All of the startups mentioned are venture backed. There seems to be a distinctive lack of scandals from the IndieHackers, IndieWeb, Platform.coop, etc. communities.
I disagree. The nerds and the geeks are not rejects, misfits or outcasts. They choose to live in distance from the "popular" folks and the crowd around them because they don't understand them and don't find any enjoyment or meaning in that.
I don’t think they choose to live at a distance, I think they do it to avoid getting hurt.
This is purely anecdotal, but I remember a brilliant nerdy kid back in high school days dared to talk back to some bullies that were messing with him. He ended up getting beat the fuck up and they purposely broke his glasses. At the end of the day though, the bullies were still popular and accepted by everyone, and the nerd was still a nerd who should have known his place.
How does a life event like that affect someone’s world view later when the very thing that once made them an outcast is suddenly the source of all their power and wealth in this word?
While this may be it in some instances, it could be a lot of things I think.
For the same reason (geeks/nerds/rejects etc) may feel they cannot by definition be oppressive because they too were oppressed before by the popular ones. Of course, anyone is capable of oppression and discrimination, to varying degrees of efficacy, but that tends to get lost when you feel pretty beat up from others and suddenly are confronted with the fact that they are doing that very thing.
The headline is sensational, though, as it's not all techies, no. But at the same time, there are quite a few who, as the article's opening illustration shows, are happy to put their head in the sand and just tell themselves "It's not me doing it, I know what it's like to be oppressed/discriminated against, I did x/y/z action, so I'm a good guy", all as their colleagues have to put up with such non-sense.
I would suspect that is where a lot of the frustration and backlash against a lot of tech folk during these issues over the past few years has come from; the eschewing of any responsibility with mantras and "not all of us do that, some of us were the ones that got picked on in high school!". I don't mean to say that there is a concrete hierarchy of suffering and only those with the most suffering may complain; I don't subscribe to the War Orphans in Darfur clause. What I would say is that suffering is suffering and if we can help, the world is better for it. And I think that is the basis for the complaints against tech folk - there is a lot of potential to stop it or to help, but many do not. I get there may be some awkwardness and even professional risk to confronting bad behavior, and I respect that it's a hard decision for some.
I am one of those misfits (not an evil or unempathetic one i think...), and people like you are just the shitty bullies all over again.
Tech has an abundance of non-nerdy types now, and arguably those are the people with enough business and social savvy to have made it into the force it is today. The VCs who choose what to fund, the advertisers that shape content platforms, the founders who care only about engagement..
These socially "well-adjusted" people are just as culpable (if not more) for the evil tech has done, but yet people like you point the finger at nerds and only nerds. There are many, many socially competent people who do evil things, but they have good social skills so you don't care. Its just a trash regurgitation of the hierarchies of high-school all over again.
Its oh-so-convenient to believe "evil" ties in perfectly with your intuitive sense of "well-adjusted", to divide the world so easily into "misfit = evil" and "friendly = good", but truly evil people have to blend in as "good" to get anything done. The sociopaths are running the show.
I don't think nerds are all good, but I don't think they are all evil because of their childhood experiences either as OP implies. The fact is good and evil people are everywhere.
I don’t think they are all evil, but I think the cause for at least some evil is shaped by those experiences. Especially on a young impressionable mind.
The top post in this thread said "many". Not "most". Not even "all".
I have no idea where you're getting the notion that it was an indictment of technologists, writ large. It observed that many of us — myself included — were very much on the outside, socially, as young people. I mean, how do you know that 'matte_black wasn't bullied, too?
No matter what, that leaves a mark. That some subset of those people developed consequently in a way that manifests a lack of empathy and an "Oh, yeah? I'll show you!" kind of attitude is neither surprising, nor worthy of condemnation for acknowledging aloud.
I think that this is red herring. Not all techies were bullied, not even majority in my experience. Some were lonely, some had small group of like minded friends and some were average socially. Yes there are people who have social difficulties, but majority of techies can communicate.
