Silicon Valley: A Reality Check (2017)
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
When Wall Street screws up, the country is plunged into recession and poor families lose their homes.
When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes pretty good juice."
When Silicon Valley succeeds consumers get mass surveillance of the minutiae of their lives.
Contrary to the author's statement, there is a point to the Wi-Fi enabled juicer.
For one, it can continuously gather data and can transfer it over a network to an organization that can use it strategically/monetize it.
The government doesn't need ad cookies to track you.
Plus the information and therefore power asymmetry between people and corporations increases. Imagine a business-to-business 'analytics' service to identify or predict insider threats such as whistleblowers or labor organizers. Background checks already get help from the private sector - this is just the logical next step. I'm sure they'll think of many more uses, if they haven't already.
The objective of the comment was to address the author's deceptive use of the term "pointless".
Also, have you noticed the general "oh, what can we do now? It is too late" response to a lot of outrageous things because we didn't see what was coming? More correctly, we refused to consider worst case scenarios? For example, if people knew Facebook was calling outright theft as "friendly fraud", what would have happened to their IPO? Would advertisers have been willing to trust FB with their money? Would the governments be OK with allowing them to acquire whatever company they wanted? Why is there such a long lag between the occurrence of an event and the time when it comes to light? When companies have this kind of a track record, the last thing you want to do is to look at the most common outcome and decide "Oh, everything is fine".
> stop talking about how Silicon Valley only makes ridiculous overpriced juicers
But who are those people who simplify Silicon Valley, and mock the useless innovation?
I feel like the author falls victim to the same blind-men-and-elephant problem: he somehow reads all the 'thinkpieces' (whatever that means) that focus on strange things SV does. I personally do not see this phenomenon, probably because I get my news from aggregators with different bias. The (successfully defeated) strawman is just that, a strawman.
The article makes a good argument against taking media spin at face value. (Including that within the article. Including that within this comment!)
I feel like the author falls victim to the same blind-men-and-elephant problem: he somehow reads all the 'thinkpieces' (whatever that means) that focus on strange things...
We all fall victim to all the media [X] that focus on strange things. In Manufacturing Consent we see how it worked in the 80's with newspapers and television mergers in the context of the west vs. the Soviet bloc. In 2019, it's Left vs. Right and new media vs. old media.
I personally do not see this phenomenon, probably because I get my news from aggregators with different bias.
Then you do suffer from an analogous phenomenon, modulo your own biases.
The (successfully defeated) strawman is just that, a strawman.
If only it were a strawman. At this point, it's more like a miasma we are all living in and breathing in.
In my obviously very much less than completely thorough experience, they're often people with clear goals who want them advanced. They're frustrated with useless innovation, seeing it mainly as resources that could have been used to advance a more worthy goal. They lament the waste of resources and the failures of vision to bring those resource to bear on the proper goals and problems. All the solvable problems that so many smart, driven people and so much money could hardly fail to solve. The lives that could be enabled, the societies that could be changed.
I've known a number of such people. I've seen a series of such pieces over time, no few of which pass through HN.
With that said, however, my personal opinion is different. Although I think innovation of any kind is great for society, what I'm frustrated by is the relative mindshare of where we focus our attention on.
I like to use the term "farsighted" - many people in SV are able to see very far distances into the future, but ignore some of the immediate problems that are right under our noses. That's what I'm frustrated by.
The other tool I find useful is to remember that my perception of where our collective mindshare is going is necessarily going to be less than fully informed. It can easily be quite far off the mark, leaving me thinking that a major problem is going completely unaddressed when there are in fact vast resources being directed at it without any visibility to me.
When you're more farsighted, you tend to look at the root cause of problems and try to find solutions that cure problems once and for all.
They do tend to take longer to come about, for sure. But which approach produces the most utility is very hard to prove. Is it better to equip people with mosquito nets, or to create better malaria vaccines?
We probably need both approaches in the end, but only having the immediate problem approach is guaranteed to lead to local maxima.
If that's truly their concern, why focus on Silicon Valley and not on Hollywood or professional sports?
Why would that person be bothered that some SV company spent a few million making a fancy juicer, but not care that some billionaire is spending orders of magnitude more money (often taxpayer money) building a new stadium which is only slightly different than ones that already exist?
If you imagine all that money, energy, brains, and change going towards something you deem more worthy, I can see how someone might deem it a massive waste of everything. It's understandable.
Though, I believe, perhaps occasionally a bit naive.
Isn't listing "those people" the very first thing he does at the top of the essay? WaPo, TechCrunch, Slate, etc.
This is one of the things which we need to get better at calling out in the media in 2019.
Basically just taking PR press releases
Too much media in 2019 is just parroting other media and official pronouncements and press releases.
