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Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

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Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#101

Post by evgen »

nodesocket wrote: post #79
chillwaves wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media "feeds" us stuff to be outraged about? You mean factually reporting the news? There is real and severe damage that is happening to our country and our standing in the world. The regressive politics will have consequences. Even if you are a fan of Trump's policies, the White House is chaos, we essentially do not have a president. Imagine a real crisis hitting, and what this White House would do. It's incredi…

The fact that you can't see that it's in the media's best interest (manily to stay in business) to push outrage and sensational headlines and enable constant outrage is surprising. Facebook also further reinforces the outrage (on both sides) again for huge profits. Outrage sells, and business is a booming.

Maybe they are just not oblivious to the fact that there is a lot to be outraged about? Sometimes the outrage is not manufactured but simply a response to lies and criminal behavior in the halls of power.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#102

Post by evgen »

shaftoe wrote: post #58
sigmar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm not sure I'd use the word "absurd," arguing that "he won, so it couldn't be absurd to support him" doesn't make sense. Lots of demagogues win elections. Winning an election doesn't automatically make you ethical or competent.

No, but it certainly makes you mainstream.

Agreeing with 46% of the population is mainstream? Okay...

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#103

Post by Covzire »

tomcam wrote: post #31
makewavesnotwar wrote: post #9

Likening people to Thiel is ridiculous. He is personally facing the backlash from openly supporting Trump and being a speaker at his rallies. Nobody else in the valley did anything as absurd or unnecessary. And if he thinks he'll fair better in LA, I think he's sorely mistaken once people start recognizing him en masse. But to my point, this article seems to be generalizing an outlier to make its point. Everyone is b…

Why was supporting Trump absurd?

Have you ever noticed that that phrase "I may not agree with you, but I'll defend your right to say it to the death!" (heard it a lot after the 2003 Iraq Invasion) is almost universally applied from Right to Left and almost never the other way around? That to me is a great indicator for which side is much more authoritarian.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#104

Post by sho »

chillwaves wrote: post #84
tomcam wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was supporting Trump absurd?

When 60% of the country actively hate the guy, it doesn't make for good business. On a moral level, Trump is literally one of the worst human beings on the planet. Every awful trait you can associate with a person, Trump has it. The dude is a walking billboard for the 7 deadly sins.

> On a moral level, Trump is literally one of the worst human beings on the planet

Oh come on. I am far from a Trump supporter but this is ludicrous. How many people has he killed?

Trump is a horny old silver-spoon doofus with a knack for telling people what they want to hear. I can't stand him but Stalin he ain't.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#105

Post by jonathankoren »

axau wrote: post #42
throwaway5752 wrote: post #10

What is it that Peter Thiel said previously about women voting? What did he do to Gawker?

Does it matter? Do you think we should blacklist people if they allegedly hold or have at some point allegedly held unfashionable opinions? What a horrible precedent.

Anyone can have "unfashionable" opinions. It's just that they can't also dictate how other people react to those opinions.

There's nothing more libertarian than holding people accountable by exercising free association, or in this case, freedom to not associate.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#106

Post by FeepingCreature »

api wrote: post #38
davidf18 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SV is very liberal, yet typically engineers (eg. EE, Mechanical, Civil, Aero, Industrial, Chemical, ...) are conservative. I wonder how many people with real engineering degrees (disclosure my BS is EE with CS minor from top school) are SV liberal.

SV liberalism is kind of hypocritical and surface. Here we have an apparently super-liberal place whose main industry is mass surveillance and that does everything in its power via local zoning policy to price out the poor and minorities. The local echo chamber is all about 'diversity' yet the local tech industry is among the least diverse industries in the world. A lot of the echo chambering is in the "methinks you…

> among the least diverse industries in the world.

If you count asians as white...

Also gonna want a cite on that. afaik sv hiring is about equal with labor market.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#107

Post by jstewartmobile »

dang wrote: post #86
door3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but really the point isn't about me. The point is the dominant opinion on Hackernews is "James Damore was right!" or at least "James Damore made some good points", which, whether you believe it or not, is absolutely a right-wing, conservative opinion, not the kind of "liberal SV PC culture" that is supposedly dominant and oppressive.

Every side thinks HN is dominated by the opposite side. This is as reliable as clockwork. But the truth is boringly tautological: on divisive issues, the community is divided, like any sufficient sample of society at large would be. People with strong views simply notice the comments they dislike much more strongly. And sometimes they pass around links to their friends to 'prove' it—which proves nothing, of course, b…

I think it's more a case of everyone being so entrenched in ideological warfare that we've moved from discussion to brand management--downvoting wrongthink rather than engaging with it.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#108

Post by catdograbbit »

breakyerself wrote: post #17
dontcare25 wrote: post #7

Most silicon valley employees don't really care about any of this. If anything most have extremely conservative opinions, they'll be all for Trump if they could vote on H1

Anti-net neutrality, anti-legal pot, draconian immigration policies, erosion of the social safety net, deregulation of the environment, kneecapping solar, climate denial. Are these really things most educated people in silicon valley are on board with? I have no connection to silicon valley, but most tech workers I know wouldn't support Trump at the very least because his climate denial is anti scientific and destruc…

All of these things have only minor impact on the average citizen. Trump's tax cuts have already done way more for the average tech worker than anything Hillary was proposing.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#109

Post by cinquemb »

sho wrote: post #91
gameswithgo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what SF is like, so in these discussions I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies, or if people who insist on remaining racist and keeping gays in the closet are mad that nobody is having that anymore. The latter is what I see in my own circle of humans but I live in Texas. I can say though that I've moved further to the left as I've gotten older, from a li…

> insane, insufferable far left crazies Definitely this option. And by the way, I've been increasingly wondering lately whether our blind insistence on labelling absolutely everything "left/right" or "red/blue" isn't doing our society real damage. I've never voted conservative my entire life but I have nothing in common with the far left and indeed fear them a lot more than the far right. We need a new vocabulary.

>…indeed fear…

For someone like Thiel, as it pertains to their life and continued living in this world, what is there to fear?

You have multiple generations of people uploading (metadata) in real-time to a multitude of platforms they own/control to some large degree, that they continue to profit off of, and if needed could easily funneled to a tasking queue for metadata drone strikes if they so happen to go abroad (or legalized for domestic usage in the future, possibly with the aid of PMC's).

If anything the fear people are increasingly acting on in "public" will only make such future realities more certain as people feel that they need to go to extremes to address any actual or perceived injustice done to them.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#110

Post by resu_nimda »

gameswithgo wrote: post #55
sho wrote: post #46

What is crazy about the the situation in SF is that even 5 or so years ago if you asked me what the "echo chamber" there was echoing I would have said libertarianism and some kind of techno-utopianism. The takeover by the proscriptive far-left has been astonishingly rapid, and it is absolutely real. I also know people who have left, and many more who absolutely keep their political and even philosophical views to the…

I have no idea what SF is like, so in these discussions I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies, or if people who insist on remaining racist and keeping gays in the closet are mad that nobody is having that anymore. The latter is what I see in my own circle of humans but I live in Texas. I can say though that I've moved further to the left as I've gotten older, from a li…

I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies, or if people who insist on remaining racist and keeping gays in the closet are mad that nobody is having that anymore.

That's because it's entirely a matter of individual perspective and experience. Everyone takes their own tiny viewport onto a region of millions of diverse people and attempts to claim "oh yeah SF/bay area is like this..." "Oh no I had a different experience so you see it's like this..."

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