There is however something cultural that makes us assume (in these discussions) that techies were all bullied and are all unadjusted. Up to the point where pretending you don't get social nuance occasionally, when it suits you, is a brag point and makes people assume you are smarter. (Of course crutial difference is that people who really don't get social make mistakes when it does not suits them)
People throw around weird techie stereotype, but when I ask names, they can't answer. Because their real world colegues are not stereotypes mostly.
>The top post in this thread said "many". Not "most". Not even "all".
Even saying "many" is perpetuating a stereotype, and its harmful in the way all stereotypes are.
See how controversial saying "Many women tend to gravitate away from technology & towards people-focused disciplines" is, for the same reasons. It subtly disempowers people within the stereotype by implying they must be a certain kind of person or do only certain things.
> I am one of those misfits (not an evil or unempathetic one i think...), and people like you are just the shitty bullies all over again.
Didn't you misinterpret him? I thought his point was that "tech nerds" were generally thought to be "better" than the cool people or jocks, but now that they themselves have the power, turns out they're just like everyone else. Which seems about right to me.
There are very few people I can think of who've made it big in tech and haven't compromised the "generally accepted" principles of "don't be evil".
Lol perhaps I am horribly triggered and reading incorrectly... but the 2 lines you wrote seem clear as day to me -
Techies are "misfits". Being a "misfit" "creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.".
i.e being a misfit = higher chance of being an evil person.
Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, no matter who you're talking to or how wrong they are. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do this again. Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site to heart and you'll be fine.
Edit: I'm sorry to see that you've posted several other uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN recently too. Really, please don't do that.
Or the atomization, consolidation, & networkization of culture encourages sociopathic behavior in otherwise normal people while emboldening the psychopaths.
Excessive amounts of ill gotten gain & subsidies adds fuel to the disconnect built on faulty presuppositions.
5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn't this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That's the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're headed for big trouble.
Hrm. I'm not really sure exactly what he's referring to there but it does kind of come off as something someone would say if their ideas on race realism were being shot down by people. Not that Tim Ferris is such a person (I have no idea) but you can see it all over the internet and wider media these days. Small, seemingly innocuous, doubts being sewn into the greater conversation of the time. The current cultural battle is an enormous push for civil rights, recognition, and acceptance. It's faux-pas to attack people who have generally been targets in the recent past (transgender people, for example), so the proxy war is "free speech". "My free speech is being encroached because I can't speak realistically about [transgender people, black people, whatever]".
Note: I do not live, and have not lived, in Silicon Valley. So it could be my context is wrong.
I have no idea of what his exact meaning was, but your comment to me seems like a perfect example.
You have absolutely no context of any of these conversations, yet your first presumption that he has some opinions on race realism? This mainstream behavior of seeing a racist behind every rock, or every innocent comment having some underlying racial motivation is I suspect exactly what he's referring to.
No I didn't say that he's a race realism pusher, what I'm saying is that it reads like the kind of shit you'd see someone who is write. I'm not sure if you're new to the internet or not but there is a major culture war happening these days, and there is a lot of fighting over free speech that is just a proxy for other agendas.
Oh I'm aware, and you are clearly on the side that thinks it is 100% right and everyone better step in line with your beliefs, or else they're racist....oh sorry, on second thought, they just sound like someone who is racist.
Actually I was speaking about people like him. Tim Ferris "received a degree in East Asian Studies from Princeton University". When did he become a Techie and why?
If he was born 30 years earlier he would be saying the exact same things about Wall Street.
That's a really important point. "Technology" is an almost uselessly broad term, which would logically include things like medical- or energy-related tech but in casual (especially Silicon Valley) conversation usually means things that are strongly computer-related. As it's very dependent on the finance industry for support, that kind of tech has been increasingly infected by finance-industry perspectives, politics, and cultural standards. Sand Hill Road is not a rival of Wall Street; it's a subsidiary. The "tech bro" CEOs that most of us hands-on-the-keyboard folks hate are just finance bros in different clothing. We - the ones who actuall do the work - are just the investments they prefer this year. It's not like real techies are all perfect or anything, but the reason we end up in the "bad guy" column is that we've chosen to ally ourselves with the guys who were always bad.
