Silicon Valley is broken and heading for social unrest
qz.com
qz.com
http://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/01/28/san-franciscos-tech...
Nothing is more disgusting than a human being that profits off of society and insists they have no responsibility to anyone else. Let the sham that is the social contract collapse and reveal the exploitative nature of capitalism for what it is.
[1] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
So basically you just want to watch the world burn?
Peculiar to hear this moral stance from a position of high self regard.
the social contract is a foundational concept of Liberalism. without it, the current relations of property, state, government, and people are unintelligible. a breakdown of the system is a breakdown means a breakdown of its premises.
I understand that you might expect something better to rise from its ashes, but it seems like in the short term it could be horrifically bad for many people.
History disagrees. Strongly.
Show one instance of assent to this contract. Or, maybe, just show us the text of this "contract".
Why are tech companies supposed to donate more than their share to "develop infrastructure"? No one has ever been expected to do something like this in the past, AFAIK. Just raise taxes in SV and publicly fund more of what you want.
They're not legally required to, but there certainly is historical precedent. I live in LA, and many of the parks, museums, university buildings, and charitable institutions bare the names of the cities oil/property barons. Even those that don't were still financed by that money. There's also the "company town," where the dominate industry in town shoulders even more of the infrastructure.
then there shouldn't be any expectation
And I'm pretty sure the robber barons are criticized more than the current Googles of the world.
What you are saying when you say these companies should be doing social projects and planning, is that the cities are failing the citizens to do those projects and planning.
I agree that they can do it from a perception point of view, but I've found that Social Justice is usually 80% distraction and opportunism, and real solutions should be properly architected by the right entities, and usually have the character of benefiting everyone, not just the oppressed group. Just as a couple examples: body cameras and inverting the clasroom, are not particularly "Black lives matter" solutions, more like improving "all lives" and yet they'd help more than Al Sharpton's opportunistic appearances and all that type of activism.
All these movements that make an enemy of those who they should instead try to enlist in the solution, just wind up doing more harm than good. Take for example the BDS movement. And before that, the other "social justice for Palestinians" movements. It's been decades and Palestinians are still stateless. Is BDS gonna topple Israel? No, it's just an outrage-fueled meme to protest Zionism. It doesn't actually help. The way things move forward is not by activists yelling against an enemy, but rather when people constructively get the stakeholders all together and do something that benefits everyone.
It's not ridiculous to think that the powerful and influential have a responsibility to the society that supports them. have we so fallen down the neoliberalism hole that civic duty is a completely alien concept? If the rich have no responsibility to society, liberal democracies will break down.
http://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/04/17/money-doesnt-matter...
Abstract
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Martin Gilens is Professor of Politics at Princeton University (mgilens@princeton.edu). His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press). Benjamin I. Page is Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University (b-page@northwestern.edu). His research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently engaged in a large collaborative project to study Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good. For helpful comments the authors are indebted to Larry Bartels and Jeff Isaac, to the anonymous reviewers from Perspectives on Politics, and to seminar participants at Harvard University and the University of Rochester.
Cities are not independent entities.
And good luck calculating what a "share" is.
In the UK, Google has come under fire for negotiating a risibly low tax payment.
That has as much to do with the current administration's dislike of corporate taxation as it does with Google. Even so - Google, like all corporations, benefits from the UK's education system, healthcare, transport investment, police force, legal system, and security services. It's hardly unreasonable to expect a larger contribution to all of the above than the company currently makes.
I expect the SV situation is similar, even allowing for local differences.
>If a lot of rich people live somewhere, that should be a windfall.
Not if rich people also own the government and manipulate the taxation system for their own benefit. This is exactly what is happening in the UK, and it's why public infrastructure is creaking while rich people all over central London are pushing up property prices by buying for investment and leaving huge swathes of real estate empty.
Society at scale should depend on mechanisms, not moral expectations.
danharaj, in what ways are tech companies relying on social and economic infrastructure to the detriment of others? I'm well aware of the tragedy of the commons, so what is the finite resource in this case?
The issue ultimately is that the people that constitute a city, work in it, construct it, maintain it, live in it, are completely subject to the whims of capital and private property. Whole districts can be destroyed or forced out by market forces and replaced with a more profitable set of human beings. We are supposed to accept this as not only natural and inevitable, but good! It is fundamentally undemocratic and inhuman. that's why people are angry, because there is no room for their interests in such a system. living in such a system is dehumanizing.
The compromise of Liberalism is that the people control the government, which acts as a counterbalance against the market. When government fails to mediate the conflicts between the workers and the capitalists and property owners, class conflict gets worse.
i would just like tech workers to realize that we're workers who sell their labor for a wage and that means we're exploited. Economic security, even petty wealth is always a temporary illusion for the worker. Events out of our hands can and often do plunge us into economically precarious situations. We have more in common with people who work for less than us than we do with the people who pay our salaries. furthermore, in a society that is increasingly based on technological structures, we have a civic duty to make sure that technology serves to create a more equal, democratic society.
one thing that i personally do towards that end is offer my clients reduced rates if they open source the code i write for them. i'd like to do more activist programming when i'm in between contracts.
I'm probably going to get rate-limited on my replies so i'll stop responding to comments. i sure kicked up a hornets' nest here.
But these trustafarian activists focus most of their energy on tech employees---who are just trying to find a place to live just like everyone else.
