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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."
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.
Well, I agree with the author. Tech is a malignant leech on society, unlike wholesome industries such as finance or insurance.
er... positing a question on a discussion forum is a generally acceptable way of starting a discussion on said forum
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Slashdot is a discussion forum?
Huh. Interesting.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
... 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).
I think my subject line says it all. We need to make a headline out of that.
Eh.. if you work at Apple, you get to develop the next generation of marketing technology...
Ooh, I got one!
Can any headline which ends in a question mark be answered by the word "no"?
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
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.
When independent leaders ask the people to treat their fellow members of the human race better, they are advocating for social justice.
When an enormously powerful government takes things from one class to earn the political support of another class, that is NOT social justice.
It is quite refreshing and thought-provoking to read such a comment on Slashot, of all places. I tend to wholeheartedly concur with girlintraining. My European vantage point must have something to do with that. No industry, when growing beyond a certain size, can go without regulation for a long time and still be governed by something that looks and smells like "ethics". The role of the state is NOT only to protect the weak - it is, also, a role to reign in the strong. We have known that since the Romans, more specifically since the attempts of more than one emperor to regulate the worst excesses in Roman economy ( Diocletian, most of all ). To ignore this is to deliberately let the lions' cage open, backstage in a circus full on unsuspecting public.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace