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Is Silicon Valley Morally Bankrupt and Toxic?
concealment sends this quote from a post about how the goals of many tech companies are at odds with what's good for consumers:
"Since I've been out of the Silicon-Valley-centered tech industry, I've become increasingly convinced that it's morally bankrupt and essentially toxic to our society. Companies like Google and Facebook — in common with most public companies — have interests that are frequently in conflict with the well-being of — I was going to say their customers or their users, but I'll say 'people' in general, since it's wider than that. People who use their systems directly, people who don't — we're all affected by it, and although some of the outcomes are positive a disturbingly high number of them are negative: the erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, of the public domain and fair use, of meaningful connections between people and a sense of true community, of beauty and care taken in craftsmanship, of our very physical well-being. No amount of employee benefits or underfunded Google.org projects can counteract that. Over time, I've come to consider that this situation is irremediable, given our current capitalist system and all its inequalities. To fix it, we're going to need to work on social justice and rethinking how we live and work and relate to each other. Geek toys like self-driving cars and augmented reality sunglasses won't fix it. Social networks designed to identify you to corporations so they can sell you more stuff won't fix it. Better ad targeting or content matching algorithms definitely won't fix it."
Betteridge's law of headlines
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states:
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no". ...
"The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
As for the article's content:
A great discovery!
The author has finally also found out that their customers are the advertising firms, their 'users' are the product they sell.
Film at 11.
The rest is some pseudo-socialist rant.
Move along, nothing to see here.
you dont have to be republican to vote for your corporate overlords
then it will happen. Companies that survive do so by providing something that people want and something that people will pay for (sometimes the two are split, like Facebook).
If other people don't want what you want, accept it, and don't blame Silicon Valley.
Holy rant...
Here's another idea, it's not broke.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
You were the one who wanted all this great content for free (as in beer). By "you", I mean the opinions expressed here on Slashdot, especially when the topic comes to copyrights and file sharing laws. Google and Facebook are doing things "the right way", by that reckoning, but yes there is the darker side of which you speak.
How is Google supposed to pay 30,000 engineers, 1M rack-mounted x86 systems, and still hit their quarterly earnings and revenue targets? And the same for Facebook.
Only Amazon has a traditional business model, but even they are leaders in mining content about their users as well as their traditional IP inventory.
Long answer yes, with a "but". They are no better nor worse then any other for profit venture. As soon as a company goes public, they are money making tools for the share holders.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Let me tell you, if you want to see toxic check out Wall St. and it's satellites in NJ and CT. At least Silicon Valley creates cool shit that make people productive and/or entertained. Wall Street produces nothing, it just sucks value out of the economy and puts it in overseas tax shelters. it sounds to me like you're burned out from living in the center of a capitalist vortex. Take some time off and go live in Massachusetts or Oregon or something and decompress. I would kill to work at a place like Apple. I don't care if it means 90 hour weeks, you got something more important to do than develop the next generation of computing technology?
Gee, I'd love to see a world where Intel, Dell, IBM, HP, TI and a host of other companies never existed. Yea, we'd be better off without GE, Ford, General Motors, Exxon and the like. Would not need any hackers in Silicon Valley, much less silicon. Just forget the transistor, integrated circuits or microprocessors ever existed.
Capitalism may have it's flaws, but it is better than any previously tried system over the last 6,000 years of recorded history. Please let's not repeat any of them!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The era of socialism as it defined in the dictionary is dead in America. The idea of noblesse oblige, and societal responsibility are not only forgotten in minds of those who control the wealth in this country, but spit upon as if it were a curse. Too many Americans today feel that wealth redistribution by the state should be abolished, as they are quick to scapegoat the needy in light of this country's ills. It is this undercurrent of disregard for our fellow countrymen that is showing all over the place in the attitudes of the Haves, in today's politics and even something so basic as getting a job.
America needs to wake the hell up and realise that helping each other, taking responsibility for one's actions, and working for the common good are the cornerstones of civilization. Throw them out, and all you will have is barbarity and all that implies.
There is too much invested in the lifestyle we have now for society to change course to avoid catastrophe. People will continue doing the same things until collapse by economic, environmental or political forces impose change.
... well ...
