An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption
wired.com
wired.com
Inside this framework, the driving factor is what Wired calls "techno-darwinism" the idea that software companies are "still standing post-disruption must have survived because they were the fittest". If you talk to people in SV, especially after the depression, the stereotype was that every startup was about to "change the world by becoming the [X] for [Y]" (Uber for cookies, AirBNB for laundry, etc.)
However, the outside world looks at us with disdain: they don't view our motivations as a desire for simple innovation or creativity, but outright greed and power. The folks that we have disrupted are often those who do not have the means to convert their labor to new industries; even when they do, those industries then get disrupted by some new actor.
Tech workers also have, stereotypically, been disdainful of government: it's too slow, too compromised/corrupt, too inefficient. However, engagement with the polity is the main vehicle by which the poor and disenfranchised are are able to find some kind of recourse for their lives, either by the ballot box or the ammo box.
I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris.
Close. But I would say it's ultimately a lack of empathy that is doing the most damage. It manifests itself in so many (negative) ways. It doesn't have to be this way. But that's the irony of lacking empathy.
I think that's fair. I mean, since we get credit for the positive social outcomes, we should accept that we'll be blamed for the negative ones.
The only people that view the tech industry with disdain are journalists and old media.
Regular people happily use their iPhones, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB...
Just because a lot of ink is spilled trying to keep outdated media models alive, it doesn't mean the general population feels this way. The success of all of these services is proof enough that people are not bothered.
What makes it "take advantage" and not "serve"?
People want entertainment on their phone. So entertainment is provided.
People value seasonal rentals more than permanent housing. So seasonal rentals are provided.
What party is being "taken advantage" of? What coercive or dishonest elements at play?
People want cheeseburgers, they're provided. People want marijuana, it's provied. People want alcohol, it's provided. People want sugar, it's provided. People want to gamble, it's provided. People want pornography, it's provided. People want violent movies and video games, it's provided.
You can outlaw so called sins, negatives, or you can properly regulate them and treat people that become addicts. Heroin is obviously an extreme example of that context. There is only one effective solution to heroin addiction: treat addiction, do not outlaw heroin use. It should be safely, legally provided to people that need it.
People want georgism, it's not provided.
People want privacy, it's not provided.
People want to the signing keys for the whole chain of bootloaders, without false bottoms, it's not provided.
People want universal basic income (or some variation thereof), it's not provided.
And so on...
So when Uber circumvented the law to allow anybody to become a taxi driver, thereby hurting drivers who played by the rules, and the media reports on that, they can be safely ignored because they didn't interview a happy user of the app?
Regular people happily use non-biodegradable plastic bags. Maybe the old media should hold off on reporting on its consequences until the oceans have been completely liberated of marine life.
I'm no Tesla fan, but that's sort of how loans work. You get your money back plus interest. It's not a lottery ticket. And Tesla paid back their loan early. I don't think the program lost very much money overall.
From the view of the economy as a whole, it can work out fine, in that we tax the profits of the successful companies. (Although a great deal less than we used to.) But it does rather put a hole in the myth of self-made men and the companies they built from nothing.
I'll also note that Silicon Valley has a university at the heart of it. We fund a great deal of research, and we should. We also subsidize education in a variety of ways. But the first version of Google was developed by grad students as part of their student work, and Google today hoovers up quite a number of recent graduates from schools are either publicly run or receive a great deal of government assistance. It's a highly interdependent system. I think that's great, but don't think our myths acknowledge that.
Perhaps big fat government loans should really be purchases of special restricted securities (that do things like limit the control the government has over the company and prevent dilution).
In-Q-Tel is a program where the government invests in startups and participates in equity growth.
So it's not impossible, but not particularly common.
There may not be direct returns, but that’s not really the point.
- How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman
- The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Mariana Mazzucato
- Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
edit: formatting, copy paste issues (argh)
The reality is as follows:
- ARPANET is considered the earliest form of the internet, which was developed by DARPA (paid by taxpayers)
- Many patents for internet based technologies are held (or were held) by universities which were paid for by taxpayers
- The first proposal of hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee was done in his capacity as a contractor to CERN, which is a multi-government-backed entity
The question, that will be debated for centuries, is who has profited from all of this? Just think of your laptop for a second. There are probably a million different functions, services, applications, etc. all playing together harmoniously. It's the purest form of amalgamated advances in both government backed projects, FOSS, and for-profit entities all dancing together harmoniously. Many people would argue the ones who sell the final good are creating the most value, because they are essentially responsible for bringing all of those disparate parts together, and hence why they would argue they deserve most of economic profit.
