Yet my — and I’d imagine your — frustration isn’t borne of a hatred of technology, or a dislike of the internet, or a lack of appreciation of what it can do, but the sense that all of this was once better, and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into an incredibly profitable business.

So much of the pushback I get in my work — and the pushback I’ve seen toward others — is that I “hate” technology, when I’d like argue that my profound disgust is borne of a great love of technology, and a deep awareness of the positive effects it’s had on my life. I do not turn on my computer every day wanting to be annoyed, and I don’t imagine any of you do either. We’re not logging onto whatever social networks we’re on because we are ready to be pissed off. If anything, we’d love to be delighted by the people we chose to connect with and the content we consume, and want to simply go about our business without a litany of microaggressions created by growth-desperation and a lack of responsibility toward the user.

Technology has, in many ways, stopped being about “using technology to help people do things,” or at the very least “help the user do something that they want to do.” Software has, as Marc Andreessen said it would in 2011, eaten the world, and has done so in the nakedly-cynical and usurious way that he wanted it to, prioritizing the invasion of our lives through prioritizing growth — and the collection of as much data as possible on the user — over any particular utility or purpose. Andreessen and his ilk saw (and see) software not as a thing that provides value, but as a means for the tech industry to penetrate and “disrupt” as many industries as possible, pushing legacy providers to “transform themselves into software companies” rather than using software to make their products better, describing Pixar — the studio that made movies like Toy Story and Inside Out that was acquired by Disney in 2006 — as a software company rather than a company that makes something using software.

I realize this sounds like semantics, but let me put it another way: software has, for the tech industry, become far more about extracting economic value than it has in providing it. When the tech industry becomes focused on penetrating markets (to quote Andreessen, “software companies…[taking] over large swathes of the economy”) there’s little consideration of whether said software is prioritizing the solution to a problem.

The problem is that we, as a society, still act like technology is some distinct thing separate from our real lives, and that in turn “technology” is some sort of hobbyist pursuit. Mainstream media outlets have a technology section, with technology reporters that are hired to cover “the technology industry,” optimizing not for any understanding or experience in using technology, but 30,000 foot view of “what the computer people are doing.”

This may have made more sense 20 years ago — though I’d add that back in 2008 you had multiple national newspapers with technology columnists, and computers were already an integral part of our working and personal lives — but in the year 2025 is a fundamental failure of modern media. Every single person you meet in every single part of your life likely interfaces with technology as much as if not more than they do with other people in the real world, and the technology coverage they read in their newspaper or online doesn’t represent that. It’s why a relatively modest software update for Android or Windows earns vastly more column inches than the fact that Google, a product that we all use, doesn’t really work anymore.

As a result, it’s worth considering that billions of people actually really like what technology does for them, and in turn are extremely frustrated with what technology does to them.

The problem is that modern tech media has become oriented around companies and trends rather than the actual experience of a person living in reality. Generative AI would never have been any kind of “movement” or “industry” if the media had approached it from the perspective of a consumer and said “okay, sure, but what does this actually do?” and the same goes for both the metaverse and cryptocurrency.