Please stop using the PC / Tablets / Smartphones - for many of the hardware were designed in Silicon Valley
Please stop using many of the software that you are using - including technologies that enable you to surf the Net
Without the Silicon Valley - and many of its offspring around the world - the author of TFA can whine all he wants, on a column on his local newspaper - if the editor of his local newspaper grant him a column, that is
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Never shall I sit my arse in a self-driving car. Bus? Fine, that's what I tend to prefer being a shitty driver. But not something that can be messed with as easily as these sort of control systems.
Someone wise said this on slashdot earlier to the topic - Society can cope with serial killers, but parallel ones are a different cup of coffee entirely. Imagine the result of a software flaw or a malicious intervention where twenty cars do the same fucking stupid thing on an interstate highway. Sure, people fuck up all the time, but at least there, the probabilities of them doing so are fairly independant, and they can adapt to a messup better than software.
If you read the article, it's not about that at all. It's about _new_ Silicon Valley: the startup culture. This is massively different to the culture that existed when Intel, Dell, IBM, HP and TI were founded.
Those companies are all fairly traditional companies in organization and goals. They were typical old-school American corporate structures built to achieve modern results. HP wasn't crowdfunded, hyped into a bubble and then pushed into an IPO to make the founders and a couple of venture capitalists into multi-millionaires. It was a long-term endeavour built around providing serious engineering for serious ends. It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme.
This article is more about the culture of quick-hit startups in Silicon Valley these days, which are built more around buzz, hype and marketing vapidity than they are around serious engineering or any kind of long-term planning. It's questioning the culture of founding a company around a cute idea with the aim of selling out in two years to become a millionaire. That is not what Hewlett and Packard were about. They built a company around engineering on the basis of a belief that they could provide a benefit over the long term.
If anything I'd say the weakness of the article lies in its evidence, which isn't really sufficient. It has one useful and accurate case study - Uber - but it really needs more than that to talk about any kind of trend. I rather think, though, that if the author had tried, he could have come up with lots of other examples. Uber was a great case study, though. It's 'innovative' and 'disruptive'...where you read 'disruptive' to mean 'doesn't see the point in complying with regulations meant to ensure public safety'. There's a _reason_ taxi services are strongly licensed and regulated virtually the world over (and you probably wouldn't feel great taking a cab in a place where they aren't).
If you think we live in a capitalist society, think again.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"Capitalism may have it's flaws, but it is better than any previously tried system over the last 6,000 years of recorded history. "
I have noticed that many people who praise capitalism is often not realising they are praising a system that arent anymore. Capitalism today is not the capitalism you saw 20-40 years ago, when the economy flourished. Everything was more regulated back then. The industry was regulated, the banks where regulated(take the glass stegal act.) Unions was much stronger. Income inequality was waaaay smaller, jobs wasnt outsourced to cheap 3rd world countries where people want to work for pennies. Companies wasnt as focused on profit maximizing, low wage jobs didnt pay soo low that people still had to ask for food stamps, or lived inside tents in the woods because their paycheck was soo small they couldnt pay rent(hello walmart: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/walmart-warehouse-workers_n_1989121.html )
Capitalism today is failing bigtime. Cooperation turn in record profit numbers yet keep firing people and outsource the jobs to low wage countries. CEO paychecks explode while the lower and middle incomeclass becomes poorer. Loopholes are being used by everyone to prevent paying taxes, that funds schools, healthcare, fire and policedepartments and more. Right now our capitalistic system is soo focused on how to maximize their short term profit, that they dont realize(or dont care) what they are doing to the system in the long run.
Take Apple. If there was no big consumerbase in the west who would buy their phones? Not their chinese workers because they dont get paid near enough to afford such a phone. Like soo many other big companies Apple want to sell to a rich consumerbase that we have in the west, but they dont want to pay to have such a consumerbase. They expect other companies to make sure we have jobs that pays us enough to afford a iphone, so they can skip that important step and pay poor chinese people to produce their stuff instead. Problem today is that the outsourcing of productionjobs have skyrocketed. Everyone want to sell to the western consumerbase, but noone want to pay that consumerbase enough to be able to consume. They all expect others to lift that burden, and that is not happening atm.
So before you praise capitalism think about what kind of capitalistic system you are praising. Is it the capitalistic system of today that outsource productionjobs, and find tax loopholes, or is it the capitalistic system of yesterday.
