Every action has an equal opposite reaction...

If problems were actually solved, like fully remedied, how will billionaires ever afford that 6th superyacht? Jeez, think of other people for once.

Capitalism.

Because techbros never consider the downsides or misuses of the technologies they promote, only the profit potential.

We don't notice technologies that quietly solve the problem they were intended to solve. I've never seen a rage post about light switches. Or wrenches. Or locks. Or pencils.

AI, and a lot of the technologies we complain about, are business models that prioritize value to the producer over value to the buyer or user. They aren't technology per se, so much as a shoddy product wrapped in unrealistic promises.

In any problem, every solution that works is a solution, but not every solution is of equal value.
In math we use the word "Elegant : Characterised by minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision. " To describe solutions that work well, are concise, and don't add pain.

Jigsaw puzzle analogy: If you have a puzzle with one piece missing, there are at least a hundred things you can use that will fill that space .. sawdust, sand, play-doh, cement, but the most elegant solution, is the puzzle piece made to go there.

With tech, its just more complex- we don't create solutions in a vacuum ( a world by themselves ), they have to exist and mesh with a preexisting world. We call those limits constraints. And the problem with tech is that often the people who create the technology ignore (don't care much about) the constraints.

Inventor: Can we do xyz with cameras?
Society: And not let them be used for evil?
Inventor: Not my problem.

Its easy to solve problems: the cat is sick. kill the cat.
people: No that's awful.
inventor: but it did solve the cat problem.

Solving problems in a way that meshes well with the world is not easy. And our inventors are at the moment, shortsighted and greedy.

And when they quietly solve a problem, we often expand their use until they start creating new problems. The automobile solved the problem of horses in cities (which were yes, a really terrible thing, between their excrement, their smell, the bodies of the ones driven to death, just horrible). But then we re-designed our whole metro-areas to put people at least 10km away from workplaces, groceries and services. The sprawl made the car necessary for parts of life that were never serviced by horses, and then you have terrible traffic and all the downsides that come with it. My point? The car did actually quietly solve a problem quite elegantly at first.

Technology doesn't have problems. People have problems.

Because every time you apply a solution, you increase the number of failure points.

Take something simple:

I want to walk to the mailbox and check my mail.

Well, I have medical conditions which put me at risk for foot injuries, where are my shoes?

Oh, and I need a key for the mailbox, better have that.

Feeling a little winded today because of the heart trouble, I should probably use the wheelchair for safety...

Which is still in the backseat of the car, so I need another key...

Hope it still has a charge on it, it should, but I didn't use it last...

Each solution is a failure point. The more solutions you add, the more failure points there are.

There's a term in hardware design called Mean Time Before Failure or MTBF. Essentially it means that the more parts a system has in it, the quicker it will fail. I think the ever increasing complexity of software tends to follow the same pattern.

There's an idea in marketing that if you create a solution, you also need to create new problems that you can market. For example, you buy a printer to allow you to print at home but now you need to buy overpriced proprietary ink. Or maybe you buy a phone, but now what can we do to make sure you come back to buy a new phone in 2 years? Truly solving a problem sells something once and that will not satisfy the infinite growth mindset.

It's a concept up there with Edward Bernays work in popularizing applying propaganda techniques to modern advertising as the idea that may have done the most to really push capitalism to its worst possible end.

I don't think a socialist society without propaganda would be much better or worse than a capitalist society without propaganda.

The differences would be almost decorative, so the socialist variant can be represented as a market of ideas in many democratic organs, with those people more successful by accepted criteria getting more resources allocated to them "for merit".

Or the capitalist variant can be represented as a system of efficient resource distribution via accepted universal equivalent, with voluntary associations and public morale acting to help those in need.

Those would be both comprised of humans, so without propaganda you'd have normal human hierarchies, human inequality and the resistance to it, human groupings and human hostility, all the same.

Provided, of course, that both are democratic. Otherwise you'll have Stalin's time Soviet bosses with their palaces and lovers and cars, and you'll have Nazi Germany's industrialists, the former as accountable as the latter and the latter as much part of the state hierarchy as the former.

Technology is developed by people to fulfill their goals, more interest - more power - more developed technology.

Hence big tech is where it is, and meshnets-p2p-cipherpunk is where it is.

Not really, there's an OR logical element present in our world.

Divide et impera, applied to engineering. For 80% of things this fast cool solution works, for 20% the simpler one works. The aggregating element to make using both in their own situations transparent reduces reliability just a bit, but the efficiency gain is visible.

And the "80%" and "20%" solutions can further on too use such unifying elements to aggregate different solutions for them. To improve efficiency without additional failure points (except for aggregators).

Nobody does that because the "80% solution" producer wants to capture you, they don't want alternatives, they want power, and it's a honeypot.

It's up to you the customer to understand this. In the classical model. Also see customer associations, which are like unions inverted. Isn't it funny how we have big businesses organizing, but not labor and not customers? While for them it's much more important.

As you can see, the aggregator is very important here. We need standards, so that all social media would compete with other social media in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all search engines would compete with other search engines in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all file hostings ... you get the idea.