Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

> In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building.

Too true. But that was Gibson's way of showing the "bad result" of society. There's plenty of places where scifi authors use constructs of absolutism to show very bad places policies go.

And if you think TV was the great pacifier, then just wait till VR and AR really take off. Live in a 15'x15' room and feels like a mansion.

> I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do.

No, basic income was a way to provide the basics of living plus a bit more, so everyone has the innate rights of: water, food, electricity, communication, lodging. To not have this covered for every human should be abhorrent. The converse to this is that some people just don't deserve food, or water, or shelter, or electricity, or communication. And especially with food/water/shelter, we see semi-significant efforts to try to stem those.

Solving lack of food is solved by... providing food. Same with water, but thankfully we don't see coin-op water fountains. We do have homeless shelters, but many have barriers for the people to use. Drug usage is rampant along with mental illnesses. And many a time they have oppressive "closing hours" so homeless cannot simply take any job.

A UBI would provide money in so that people could put it where they need it. Many a times, these are cashflow problems which can be solved by cash.

> (List of many non-UBI things that can be done)

Without the requisite resources for #1, it seems torturous to say you can lengthen life spans without the means to keep someone alive respectfully. This seems more like "Keep the rich living 2x-3x life span while the rest of us die in our 60's".

The extermination of mental illness is something I would heartily support. The only problems with those are well cited - you need permission from the very people whom you want to treat. And many times, their illness has them not give permission. This has been well discussed in the homeless/jail/mental health discussions on many places, including HN and Reddit.

But I believe that you have posted UBI as a "UBI -or- Multipoint plan". I disagree with the postulate of "A or B". Both can be done. With people freed from the monotony of tiring drugde-work, people could start working on the very societal things you mention. Not everyone will, of course. But that's the nature of freedom: people can and should be able to choose their destiny. Right now, that's bound by threat of hunger, lack of shelter, being divorced from social net, and poverty.

People want the great monopolists regulated because they act like monopolists.

People want the giant companies to pay taxes, because they want them to pay a fair share and because it's unfair they get away with not paying taxes while competing with small companies that do pay taxes.

People realise that the giant companies create few jobs, often terrible ones as temps, but destroy many jobs. People are not sure the giant companies make up for the lost jobs.

People see that giant companies get away with blatantly disregarding laws like the ride sharing or apartment sharing conpanies that disregard taxi laws or employment laws or rental laws or hotelling laws, or like social networks or search engines disregarding privacy laws.

In short, people are tired for reasons that have everything to do with what these companies do as traditional capitalists and nothing to do with whether they innovate or are successfull.

You can understand where these hapless doofuses are coming from, though: whatever you come up with has to have paying customers, and be something someone won't steal two weeks after release. In other words, some plausible return on investment.

Inventing the internet was fun hacking paid by cushy government grants. You're not easily gonna get that today, or not for just any old idea that pops into your head.

Affordable computers in the hands of everyone means optimizing existing commodity stuff down to razor-thin margins (if not indeed taking a loss) plus all the logistics of actually reaching everyone.

Don't blame the messenger. "The media" is a reflection of the people. Not only is it made up of, largely, ordinary people; it spends billions of dollars each year to find out what ordinary people think, want, and feel. It tracks their lives in ways that companies like Google could only dream of, and is sitting on almost a century of trend data.

Look at any failed enterprise from the former Iraqi government to Richard Nixon to movie stars of today and a hundred years ago. Blaming the media is a pretty good indication that you're on the wrong side of things, and would rather point a finger at a scapegoat than take responsibility for and fix your own failings.

People used to love cars made in Michigan. But we found out that we loved cars from Japan more. You're confusing feelings toward Silicon Valley with feelings toward the products it creates. Silicon Valley is replaceable.