In any case, the fundamental underlying problem is that tech has created a monotonous economy in the Bay. No locality that has one has good economics for citizens.
I expect that if the tech companies were deeply involved in encouraging development and mass transit, then a sizeable percentage of people in SF and elsewhere would decide that this is bad. Most of the press would focus on individual personalities with bad optics and on sub-issues that involve sacred victims, since those are the kinds of things that the readers want to hear about, and "tech companies are villains who do bad things" is an established narrative that it's easy to understand new events by; public opinion follows naturally.
And if that's not the case, one of my takeaways is that there would be something else that people decide is intolerable about the tech companies. The issue is not the issues; the issue is the narrative, into which a limitless number of stories can fit.
Meanwhile, what has the author done other than blog to remedy the issue? What is he a proponent of exactly, other than "Tech companies suck, boooo"?
These kinds of businesses don't seem to get much attention.
We've been a going concern for 4 years now, so there's still time for things to go off the rails; but for the moment we're killing our competition and there's essentially zero internal strife.
To keep the caps we're starting to divide like a bacterium - fostering other companies around our model instead of growing ourselves. We'll see how that goes. It's a little alarming to realize that we're creating our own competition, but there's precedent for it going well (e.g. Anchor Brewing in San Francisco).
It's a great way to make money, and I spend all the other productive hours of my week on my efforts to change the world. There's lots of blue-ocean ways to do that when the need to monetize takes a back seat.
Edit: I'm trying something similar.
I find the idea of working similar hours as you but still being able to provide for my family while spending a lot of time with them incredibly appealing.
Whereas at the moment, during the week I'm lucky to get more than 2 hours a day, the commute and workday eating up the balance.
- Provide the central point or argument.
- Provide some supporting points or arguments.
- Provide evidence and support for each, and tie it back to the main point.
But even in the '90s tech boom in Texas, many were using equity in tech companies as leverage to buy and develop land. This in a place with more affordable housing and no water bounding it.
What passes for capital in SF is also not necessarily easily understood as capital without extending the concept quite a bit. It's closer to speculation in early phase equities, which is about the ... third derivative of actual capital. Unlike a building full of machines that add great creative value but are hard to move, this brand of capital is many orders of magnitude more ephemeral.
Capital also is an input, not an output, so I'm not sure what distinction you are trying to make.
What he's claiming is that in "normal" businesses those who supply the inputs (land, labor, and capital) all get a decent share of the profits, but that in the digital economy most of the profits go to those who supply capital.
The problem I see with his claim is that he doesn't actually make a case that this is inherently bad.
He uses Airbnb and Uber as examples to illustrate how it can be bad. I agree both of those companies are bad...but they are bad because their business model is essentially based on turning many of the costs of the hotel and taxi business, respectively, into negative externalities, not because of how their profits are distributed among the suppliers of land, labor, and capital.
[0] Entrepreneur is a concept that AFAIK economics does not have a good way to deal with. It seems to be a special class of labor because entrepreneur make there money by knowing exactly what kind of labor would be most useful. But it also seems to be a special class of capital because they make all of there money on equities (by selling shares in their own companies that they bought for pennies at founding). If anyone has a coherent theory of economics that accounts of entrepreneurs, I'd love to read about it.
My favorite sentence: "He also wrote a book on the internet in 1992 that was never published, based on the belief that the online phenomenon would be over by 1993."
That picture isn't even from Silicon Valley; it's S.F.
I think that sentence is incorrect. Rushkoff's first book Cyberia was apparently completed in 1992 but not published until 1994 because the publisher initially believed that that the Internet, email, etc. was a fad that would pass.
The article is very poorly written, but I think the concern it is trying to hit on is what happens to the economy when too many jobs are automated out of existence and the overall employment plunges.
Personally, I'm optimistic that the society will adapt, as we have adapted to the industrial revolution, but we need a healthy debate to do so.
Stopped here. Airbnb commoditizes land, and Uber commoditizes labor. They do so very efficiently, but the problem is they take too much for the parent company for how efficiently they commoditize these assets.
I can't take someone seriously who can't even get the basics right.
For example- Highly paid engineers from a large Tech Unicorn company that moved to an East Bay city- drive up prices there displacing half the current residents. The city's economy improves- other tech startups follow suit, people buy houses, real estate value go up, people invest in remodeling homes, setting up shops and services.
1 year later Unicorn dies or moves to another city for lower costs. Engineers with high salaries leave, other startups start to fold, city return to pre-Unicorn condition. People left holding the bag are the ones that felt this was long term sustainable or couldn't move because they were tied down.
It's not the entire tech industry's fault, but if you were a resident of that city, who are you going to blame? Probably the company who started it all, although some may argue they also brought prosperity in the first place. Depends on how you were impacted. If you flipped a house profitably, you are happy. If you bought a condo to live in - not so much.
It is unbelievable how primitive and underdeveloped the society in the USA still is, how anti-social and pre-homo-sapiens-sapiens-like most people with money are behaving.
Very disgusting especially when looking at the enormous amount of money USA puts into its war machinery.
Simply disgusting. You have nothing to be proud of.
I haven't noticed people leaving the United States for Cuba by crossing shark-infested waters on rafts they've made from trash bags filled with styrofoam packing peanuts, have you?
Oddly, all of that traffic seems to be going the other way.