And when an unethical product is made, and there certainly are some, occasionally employees pressure their company to stop. That is unusual historically.
Of course there are serious problems like exclusivity due to cargo cult hiring, exploding cost of both doing business and living. And of course the related tidal wave of homeless. But even there, occasional effort is made to address them. Historically the typical pattern is for industries to blame victims for the harm inflicted on them.
While those problems are pretty good reasons not to have it in your back yard, as an industry located far away, it's obviously well above average.
That calls into question the abilities of the VCs doling out the money, which gets popular because it works as a confirming data point to peoples pre-existing cynical worldviews.
> " If a deeply good person crusading for a better world enters Silicon Valley, she’ll find herself surrounded by deeply good people crusading for a better world. She’ll see mobile apps that track tropical diseases, clean energy startups that fight global warming by directly sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, companies bringing microbanking to poor Nepalese villagers, and boutique pharmaceutical labs searching for cures for orphan diseases.
If a futurist enters Silicon Valley, she’ll find herself surrounded by futurists. She’ll see neural nets and deep learning, reusable rockets and flying cars, high-throughput genome sequencing and CRISPR, metamaterials and nanotechnology.
If a social-media-obsessed narcissist whose view of the world begins and ends with his own Instagram page enters Silicon Valley, he’ll find himself surrounded by social-media-obsessed narcissists whose view of the world begins and ends with their Instagram pages. He’ll see a bunch of streaming video services and Uber-for-hair-products apps and elite pay-to-play dating scams and people trying to disrupt the gymwear market.
And if one of those people who talks about “the cloud” all the time enters Silicon Valley, he’ll find himself surrounded by people who talk about “the cloud” all the time. I have no idea who these people are or what they’re doing, but they all seem really happy with each other and I’m glad they’re enjoying themselves.
They’ll all have their blind-men-and-elephant view of what kinds of things Silicon Valley “does”. And they’ll all be sort of right.
(thinkpiece writers: “Can you believe that Silicon Valley only makes products for shallow elites obsessed with the latest fads? It’s the strangest thing!“) "
> Y Combinator...Thirteen of them had an altruistic or international development focus
SSC mentions criticism, and then counters with the couple of hundred grand of "altruistic" money YC hands out every year. As puff statements like this are as easy to predict as anything, it seems analogous to several hundred grand to a PR department. As his very statement is a usage of it as PR.
Of all the most awful big organizations and groups in the world, I can't think of any that don't engage in such "altruism" PR.
Then he goes on to say that fault found in Silicon Valley is psychological projection, a "deeply good person crusading for a better world enters Silicon Valley, she'll find herself surrounded by deeply good people crusading for a better world" (Jesus, who swallows this?) and a narcissist will see narcissists.
He admits an "invasion of rent-seeking parasites and empty suits".
How about another tale - a naive young 21 year old MIT grad who wants to be a "deeply good person crusading for a better world". They are shown PR projects, maybe a "peer-to-peer lending service in India" (odd to hear the Christian and Islamic sin of usury being praised as altruism), or cool tech like 3d printers. Then they get put in a FAANG division, or dedicated startup, spying on people for better and targeting. Or generating flamebait headlines to get more clicks. Pulling the strings behind all this are the rent-seeking parasites and empty suits - "activist" investors and hedge funds, LPs, VCs, seeds and angels, executives and management etc.
A lot of talk about what is happening and not who controls it. And who controls work ain't the 21 year old MIT grad paying $2000 a month for a small apartment in Oakland. Who does all the work and creates all the wealth. Who gets the bulk of the fruits of his labors, and to a very large extent what he does is determined by said expropriating suits. That the grad has some choice, although not much, is the reason for the 3 card monte shill game of cool tech and altruism. The kid will be setting up the ad spying networks Kubernetes containers, not doing altruism and playing with cool tech.
Of the people working in Silicon Valley, the main victims of expropriation are the people working in Silicon Valley.
At any other ti in history, with any other technology (Tesla vs Edison) that would be true. But in tech, the billions made the companies. Page, Brin, Bezos, Gates all got the "bulk of the fruits".
There is this weird idea that work creates value in a vacuum. That's not true. Work in a context - of a company that has funding/profitability/stores of cash creates value. Work done in a vacuum does not.
We need to balance those elements carefully, because not enough workers slows growth, but so does not enough capital/misallocation of capital (see housing).
The ideal world is one in which we all move in the same direction together not out of compulsion but out of an understanding that we all benefit from moving in said same direction.
You might enjoy "Listen Liberal" by Thomas Frank (the guy who wrote "what's the matter with Kansas"). He takes the modern "left" to task for sucking up to capital, and is particularly hilariously venomous against the "microloans" that the modern managerial class seems to love so much.