It would help if we actually had a left wing. Currently, we've got a center-right and far-right wing. I'm admittedly on the far-left, making me a bit out of step with the rest of the country, but it's deeply frustrating to any socialist when people call Barack Obama, a center-right politician, a Marxist or socialist.
Obama is very friendly to Wall Street. Very, very friendly.
Money that people pay for your service or product is exactly what you worth for society.
I disagree. Money has coercive properties. They are not as obvious as brute physical force, but they are there all the same. For example, people need to buy food to live. Convince them that somehow they aren't trapped and trap them in a cycle where they have to give you all their money just to get enough food to survive, and nearly everybody will perform whatever work you require in exchange for it. They will give you any amount of money if you have all the food.
There are numerous other ways in which money can coerce people into doing things that aren't generally productive or helpful. I think it's very easy for very money focused economies to fall into local maxima from which they cannot escape because the people who have the most money are able to use the coercive power of money to erect barriers that prevent the system from leaving the local maxima.
What you are repeating is standard libertarian dogma. And while I'm very sympathetic to the libertarian position, I think this is one blindspot in libertarian philosophy.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Google+ doesn't want me to use a handle. I'm a queer/transgender female so that's offensive.
You obviously read enough of The Fucking Article to have seen this part:
As a queer/genderqueer woman, victim of abuse, and someone who was (at that very time) experiencing online harassment and bullying, I was very vocal within Google for the need for Google+ to support pseudonymity.
Her words speak for themselves.
You haven't done anyone a service by summarizing.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
My vacuous twaddle is just my own opinion. I may be wrong. I may have observed the wrong sample of reality to come up with my opinions. Sorry.
That said, my use of the word "soul" shouldn't be construed as some mystical mumbo-jumbo. I mean simply our seemingly unique human capacity to use reason to discover the nature of the universe... which capacity we frequently ignore as we become emotional about issues and circumstances. I'm not sure if you've read the book "The Black Swan" but it has a few great sections on common logical fallacies that are based in emotional mechanics of our brains. Very cool stuff. And yet we clearly are able to transcend that emotionality and move to rationality.
I just believe (again based on limited evidence) that most people choose moral relativism, capitalism, American culture etc. because it is emotionally easy, not because they have thought clearly and rationally about it.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
This is the way it is with everything, the way it has always been and sadly, the way it will always be until we're genetically altered as a species to have an unquestioned hive mentality. It only seems unusual when one gets initially involved with a sense of excitement about their own dreams and plans, eventually realizing they were wrong for imagining it to be otherwise. Humanity operates politically as a political animal and has never been a meritocracy -- although it tries to be on occasion. The real challenge is to find a way to constantly improve something and allow everyone involved in the problem to buy into the decision making process. Anything else will only result in variations of the original complaint skewed with a different perspective.
So what will you actually do? It has to actually be something.
Speeches that allow you to feel proud about your comments are more about the pride and little about the (conveniently vague) idea. The idealistic rant is a classic condition of human nature. It's been done by everyone at one time or another and not unique to any time, place or culture. Stating the obvious while thinking others were unaware of the obvious and thinking they have become impressed with your enlightened insight is one aspect of what the Greeks meant by being sophomoric. After stating the obvious, you then "walk away" and leave it for someone else to resolve while feeling like a genius for somehow equating the stating of a problem with the offering of a solution.
Personally, my beliefs presently lack the cynicism anyone may wrongly infer from this post and embrace a positive outcome for societies in the long run, maybe even close to what was explained in the summary. But that will occur only if there isn't suppression of communication or a suppression of disparate groups of people with differing opinions independently trying to work with each other to improve their condition, including a process that prevents one of those groups from becoming a monopoly; or a way to prevent a bunch of royal asshats wandering around with nothing to do except to question people's motives -- every time they pursue something they happily enjoy doing or find interesting -- explaining this is not in the best interest of society.
The utopian scenarios I'm told I should pine for instead of pursuing personal happiness, never seem to really explain themselves well enough to prevent it from deteriorating into some one-size-fits-all master plan empowering a committee of well meaning self appointed leaders to decide what's best for everyone to do. Also, they tend to pay lip service to people's feedback (in the best case scenario -- usually, they disappear) and becoming an inhumane version of the original complaint in TFS. If you want to prevent it from happening, well ... then (cough) ... you should do something about it.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why