Techies Still Think They're the Good Guys. They're Not
wired.com
wired.com
And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a whole bunch of jobs.
Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought quality college classes to a large audience, etc.
However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the general public distrusts big tech companies.
The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.
This is very similar to the anti-competitive strategy of "dumping", where you sell something at a loss to undercut a competitor. Again, the primary thing being disrupted here is "laws".
In fact, knowing that people put such a low value on their privacy nowadays, is offering them decent, innovative services in exchange for that data not by definition "doing good things to change the world"?
Snowden risked his life to show the world and public at large that they were being spied on by the US government, facilitated by the big tech companies. The response was at best apathy, at worst a thirst for Snowden's blood. It's very hard to come back now, in 2017, with "muh privacy".
Is that the right pattern?
Because it seems that a lot of things don't fit that pattern.
A lot of people smoked, and continued to smoke even after the packages all got warning stickers on them. Yet it took decades before general smoking bans went into place.
People used pull-tab cans for 20 or more years, because it was much more convenient than remembering to bring a church key to open the can. This despite many warnings about how pull-tab litter caused people to cut their feet, and how children accidentally swallowed pull-tabs inserted into the can itself. (To paraphrase, "The response was at best apathy, at worst a third for injury in others"?)
Then there are substances which are now banned for general use: asbestos, DDT, CFCs, lead paint, arsenic as a home rat poison, insecticide, and coloring agent (used in everything from children's toys to wallpaper to candy). All of them had a period where sales were relatively unrestricted, but where people knew, or should have known from its coverage in the general press, about their negatives, before they were banned.
That history of protecting citizens has almost certainly lead people to believe that if a company does X or sells X then the government has evaluated it to make sure it's safe, and has good consumer protections in place.
This isn't true, and is becoming even less true over time as the cult of "let the market decide" becomes more powerful.
Nevertheless, history shows that sometimes it takes more than 5 years (Snowden left the US in 2013) to go from "X is bad, we need to stop doing it" to actually putting laws and regulations in place to restrict X.
I tend to agree with the OP that privacy is a red herring. People do not care about sharing their data with large corporations. The idea that they do is the root cause of much wasted effort and malinvestment in the tech sector. It's a pretty idea but it's false. People will happily provide all sorts of information about themselves to get even quite trivial things for free. Companies that bet on privacy usually end up marginalised and struggling. Companies that bet on free+ads take over the world.
If governments give in to the temptation to "fix" this because of powerful newspaper owners, it will be a sad day for everyone. The silent majority that doesn't actually assign much value to trivia like their purchase history or inbox contents and already have enough bills to pay will have been oppressed by the loud minority that massively over-estimates the value and importance of "private data".
Your statement now seems to be is that no problem actually exists. This is a different argument.
I think the modern trend to put mandatory arbitration clauses into consumer contracts, and to prohibit class-action lawsuits, is a horrid perversion of justice. The government should have strong consumer protection laws and enforcement in place. Failing that, people should be able to sue. And because most people don't have much money compared to companies, they should be able to have a class-action lawsuit, with no statutory limits on possible fines or judgement. Mandatory arbitration is a big fat thumb on the scales of justice, in favor of large companies.
But so far there hasn't been much in the way of problems with mandatory arbitration clauses. There are some, and they make it to the press, but given the current Congress and Administration's view on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we'll have those clauses for some years still.
While in the EU, Japan, and other countries, such clauses are either illegal, or are much less tightly binding as in the US.
I see privacy as the same way. At some point there will be laws which place tighter controls over what a company can do with personal data. It will likely take a massive negative event. (Eg, an anonymous public torrent of all of the URLs accessed by Comcast users, indexed by account owner name and IP address. Or just the visit history of the people that the President appoints or nominates for high positions.)
For an example of a "loud minority" which changed the law for stronger privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act . This still applies to sites like Hulu, by the way.
