TL;DR: Big Tech isn’t inherently evil, but we’ve ceded too much control. It’s time to take it back.
I have spent many years in technology. For background, I studied computer networks and distributed systems at university, worked as a sysadmin, SRE, and software engineer at a few companies, and then started Micro as an open source project in 2015. But like most of you, I was born into the era of consumer technology, with Ataris, Amstrads, Sega Mega Drives, and everything that came after. I loved computers, but I was never a child programmer like many profess to be. I was a heavy user, but also a physical builder. I liked assembling PCs from the ground up: choosing the right case and motherboard, assembling the parts, and applying the layer of thermal paste to the CPU before resting the heatsink on it. For a period, it was my true passion. Then I learned to program, and that took over.
To me, there was a sort of remarkable nature to software, an almost living-like experience—the idea that we could make it do things and that it could continue to operate while we were asleep. I was enthralled by this idea of building living software. And today, obviously, we are getting much closer to that with Agents and the whole pursuit of AGI. But I think what’s more interesting is when you zoom out and try to understand it from the perspective of nature and living, breathing systems like trees, or our universe. The reality is, the living, breathing system—the organic matter—is actually something larger and more complex. It’s not a singular piece of software; it’s a whole host of systems all working together to create the semblance of life. The human body is probably the best representation of that. In our profession, though, I’d argue Google as an entity is the living, breathing embodiment of a software machine interwoven with human agents.
What am I trying to say here? It was inevitable that if all the variables at play to create a huge software machine were correct, we would end up with these giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. And the thing is, if we continue to feed these beasts, they will continue to grow and then become far more intelligent than they are. You see, up until this point, these things were not very clever, but they are about to turn into something we’ve yet to see or fully comprehend. But what are we feeding them? What are the variables? What are the inputs that turn these things into massive, giant supernovas that consume everything in their wake? It’s us. They feed on us.
Google doesn’t exist without us. Facebook doesn’t exist without us. TikTok, Threads, every other new socially addictive thing. All the Big Tech companies and the up-and-comers like OpenAI—the ethically and morally challenged OpenAI—are all feeding on us to fuel their growth, and they wouldn’t exist without us. Google in the early days was something to be lauded. It was a feat of technical brilliance—whether you point to PageRank, BigTable, GFS, Borg, the simplicity of the UX, or the mastery of search and indexing. The sheer technical superiority of that product was outstanding. And in the beginning, it made sense that advertising fit that model and enabled Google to print cash to the point of being able to do absolutely anything. They did so many things, and they deprecated so many things. And they acquired so many things, and they shut down so many things. But a lot of that also got merged in to become some of the great products we know today. I am a Google user; I still use Google Search and I still use Gmail. And I also worked at Google for a short time.
Back in 2011, the startup I was working at as a sysadmin got acquired. I was 26. I went from someone who managed nine production servers on bare metal to seeing inside the most impressive technical company in the world. And let’s not argue, in 2011, their technology was vastly superior to everyone; they just didn’t talk about it. Going to Google was like looking 10 years into the future. I spent 18 months there, and without a doubt, it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life, but it was also one of the worst. During that period, I lost my dad to a two-year battle with myeloma, and it completely rocked my world. It shattered everything I knew about life, including my love for this tech giant. Google before I lost my dad was like a playground; it was all whimsical and fun. And then after, it was like I was looking at the inside of a cult. It sounds extreme, but when you begin to question your entire existence, you then wonder, what am I spending all my time on? Why am I here? Why am I in this room? Why are all these people spending 10+ hours a day here? What is this meeting we’re in? What is even the point of this? What a waste of time.
Google went from being my dream to hell. I stopped being able to work; I was paralysed at the desk. Profound issues were at play, obviously. But it was sort of the start of my disenchantment with Big Tech from the inside out. I still liked using the products, I still respected what they had built, but I could no longer sit at my desk working on arbitrary things that gave my life no meaning, like DNS configuration. That’s not a knock on those who enjoy doing it or have to do it. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And it was depressing that I couldn’t. I wanted so badly to still believe in the dream, but just couldn’t. My world had ended—who I was, he was gone.
But the moral of the story is, it took something like death to make me see the truth. These companies are like a cult, an ideology; when you give yourself over to them, you neglect something else. You neglect the truth, you neglect reality, you neglect real life. Big Tech is all-consuming from inside out. We all need a job, we all need to work, but what these companies have done is create an environment in which you have to conform to the system, you have to be indoctrinated. It might seem harmless to get the branded t-shirts and hoodies, or to have all your meals catered for at work, or to get the free gadgets like the phone or VR headset, but essentially you are being lost to something you had no control over in the first place. The system was designed like this to keep you there, to make you forget about everything else. Heck, Google in Mountain View wanted to operate like a college campus, offering laundry, and other amenities. But I don’t want to keep ranting about it. What I want to try to convey is my disillusionment with the thing I came to love. And that you too, if you work there, need to think about why you’re there.
