In what is apparently an ongoing series I'm going to have to subtitle at some point Middle-Aged On The Internet, I have spent time this week thinking about the growing backlash against tech. Considering that every one of the [big four]has managed to earn the ire of the customers in one form or another it’s not surprising. That said, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are not why society is a burning dumpster fire. And before you try being too clever and start talking about Twitter in the comments, that's a small swimming pool full of [Yelling Birds]that just happens to host the President's stream-of-consciousness poetry. (Seriously, it's like a beatnik was recruited to join a racist prison gang.)

Its importance is outsized because most cable shows have found that Twitter and Facebook comments are way easier to scan through than hiring people to do actual reporting. Reacting to reactions is at least 3/4 of the news cycle now, and we eat it up. All of this stuff makes money because we're paying attention to it, but we're going to pretend it's Facebook's fault? They didn't make your weird uncle racist, it's just depraved and indifferent enough to target racist uncles as an advertising demographic. That's ethically dubious, but the idea that we can shove the problems we've been ignoring for decades back under the rug by deleting an app from our phone is a laughable at best.

There is a paragraph of text I deleted blaming the boomers for pretending that racism and sexism were fixed with acid and fucking in the park. Dunking on boomers at this point is as cliched as the [Jesus and Trump memes] your grandma shares on Facebook. We all know they pretended because they listened to Motown, racism was fixed. Trust me, all these millennial hipster assholes are going to say the same thing when they call the cops and teenagers and cite their MP3's of Yeezus as a defense.

That got away from me. I get that we're uncomfortable with four companies controlling so much of our information, and that they seem to lack any real moral center. But corporations exist to put profits ahead of a moral imperative and often have a legal obligation to do so. The AOC/Bernie crowd out there are nodding their heads, but I'm not imposing a value judgment. It would be better if we allowed companies to have the sort of moral flexibility that Apple showed when it uses Environmental Responsibility as a core value and told investors to get out of the stock if they didn't like it. But that is something you can only do if your CEO of a company with more money than some European nations. (Environmentalism as a marketing tactic is also another topic smarter people should tackle.)

I'm also skeptical the market can solve this problem. As I said last week, most of these are skinner boxes wired to our base impulses. That isn't unique to tech, large swathes of our economy are built on marketing exploiting those impulses. Unless your parents were terrible at their job, you understand how to see and step aside cheap exploitation like that. Most of the people making the internet a shitty place and blaming it on social media are people that didn't grow up with Computers. There are consequences for younger people, but they aren't the ones blaming Facebook for breaking democracy. They know when the con is coming.

Most of the problem goes back to that people are not media literate in the US. We have a hard time learning to read how stories are created to get our attention, we don't know the difference between editorial and information, and now we are showing we can't differentiate news sources from shitposting. Boomers for all their criticisms of millennials spend their days on Facebook behaving like some incel on 4Chan, trying to trigger arguments. We're not even talking about the sociopaths sitting in comments sections for actual news outlets. That's a battle of the idiots not seen since they scheduled Transformers and Gobots cons in the same hotel.

I was driven to write this because I felt there was a shrug at the end of last week. One I see all of us taking right now, that somehow this isn't all of our faults. We have no idea how we got here. That's bullshit, we know exactly how we got here, but the answer isn't great. We have a shit culture that is enabled by tools that let us be even shittier to strangers and treat our friends and family like strangers so we can be shitty to them too. You like to be a jerk on the internet, everyone does. The culture is shitty, not the tech.