Great analysis, and definitely agree in terms of the promise vs reality of where tech took us—including the vision before of millions of small businesses with the inherently decentralized internet, vs the tech titans that are now much of the total stock market alone (and individually are larger in value than entire countries’ GDP).
That’s part of the small vs big tech too, and people can be forgiven for not really seeing the difference when the original promise of what the future looked like from what used to be “small tech” also turned out not to be.
IMO the Tech Backlash started around 2014 when the NYT figured out that they are actually competitors in the digital market against Google and Facebook and their previously glowing coverage of Silicon Valley turned into daily attacks. By 2018 they were criticizing the stray cats at Googleplex. This was part of their successful digital transformation strategy.
It was the launch of news.google.com in 2006 that drove the media's turn on the tech industry, as for the first time Google revealed just how much duplication there actually was in the media. People were shocked to see links like "Read 12,425 more stories on this topic". Simultaneously the tech business was moving up from taking the SME advertising that local news relied on to the big brand ads that funded the left wing "prestige" outlets (who at that time still pretending to be unbiased).
For a century or more journalists had made money by advertising without actually caring about it as an industry, nor the customers who advertised with them. Instead they boasted about how firewalled the ad business was from the "real" business. By the time they realized that tech firms had built teams with thousands of software engineers earning 10x what they earned doing nothing but optimizing advertiser success, it was far too late to compete. All they could do is watch as the industry shrank and shrank, with the few survivors pivoting to a business model that involved gathering the most highly engaged politics junkies and selling them relentless political pandering.
We should never forget that journalism was a bloodbath during this time.
In America alone it lost 24,000 jobs between 2008-2014. The job losses slowed after that because those same tech billionaires they now attack felt sorry for them and started subsidizing the industry, but it's still shrinking (~2500 jobs lost in 2023). This is how they now feel:
Making the problem worse is that after so many years of recession journalism became a landfill of left-wing deadbeats who are clueless about business and hate anyone who might help them. They blame the "avarice" of CEOs, "vulture capitalists", the lack of an "enlightened society" and a remarkably frequent refrain now is that governments should just outright nationalize the entire industry, or that rich billionaires have a moral obligation to continue paying their salaries even if nobody reads their work.
The thing is - it's not even over. The tech CEOs are getting tired of their hands being bitten by the journalists they're trying to feed and are starting to withdraw support, for instance The Intercept has lost its philanthropic backing recently. US journalists have desperately been crowding onto one of the few lifeboats that exists (the New York Times), but left wing pandering is a commodity and the NYT's reputational edge is being rapidly exploited into non-existence. And the tech industry isn't even done with these fuckers yet. The lack of money in news means there's been little effort put into replacing journalists with software so far, but LLMs make many tasks that were once hard cheap and easy. I hear more and more talk amongst my tech friends about news related projects exploiting AI, always driven by the disgust we feel at how politically biased and tech-hating the modern journalist class is.
It is an interesting summary but it gives the journalists a certain sort of professional class consciousness that I don't think most have. Speaking as a former freelancer, at least.
Agree with you on this. Silicon Valley is increasingly making things people don’t want or things like smart speakers and AI that people might like but don’t want to pay for. Add to that to the fact that the products people do like don’t work well anymore (like Google search).
Another part of this is the interest rates. The millennial no longer so heavily leaning Democratic and the tech billionaire complaining about Democrats share a common problem. The cost of borrowing has risen. This means for middle class people in their 30s that it's harder to get the next house or car they remember the financing on back in 2019. This has been expanded on in an NBER paper by Larry Summers, showing the cost of borrowing money explains the extremely low consumer sentiment despite unemployment rates any incumbent political consultant would've killed for in 2012 or 2016. These types of voters suspect Democrats are to blame for the scope of inflation and resulting rate hikes. They aren't wrong.
If you're working in an executive role in software for the last decade, you've never experienced how difficult it is to promise a good return to VCs. Thiel's Zero to One was literally a sales pitch; it was how you fundraised, on the promise of offering 20% odds of being the first financier of the next Apple or Google. That's now changing. You now have employees demanding more at a time when you have less. The firings at big tech firms were a realization that buying yourself out of any conflict between workers and management is a low interest rate phenomenon. Suddenly, the businessmen in Silicon Valley realize a little of the labor fears and input costs that make mid-sized business owners such diehard Republicans. They are becoming a little more like the rest of the economy.
