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Comment by amarkov | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that these kinds of authors always see the alternative as a Silicon Valley with their politics. This article describes a bunch of concrete things that tech companies ought to do: ensure the poor aren't marginalized, bring local communities together, and don't provide mechanisms for creating echo chambers. But what neither Turner nor Khan discuss is how tech companies will realize they ought to do this.

What if Amazon politicizes in the direction of libertarianism, and decides its only social responsibility is to increase the world's GDP?

What if Facebook politicizes in the direction of social justice, and determines that segregating people into identity-based safe spaces is the way to go?

What if Google politicizes in the direction of some political party, and decides it's duty-bound to tweak its search algorithm to hurt opposing candidates?

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Yeah, I think there's a strand of political thought which assumes that no-one can honestly come to a different political conclusion than them and it's everywhere. It even gets applied to stuff like TV programs and other works of fiction. If you don't politicize everything according to their politics, it's because you're just too clueless to understand that everything has to be political.

I think that is basically what has happened, only it is one step removed from the corporations listed. For example Cambridge Analytica leveraged Facebook to further their political agenda. US government leveraged all the above to setup a surveillance state unrivalled in it's scope (bar maybe by the Chinese). The web was supposed to be a liberator allowing the marginalised to connect and flourish. This happened. Now nerds are cool but no one ever considered that racist misogynist scum are also a marginalised group.

Personally I see the alternative as a Silicon Valley which accepts that its output can never be "neutral" or "apolitical", no matter how many claims are made to the contrary, and which gives consideration to that before building things, allowing that consideration to influence the design.

Any time you're building technology with (or with the intention of) mass reach, "if the person I consider to be the most evil in the world were to commandeer this, what's the absolute worst they could manage to do with it" is a useful question to ask. If some companies had asked this question far earlier in their lifecycles, we might see a very different world around us today.

How many VC's want to see that question answered in the pitch deck?

In a worst case scenario, at least the people at those companies are somewhat intelligent. All other things being equal I would prefer an oligarchy of people who are intelligent over one composed mostly of idiots.

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