The big fish are the government and private industry that helps drive forward, but when you break it down to the particles that make up the system, you'll find individuals, inventors, entrepreneurs, good managers, smart financial navigation and encouraging of the open creative state.
Anything that allows the smallest of nodes in that system to flourish, the individuals, should be noticed and rewarded.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...
Generally, the pattern has been that government and university funded researchers make the early discoveries, and then corporations do the research towards applying them. Universities benefit from patents, but the federal government doesn't.
But what we see sometimes (alternative energy, drug research, e.g.) is government funding of applied research, and that isn't good for the market or the science, and should be called out.
Even if they wanted to use it purely internally, they'd have to hire a company to manufacture what they want. I suppose a country like China could use a state run company instead of a private one?
Disruption has always been used to mean disrupting established market leaders via innovation. Guess what? That's exactly what has happened with Uber, AirBnB, Amazon...
If anyone wants to learn more about the actual meaning of disruption, I suggest The Innovator's Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
Amazon, sure, but Uber & AirBnB? Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again?
AirBnB disrupted the hotel industry.
Both used technology to get there (there were no apps to hail taxis anywhere near feature parity with Uber for instance). They also leveraged the distribution mechanisms of the app store to reach scale.
> Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again?
Whether you view it that way or not (I don't) it doesn't change the fact that these companies successfully disrupted established players. It doesn't matter if it was "innovative" (again I think it was), the end result was textbook disruption.
Cellphones in general mean hosts don't have to provide TVs, landline phones, alarm clocks, paper maps, newspapers, etc. that were traditionally in hotel rooms.
That's disruption?
Before regulation locked out any possibility of long term successful competition.
I read this three times before I understood what you were saying. At first I read it as "If you have to break the rules to succeed against competition, that is playing by the rules" as if to justify breaking the rules. English is a lovingly ambiguous language sometimes.
from companies willing to exploit loopholes in hard won labour laws whilst putting the health of the general public in danger by exploiting the slow moving mechanism of governance for profit
Anyway this isn't a "whole article about disruption", it's an article about three books that reframe Silicon Valley's history.
It's totally fine to have a contrarian point of view but you have to accurately represent the opposing view point. That wasn't done here.
What's with this unrelated off topic dig?
Secondly, what's the point they're trying to make? That Thiel is a hypocrite? If so, you can both hate politics/government and work to try to improve it. One strategy is to do so from within. Musk was trying to do the same for a while.
I imagine things have evolved since the good old days:
https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-...
But things largely have stayed the same.
The other kind of contractor is ordered from an agency. The agency might charge a shit ton, but the IC sees a fraction of that. These agencies only profit from the markup, so they position themselves accordingly; they find as much cheap labor as they can. If you look at the top H1-B sponsors, it's typically dominated by these places. Nominally places like Infosys file Labor Condition Assessments at 10x the rate of Google, but in a sense most big tech firms are outsourcing the H1-B process to the body shops. As you can imagine, this puts downward pressure on contractor wages.
Left a sour taste in my mouth, though. Haven't worked in tech since.
Government contractors seem more like 50%.
> They promised the open web, we got walled gardens
Google doesn't give out its users data in the same way that a bank doesn't give out it's users balances.
> ...many of the dystopian business practices we associate with fast-growing tech platforms [like] operating with a small group of well-paid engineers, surrounded by contractors
The implication here is that before Amazon, no company applied aggressive and unethical cost saving measures. When was Nestle founded again?
> Uber did not cause this precarious economy. It is the waste product of the service economy
This is the kind of thing that makes you sound smart but means nothing. There is not an explanation of the "waste product of the service economy" that follows this quote. In fact this implies it is not Uber's fault at all for disrupting the taxi industry.
> In the case of venture capitalists, [...] their real genius appears to lie in their timing: their ability to enter a sector late, after the highest development risks had already been taken, but at an optimum moment to make a killing
The implication being that nobody made a competitor company before the internet was around. The other claim is that being n+1 to the market gives you a guaranteed and significant advantage. If this was the case it would be trivial to overtake Google.
> The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings
This line tells me that the author has gotten used to modern day conveniences that tech has brought us and thinks its unpredictable that people who made companies that span the globe are rich and powerful.
So this isn’t an alternative history more than it is just a weird anecdote or two without follow-up.
I’m not sure what Wired is as a magazine any more. It really needs knowledgeable editors to plan and shape stories along some theme. I feel like these stories about rich and bad Silicon Valley is are pretty common and all boil down to the same reality that Silicon Valley has high margins and makes a lot of money for in demand employees and stockholders. This isn’t relevatory though and I’m not sure what Wired’s angle is.
It's weird. The article seems to be a book review somehow cast as a news article or thought piece. Read as a book review it's a perfectly reasonable and informative.