This statement represents the complete disintegration of the optimism that ruled in the 90s and before when we ardently believed that networking and communication amongst people would increase understanding and improve lives by ensuring no one would be cut off from the common wisdom and knowledge of humanity. While robber baron economics certainly appeal to a lot of robber barons, the twentieth century pretty decisively shows that prosperity at the median makes society progress much faster and more thoroughly than anything else. One used to hear of noblesse oblige, the duty of those with much to help. One used to hear about the great common task of humanity, which we aspire to make a contribution to.
>we ardently believed that networking and communication amongst people would increase understanding and improve lives by ensuring no one would be cut off from the common wisdom and knowledge of humanity
This is such an interesting take, about which we could probably write whole paragraphs.
Can the 90s be really summarized in such way? Yes, we had the "information highway" and "waiting for year 2000", but at the same time people distrusted their governments. X-files was all the rage, maybe grunge.
In USA there was Bill Clinton - the president that didnt do any wars and balanced the budget.. who got removed for blowjobs. But at the same time there was outsourcing. In rest of the world it also cannot be summed up so easily - I remember that 90s were a struggle, especially for post communism countries.
Obviously later on we got cell phones, but we also got the cancer such as Jack Welch style management that lead to various methods of enshittyfying everything.
I had a talk some time ago - I have a genuine polo bought in a supermarket in the 1980s (wont tell the brand since it is irrelevant). This piece of cloth feels and fits very well - after 40 years. It was worn through many summers.
Now I cant buy a polo shirt that will last more than 2 seasons. And I buy the "better" ones. There is lots of crap that falls apart fast.
For me the 90s were a start of that trend - enshittification of products that are designed to last 25 months (with a 24 month guarantee) and be thrown away.
But maybe it depends on life experience and anecdotes.
Was there optimism in 90s? Lots of it in marketing materials. But did people really believe that?
I had in mind the sort of networking/software people that I imagine read hackernews these days, not the overall people in the world, nor the overall population of MBAs/business people. There was a lot of idealism, among the people writing drivers and servers, and plugging in wires to enable the connections, that connecting the world would be good, increase understanding and solve problems faster and so on.
I will point out that in the US, the overall picture was we'd beaten the Soviet dictatorship, and democracy seemed to be spreading, and the income inequality was better than it is now and houses were affordable to a lot more young people. Also we had a budget surplus one year. Gay people couldn't get married and could be kicked out of homes and jobs, and there was a lot of anti-Black police brutality and war on drugs, but it seemed possibly less than in the 1950s and we hoped it would continue to decline. (Possibly distributed and networked cameras via cell phones have put pressure against police brutality, I think the outcome there is not certain either way, but the people of good conscience now have much more awareness of the violence inherent in the system.)
I certainly felt optimistic. Of course, I was also a young adult, found my calling in writing network services, had my first child, bought a house, all that good stuff. Unlike many software engineers today, I had sort of stumbled into the distributed networked computing world, having worked at other much less fun jobs, and I appreciated, not getting paid to be a lord of the society, but getting paid at all for such interesting and fulfilling work. Every raise I got was an astonishment and a delight. Once I passed $60,000 per anum, I was able to get a house. It was quite cool, given all the mocking that math/programming people had been subjected to the prior several decades.
Oh it gets better than that: he didn't even get impeached for the blowjob, it was just for lying about the blowjob. If he told the truth up front, it would have been out of the news cycle in a week or two.
The game was rigged in the 90s as well (with the likes of enron. Many executives get a few years of minimum security prison in exchange for a small fortune), there was just less dissemination of information.
In the 80s and 90s, the government had shattered AT&T into many pieces, so there was plenty of real growth in implementing innovations that said monopoly had foregone (e.g. packet switching, wireless telephony, etc). But that's temporary.
Parallel to this was the complete disintegration of the understanding that ruled during the Progressive Era, when we believed you don't sell half your country's economy to a handful of megacorporations[0]. The real growth that came from switching from analog[2] landlines to Internet ran out in the mid 2000s, because most people had it, while consolidation kept on going up until 2020 when we realized, "shit, we're locked in a box with Facebook and TikTok now".
In the late 2000s, there was a shift in the kinds of businesses venture capitalists funded. They can be classified as one of two things:
- Creating a target for a big tech acquisition that will get the VCs their exit
- Flagrantly violating an established rule or law and calling it "disruptive"
The last bit is almost a sort of parody of the post-AT&T boom. Surely, if we squint, AT&T and the US government are both monopolies[3], so they're both fair game to 'disrupt'. Shareholder fraud is pretty ubiquitous in large companies[4], but AI is also based on several more instances of "hope the law goes unenforced". e.g. the whole usefulness of all this AI crap is specifically based on laundering away copyright in a way that lets OpenAI replace the entire creative industry without actually getting rid of the monopolies that made the creative industry so onerous for the public.
"Laws for thee but not for me" is the key point here. Uber and Lyft violate taxi medallion rules, but they aren't interested in abolishing those rules. They just wanted (and got) special carve-outs for themselves so they'd have a durable advantage. If they had just gotten those rules removed, there'd be competitive pressure that would eat their profits. To be clear, I'm not alleging that Uber and Lyft actually are profitable businesses - they aren't - but their ability to access capital markets to continue losing money is predicated on them having something monopoly-shaped. Every pirate wants to be an admiral, after all.
[0] English for chaebol[1]
[1] Korean for zaibatsu
[2] Yes I know ISDN existed sshhh
[3] To be clear, the US government is not a moral high star, but they have democratic controls that other monopolies do not. Voting in a government is granted to all citizens on a one person, one vote basis. Voting in a corporation is one dollar, one vote - i.e. not a democracy.
[4] Example: big tech's complete refusal to break down business profits by line of business despite clear SEC rules against that
But, sometimes those "rules" aren't laws; they're norms, expectations, or personal human "limitations" (doing uncomfortable things to raise funds, secure the best people, connect with your customer better, etc).
Just wanting to underline that not all of this rule-breaking has to be immoral, or even illegal.
