Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.
This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces
Don't forget social media. I mean, we have some of the smartest, best paid people on the planet incentivized to use every bit of data they can to hack your evolutionary biology to keep you scroll, scroll, scrolling.
I think one reason I've sadly become quite disillusioned with technology is because I see it less and less as a tool for improving the human condition, and more about creating addiction machines to siphon ever increasing amounts of money from the system.
Google creates its search engine and its meaningfully better. Even their creation of contextual text advertising was meaningfully better. But then they start pivoting: the ads have a different color background to distinguish them as ads; what if we got rid of that so that they looked like regular search results?
YouTube brings video to people. Ads might be necessary to cover costs and make some money, but then you start pivoting to see exactly how much pain you can inflict with those ads before people turn away.
Smart TVs allow people to stream content...and then they pivot to injecting ads everywhere and spying on what you're watching.
For the companies, they pay someone $250,000 and that person makes $350,000 for the company and it's a net win for the company. However, sometimes people are employed creating additional value for society and other times people are employed redirecting value from one group to another.
What you've hit upon is that we're having so many of the smartest, best paid people working on redirecting value rather than creating value. And this isn't limited to technology. Companies and people have been trying to do this forever. Kings would seek to figure out how they could extract the largest cut from nobles without getting dethroned. A ruler certainly can create value by ensuring wise governance, encouraging good use of public funds, and encouraging good investment in the future. They can also scheme to take a larger cut of the current pie.
And that's a lot of the negative things that we notice: scheming to get more without really creating more value. We set KPIs (key performance indicators) for people who are used to ace'ing tests and they'll hit those marks whether it's useful for the customer (or even the company). One of the best examples of this that comes to mind is Facebook Messenger. For a while, anytime I added a friend on Facebook, I'd get a push notification on my phone from Facebook Messenger telling me that I could now chat with that person on Facebook Messenger. That little red "1" would stare at me until I opened the app to clear it. I can't be sure, but I'd bet that some PM had a KPI of increasing weekly active users on the app. They knew that if people had to clear a notification, more people would open the app each week. They probably crushed their numbers and got a big promotion - despite not actually creating value for users or for Facebook (since it wasn't real activity, just people trying to clear a notification). It's not always even companies redirecting value to them, sometimes it's individuals who have found a way of redirecting value from the company to themselves.
no, business history is full of selling addictive products, using force against labor, and using trick language in agreements, to name a few examples. In other words, there is plenty of business history that starts from maximum exploitation. "pivot" is more like a gravitational attraction to maximum exploitation, not "pivot" IMO