“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
This makes me think of the old saying, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on you side, pound the table.”
The issue is, people today are generally pretty tech-savvy, or at least tech-savviness isn’t some rare trait. So there are plenty of people who are rationally looking at things like panopticon technologies, and AI, and raising serious concerns.
And it’s hard to argue with them anymore, because these concerns aren’t all gibberish to the average person like they were before.
So instead the approach is to just drown them out. To not engage with the arguments, because the arguments are right. Instead just say vaguely that people don’t understand, that these changes are inevitable and natural (never you mind the trillions of dollars being spent to push them up the side of a mountain, never you mind that lawsuits and zoning changes being made to force things along, never you mind the lobbying and propaganda). But never, never talk about the arguments, because the techbros today can’t win the arguments.
