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Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

36 points shubhamjain | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.24s | source

I see people all around me who have this bleak, pessimistic view of where everything is going. That art/originality is fading, that technology is causing more harm than good, and that most jobs now exist to feed some mindless machine where sole goal is to get people addicted. Tech roles feel drained of purpose, and non-tech roles are being eaten away.

This outlook is a stark contrast to the era I grew up in. From 2010 to 2020, tech optimism was at its peak. Despite the flaws, companies like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things—breaking old monopolies and building better systems.

Now we have AI, arguably the most transformative technology of our lifetime, yet a lot of times the reaction seems to be exhaustion rather than excitement. Sure, people love using it, but unlike the early Internet, AI doesn't seem like a medium for creativity. The core value feels just about compressing the time it takes to do what we were already doing.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s just me. And maybe I am bitten by false nostalgia. But I’m curious: how are others seeing this shift?

1. moomoo11 ◴[07 Dec 25 15:13 UTC] No.46182257[source]▶
Tech went from solving problems for the Everyman or for every day things, to all in on gambling and other perverse shit.

I honestly believe that 2008-2019 was the Golden Age.

There were apps for so many things popping up. Services for making life better. People got paid. Dev tools for actual work. Etc.

Fast forward to 2025. Betting on stupid shit. Buy now, get fucked. People who actually unironically want to live in cyberpunk 2077.

In 2018 I felt like a million dollars meant something. Today I feel like nothing when someone mentions they made 100M or even 50B. I genuinely loved my Tesla when I first got it. I thought my iPhone was amazing.

Now it’s like how can I extract more money from you or enslave you to my platform.

It’s all wack. I hope there’s such a massive financial crash that all these assholes are wiped.

The only nice thing has been agentic coding. It’s like having an on demand rubber duck for when I’m solo working.