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Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#101

Post by cromwellian »

cromwellian wrote: post #68

The reporter asks a rhetorical question of whether self driving cars should be stopped. Did he ask the car companies whether they should have been stopped selling a machine that helps kill tens of thousands a year and pollute the global environment? I mean, lets get a damn perspective here: traditional non-silicon valley companies continue to make and sell things which poison and kill people and because of that, ther…

I responded to someone who deleted their comment, it was a valuable and good comment, so I don't know why he deleted it, but here's my response:

I think it's the wrong question he's asking. We're trying to restrain technology and productivity increases from reducing the need for human labor, rather than asking if we can create a society where human labor is not needed to survive or thrive in the first place.

Is it better to have millions toiling away on assembling lines to pay for food so their kids don't starve, or it is better to have millions of robots toiling away on assembly lines while a generation of people are freed up to pursue other things?

We should be looking at the long term trends in demographics and labor force participation and asking not "How can we gum up technological progress so people continue to do shit work", but "How can we prepare our culture and political system to transition to a world where work may be a choice, an optional pursuit, but people can live without it, or find meaning in other ways?"

And that doesn't just mean concepts like Universal Basic Income, it also means, how can people society deal with newly found idle time, without self destructing or losing motivation. These are huge challenges, but they aren't going to go away from questioning Silicon Valley.

What needs to be questioned is the entire model of the protestant work ethic style industrial society, and how a transition to a post-industrial, maybe post-capitalist society, could occur.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#102

Post by r00fus »

Skepticism is a good thing, including while consuming this anti-valley diatribe.

I fear what SV is becoming, but this article says nothing of previous history of other such revolutionary shifts like with industrial revolution, petroleum economy.

Maybe SV has a feel-good image because in comparison to other mature consumer industries (think TV/Cable or Automobiles) it's comparatively less full of bullshit.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#104

Post by Bartweiss »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #24
hprotagonist wrote: post #2

I grew up reading 2600 and the jargon file and early slashdot, and hanging out on freenode and usenet, so i've been indoctrinated in this way of thinking this way for 20 years. In my experience, the people who built the net are among its sharpest and most vocal critics, and there's some cause for that. I'm not sure what the implications of everyone else thinking this way will be.

This is my experience as well. While my family are enjoying their Amazon Dots and "Hey Siri" and everything else, I'm constantly reminding them of how evil these companies are, and how they're constantly consuming and eating information, while Uncle Sam syphons every drip of internet off the pipeline. Convenience, in my mind, has never been worth the price of losing anonymity.

I'm honestly pretty baffled by the whole "techies hate privacy and undermine consumers" genre.

I mean, sure, engineers built Echo/Alexa and the Equifax website. But engineers also built Signal and HIBP. Programmers vary in their concern for privacy, just like any other group, but my general experience is that they skew more privacy-conscious than the general consumer.

The writers who admit that often frame it as hypocrisy, but that's the usual sloppiness of conflating individuals with group averages. I doubt the people who wrote VTech's godawful software are particularly privacy-focused in their personal lives, while the engineers using encrypted messaging and password managers also tend to have scruples in the office.

At a certain point the whole thing feels like blaming mechanical engineers for the military-industrial complex. Sure, someone found a team that would build Predator drones, but that tells us less about mechanical engineers than it does about the government.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#105

Post by JumpCrisscross »

r00fus wrote: post #102

Skepticism is a good thing, including while consuming this anti-valley diatribe. I fear what SV is becoming, but this article says nothing of previous history of other such revolutionary shifts like with industrial revolution, petroleum economy. Maybe SV has a feel-good image because in comparison to other mature consumer industries (think TV/Cable or Automobiles) it's comparatively less full of bullshit.

> this article says nothing of previous history of other such revolutionary shifts like with industrial revolution, petroleum economy

Each of those shifts resulted in their industries being massively regulated, in respect of their effects on labor and the environment, respectively. The article calls, if somewhat indirectly, for the similar regulation of tech.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#106

Post by EddieSpeaks »

I know this has been said before, but we need blockchain based alternatives for everything. Starting sign Steemit which works like Reddit (and pays its users) and openmarket.com which is like amazon we can slowly supplant every service. About time we did.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#107

Post by abakker »

binarymax wrote: post #81
engagement wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wall Street does not claim to improve the world. Zuckerberg for example claims that he has some goal of changing the world for the better. Note, I think this is all a little silly when it clearly comes down to rich individuals that define most of the giving. Gates couldn’t have done so much without microsoft.

Not true. Plenty of people in the finance world consider the driving force of capitalism to fuel progress by increasing value to the economy.

and by improving the allocation of resources to growth areas.

The thing is, the technology industry, and the finance industry do useful, good work. The trouble really comes from an overreach of corporate power. poor regulation and lousy, antisocial corporate governance are not the problems of their industries, they are the problem of our government.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#108

Post by stevenwoo »

danenania wrote: post #49
losvedir wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they knew, I'm still not totally clear on what's wrong with running those ads. It seems everyone has such a low opinion of everyone else these days. I really wish the outcome of learning that Russians bought ads on facebook was a cultural antibody to not believe ads, not a call to ever more closely regulate what stuff people should see.

While I agree that we don't want legally mandated censorship, companies like Facebook are constantly making decisions about what sorts of ads and content to allow or disallow on their platforms. I don't think it's too much to ask that they extend these policies to material that is designed by spy agencies to function as divisive and destabilizing propaganda. This kind of stuff can even lead directly to physical viole…

Political ads are regulated in the USA on broadcast/print networks (one has to state who paid for it) so either one would want them to be unregulated or the ads on Facebook probably should be regulated to be equal in treatment. There's also the foreign funding aspect that is also regulated in the USA. This is independent from the actual source being a spy agency issue. The pizzagate originator was a white nationalist/red pill troll in the USA. The way Twitter selectively enforces its TOS arguably makes it easy for these folks to do their work. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/us/politics/mike-cernovic...

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#109

Post by macNchz »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #62

I wonder how "Wall Street is not your friend" would play in the NY Times. I mean I get it, greed and flexible morality result in exploitation of the masses, but it is not unique to tech. During the dot.com boom it was pretty clear that there were people here in the Bay Area whose only goal was to sell some investors on an idea, pump it up, take it public on a story, pocket some big profits and then blow town. My frie…

>I wonder how "Wall Street is not your friend" would play in the NY Times.

NY Times regularly publishes very critical opinion pieces on Wall St behavior.

Here's a particularly good one from last year, "When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers", Part 1 of a 5 part teardown on how PE firms have wormed their way into critical services in search of profits: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/dealbook/when-yo...

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