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

This just in: actor discovers corporations don't have a soul.

Why don't you come over here to Europe, we have strong data protection laws. Oh btw you'll have to cut your your salary by 50%, because no Silicon Valley, and because strong data protection laws. Hows thats sound to you?

I'm not trying to deflect personal responsibility and I fortunately have not been in a position where I've had to make an ethical decision that would contradict the wishes of my employer (nor do I work for an employer in the realm of data hungry social media/advertisement) but I have come close WRT intellectual property and software patents. My comment which admitttedly digresses slightly at the end is more about the fact that I find it hard for a company or a group of people to agree on _any_ sort of ethical framework these days when we have such a wide array of cultural backgrounds. I may not like giving up privacy in exchange for auto-gifs of my photo albums, but plenty of people love it, and is it even my place to tell you how you should feel about it (different from telling you how I feel about it and why)? I and other individuals and digital rights advocacy groups do have the conversations about the fallout of letting companies run around unchecked with all the data. And I support the other individuals in arguments and the organizations financially (and as I mentioned try to lead by example). My take away from those conversations however is that privacy is not as much a concern as you or I or Kumail might agree it is right here right now. I don't see how I can have more stake in the game short of shouting louder or deciding to pivot my personal career into public advocacy or civil service... Am I really responsible for indoctrinating others into my own privacy conscious worldview? At the end of the day you have to educate yourself and form your own worldview and live out a set of virtues. If you don't do that or choose a different worldview or set of virtues than me, is that my fault? And if a group of individuals who don't care about the same virtues as I do are at the helm of a company, it's a failure on my part to have prevented that situation from happening? Maybe I'm not 100% clear on your point.

Take a look at the Reddit item I linked, it's my own (uncharacteristically brief, you're welcome) essay.

I've been digging into literate on this further, and ... there's some general support, though the overall picture's somewhat mixed.

My starting observation was that, while the ability for two parties to voluntarily communicate might increase their trust, the ability for a party (or parties) to unilaterally surveil others, particularly at scale, is almost certainly corrosive to trust. Issues such as comprehensive systems surveillance (user logging and monitoring on computers), cameras, microphones, etc., come to mind.

In reading on the topic, there seems to be a great deal in sociology, particularly Durkheim and Weber, addressing the point. I'd observed that every major empire has had a strong religious component (with the possible exception of the Mongol Horde), and that religion didn't start breaking down strongly until ~18th and 19th centuries, under the onslaught of both science and reason, and improved communications.

JoAnne Yates and James Beniger have both written extensively on the nature of communications technologies and practices especially within commercial contexts. Beniger's The Control Revolution in particular details the evolution of commercial and commodities practices in the Americas starting before the American Revolution. A significant feature especially prior to the 1830s / 1840s, at which point the telegraph provided instant communications especially of prices was that movements of goods required agents, working at a distance, and with considerable independence and autonomy. Beniger describes the counterflows of goods and financial records, generated at each transshippment point (each triggering a transfer of goods, a financial transaction, and a trust relationship between originator, buyer, and agents).

I'm not saying that the trust was always well-placed, but that there was no real alternative, other than setting up rules, perhaps some form of non-realtime checks (multiple agents rather than one, say, such that outlier behaviour might be observed), and a very strong reliance on reputation. This is reflected even in the language of business communications, which is based on establishing and maintaining trust -- later streamlining of external and internal communications in the early 20th century removed much of the ornate 19th century language and replaced it with the no-nonsense, strictly-business correspondence of the 20th century. Email, texts, and Tweets have stripped that further still.

Beniger specifically mentions bureaucracy as a technology, by the way.

And yes, scale has a ton to do with this. Another notion I'm looking at is that networks (I'm looking at interpersonal / social, as well as technological) directly affect information flows through size, topology, cost functions, cohort selection, protocols, and more. (Yates appears to be studying a fair bit of this, though I'm not sure to what extent her views are as technical or information-theoretic as mine.)

Bureaucracies are, by the way, generally very efficient, so long as they can be subject to efficiency constraints. They do get hidebound, in that a bureaucracy is a mechanism for formalising information flows (literally "creating forms" -- a major class of business correspondence), and that there's always a problem between a tightly-specified limited grammar and the Real World. (See: things programmers believe about time, time zones, names, places, etc., etc., etc.)

There's also the matter of dealing with information at scale, for which I find powers of ten a useful-if-rough organising concept. Treat these as ranges, with [previous bound] ~10^0: Full focus. An item.

10^1: Reasonable scope of daily focus. A short list.

10^2: An information-gathering scope, it's possible to be at least generally aware of each item. A long list.

10^3: Stressing the bounds of even skilled individual un-managed awareness. A compilation of lists, a book. Pre-Gutenberg Europe had about 30,000 total books (volumes, not titles), and few libraries exceeded 1,000 total volumes.

10^4 - 10^5: Some sort of organised management system is necessary, can be paper-based. About 300k - 1 million books are published annually ("traditional" and "self-published" respectively).

10^6 - 10^8: A formalised and electronic system is probably necessary at this point. Statistical treatments quite helpful. The largest libraries contain ~24 million volumes.

10^9 - 10^11: Statistical treatments almost certainly necessary.

10^12+: Big data, machine-learning. Multiple levels of abstraction required to humanly comprehend scales. A galaxy's worth of stars. Total number of cells in the human body.

I use books, notes, and index cards considerably. The sense of information scale (and tractability) as I range from 1 card to 10 to 100 to 1,000s is interesting and visceral.

Now make those people and organisations and businesses and systems, and try to work with them ....

See:

Beniger: http://www.worldcat.org/title/control-revolution-technologic...

Yates: http://www.worldcat.org/title/information-technology-and-org...

I agree. What I mean is recognition of human nature. We do respond to incentives, there's no working around that (at least for now; maybe we'll have some mind-engineering tech in the future). We want people to do good, and to achieve this we need to both strengthen individual sense of morality and shape the incentives and engineer systems that protect from pressure - because we recognize no human is immune to incentives.

Will we find the right balance? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. The balance we have now is dynamic - people do bad things, but not enough of them to cause a societal collapse. Incentives are recursive, too - institutions are formed not out of abstract thinking, but because there were enough bad things happening on that some people had a powerful incentive to stop them.

That's fine, but ultimately how can you look down on people like Trump, Ajit Pai, or the CEO of Comcast? They're sacrificing ethical decisions for money, same as you.

Only difference is they're getting "fuck you" money and you're barely getting enough to buy a house. Kinda lame to sell out for so little IMO.

As long you don't complain about these types of people, then whatever, but if you do you need to take a harder look in the mirror!