Hacker News Reader

> "Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified."

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.

> Uhhhh... Way to prove the point, man.

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.)

> 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.

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."

I never thought that I would get to quote Jane Austen on HN, but here's a perfect one : "Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation."

So says Mr Darcy before he realises that he's actually a bit of a dick...

WSJ: Silicon Valley Has an Arrogance Problem

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

Note that stock prices are "Wall Street" metrics, which by the way constitutes two thirds of WSJ's name. By their metric, SV is doing well.

I can think of something more powerful than code.

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.

>more Elizabeth Warren-esque rubbish suggesting that Google wouldn't have been created if not for the public road system

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. :)

So you put stupid words in my mouth and use that as proof that my reasoning is flawed. That is an interesting strategy. Have you convinced many people with it?

>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?