Silicon Valley Has an Arrogance Problem
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Whereas the people I'm talking about, underneath there's a huge amount of noblesse oblige.
What I do not see in this talk directly is arrogance. That is not to say that people in Silicon Valley are not arrogant. This talk is not.
Also, I personally think the WSJ article is pointless and whiny. Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
All the hardware that enables code to do anything.
Code lives in an ivory tower. It's pretty easy to build something productive in that kind of environment, but then thinking that your productivity in an ivory tower will be matched in the real world is just ignorant.
To demonstrate this property, consider iTunes, probably one of the most key pieces of software today, responsible for distribution of many types of media across the globe while paying authors instantly, at a small cost of freedom for both parties.
Now write that code on pamphlets and drop it from a plane over Africa. Pay close attention to what happens. If you look close enough you'll notice not a god damn thing happens that is not related to the physical medium being re-appropriated for productive uses. They won't reverse engineer the code, they won't abstract away the key business principles and build a new prosperous Africa, they won't learn how to program either.
You see, Africa has no need for a digital distribution system with DRM. They don't even have a network capable of carrying it's data to 99% of the population. Even if you set one up and gave away iCrap to every African, you'd never recoup the astronomical costs selling copies of bits.
The thing SV needs to realize is they are not the first coders and they are already surrounded by code, at the level of societies, religions and governments. These coders are much better because they've been dealing with inconsistent platforms for hundreds of years without the benefit of virtualization layers or government-enforced standard protocols.
Sure, you can generate the same kind of code that runs governments and religions from a computer, but you're forgetting the fact that that computer exists inside the system of government.
As soon as you remove the government, your hardware gets stolen by people with better hardware, your software gets stolen by people with better software, and your communications data gets mined by deep packet inspection, extracting value just like an invisible tax or inflation. That last one was a joke, you need government for that.
And so, according to you, we need to wait for Africa's "benevolent" dictators to stop warring with their own people and just create a public infrastructure before private industry can create civilization? Keep it up with your liberal bunk, you'll be a second-class citizen in our new Society soon enough. :)
>second-class citizen
>new Society
pick one. Is it really a new society if it's just re-implementing the same social hierarchy as before, but with different people in it?
Hey, at least you're working hard on it since someone convinced you you'll be at the top. I wonder how you came to terms with this logical paradox. Perhaps you haven't and that's the motivation for your angry and illogical outburst.
Since you seem to be a free-market guru, have you ever considered that Africans, working with only local African resources, can work more effectively and efficiently than Europeans or Silicon Valley nerds at running Africa using external resources that have to be flown in and distributed across a land with no infrastructure?
Uhhhh... Way to prove the point, man.
> "Technology is going to be more powerful than many laws and regulations"
Yes and no. And this is part of Silicon Valley's arrogance: it is so utterly full of itself that it has usurped the entirety of the word "technology".
Think about it for a second, step back from your day to day writing code and think about the word "technology". We software people occupy a tiny portion of tech, even though we're so loud and so good at attracting attention to ourselves that it seem to everyone else (and us) that we are technology.
Forget nanotech, forget good old mechanical engineering, forget aerospace, forget biotech, forget electric, civil, geological engineering. Apparently those don't exist, and the only technology that matters is code.
What a load of shit, and I say that as someone who writes code for a living.
We are part of a much, much greater whole. We do interesting things, occasionally they are immensely impactful, 99.9% of the rest of the time it's really not.
There's a old Chinese parable: "the frog at the bottom of the well" - about a frog stuck at the bottom of a well, who is immensely self-satisfied with his situation, because the rest of the world is just one boring little blue circle.
I am not SV.
The point I am trying to make is that it is irrelevant that SV comes across as arrogance. Certainly not worthy of a WSJ article. Similarly, you can say that the article comes from an arrogant mindset the same way.
Silicon Valley might be "arrogant", but that's not necessarily a "problem". The premise of the headline is incorrect -- and hypocritical to say the least.
> Forget nanotech, forget good old mechanical engineering, forget aerospace, forget biotech, forget electric, civil, geological engineering. Apparently those don't exist, and the only technology that matters is code.
I put "code" is in quotes, in case you did not notice, and Silicon Valley has welcomed more industries than just cut-and-dry coding. By no means I believe code is the only important technology out there. (That said, while this is beside the point, code is an increasingly critical part of those other disciplines you mentioned.)
Were you around in 1999? People said the same stuff then too and look how that turned out.
> "code" becomes the de facto law in many contexts.
"It's the New Economy! Everything is different now."
SV: Also, I personally think the WSJ article is pointless and whiny. Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
QED
So says Mr Darcy before he realises that he's actually a bit of a dick...
People cite everything from arrogance as a defense mechanism against failure, to the necessity of entrepreneurial delusion, to youth, to denying that people in SV are arrogant at all.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-confess-the-...
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGkL6eQWOAI
3. ...really? http://i.imgur.com/4aaH7GW.png
Look at Berlin, Kiev, Riga, and a dozen other places. SV's monopoly on world-changing does not have "USA" as a dependency.