Apple, unlike Facebook and Google, isn't an ad company. They've done a pretty good job taking over the world.
There may at some point be a huge negative event as you describe. I'm not sure there extremely rare events should be used as the basis for sweeping regulations. That has not worked out well in the past.
I did that to suggest that it may be another counter-example showing how that argument isn't really a strong one.
"That has not worked out well in the past." - the VPPA worked out pretty well, though of course not perfectly. It has been changed since then.
I personally like the requirement that if I no longer am a customer of a company (like Netflix) then they don't keep track of my records. That's a requirement of VPPA for video records, and I don't see how that requirement won't work out well for other areas.
It's like big pharma. You could think of them as the good guys who cure diseases. But the truth is that the big pharma guys are in it for the money and are ready to do anything for it.
People are starting to view the GAFA as they see big pharma and big co in general. And that's a shift from the fix-the-world-from-my-moms-garage image they had in the early 2000s.
This is kind of how I feel. Both about Google and Facebook - on one hand they are large companies, Google for example lobby the government [1] more than Verizon, Shell or say Goldman and somehow the irrational part of my brain is still telling me "Oh but they are just the cutesy little startup with colorful letters and a nice search feature and their motto says they are not evil and such".
For many people especially in some countries being on the internet is effectively being on Facebook. I like how India fought back against Facebook's "free internet". There was a collective push-back. There should be a similar one against Google and others.
These companies are holding more information about people than any state security service out there. It's not just people who volunteered the info (even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2]), I for one never signed up for Facebook, but I have no doubt they know who I am and have a profile on me. How is Facebook going to use that info? What if some repressive government wants it and subpoenas Facebook to give it to them or they simply get hacked like Equifax. People should at least be afraid of them more than they are afraid of the bankers and the oil or tobacco executives like the article alludes to at the end.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D0000678...
Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That seems counter intuitive to me.
Well I'd hope they wouldn't be lies and he would actually care a bit more about storing and using that data and have more respect for his users. But I think you are saying given his motivations and personality, wouldn't it be better if he is honest about his feelings, then yes, that's certainly preferable.
People see software like a bridge or a highway and imagine that simply building such things is morally neutral. But if you build a highway by destroying a neighborhood full of black businesses that has implications on society and racial equality. If you build a highway in a way that excludes the addition of a rail line along it or that has unusually low overpasses which limit where buses can take people then you are deepening socio-economic divisions and exclusions. (These aren't just hypotheticals, look up the history of Robert Moses for a prime example.)
Stop thinking of tech workers as being part of some scrappy, underdog counter-culture. Geek culture is mainstream culture. The tech industry is the establishment. Tech workers are elites who are working to maintain the establishment. If you're a coder working at Facebook or Apple in 2017 you are little different from the people working at General Electric, Exxon, Union Carbide, Raytheon, Dow Chemical, or Phillip Morris back in the 1960s. You may wear a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie while they wore business suits, but that's a superficial difference.
What we build and what we do affects the world in profound ways. We must develop the skills to wrestle with the morality and the social consequences of what we build as well as take on the responsibility to build things that make the world a better place. We are not simply cogs in a machine, when we decide to go to work at amazon, or uber, or facebook we are making a choice in how our talents will change the world and affect people's lives. We need to be mindful of that. Every day.
We are not pretending that responsibility does not exist: we are denying it. I spent 12 years in school being told to care about people who didn't give any shit about me, just so they could exploit how naive I was. It took me way to long to see through that shit and I am not falling for it again.
Technology is the instrument with which competitors under capitalism destroy each other. If you think we have a moral obligation to abstain from competing because the destruction is too painful, well okay, but we had better rip out the rest of capitalism too.
(Personally, I'd rather we directly provision a social safety net, rather than selectively protect certain inefficiencies to maintain the facade of earning a living).
