That’s the word describing what most of the tech world –devices, apps, services- leans to, a bit too much. It annoys me.
Let’s take the example of Uber. I use their service a lot, over 100 rides in a year. Love the diversity of drivers, always nice people and great experiences I could be an ambassador for that service right? No. They use deceptiveness as a business model: drivers are made to believe that they make money when it’s becoming harder and harder, and users are made to believe that prices are cheap when Uber is using that surge BS as often as they can: they know that people order their rides right before leaving so if they push a surge, there’s a huge chance that people will pay more. There is no such thing as supply/demand through the invisible hand, Uber tricks everyone for their own valuation’s sake. They have all the data. Uber’s valuation is about to hit $50 billion. It was $330 million four years ago.
And that’s what is so fucking wrong. So much of that new technology could empower people and make them live better lives but so much is done by design to milk the shit out of our credit cards, very quickly. F2P comes to mind. Phone carriers and smartphones. And you know where that control-freak worship-me attitude, make insane profits culture comes from?
Apple. 2003. iPod/iTunes.
All tech companies in the world are copying that model, that vertical model. They want those trillions or whatever. Twitter exploded thanks to its openness towards developers and once they went public, they screwed them all and still do. Google with Android has been deceptive, open source bla bla but it quickly moved to third gear and locked everything down once their mobile system was big enough for them to impose policies. Facebook’s algorithm, talk about bullshit. Microsoft has been the least deceptive (services available on all platforms, opening up .NET etc.) which is why Wall Street blasts them, why people think they’re weaker and why they’re fine by me.
It comes down to this: you don’t have to use deceptiveness to make a nice profit. You do that to make insane money via valuation, by locking people down and sucking as much as possible from them by sort of lying to them.
From 2000 to 2005, all that tech –feeds, location-based, miniaturization- was being created and true, most people had no idea how to monetize that. But it first empowered people and made them dream of a not so distant future where it would simply make our lives better, not transform us into brainless “fans” of a brand.
About 10 years of signup login and FOMO and Fear Of Not Being Able To through deceptive designs and companies abusing us by saying that they are changing the world with their services while they are mostly making us weak, dependent. And people play the game, get mad when a platform gets an app they had “exclusively” on theirs.
This all vibe needs to stop.