Comment by donmcronald
10 days ago
And a lot of the gains from the Dotcom boom are being paid back in negative value for the average person at this point. We have automated systems that waste our time when we need support, product features that should have a one-time-cost being turned into subscriptions, a complete usurping of the ability to distribute software or build compatible replacements, etc..
The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some way, but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy people that have gained control of everything.
If you're ever been to a third world country then you'd see how this is completely untrue. The dotcom boom has revolutionized the way of life for people in countries like India.
Even for the average person in America, the ability to do so many activities online that would have taken hours otherwise (eg. shopping, research, DMV/government activities, etc). The fact that we see negative consequences of this like social network polarization or brainrot doesn't negate the positives that have been brought about.
I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.
For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But…
Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware of other peoples’ personal space, see their family dynamics. Queuing for event tickets brought you shoulder to shoulder with the crowd before the event began… Today, we do all this at home; strangers (and communities) are separated from us by glass, cables and satalites, rather than by air and shouting distance. I argue that this time saving is reducing our ability to socialise.
Research: this is definitely accelerated, and probably mostly for the better. But… some kinds of research were mingled with the “shopping” socialisation described above.
Admin: the happy path is now faster and functioning bureaucracy is smoother in the digital realm. But, it’s the edge cases which are now more painful. Elderly people struggle with digital tech and prefer face to face. Everyone is more open to more subtle and challenging threats (identity theft, fraud); we all have to learn complex and layered mitigation strategies. Also: digital systems are very fragile: they leak private data, they’re open to wider attack surfaces, they need more training and are harder to intuit without that training; they’re ripe for capture by monopolists (Google, Palantir).
The time and cost savings of all these are not felt by the users, or even the admins of these systems. The savings are felt only by the owners of the systems.
Technologgy has saved billions of person-hours individual costs, in travel, in physical work. Yet, wemre working longer, using fewer ranges of motions, are less fit, less able to tolerste others’ differences and the wealth gap is widening.
> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.
"Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.
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Yes, this is true. There used to be a lot of local book stores, for example. Amazon optimized that away, while ruining social fabric.
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Recall that the arXiv was established in 1991, many years before the dotcom bubble. Many scientists still use arXiv prominently for research.
It seems the crux is that we needed X people to produce goods, and we had Y demand.
Now we need X*0.75 people to do meet Y demand.
However, those savings are partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to owners.
There is only so much marginal propensity to spend that rich people have, so that additional wealth is not resulting in an increase in demand, at least commensurate enough to absorb the 25% who are unemployed or underemployed.
Ideally that money would be getting ploughed back into making new firms, or creating new work, but the work being created requires people with PHDs, and a few specific skills, which means that entire fields of people are not in the work force.
However all that money has to go somewhere, and so asset classes are rising in value, because there is no where else for it to go.
> Now we need X0.75 people to do meet Y demand.*
This is how GDP/person has increased 30x the last 250 years.
What always happens is that the no longer needed X*0.25 people find new useful things to do and we end up 33% richer.
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> partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to owners.
Or, the returns on capital exceed the rate of economic growth (r > g), if you like Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century.
One of the central points is about how productivity and growth gains increasingly accrue to capital rather than labor, leading to capital accumulation and asset inflation.
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With telecom, we benefited from skipping generations. I got into a telecom management program because in 2001-ish, I was passed by on a village street by a farmer bicycling while talking on his cellphone. Mind you my family could not afford cellphone call rates at the time.
In fact, the technology was introduced out here assuming corporate / elite users. The market reality became such that telcos were forced kicking and screaming to open up networks to everybody. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (back then) mandated rural <> urban parity of sorts. This eventually forced telcos to share infrastructure costs (share towers etc.) The total call and data volumes are eye-watering, but low-yield (low ARPU). I could go on and on but it's just batshit crazy.
Now UPI has layered on top of that---once again, benefiting from Reserve Bank of India's mandate for zero-fee transactions, and participating via a formal data interchange protocol and format.
Speaking from India, having lived here all my life, and occasionally travelled abroad (USAmerica, S.E. Asia).
We, as a society and democracy, are also feeling the harsh, harsh hand of "Code is Law", and increasingly centralised control of communication utilities (which the telecoms are). The left hand of darkness comes with a lot of darkness, sadly.
Which brings me to the moniker of "third world".
This place is insane, my friend --- first, second, third, and fourth worlds all smashing into each others' faces all the time. In so many ways, we are more first world here than many western countries. I first visited USAmerica in 2015, and I could almost smell an empire in decline. Walking across twitter headquarters in downtown SF of all the places, avoiding needles and syringes strewn on the sidewalk, and avoiding the completely smashed guy just barely standing there, right there in the middle of it all.
That was insane.
That kind of extreme poverty juxtaposed to extreme wealth, and all of the social ills that come along with it, have always been a fixture of the American experience. I don’t think it’s a good barometer or whether the USA is in decline when there has long been pockets of urban decay, massive inequality, drug use etc. Jump back to any point in American history and you’ll find something similar if not much, much worse. Even in SF of all places, back in the wild west era gold rush or in the 1970s… America has always held that contradiction.
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AI itself is a manifestation of that too, a huge time waster for a lot of people. Getting randomly generated wrong but sounding right information is very frustrating. Start asking AI questions you already know the answer too and the issues can become very obvious.
I know HN and most younger people or people with otherwise political leanings always push narratives pointing at rich people bad but I feel a lot of tech has made our lives easier and better. It's also made it more complicated and worse in some ways. That effect has applied to everyone.
In poor countries, they may not have access to clean running water but it's almost guaranteed they have cell phones. We saw that in a documentary recently. What's good about that? They use cell phones not only to stay in touch but to carry out small business and personal sales. Something that wouldn't have been possible before the Internet age.
Don’t say that, you’ll hasten the Antichrist!
(For those who missed it: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/785407/p... )
> The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some way, but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy people that have gained control of everything.
You are describing platform capture. Be it Google Search, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, X, App Store, Play Store, Amazon, Uber - they have all made themselves intermediaries between public and services, extracting a huge fee. I see it like rent going up in a region until it reaches maximum bearable level, making it almost not worth it to live and work there. They extract value both directions, up and down, like ISPs without net-neutrality.
But AI has a different dynamic, it is not easy to centrally control ranking, filtering and UI with AI agents. You can download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta. Now it is AI agents that got the "ear" of the user base.
It's not like before it was good - we had a generation of people writing slop to grab attention on web and social networks, from the lowest porn site to CNN. We all got prompted by the Algorithm. Now that Algorithms is replaced by many AI agents that serve users more directly than before.
>You can download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta.
You can download a model. That doesn't necessarily mean you can download the best model and all the ancillary systems attached to it by whatever service. Just like you can download a web index but you probably cannot download google's index and certainly can't download their system of crawlers for keeping it up to date.