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Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#41

Post by and0 »

thriftwy wrote: post #23
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.

We knew from the day one that over-reliance on cloud giants like Facebook or Google in holding all your life worth of data is a bad idea. We told everybody that it is a bad idea. Everybody promptly ignored our warnings. Some laughed. I guess they don't laugh anymore, do they? Now, who was right? Obligatory https://xkcd.com/743/

Man I dunno about giving weird Rorschach monologues in general, but if you're really compelled to.. at least don't punctuate it with an XKCD.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#42

Post by Fordrus »

s_kilk wrote: post #14
dragontamer wrote: post #3

Okay, there are a lot of ills in Silicon Valley / Tech world, but this article... frankly speaking... is a load of anti-corporate rage. I've read about halfway through this article, and it seems like the biggest "sin" of Silicon Valley, according to this article, is their acceptance of advertisements (Google / Facebook Mobile) and possibly Amazon's dominance of the online marketplace? Facebook's "sin" of allowing Rus…

No, the "sin" is in Valley programmers broad refusal to acknowledge the social impacts of their work, their refusal to believe that technology, which is inseparable from the context it is used in, could possibly have any negative impact on that context, and the people who use it. Even in 2017 we still have engineers crowing about how technology is value neutral, it's a-political, and how any attempt to claim otherwis…

But one main alternative to that value neutral statement and one major outcome of truly caring about the context of technology is literally Ludditism- like, if we figure out a way to make unlimited free energy with zero waste, do we REALLY want to restrict that because it'll bankrupt the coal industry? Does it become the inventor's responsibility to care for coal miners displaced by her/his new tech?

I am in the end for your argument - that is, I think you are generally correct that we need to consider the context, but I am at a loss as to how to regular that sentiment, because the 'care about context' sentiment gets to its absurd extremes REALLY FREAKISHLY FAST.

Example: I can say with some ease that Uber has gone rogue and is bad in it's context, but I am not joking or hyperbolizing about the previous suggestion about coal and free energy. What about radical lifespan increase? Rich people will start living 5x as long as poor people, making them functionally different SPECIES from us, especially in the context of humanity currently (they'd be like elves to our low men). Our alternates are reasonably scarce - we can push for regulation, but seeing as the regulators are captured by private interests at present, THAT has AT LEAST as much possibility to run amok and extend beyond those of us who push to begin it as our science/technology does!

So neo-feudal hellscape or no, I assert right back at you: technology and science are value neutral, or even automatically value positive by virtue of increasing knowledge, and this argument is detached from "we need to regulate the stupid crap Uber/whoever else is up to," that you're making. Fighting the argument you want to fight here merely leads into a rat's nest of impossible options. I say stand above that and regulate behavior before regulating technology, and where that is impossible, adapt to new reality and/or revolt, because getting lost in squirrel fantasy rat's nest of regulatory oversight on what technology is even allowed to HAPPEN isn't going to prevent that hellscape - it'll speed our descent into it.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#44

Post by justinpaulson »

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 do not think anonymity == privacy. They are two different things. It is one thing to maintain privacy and want to keep your actions and preferences private from the outside, but anonymity is more about making public statements and maintaining an anonymous persona. I would say anonymity in making public statements has greatly increased with the rise of the internet, while privacy has diminished. In fact, a lot of the data which these companies collect is anonymized.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#45

Post by bm1362 »

losvedir wrote: post #37
baron816 wrote: post #8

I'm no fan of Facebook, but I don't get why they're to blame for Russia's meddling in the election. It's hard to believe that they were aware of what was going on and allowed it to continue because they were making money off of it. The money they were getting was a pittance, all things considered.

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.

One could make the meta-argument that this is an attack on our trust in Facebook, a news conduit, and that the end result is people are more reliant on traditional news monopolies.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#46

Post by KirinDave »

vog wrote: post #20
KirinDave wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that folks think that paying for a product somehow fixes this? You can pay up front for the product and still be part of the product. Look at the game Overwatch, which is exactly the free to play model of gaming (where 20% of the player base is 80% of the revenue) with an upfront fee! People who don't spend lots on loot boxes are there for to provide entertainment and interactivity to those who do. And unli…

Payment is not sufficient, but necessary. Without payment, they either make loss or have ads, so of course your are the product. With payment, they can afford to have strong privacy rules and have others check their system integrity. But they'll only do so if there's demand for sanity. So, pay for it and demand sanity. Oh, and payment doesn't necessarily mean a "pay per use" that makes user surveillance necessary. Fo…

> With payment, they can afford to have strong privacy rules and have others check their system integrity. But they'll only do so if there's demand for sanity.

I confess it's frustrating to me that I just defined 2 alternative models that involve customer paying, break customer faith, and do not involve ads. A post ignoring the examples I gave immediately appears. There is no set of behavior YOU can engage in to encourage a company to do the right thing. You may make gestures and they may move some companies, but most of the actors we're focusing on in these conversations have attained a scale or reach that insulates them from all but globally coordinated collective action.

Services cannot help but accrue data about the people who use their services. In many cases it can happen without any of us as customers ever knowing even if we read our customer agreements. We not only need to demand transparency but we need to find a way to extract and refund the value AND penalize those companies.

Consumer habits and opinion simply haven't provided an adequate counterbalance to these companies. Look at our current crop of credit agencies; you can't even opt out of them and the stock market is not penalizing them for their outrageously poor security practice (even post-breach).

Without a strong regulatory framework and advocacy for consumers, there is no set of habits or recommendations that can protect us. You can't even opt out now!

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#48

Post by walshemj »

losvedir wrote: post #37
baron816 wrote: post #8

I'm no fan of Facebook, but I don't get why they're to blame for Russia's meddling in the election. It's hard to believe that they were aware of what was going on and allowed it to continue because they were making money off of it. The money they were getting was a pittance, all things considered.

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.

Avoiding the regulations on election spending and for those country's that have them the strict rules on political advertising eg in the UK all political adverts must have a named promoter who is registered

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#49

Post by danenania »

losvedir wrote: post #37
baron816 wrote: post #8

I'm no fan of Facebook, but I don't get why they're to blame for Russia's meddling in the election. It's hard to believe that they were aware of what was going on and allowed it to continue because they were making money off of it. The money they were getting was a pittance, all things considered.

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 violence in extreme cases (think Pizzagate), so there is clearly some sort of line that these companies need to enforce if they want to be viewed as responsible actors.

If they're smart, they'll self-police before it becomes a question of legal remedies.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#50

Post by humanrebar »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #32
cmsonger wrote: post #22

"For profit organizations are not your friend" is usually true. It's not restricted to tech companies or silicon valley.

I'd be more general and say "organizations of more than 10 or so people are not capable of being friendly" Sure your interests may align for a possibly indefinite time period and deliver similar results to friendship but the larger a group is the more it acts like a sociopath.

Agreed. I don't know why limiting the skepticism to for profit organizations makes sense.
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