But, I wish the author were more self aware of their own industry and how it is complicit in what the author is complaining about (the I scratch your back you scratch mine --i.e., I give you juicy scoops, you give me positive words) but also their industry at large --pretending to be agendaless when they all have agendas and biases and use their position of trusted source to push their slants.
And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow. Few people outside New York City know what a bodega is. Next thing "deli" or "Danish" is frowned upon cuz... ??? someone saw someone seeing an idea and running with it?
Bodegas are small family businesses generally run by immigrants. So yeah they are kind of sacred.
Wanting to disrupt small family run businesses is kind of a shitty aspiration. And a good example of being out of touch and tone deaf.
The rapper referenced in the article if from NYC where bodegas are an institution.
bodega.ai's slogan is "Everyday Essentials, Instantly" which is the exact functionality that a real bodega already provides. It's like something right out Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley."
It's no different. People celebrate disruption, until they don't. There is no difference in why on the one hand Uber is celebrated but Bodega isn't. Or any number of disruptors who displace small biz and automate and make the biz more efficient, etc.
Also taxis aren't a vital resource in a city with 24 hours mass transit system. Whereas access to food and water is. So no its not the same at all, not even close.
And the mom and pop book stores were mostly put out of business in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the Barnes and Noble and Borders book chains. The irony is that Amazon had ended up disrupting them.
Lastly your whole argument is a strawman - lack of public dissent on one issue does not mean you forfeit the right to dissent on another issues.
[1] https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/sites/newyorklawjourna...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newyorkcity-taxis-uber/ta...
[3] https://priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the...
>"And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow."
The "swipe" was not by the author but by a NYC-based rapper on twitter. Someone for whom bodegas would be essential.
I've articulated why bodegas would be considered special to someone for whom they serve an essential neighborhood function. I have also explained how this is different than the Taxi medallion monopoly systems and bookstores.
Yes taxis exist outside of New York City and cities such as Chicago, S.F and Boston also have regulated monopolies via a taxi medallion system.
You really don't seem to have any kind of arguments other than asking "what about __?" questions.
Bit offtopic, but people keep saying this and it turns out to 'not be true for my friends and me' ; we might not be the norm, but if they know the predilections of the norm, they know nothing of value, so what exactly does it mean /or/ what's creepy about it? Google & Facebook (the latter I stopped using because it became rather useless of late) know everything about my life, and, as a human, I can predict what my profile likes or wants at mostly any given time, and yet they are always(!) wrong. And so is Netflix. For all of these; I am an avid reviewer and I rate; I usually rate binary; 1 or 5. And yet, they cannot predict anything I would want and routinely give me things to buy/watch that I would never even consider using or buying. So where is this creepy thing that knows so much about me? Is it not used to advertise to me? Or does this mean; 'we get it right for 80% so it's really great?'? Because that really means nothing; it is really easy to predict for the masses.
I would say the 'evil' in the industry is more around homogenizing everything; taste, friendships, contact, dating, looks, feels; trying to make them the same as what you are selling and actually have people falling for it. Which turns 'predicting taste' upside down; mold people, then predict they will like the mold. Not many tv shows, movies and music I see/hear that fall outside of the mold.
The incident referenced here seems to be blown up a bit.
Sure, it is a PR nightmare for Netflix and the joke felt flat. But, there is doubt on whether the social media team does have access to people's viewing data directly. It is most likely they thought of a joke and to make it sound real they referenced some numbers. Now everyone thinks not only they have poor taste in jokes but also are looking at people's data.
But I agree. The article reads as "these guys seem desperate, let me kick them one more time, it's for their own good". It's one thing to be driven by facts, calling out bad things when you see them, this reads like an opinion piece saying "they still haven't learned". And "they" is wildly generalized.
It seem that "entrepreneur" is becoming synonymous to "arrogant, sexist asshole", and if think that, you're actually creating another problem, not solving the existing one.
Excessive amounts of ill gotten gain & subsidies adds fuel to the disconnect built on faulty presuppositions.
