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Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#71

Post by smt88 »

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.

Some orgs, but not a majority, are larger than 10 and still my friend. Here are some:

- ProPublica

- my local farm co-op

- REI

Just trying to say it's not a law. I do agree with your point though.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#72

Post by KirinDave »

dragontamer wrote: post #5
wil421 wrote: post #4

If you aren’t paying for the service then the company is certainly not your friend. Even when you paying I would still be cautious. In the beginning, FB was a great way to connect and the community seemed more friendly and united. Now it’s used as a political divider and a cesspool of mis-information. NextDoor has been a positive experience for me but I can see it going they way of FB. Depends on your neighbors I gue…

> Now it’s used as a political divider and a cesspool of mis-information. As a longtime user of the internet, from the 90s days of Usenet, to Gamefaqs LUEsers, to Something Awful, to Slashdot, to 4chan and to Reddit... public discussion has always been a political divider and a cesspool of misinformation. I'm not old enough to comment about the "early web" or the days before the "Eternal September". But my understand…

> As a longtime user of the internet, from the 90s days of Usenet

A big difference from those days is that most of the major troll communities actively shunned people for what we'd call doxxing today.

It's quite striking how as folks became more and more interested in the outside world, it became more and more important to attack people.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#73

Post by joering2 »

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…

Its quite different with Wall-street tho.

In Bay Area with your freshly mint MBA, over the weekend you could put together power-point presentation, pitch it on Monday as a "big shot with incredible idea and amazing connections" and get funded by Friday.

Meanwhile to be selling the same BS on the stock market you actually had to had a stock, who got on the NYSE/NASDAQ board first, and that means there has been actually a physical company with employees and everything in place.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#74

Post by moomin »

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 think the reason that article doesn't run in the NYT is because it's accepted wisdom. A much more likely article is "You may hate Wall Street, but you'd miss it if it was gone."

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#75

Post by jrs95 »

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…

Essentially every major institution is like this, the NY Times and the rest of the media included. We should probably be less fixated on which particular groups of corporations are 'good' or 'bad' and deal with the underlying problems.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#76

Post by pm90 »

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…

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.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#77

Post by Fnoord »

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.

You also grew up reading Snow Crash wink

Some things just don't make sense to me. Why are the default settings for something like Facebook public? Why not friends by default?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#78

Post by engagement »

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.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#79

Post by ithinkinstereo »

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.

The comparison here isn't very apt because wallstreeters don't really pitch themselves as visionary innovators out to "save the world" and "do no evil." I mean sure the PR departments of all the bulge brackets will spin their typical corporate BS, but generally speaking, Wall Street is pretty self-aware.

In comparison, tying your mission to some humanistic cause is basically a pre-requisite for a tech company/startup. Case in point from yesterday's WSJ coverage of Outcome [1]:

Outcome has said its mission is to “activate the best health outcome possible for every person in the world” and provide "actionable health intelligence at the moment of care."

In practice, it puts flat screens and tablets in doctors’ offices and gets paid by pharmaceutical companies to run ads on them.

1. http://archive.is/QZnTN

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#80

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> I don't get why they're to blame for Russia's meddling in the election

Bad things happened through their products that would not have been possible, or at least as undetectable, without their products. "Bad things" refers to a foreign power running political ads to influence our democratic process. This is provoking a backlash.

I find analogy in the financial services industry's response to the 2008 crisis. Let's zoom in on Goldman Sachs creating structured products with hedge funds betting against said products [1].

Goldman created a product referencing an index. This is like an ETF [2] referencing the S&P 500 except the relationship isn't 1:1 and the index isn't the S&P 500. Goldman asked a hedge fund to help it build the index because (a) the hedge fund knew the market well and (b) Goldman hoped to sell the risky part of the product to the fund. (The risky part bet on things going down. In every trade you need a buyer (long) and a seller (short). In every structured product you need parties betting up (long) and betting down (short).)

TL; DR the hedge fund bought the risky part, Goldman marketed the other part, Goldman got paid its fee and the hedge fund made its money.

"But these were sophisticated parties!" "But Goldman were acting as a market maker! They didn't have a fiduciary obligation to anyone and their counterparties knew this!" "But the hedge fund is an independent agent!"

Doesn't matter. There was popular consensus that everyone looked like shit. If you don't say "that was shit, we won't let it happen again" you're in trouble. Society will create the laws and regulators to ensure it for you. Remember: laws are codified social constructs. The rule of law means codification precedes enforcement. But the social construct --> law process, the legislative process, is political. It's animalistic because we're animalistic.

The counter-arguments I presented above are technically correct. Just like it's technically correct to claim Facebook doesn't manually review its ads. Or like it's technically correct to say said ads probably didn't sway the outcome of the election. It doesn't matter. Russia would not have been able to micro-target fractures in American society with the precision, and without detection, from afar as they did with the algorithmically- and selectively-deployed ad platforms Facebook, Google and Twitter built. That the negative effect is an inherent consequence of the system doesn't help. In fact, making that claim is counterproductive since it implies an independent outsider, i.e. a regulator, is needed to help rebuild the system.

[1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/regulators-tackle-co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund

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