The Moral Economy of Tech
I think Maciej&#x27;s mind is getting seriously poisoned by the hatred towards SV. I understand the anger - hell, I abhor the ad-driven tech too, I&#x27;ve stopped believing in the startup marketing long time ago. But just because companies say bullshit to make money doesn&#x27;t mean the tech doesn&#x27;t work, or that technologists are <i>worse</i> than normal people because they use their brains to solve complex problems. This, and previous talks start to sound less like pointing out existing problems and more like anti-intellectualism.<p>In Maciej&#x27;s recent talks I feel a sense of defeat that he&#x27;s trying to mask with calls to actions and thinly-veiled insults towards programmers. Like the constant references to politics - if there&#x27;s one thing true in this world, it&#x27;s that the politics is one of the least cost-effective way of solving <i>anything</i> one can imagine. If people want to do tech, or science, instead of politics, maybe it&#x27;s not because they&#x27;re stupid, but because they want to do something <i>effective</i>? After all, it&#x27;s not politicians who fed the world, it was Haber &amp; Bosch. It wasn&#x27;t environmentalists who saved whales from extinction, it was whoever invented that synthetic whale-oil substitute.<p>While I accept I might be a bit technophilic, I think some of Maciej&#x27;s recent comments border on ridiculousness. Criticizing not just Google per se, but the very effort at curing death? It&#x27;s not hubris. <i>It&#x27;s something we should have been focused on doing for at least past few hundred years</i>. If it takes rich SV guys to finally do something about it, I think instead calling them full of hubris one should instead ask, why it was them who finally started tackling this problem in a way that has at least a chance of being effective.<p>Another point - Maciej said that &quot;really it&#x27;s just the regular old world from before, (...) [and] it has the same old problems.&quot;. Well, people don&#x27;t change (fast enough), their problems don&#x27;t change. But the world looks <i>very</i> different than it looked few hundred, or few thousand years ago. So what changed, if not people?<p>I say, technology. Personally, I&#x27;m getting more and more convinced that social changes are <i>caused by</i> changes in technology landscape, not the other way around. I.e. we didn&#x27;t have liberal democracy 500 years ago not because we were stupid then, but because technologies that can support it - like the printing press, effective firearms, etc. - did not exist or did not yet reach the point of ubiquity.<p>So yeah, daily bashing of advertisers and anti-social startups is fun. But let&#x27;s not pour the baby, the soup and the whole medicine cabinet out with the bathwater.