Indeed, soon if not already "not US-based" will be or already is a feature.
It's about the ability of smart people to start businesses in places with good quality of life and low costs, serving the whole planet.
Pixelmator comes to mind too, but that's Vilnius and they're small, but absolutely game-changing.
It's quality, not quantity.
Soundcloud is cool but not exactly a technology platform. Successful in in it's own niche, but a dwarfs beside Youtube or iTunes volume.
I don't think there isn't any reason why there can't be (like Nokia was at some point), but just now there isn't any left.
(I said "leading" in quotes, because someone might comment that there are Siemens, SAP and whatever, but I really can't think of that many hardware/digital/services products that I would regularly use or to build on for work or for other purposes.)
These are all legitimate problems businesses in other parts of the world face (though not in places like Germany or UK).
Even the markets developed countries like Germany are not as large as the US consumer market. Having close, easy access to the biggest consumer market in the world has its perks.
> legal infrastructure ... see patent trolling
But when I asked him what harms techies faced that might
prompt such a drastic response, he couldn't offer much
evidence.
He pointed to a few headlines in the national press warning
that robots might be taking over people's jobs. These, he
said, were evidence of the rising resentment that
technology will foster as it alters conditions across the
country and why Silicon Valley needs to keep an escape
hatch open.
But I found Mr. Srinivasan's thesis to be naive. According
to the industry's own hype, technologies like robotics,
artificial intelligence, data mining and ubiquitous
networking are poised to usher in profound changes in how
we all work and live. I believe, as Mr. Srinivasan argues,
that many of these changes will eventually improve human
welfare.
But in the short run, these technologies could cause
enormous economic and social hardships for lots of people.
And it is bizarre to expect, as Mr. Srinivasan and other
techies seem to, that those who are affected wouldn't
criticize or move to stop the industry pushing them.
I can only speak for myself, but the motivating emotion here isn't arrogance. It's one part apprehension, knowing what happened to the Chinese in Malaysia, the Indians in Uganda, and the Jews in Europe. And it's one part hope, thinking that we can build something better with a clean slate, without 230 years of legacy infrastructure and cruft.
BSS was talking about finding new places for trying new things if they aren't allowed in America. Or even within America finding new ways of trying new technologies without affecting the entire society all at once.
This article is overly sensational and reactionary.
But then again I should probably stop reading WSJ comments, and that would also probably get me called arrogant.
I view this author's attitude a lot like I view that of Fareek Zakaria, whose tripe we're all force-fed in high school: "We may be entering a post-paper-belt world, sure, but we can't be certain how this will all turn out so it's best to speak moderately and carry around a copy of the New York Times."
Right, and the Spanish and British founded modern America, what is your point? There is quite a bit of precedent for taking the ball from the previous players and starting your own game to their exclusion.
Sounds like Page and Thiel want to be the experimenters and someone else to be the guinea pigs. I doubt those two want to be in those societies other than as dictators. Too much to lose.
We just need a new frontier like the moon or mars.
Small democracies can be restored. Big ones... maybe not.
Look, it's not the nerdy engineers (the ones who love technology, who would be in it even if it weren't "hot") who are responsible for this crass, New Money horror-show. It's the carpetbaggers who failed into technology because banking, hedge funds, and consulting didn't want them. They don't really belong in the first place. They're an invasive species in tech, and they're the ones creating this arrogance problem. They capture the lion's share of the value, set themselves up as the elite (when tech is "hot") and make a whole set of unrelated people look bad.
However, I agree. The Sand Hill Road elite is utterly unfit to manage a bag of rock salt, much less run the world. Those sad wankers built a society in the Bay Area where the software engineers building the place can't even buy a house-- and they want to call government ineffective? Crackah, please.
They are all distractions. All of them. If I start my own company I'm going to do it without all of that frivolous shit. I'm tired of disruption. I'm tired of "changing the world", "changing the way we X", and all the blithering idiots who made Snapchat a $4b company. Think about it. Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter and all of the other successful companies would have succeeded despite all of this shit. They were awesome ideas. They would have succeeded anyway.
I refuse to participate. I'm tired of it. I can't be the only one who's disillusioned with all of this nonsense.
None of those successful companies make a profit; they are all in the process of burning through someone else's money. Whether they can convert that to a money-making situation is still an open question, but given their huge valuations, that might be tough. They have certainly been a success for their founders, initial investors, and free users, but as companies (which are formed to make a profit), they are not currently successful.
If you are so hostile to big money, then you should not be promoting companies as successes which have relied heavily on raising huge amounts of money to fund loss-making operations for years. Other companies like linode, slicehost or 37signals might be better examples of success you could aspire to.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24751441 "The increase in revenue led to $425m in net profit in the three months to September."
If you consider all the investment in them, including the IPO, of course they are nowhere near profit on that, so now their problem is turning that $425m profit into something that justifies their valuation of $100 billion and pays back all their investors; that might take quite some time, however over a long enough time frame (if they last that long), they could pull it off.