But we’ve changed and the tech industry has changed.
There is a slow metamorphosis of the American technology industry from David to Goliath. Along with this, the spicy confidence of the early 2010s thickened. Our seething faith in technology is now tempered by mistrust and resentment.
That change was highlighted this week by a landmark European law that seeks to wrest power from Big Tech, new allegations that Meta has repeatedly failed to help people whose social media accounts have been hijacked by fraudsters and a battle between wealthy tech executives for artificial intelligence that is more about their self-interest than our needs.
Many of us are grateful for technology and hope that it can help us solve difficult problems. We also fear that many technologies and technology companies are making us and the world worse. We have become more worried than hopeful about inventions like AI.
Our feelings about technology may not be facts. But they influence the way we look at technology and the world around us. And there is no going back to the fresh optimism I felt years ago.
The anxiety behind the crackdown on Big Tech
This week, the European Union passed the most sweeping law yet to try to topple America’s tech superpowers.
It’s easy to get bogged down in boring legal mechanics. Fittingly, lawmakers and regulators in Europe—along with those in the United States and many other countries—are asking the vexed questions about technology that many of you are asking yourselves and me:
- If the technology is so good, why is so much of the internet riddled with scams?
- Why, as a reader emailed me this week, if you search Amazon for a particular brand of sandals, do you find countless inappropriate shoes? (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
- If you have an Android phone, why are you getting a garbled video or weird looking emoticons from your iPhone friend?
- Why do you find it impossible to keep drug dealers and child predators out of your teen’s social media feed?
- Is there any way to avoid unscrupulous companies collecting your personal information when you file your taxes, visit the doctor, or go to bed at night?
You might say that these are trivial annoyances or some of the inevitable downsides of technology, making it easier to do things that used to be difficult, including spreading fraud and committing crimes.
But many government regulators and elected officials see examples like these as the consequences you face from unfettered or willful abuse of technological power.
When a company gets big enough, it can afford to look out for its own interests far more than yours.
Weeding out fraud and lies, already difficult, is becoming less important now that companies including Google and Meta are too big for your frustration to have real consequences for the companies.
Apple has so many devoted fans and unwavering faith in its own good intentions that it compromises the privacy and usefulness of your texts and says it’s for your own good.
Amazon gets paid to show you inappropriate sandals in search results. The company also says it’s for your own good.
Current or proposed tech laws and government litigation — including renewed efforts to ban the TikTok app in the United States — may not be the right approach to dealing with your tech annoyance. It’s easy for governments, and for us, to resent the success and wealth of tech companies and executives.
But the repeated attempts at legal restrictions on technology have a common unpleasant feeling that you may share: technology doesn’t necessarily work for us as we’d hoped.
We sense the ways technology is great, but also the worst. And we are right to ask, is there anything we should do? Or is that just how it should be?