At this point, I didn’t feel like Google was doing morally questionable things. Witnessing it from the inside, I felt some level of trust, despite all that I just said. I felt like I could trust them with my email and trust them as a technology company. And with the likes of Demis on DeepMind (the future CEO), I feel like it’ll be fine. The problem, though, is where things are going from a consumer perspective. Google was always terrible at social products, and to be honest, I think that was a good thing, because it kept the company mostly honest and focused on building utility things: bigger projects, Maps, Street View, Android, etc. We didn’t need yet another Facebook or Twitter; we needed Google to be Google, the nerdy kid with no friends who saved us from the other evil nerdy kid later on, e.g. Microsoft.
As a segue, let’s talk about Facebook and Twitter before we head back to the mobile era of tech with Apple and Google.
Somewhere after 2013, social started to take off. Facebook did well on desktop, but mobile was a whole other world. Just remember that Facebook didn’t invent Instagram; it had to buy it. Yet what it did after was turn it into a giant, socially addictive, anxiety-inducing machine. You see, in the time Facebook was on desktop, it had learned everything about gamification. And what it couldn’t do to compete in search or other categories, it made up for with dopamine-fueled raging clickbait, pokes, and likes. This gamification then got applied to Instagram, and our lives ended up in the gutter.
How much time do you spend scrolling Facebook? Now, how much time do you spend on Instagram, Reels, or whatever other service Facebook owns? Facebook, now Meta, figured out how to keep you addicted through new channels: videos, images, short-form vids, and now the reincarnation of Twitter as Threads. We’ve lost a whole decade to what I can only describe as a vanity-fueled raging addiction of a horny teenager—that is the second generation of tech companies that came out of the Web 2.0 era.
I lost many hours to Twitter and posted many a tweet into the abyss, heard or seen by no one. Probably like many of you, I fought with these sites and technologies, sort of marveling at the engineering genius while also being thoroughly annoyed at their addictive nature. Turning to other places like Reddit or Hackernews that felt like more appropriate places for a dev like me but at the same time, maybe not always the best place to lose countless hours.
As all this was happening, mobile was taking off, and Apple and Google dedicated their efforts to monopolising these new form factors. Each with its own incentive, whether to further the evolution of hardware or to stop the cannibalisation of search. Regardless, both ended up in the same place: monopolistic App Stores accruing large marginal fees from developers. Let us not waste too much time talking about this, but at this point, I could start to feel Google’s moral quandary. Driven by fear, Google has started to make some questionable decisions. Fear of what? The loss of their cash cow, search advertising. They’ve spent a lot of time trying to diversify that revenue, and some things are working out—maybe Cloud will generate cash, maybe AI will do something—but the Play Store, that became a major driver of a lot of revenue that they don’t want to talk about because it’s A LOT of money. The revenue is now easily upwards of $30 billion, with projections over $60 billion for the coming year. Kudos to Google for fighting back and doing it, so that now we are in an oligarchy—a two-horse race. But you know when you see the writing on the wall and your billions of Ad revenue going to be eviscerated, you have to adapt.
We’re getting sidetracked. Anyway, so mobile became the new medium, social became the new network, and we became the product.
Let’s fast track it to today. How many hours do you spend staring at a screen, looking at something on the internet? I’m guessing countless hours. Maybe double-digit hours in some cases. It’s not your fault. You’re just food. We became the fuel for these large beasts. They figured out that we taste better and are more nutritious than trying to go out and source other forms of sustenance.
We are slaves to a system we didn’t create. Yet I’m here to tell you, it’s our duty to do something about it. Life isn’t about endlessly scrolling X, TikTok, or whatever else holds your attention. There is real purpose to this life. And part of that purpose is for us to rectify a wrong when we see it. A lot has happened in the past two years. A lot has happened in the past decade. But what’s really become clear to me is, we can’t keep letting ourselves be beholden to these things that are just corporations feeding off our attention to make money. There is a justification that they are building technology that helps humanity, and yet all I see is massive levels of addiction, inequality, and unhappiness. We are depressed. We are in a horrible state. We are as far from what it means to be human as we can be.
People are being bombed, starved, and beaten to death across the world, and we spend our time staring into these screens with little to show for it. And these companies—these companies that profit in the billions from our attention, from showing us a genocide in real-time, or tracking our whereabouts on the internet for their margins—are doing nothing. For all that we put into these companies, for all that they have amassed, what good did they really do for the world? There are people still dying, being murdered, starved. We sit in the comfort of our homes with food in our fridges and money in our bank accounts, all the while staring into screens to escape a reality that no one wants to acknowledge.
I am utterly and entirely sickened by the state of Big Tech. As engineers, we are the ones with the power; we have the ability to create real change, we can do something that reorients the state of play. I don’t know how much of this is a technology problem versus a people problem, but what I do feel is that something needs to change. And that has to start with us. We have to do something. There are certain things we cannot affect directly, not yet, but there’s a lot we can do. And we should do it.
I don’t know if Big Tech will ever change. I think we will continue to see these empires rise. We will continue to see the likes of OpenAI and others fight for our attention. But it’s our attention, and we can take it back.