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Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#141

Post by gnicholas »

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.

Talking to friends in NYC, they say that the "Silicon Valley is evil" trope plays well there because New York is heavily finance-based, and finance has been slammed while tech has ascended.

Also note that Amazon is included in "Silicon Valley", even though they have never been headquartered in CA.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#142

Post by Applejinx »

humanrebar wrote: post #85
pm90 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a total non-issue if they did come out saying that openly though. Probably it started off with Google's "do no evil" motto; I can't think of any tech companies that promoted themselves as a force for social good rather than a pure business. Except maybe Apple under Steve Jobs.

> I can't think of any tech companies that promoted themselves as a force for social good rather than a pure business. It's actually a trope for SV companies. It was lampooned in season 1 episode 1 of the show Silicon Valley: > And yes, we're disrupting digital media, but most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility. http://s…

Word of warning: I went and read tons of Silicon Valley quotes, and then returned to this thread, and struggled to tell the difference :)

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#143

Post by dclowd9901 »

rublev wrote: post #70
dclowd9901 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not tweeting (much), not instagramming (much), not posting on Facebook (much), etc. I don't see anonymity as a binary; more of a spectrum (think something that stretches between a hermit and a celebrity). Obviously as a human existing into some manner of time with family and friends and coworkers, I'm _known_ by those who could/should, but I don't need Amazon parsing conversations in my kitchen.

>Not tweeting (much), not instagramming (much), not posting on Facebook (much) It's not a spectrum. You are a user and you are rationalizing your cognitive dissonance. Just delete it, those things are completely useless/pointless and you're being tracked regardless of whatever precautions you take. You are on it, or you are not.

This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms. We don't always get to choose our battles, and this is one I won't win. And trying, in earnest, to avoid putting yourself on a stage is a far cry from publishing posts incessantly, looking to be a social media celebrity of some kind.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#144

Post by mcguire »

engagement wrote: post #78
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…

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.

Have you studied any basic economics? "Improving the world" is the foundation of what they think they are doing.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#145

Post by SilasX »

wallace_f wrote: post #128
macNchz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Ok not bad, but it isn't really fair. The real villains are not PE firms (people who play with their own money and don't care who they hurt trying to make more), but the commercial-investment banking empires (people who play with other people's money, get the world's cheapest, most unlimited insurance--err no: bail out policy, from a private bank that somehow swindled the American people into controlling its printing…

PE firms do pretty villainous things. "Oh, burdened by unfunded pension obligations? Those are pretty much unranked next to debt, so sell off all the good assets to a carbon copy firm, default on everything, and pass the pensioners onto the government."

IIRC that was pretty much Bain's MO.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#146

Post by rublev »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #143
rublev wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not tweeting (much), not instagramming (much), not posting on Facebook (much) It's not a spectrum. You are a user and you are rationalizing your cognitive dissonance. Just delete it, those things are completely useless/pointless and you're being tracked regardless of whatever precautions you take. You are on it, or you are not.

This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms. We don't always get to choose our battles, and this is one I won't win. And trying, in earnest, to avoid putting yourself on a stage is a far cry from publishing posts incessantly, looking to be a social media celebrity of some kind.

>This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms.

Must maintain? With who? Do you use FB to exclusively chat to your wife and boss or something? Will the stasi knock at your door for not checking in with Lord Zuckerberg every 5 minutes?

I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform of communication in a digital age is Facebook. I don't mean 'primary', I mean 'only'.

If your 'friends' much less family won't keep in contact with you because of choice of platform, can you really say they are your friends/family? If we didn't live in an age of cellphones, if calling is too much effort, would they have ever come to visit me in person?

I deleted all that crap way back and only a few people came out of the wood work, the rest I forgot about and couldn't remember if I tried.

In reality the only effect social media has is lowering barriers to communication, letting in all the shit connections. Much like a dam. Lower it, and the crap water comes in. Same with this, just makes it easier to be connected, which is built on the illusion that these connections are now somehow important.

I have yet to encounter a plausible real life scenario that requires facebook. At best, it might add a tiny bit of convenience to your life wrt events/comm. But it's nothing that can't be easily replaced.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#147

Post by smithmayowa »

jankotek wrote: post #16

Just watch how Silicon Valley tv series evolved. It started with noble idea. In 4th series they recorded all video calls on their network, stored medical records on botnet of hacked phones and fridges...

This is so true, as it details the mentality "the end justify the means" that permeates and is normalized in silicon valley.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#148

Post by spaced-out »

danenania wrote: post #88
vasilipupkin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but to somehow blame them for the stupidity of people that can be swayed by a ridiculous facebook ad is itself ridiculous. Facebook ads is not why Clinton lost to Trump and continuing to pretend like it is is just dumb.

We aren't just talking about some random FB ads. These were targeted specifically at undecided voters in swing states based on data from hacked voter rolls. It was a surgical operation designed to shift the balance while leaving a small footprint. It obviously wasn't the only factor, but given the extremely thin margins in the pivotal states, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether it could have been the straw that b…

On top of that, we're not just talking about pro-Trump, anti-Clinton ads. Some of the Russian ads were clearly designed to incite racism[1,2]. There was an anti-Islam rally in Houston[3], organized by a Facebook group called "Heart of Texas", which was later revealed to be a fake account operating out of Russia.

This isn't just an abstract game of geopolitics, they're literally trying to incite racial violence.

1: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/353480-report-russian-b...

2: https://www.recode.net/2017/10/7/16439936/congressional-blac...

3: https://thinkprogress.org/armed-white-supremacist-protest-or...

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#149

Post by _seemethere »

m3rc wrote: post #111
humanrebar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I'm also concerned that decentralization could increase the surface area exposed to attack.

How?

By decentralizing you have to expose more things for interaction with different services leaving you more entry-points for a potential attack.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#150

Post by wallace_f »

SilasX wrote: post #145
wallace_f wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok not bad, but it isn't really fair. The real villains are not PE firms (people who play with their own money and don't care who they hurt trying to make more), but the commercial-investment banking empires (people who play with other people's money, get the world's cheapest, most unlimited insurance--err no: bail out policy, from a private bank that somehow swindled the American people into controlling its printing…

PE firms do pretty villainous things. "Oh, burdened by unfunded pension obligations? Those are pretty much unranked next to debt, so sell off all the good assets to a carbon copy firm, default on everything, and pass the pensioners onto the government." IIRC that was pretty much Bain's MO.

They do. They're just not on the robber barron level of the commercial banks, which steal truly unholy amounts of money from American citizens.

Reasonable people have put the cost of the financial crisis at 6-30 trillion, or more (6 being the lower bound of the Fed's very own estimate). The higher figure is $93,000/per citizen, and it very will could be more than that.(1)

That is only the start of the story. Ever wonder why your money devalues every day? That value is not magically disappearing due to some mystical force called inflation: someone is capturing that value.

Thanks to High Priest of the Harvard-Wall Street Order, Gregory Mankiw, the Fed even has an influential academic paper that craftily provides a logical dogma to minimize theft through seignorage, and how muxh the public really is being taken for.

There are good reasons people from Aaron Swarz to Milton Friedman really, really wanted to get rid of the Fed.

1-https://www.cnbc.com/id/101022718

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