Considering that computing and the tech industry arose out of the military-industrial-congressional complex, I think it’s fair to say that the tech industry has always been suspect in the eyes of many people outside the trade. The rise of adtech and surveillance capitalism has only made things worse, because now it directly and adversely affects most ordinary people. Too many of us are too willing to just build what we’re told to build without giving any thought to how the tools we make might be weaponized.

This is why we need a strong trade union, so that when one of us says, “I think this is unethical, so I won’t build it,” we aren’t standing alone.

As @asgartech said, tech industry has had bad reputation for a long time and that’s not news by any measure. In my country the only good thing about it in the eyes of many is the pay check.

And in many places people still kind of refuse to accept that technology is part of our lives and do their damnest to pretend that it isn’t. And a lot of younger people simply never think about it and kind of just take stuff like 4G internet and smartphones for granted (and on an instinctive level to them this is like magic and not technology, I’d bet).

And indeed, the surveillance capitalism trend – which has been around forever but only in the last 2-3 years some people drew attention to it – makes stuff even worse. I can see the Luddite philosophy making a comeback in the next decades and former tech workers from this age becoming personae non-grata in future dystopian societies.

There can be made a lot of interesting sociology studies about why people love to pretend technology doesn’t exist or they don’t want to adapt to it. It’s one of my favourite table discussion topics in fact.

Even techies can use magical/occult metaphors when dealing with this stuff. Have you ever seen code with comments marking it as “black magic” or “heavy wizardry”? I have.

But I’ve also been known to occasionally describe particularly nasty code-bases as “Lovecraftian”; to understand them too deeply is to risk psychosis.