These are very tech-centric comments: why does the public hate tech, why does the media hate tech, why does government hate tech, etc. This ad would not have been so impactful or IMO would have gone so viral, if it were simply encouraging a random young Jane Doe to go to work making electric cars or solar panels or whatever. It is specifically about "Rosie", a young woman who in the 1940s would have been "Rosie the riveter" helping America and its allies defeat fascism, but now in the 2020s is reduced to carrying out menial tasks in multiple gig jobs. Her work has no meaning to herself, and her life has no meaning to the companies that use her as a free-lance contractor. She's "below the API", and if the companies for which she works could easily replace her with a robot, a drone, an LLM, or someone in India or wherever then they would do so in a heartbeat.
The ad is an explicit appeal to American patriotism, and an implicit criticism of tech and other companies seen as having no inherent loyalty to America or Americans. Is that an unfair criticism? I'll leave that to others to judge. But I think there's at least a kernel of truth there, otherwise the ad would not have hit as hard as it did.
Good essay, and you didn't even mention the rather poisonous effect on public discourse Twitter and Facebook have had. That said, if we're going to resent people who were successful in the tech sphere, is it too much to ask that we have a decent rationale for doing so, first? EG., Amazon saves me a ton of time and money by allowing me to buy stuff without having to schlep over to some mall somewhere to pick stuff off the shelves and racks myself. Jeff Bezos and friends have probably saved tens of thousands of acres of land from development by gutting the returns to brick and mortar retail. This counts for nothing at all, though; people on the left hate him, anyway.
It's astonishing that there are techies who truly believe media is biased against them. Media subservience to Big Tech is higher than towards any politician, party or other company. They dread deplatforming or shadowbanning that they go out of their way not to disappoint their techie overlords. Most media articles about IT can be summed up by "Could the awesome awsomeness that is Big Tech being more awesome?".
The tech backlash is only really a Democrat machine thing as far as I can tell. If you work in left wing controlled sectors (media, academia, government, the Democrat party itself) then you probably don't like tech anymore. Anywhere else and people still like it or just don't care much.
After all, in real life Rosie might discover that working in a propeller factory is just as exhausting as doing gig work but 100x more dangerous, 10x less flexible, may easily involve night shifts, and her employment continues only at the whim of a boss who might one day decide he or she just doesn't like her. You could easily make an ad that showed the literal opposite: Rosie is tired and dirty at the end of another day at the factory as she returns home at sunrise. After seeing a coworker get their hand crushed in a machine she decides to quit for good and discovers the delights of the gig economy: no boss who she can have a falling out with, direct interaction with customers, absolute control over hours worked, ability to work anywhere and the convenience of managing it all through her personal smartphone. Sounds pretty utopian when it's put like that.
There is definitely a lot of ‘grass is always greener’ in the ad, but I think you are really overestimating the danger of modern factory work relative to delivery/transport jobs centered around driving. Also, I know that some people enjoy ‘direct interaction with customers’ but personally I can’t imagine being one of them so I’m not sure about that part of your ‘utopia.’
Right, I'm also a typical male who prefers interacting with things rather than people. But the ad is about Rosie, a woman, and they often express preference for direct customer interaction over working machines all day.
You're right that I exaggerate the danger of modern factory work. Still, some of the stuff in the video pretty dangerous if anything goes wrong. Giant propellers, welding robots ... lots of ways that can go wrong.
Great analysis, and definitely agree in terms of the promise vs reality of where tech took us—including the vision before of millions of small businesses with the inherently decentralized internet, vs the tech titans that are now much of the total stock market alone (and individually are larger in value than entire countries’ GDP).
That’s part of the small vs big tech too, and people can be forgiven for not really seeing the difference when the original promise of what the future looked like from what used to be “small tech” also turned out not to be.
IMO the Tech Backlash started around 2014 when the NYT figured out that they are actually competitors in the digital market against Google and Facebook and their previously glowing coverage of Silicon Valley turned into daily attacks. By 2018 they were criticizing the stray cats at Googleplex. This was part of their successful digital transformation strategy.
