Thread by @Noahpinion

1/A quick thread about anti-tech sentiment in the media.

Some folks, like my friend Balaji, believe that the media has intentionally pushed an anti-tech narrative in order to get pageviews...

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1248957097229737985

2/My tech reporter friends have vigorously denied that anti-tech bias exists in the media. They rightfully point out that if you go to the tech section of any major media outlet, almost all of what you'll see is neutral, almost bland reporting about new tech stuff.

3/I mean, let's go to Vox's Technology section.
vox.com/technology

With the possible exception of one story about news on Facebook, everything here is either pro-tech or just neutral, factual stuff people might want to know.

4/There have been a lot of tech bubble predictions that didn't come true.
businessinsider.com/tech-bubble-pr…

But predicting bubbles that fail to materialize is more or less a universal human behavior (along with failing to see actual bubbles when they happen).

5/As for clickbait, I think the degree to which journalists write things for clicks is overrated. At hardscrabble digital media content mills, yes. But not at the NYT or whatever.

(In fact, Bloomberg doesn't even tell me my traffic, in order to discourage clickbait!)

6/But having said all this, I do think there is something to the "anti-tech media" narrative. It's just a lot more subtle than people think.

Basically: I think writers view themselves as society's watchdog, and go looking for problems to write about.

7/In the absence of big threats like coronavirus, writers will naturally go looking for things that might be wrong with society, and write about them.

The tech industry is a natural thing to worry about, because tech companies are highly profitable and disruptive.

8/Recent years have seen backlashes against inequality, billionaires, corporations, and profit in general. Tech companies are either the fastest-growing or the most profitable companies in our economy (often both), and they create a LOT of billionaires.

9/It's quite natural for journalists to wonder if something is going wrong there. If this profit is ill-gotten, the result of government collusion, monopoly power, unethical behavior, etc. Journalists' role in society is to worry about such things.

10/But not all profit is ill-gotten (sorry socialists!). And when there's profit that comes from simply being one step ahead of the game at providing people with stuff they like, journalists can fixate on problems that aren't really problems.

11/To give just one small example, there were initially a lot of negative stories about dockless electric scooters. Only later did journalists realize that scooters were a cheap method of transportation for working-class people.

wired.com/story/electric…

12/Second, the 2016 election represented a huge rupture in American society, and tech companies -- especially Facebook -- became one of many scapegoats for that rupture.

13/Third, media as an industry is in decline, mostly due to changing technology (online classifieds, lower barriers to entry).

Some journalists have blamed Facebook and Google's monopsony power for the decline, when really that's just a small piece.
slate.com/news-and-polit…

14/And fourth, though there's pretty little anti-tech stuff in the mainstream media itself, there quite a lot on Twitter. Most of it probably doesn't come from mainstream media figures, but from peripheral media figures who get attention by dunking on tech industry culture.

15/So while it's a lot subtler than @balajis believes, I think there really has been a little bit of an anti-tech bias in journalism in recent years. Or, more accurately, several small and unrelated biases that seemed like one unified bias.

16/Eventually, I think some of these biases will go away. Consolidation will stabilize the media industry, reducing fears that tech will destroy journalism. And society will encounter more important problems than electric scooters.

17/The role of journalists as social watchdogs won't go away, nor should it. Journalists should and will continue to ask whether large profits and oligopolies are legitimate. And they should and will continue to warn about the potential negative externalities of new technologies.

18/As for the culture wars, of which Twitter dunking on tech people is only one tiny tiny part...well, I hope those die down in general, and our country moves toward a culture that is both less contentious and more humane. So here's hoping.

(end)