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Replace 'Tech' With 'Banks,' and We've Seen a Big Comeuppance Before (nytimes.com)
Nathaniel Popper, writing for The New York Times: When I moved to the Bay Area two years ago, it was with a sense of relief. Relief from New York winters and deteriorating subways, yes. But also relief after six years of covering Wall Street, an industry that had moved from one crisis to another after the financial crash of 2008, drawing the unending wrath of the public. In California I was joining a growing team of reporters covering Silicon Valley, which had quickly become the new engine of the economy. Just like Wall Street before it lost its luster, the tech industry had become the destination of choice for the top college graduates. I would be writing about a place where everyone was focused more on the future than on the past.
Now, just two years after getting here, and a decade after the start of the financial crisis, I have a creeping sense of deja vu as I go about my job. Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals, quickly soured into an intense suspicion that manages to cross partisan lines, similar to what Wall Street faced after 2008 [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. As I have watched the recent parade of tech executives being grilled by Washington lawmakers from across the political spectrum, it has been eerily reminiscent of the combative hearings the big banks faced back in 2009 and 2010. As was true after the financial crisis, the backlash against tech rises out of a public awakening to the integral role that these huge companies occupy in our society -- with Facebook, Uber and Twitter playing the part that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase did a decade ago.
Now, just two years after getting here, and a decade after the start of the financial crisis, I have a creeping sense of deja vu as I go about my job. Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals, quickly soured into an intense suspicion that manages to cross partisan lines, similar to what Wall Street faced after 2008 [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. As I have watched the recent parade of tech executives being grilled by Washington lawmakers from across the political spectrum, it has been eerily reminiscent of the combative hearings the big banks faced back in 2009 and 2010. As was true after the financial crisis, the backlash against tech rises out of a public awakening to the integral role that these huge companies occupy in our society -- with Facebook, Uber and Twitter playing the part that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase did a decade ago.
These are the people that build the hardware and write the code that the modern world runs on. And proceed to build it so full of backdoors and security holes that it at some point is likely to bring down a very large company if not country. Cutting corners and saving a few minutes all in pursuit of the almighty profit. Yup, nothing going on here.
The banks appear to have continued fucking everyone, so whatever their comeuppance was, it was not enough. Surely the response towards tech will be even weaker.
The banks are still running everything. They got a bailout and they got to keep the properties on which they knowingly sold bad mortgages for which they got bailed out. We paid for those homes and didn't even get them. Tell me again about this "big backlash".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Once a corporation gets big enough, it looses any soul it may have had. It's structural and systemic.
Tech is really boring these days. Back in the 90's when the net was taking off and interesting things were happening with computers (and a lot of tech companies still had some soul), one could at least naively believe in it. I did -- naively. I ran an Internet company -- I was "democratizing information" -- and thought I was doing social good.
It's all so about the money now even the naive can't believe it all.
if we held back new hardware and software until all possible security holes have been fixed we'd still be waiting for the first CPU and an OS to run on it.
Facebook is an advertising company.
Uber is a taxi service.
Twitter is an internet message board (ok, that's sort-of tech).
Google is an advertising company.
Actual tech companies aren't having the same troubles.