a lot of people very happy.<p>I grew up with the promises of the internet, and I&#x27;m pretty well over the whole thing at this point.  I lurk in my niches, occasionally venture out, but... overall?  The experiment has been an utter disaster.  &quot;Social&quot; media as a concept is fine, but as an implementation, every single version seems to have ended up in the same &quot;Drive outrage, anger, and division, to stoke more time on the site, to drive more ad views!&quot; sort of sewer.  We&#x27;ve replaced old, rugged phones with smartphones that are an utter pain to use in a lot of ways, expensive to buy, expensive to service, expensive to repair, that are, as much as they possibly can, just spying on our activities to sell us more things.<p>That&#x27;s before looking at the security of our systems, which can&#x27;t keep secrets, because they&#x27;re too complex for even the people who make them to reason about them.  If you&#x27;d told someone in 2010 that within a few years, processors wouldn&#x27;t keep secrets at all if you knew how to speculate your answers, you&#x27;d have been thought a loon.  Yet, that was the state of things.  Apple gave up, because even with their sandboxing, zero-click attacks were a thing (Lockdown is nothing more than an acknowledgement that complex software cannot be verified to not be a trainwreck).  And it goes on.<p>It&#x27;s not a utopia.  It&#x27;s a dystopa.  And the people driving it have no clue.