Almost. It was actually Murdoch in 2009, but he was merely the earliest to reach that conclusion:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-dec-02-la-fi-news-google2-2009dec02-story.html
It was the launch of news.google.com in 2006 that drove the media's turn on the tech industry, as for the first time Google revealed just how much duplication there actually was in the media. People were shocked to see links like "Read 12,425 more stories on this topic". Simultaneously the tech business was moving up from taking the SME advertising that local news relied on to the big brand ads that funded the left wing "prestige" outlets (who at that time still pretending to be unbiased).
For a century or more journalists had made money by advertising without actually caring about it as an industry, nor the customers who advertised with them. Instead they boasted about how firewalled the ad business was from the "real" business. By the time they realized that tech firms had built teams with thousands of software engineers earning 10x what they earned doing nothing but optimizing advertiser success, it was far too late to compete. All they could do is watch as the industry shrank and shrank, with the few survivors pivoting to a business model that involved gathering the most highly engaged politics junkies and selling them relentless political pandering.
We should never forget that journalism was a bloodbath during this time.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008/
In America alone it lost 24,000 jobs between 2008-2014. The job losses slowed after that because those same tech billionaires they now attack felt sorry for them and started subsidizing the industry, but it's still shrinking (~2500 jobs lost in 2023). This is how they now feel:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/mar/02/journalism-us-media-industry-layoffs-co-ops
Making the problem worse is that after so many years of recession journalism became a landfill of left-wing deadbeats who are clueless about business and hate anyone who might help them. They blame the "avarice" of CEOs, "vulture capitalists", the lack of an "enlightened society" and a remarkably frequent refrain now is that governments should just outright nationalize the entire industry, or that rich billionaires have a moral obligation to continue paying their salaries even if nobody reads their work.
The thing is - it's not even over. The tech CEOs are getting tired of their hands being bitten by the journalists they're trying to feed and are starting to withdraw support, for instance The Intercept has lost its philanthropic backing recently. US journalists have desperately been crowding onto one of the few lifeboats that exists (the New York Times), but left wing pandering is a commodity and the NYT's reputational edge is being rapidly exploited into non-existence. And the tech industry isn't even done with these fuckers yet. The lack of money in news means there's been little effort put into replacing journalists with software so far, but LLMs make many tasks that were once hard cheap and easy. I hear more and more talk amongst my tech friends about news related projects exploiting AI, always driven by the disgust we feel at how politically biased and tech-hating the modern journalist class is.
Fantastic summary here, deserves it's own post or at least a note
It is an interesting summary but it gives the journalists a certain sort of professional class consciousness that I don't think most have. Speaking as a former freelancer, at least.
Agree with you on this. Silicon Valley is increasingly making things people don’t want or things like smart speakers and AI that people might like but don’t want to pay for. Add to that to the fact that the products people do like don’t work well anymore (like Google search).
Another part of this is the interest rates. The millennial no longer so heavily leaning Democratic and the tech billionaire complaining about Democrats share a common problem. The cost of borrowing has risen. This means for middle class people in their 30s that it's harder to get the next house or car they remember the financing on back in 2019. This has been expanded on in an NBER paper by Larry Summers, showing the cost of borrowing money explains the extremely low consumer sentiment despite unemployment rates any incumbent political consultant would've killed for in 2012 or 2016. These types of voters suspect Democrats are to blame for the scope of inflation and resulting rate hikes. They aren't wrong.
If you're working in an executive role in software for the last decade, you've never experienced how difficult it is to promise a good return to VCs. Thiel's Zero to One was literally a sales pitch; it was how you fundraised, on the promise of offering 20% odds of being the first financier of the next Apple or Google. That's now changing. You now have employees demanding more at a time when you have less. The firings at big tech firms were a realization that buying yourself out of any conflict between workers and management is a low interest rate phenomenon. Suddenly, the businessmen in Silicon Valley realize a little of the labor fears and input costs that make mid-sized business owners such diehard Republicans. They are becoming a little more like the rest of the economy.
A little context:
In the 1980s, the peak fixed mortgage rate was 18% and 9% was a good rate.
Inflation in the from 1978-1990 was never below 6.75% and peaked at 18% in 1980.
