A “Silicon Valley” actor is terrified by what’s happening in Silicon Valley

The problem is not unique to SV or to tech world. This is just the good old phenomenon of "not caring about ethics makes you better at making money". The market does not care either, it just promotes people and companies who are good at making money. Complaining is one form of creating back pressure, of making it more difficult for unethical actors to make money. We desperately need more of that back pressure.

Technology makes shitloads of money now. This attracted all kinds of people - the regular ones just looking to live their lives in comfort; the greedy assholes looking to become rich by scamming (er, advertising to) others or profiting off offloading externalities on the society. There are more of them than idealists. For each "actually help the world" startup, you have 10 "get $$$ through screwing the society" ones, and 50 "build things people will buy" ones.

Also, I feel most idealists have realized by now that startups are not necessarily a good vehicle for change, because by their nature, you trade control for money. Which means that even if you have good intentions and a great long-term idea, your investors may not share it, they need their shorter-term profits, and they just gave you money for control, so you'd better do what they want.

All in all, do seek out people who want to actually help everyone, instead of forever living in the world of tribalism and petty soap-operish nonproblems. But do not thing startups are where they gather - startups are just another flavour of mundane business world, no matter what the copy on their webistes says.

The core of my argument would be: trust is something we're good at, as humans. It's efficient, and it's flexible. By flexibility I mean that it handles new/weird situations well. Trustless solutions, on the other hand, burn a lot of compute to replace the need to trust another person, and they do not handle corner cases in any way.

A similar thing is bureaucracy - it exists as a way to reduce dependence on trust, at a serious loss of inefficiency. Frankly, I'd argue that today's bureaucracies are so inefficient that without hidden trust acting as a grease on the wheels, they'd grind to a complete halt. They're also inflexible, and they're usually only saved - again - through trust that leaves room for individual bureaucrats to "cheat the system" here and there.

All in all, I feel the problem is with scale of societies we're trying to create. When it was just 100 people in your village tribe, everyone knew everyone else, and trust-based society just worked. As we grew our societies by many orders of magnitude, we've lost the interpersonal mechanisms of establishing and maintaining trust (which includes punishing actors for breaking it). And it seems to me that instead of trying to find new mechanisms for enabling trust at scale, we're just giving up on the whole idea and replacing it with burning physical resources. This, I feel, is a wrong way to go.

(I'm probably not articulating the argument well either.)