His term was “fair-weather entrepreneurs”. Essentially guns for hires without vision who will go wherever easy capital funding is to be found.
This was interesting to read:
5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn't this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That's the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're headed for big trouble.
Note: I do not live, and have not lived, in Silicon Valley. So it could be my context is wrong.
You have absolutely no context of any of these conversations, yet your first presumption that he has some opinions on race realism? This mainstream behavior of seeing a racist behind every rock, or every innocent comment having some underlying racial motivation is I suspect exactly what he's referring to.
If he was born 30 years earlier he would be saying the exact same things about Wall Street.
To be more general, Cluster Bs.
[0] https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816
Google, Facebook and others creepy surveillance behavior has been more or less normalized and few seem to have a problem working for them and furthering their agendas. Once the infrastructure for surveillance exists, things change whether you like it or not.
You can't be a victim all the time, at some point you need to take responsibility, if you can behave with integrity you can't expect it from society.
The idea that these organisations are unethical doesn't stick. Here's the brutal reality - people care about privacy from the people immediately around them. They value Incognito Mode because they want to hide their browsing history from partner/friends/family/etc. They don't value encrypted email because they assign a value of near zero to hiding messages from Google.
And why not? Privacy leaks out of these organisations are so rare as to be non-existent. They control their employees access very tightly and I can remember exactly one case of a genuine scandal involving a Google SRE maliciously accessing accounts. For a company coming up to 20 years old that's a good track record. Moreover, it's convenient to trust a large corporation. They will help you if you forget your password instead of saying "sorry, no key no access". They back things up for you, give you magical search functionality, filter stuff for you, show you useful stuff. And it costs you nothing! It's a deal so great everyone takes it.
The day I really came to understand that whinging about online privacy was just a crappy form of journalistic champagne socialism was when I took part in a system that showed me how much money advertisers were spending in the auction to appear on my screen during an ordinary few days of browsing. I saw that data because I was interested in the idea of letting people bid themselves out of seeing online ads. It was a staggering amount of money. Many many multiples the cost of my cable TV/internet subscription. Even as a well paid engineer I'd not have considered actually doing it. And for people on a more average salary? Trying to get rid of online ads or making them less efficient would just mean they couldn't afford to use the internet at all. I came to realise that no people would ever agree to pay for the true cost of their own web browsing. It was well targeted ads or it was no web sites.
Since then articles like these moaning about the evil ad-driven tech industry just make me roll my eyes. Don't like it Ms Journalist? Get rid of all the advertising and sleasy agenda-driven copy in your own industry first, then lecture others.
It was the underfunded, plucky upstarts that were generally the good guys.
That hasn't changed.
What has changed is that what little accountability we ever had against those large tech firms has completely collapsed. Even the mere thought of an AT&T style breakup would be laughable nowadays.
Now it turned out they could not stay on pedestal, because no real group of people can. They are people, not mystical Madonnas.
“This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,”
I absolutely abhor arguments that are based on the quest for pure excellence. I promise you nearly every discriminatory argument in history was based on excellence. And yes, to have civility we have to get over that and say: no, you can't say shit about gay people. If that changes some elite collectives overall IQ, get the fuck over it. Your novel comment on physics is simply lower on the scale of priorities.
This creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.
Tech has an abundance of non-nerdy types now, and arguably those are the people with enough business and social savvy to have made it into the force it is today. The VCs who choose what to fund, the advertisers that shape content platforms, the founders who care only about engagement..
These socially "well-adjusted" people are just as culpable (if not more) for the evil tech has done, but yet people like you point the finger at nerds and only nerds. There are many, many socially competent people who do evil things, but they have good social skills so you don't care. Its just a trash regurgitation of the hierarchies of high-school all over again.
Its oh-so-convenient to believe "evil" ties in perfectly with your intuitive sense of "well-adjusted", to divide the world so easily into "misfit = evil" and "friendly = good", but truly evil people have to blend in as "good" to get anything done. The sociopaths are running the show.
Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, no matter who you're talking to or how wrong they are. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do this again. Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site to heart and you'll be fine.
Edit: I'm sorry to see that you've posted several other uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN recently too. Really, please don't do that.
Thinking that being nerd implies good and does not help anything ethical. It makes it worst, because it removes doubt.
I don't think nerds are all good, but I don't think they are all evil because of their childhood experiences either as OP implies. The fact is good and evil people are everywhere.
I have no idea where you're getting the notion that it was an indictment of technologists, writ large. It observed that many of us — myself included — were very much on the outside, socially, as young people. I mean, how do you know that 'matte_black wasn't bullied, too?
No matter what, that leaves a mark. That some subset of those people developed consequently in a way that manifests a lack of empathy and an "Oh, yeah? I'll show you!" kind of attitude is neither surprising, nor worthy of condemnation for acknowledging aloud.
There is however something cultural that makes us assume (in these discussions) that techies were all bullied and are all unadjusted. Up to the point where pretending you don't get social nuance occasionally, when it suits you, is a brag point and makes people assume you are smarter. (Of course crutial difference is that people who really don't get social make mistakes when it does not suits them)
People throw around weird techie stereotype, but when I ask names, they can't answer. Because their real world colegues are not stereotypes mostly.
Even saying "many" is perpetuating a stereotype, and its harmful in the way all stereotypes are.
See how controversial saying "Many women tend to gravitate away from technology & towards people-focused disciplines" is, for the same reasons. It subtly disempowers people within the stereotype by implying they must be a certain kind of person or do only certain things.
It is a fact that the abused are more likely to abuse. We all have to be cognizant of why we are where we are.
Didn't you misinterpret him? I thought his point was that "tech nerds" were generally thought to be "better" than the cool people or jocks, but now that they themselves have the power, turns out they're just like everyone else. Which seems about right to me.
There are very few people I can think of who've made it big in tech and haven't compromised the "generally accepted" principles of "don't be evil".
He seems to be saying, yeah we always knew they were icky and weird, of course they are evil too!!
Techies are "misfits". Being a "misfit" "creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.".
i.e being a misfit = higher chance of being an evil person.
For the same reason (geeks/nerds/rejects etc) may feel they cannot by definition be oppressive because they too were oppressed before by the popular ones. Of course, anyone is capable of oppression and discrimination, to varying degrees of efficacy, but that tends to get lost when you feel pretty beat up from others and suddenly are confronted with the fact that they are doing that very thing.
The headline is sensational, though, as it's not all techies, no. But at the same time, there are quite a few who, as the article's opening illustration shows, are happy to put their head in the sand and just tell themselves "It's not me doing it, I know what it's like to be oppressed/discriminated against, I did x/y/z action, so I'm a good guy", all as their colleagues have to put up with such non-sense.
I would suspect that is where a lot of the frustration and backlash against a lot of tech folk during these issues over the past few years has come from; the eschewing of any responsibility with mantras and "not all of us do that, some of us were the ones that got picked on in high school!". I don't mean to say that there is a concrete hierarchy of suffering and only those with the most suffering may complain; I don't subscribe to the War Orphans in Darfur clause. What I would say is that suffering is suffering and if we can help, the world is better for it. And I think that is the basis for the complaints against tech folk - there is a lot of potential to stop it or to help, but many do not. I get there may be some awkwardness and even professional risk to confronting bad behavior, and I respect that it's a hard decision for some.
This is purely anecdotal, but I remember a brilliant nerdy kid back in high school days dared to talk back to some bullies that were messing with him. He ended up getting beat the fuck up and they purposely broke his glasses. At the end of the day though, the bullies were still popular and accepted by everyone, and the nerd was still a nerd who should have known his place.
How does a life event like that affect someone’s world view later when the very thing that once made them an outcast is suddenly the source of all their power and wealth in this word?