And house prices were 3x incomes, instead of 6-7x (with bigger cities where the jobs are getting into the double digits).
Yes, the context I am describing is more like post-2008. The oldest millennials weren't really shopping for houses until early/mid-2000s?
These are very tech-centric comments: why does the public hate tech, why does the media hate tech, why does government hate tech, etc. This ad would not have been so impactful or IMO would have gone so viral, if it were simply encouraging a random young Jane Doe to go to work making electric cars or solar panels or whatever. It is specifically about "Rosie", a young woman who in the 1940s would have been "Rosie the riveter" helping America and its allies defeat fascism, but now in the 2020s is reduced to carrying out menial tasks in multiple gig jobs. Her work has no meaning to herself, and her life has no meaning to the companies that use her as a free-lance contractor. She's "below the API", and if the companies for which she works could easily replace her with a robot, a drone, an LLM, or someone in India or wherever then they would do so in a heartbeat.
The ad is an explicit appeal to American patriotism, and an implicit criticism of tech and other companies seen as having no inherent loyalty to America or Americans. Is that an unfair criticism? I'll leave that to others to judge. But I think there's at least a kernel of truth there, otherwise the ad would not have hit as hard as it did.
I am the tech backlash: I love technology and was enthusiastic about Big Tech back in the '00s, and slowly watched with horror in real time as it turned into a nightmare. https://loveofallwisdom.substack.com/p/the-reluctant-techno-pessimist
Me too
It’s nice to see the young Rosie has rosary beads on the rearview mirror of her car. Looks like Our Lady brought her to the gates of the factory.
It struck me that Horowitz et al are casting themselves as victims too, a role Trump premiered, the role of the rich and powerful as victims.
"For your convenience..."
Good essay, and you didn't even mention the rather poisonous effect on public discourse Twitter and Facebook have had. That said, if we're going to resent people who were successful in the tech sphere, is it too much to ask that we have a decent rationale for doing so, first? EG., Amazon saves me a ton of time and money by allowing me to buy stuff without having to schlep over to some mall somewhere to pick stuff off the shelves and racks myself. Jeff Bezos and friends have probably saved tens of thousands of acres of land from development by gutting the returns to brick and mortar retail. This counts for nothing at all, though; people on the left hate him, anyway.
But it is a great replacement for dystopia.
Great piece.
It's astonishing that there are techies who truly believe media is biased against them. Media subservience to Big Tech is higher than towards any politician, party or other company. They dread deplatforming or shadowbanning that they go out of their way not to disappoint their techie overlords. Most media articles about IT can be summed up by "Could the awesome awsomeness that is Big Tech being more awesome?".
The tech backlash is only really a Democrat machine thing as far as I can tell. If you work in left wing controlled sectors (media, academia, government, the Democrat party itself) then you probably don't like tech anymore. Anywhere else and people still like it or just don't care much.
After all, in real life Rosie might discover that working in a propeller factory is just as exhausting as doing gig work but 100x more dangerous, 10x less flexible, may easily involve night shifts, and her employment continues only at the whim of a boss who might one day decide he or she just doesn't like her. You could easily make an ad that showed the literal opposite: Rosie is tired and dirty at the end of another day at the factory as she returns home at sunrise. After seeing a coworker get their hand crushed in a machine she decides to quit for good and discovers the delights of the gig economy: no boss who she can have a falling out with, direct interaction with customers, absolute control over hours worked, ability to work anywhere and the convenience of managing it all through her personal smartphone. Sounds pretty utopian when it's put like that.
There is definitely a lot of ‘grass is always greener’ in the ad, but I think you are really overestimating the danger of modern factory work relative to delivery/transport jobs centered around driving. Also, I know that some people enjoy ‘direct interaction with customers’ but personally I can’t imagine being one of them so I’m not sure about that part of your ‘utopia.’
Right, I'm also a typical male who prefers interacting with things rather than people. But the ad is about Rosie, a woman, and they often express preference for direct customer interaction over working machines all day.
You're right that I exaggerate the danger of modern factory work. Still, some of the stuff in the video pretty dangerous if anything goes wrong. Giant propellers, welding robots ... lots of ways that can go wrong.