Wow, clicked on the Lisa McIntire Tweet linked in the article[0], and that thread is gross. Sure, the company sounds like a terrible idea, and making fun of the concept is fine, but half the replies there are assuming and ridiculing the founders’ names and personalities based on their appearance.
The author seems like a very angry person and I couldn't help but not that they seem to think that Capitalism is somehow to blame for all the world's woes.
I think it is time to stop seeing anger as misplaced in discussions. Being labelled "a very angry person" does nothing to invalidate that person's position.
The author is simply reflecting the rising anger in the community. If you don't believe me, look for public polling on trust in Si valley and social media companies, look at politics, or just talk to anyone outside the bubble.
Large, entrenched, heavily-funded tech firms were never the good guys.
It was the underfunded, plucky upstarts that were generally the good guys.
That hasn't changed.
What has changed is that what little accountability we ever had against those large tech firms has completely collapsed. Even the mere thought of an AT&T style breakup would be laughable nowadays.
Eh. Plenty of underfunded, plucky startups are the same sort of garbage. No particular lens can encapsulate our woes on its own. Reality is too complex to summarize in a few sentences.
The author has some points --like Netflix and its creepy disclosures that it knows of people's predilections.
But, I wish the author were more self aware of their own industry and how it is complicit in what the author is complaining about (the I scratch your back you scratch mine --i.e., I give you juicy scoops, you give me positive words) but also their industry at large --pretending to be agendaless when they all have agendas and biases and use their position of trusted source to push their slants.
And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow. Few people outside New York City know what a bodega is. Next thing "deli" or "Danish" is frowned upon cuz... ??? someone saw someone seeing an idea and running with it?
> like Netflix and its creepy disclosures that it knows of people's predilections.
Bit offtopic, but people keep saying this and it turns out to 'not be true for my friends and me' ; we might not be the norm, but if they know the predilections of the norm, they know nothing of value, so what exactly does it mean /or/ what's creepy about it? Google & Facebook (the latter I stopped using because it became rather useless of late) know everything about my life, and, as a human, I can predict what my profile likes or wants at mostly any given time, and yet they are always(!) wrong. And so is Netflix. For all of these; I am an avid reviewer and I rate; I usually rate binary; 1 or 5. And yet, they cannot predict anything I would want and routinely give me things to buy/watch that I would never even consider using or buying. So where is this creepy thing that knows so much about me? Is it not used to advertise to me? Or does this mean; 'we get it right for 80% so it's really great?'? Because that really means nothing; it is really easy to predict for the masses.
I would say the 'evil' in the industry is more around homogenizing everything; taste, friendships, contact, dating, looks, feels; trying to make them the same as what you are selling and actually have people falling for it. Which turns 'predicting taste' upside down; mold people, then predict they will like the mold. Not many tv shows, movies and music I see/hear that fall outside of the mold.
Totally agree re: Netflix recommendations. I rarely ever review/rate, but Netflix should still be able to easily figure out what I like based on the genres I watch most and shows that I've watched more than a few episodes of. Instead, I mostly see what's popular on Netflix plus a bunch of recommendations that look like they could've been selected by a random number generator. It seems the best Netflix can do is to recommend the next season of a series I've already watched the rest of, which is definitely helpful but pretty disappointing given the amount of data they have available.
>"And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow."
Bodegas are small family businesses generally run by immigrants. So yeah they are kind of sacred.
Wanting to disrupt small family run businesses is kind of a shitty aspiration. And a good example of being out of touch and tone deaf.
The rapper referenced in the article if from NYC where bodegas are an institution.
bodega.ai's slogan is "Everyday Essentials, Instantly" which is the exact functionality that a real bodega already provides. It's like something right out Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley."
So where was all the opposition and outcry to disrupting all small biz taxi drivers by Uber, or all the mom and pop bookstores by Amazon, etc?
It's no different. People celebrate disruption, until they don't. There is no difference in why on the one hand Uber is celebrated but Bodega isn't. Or any number of disruptors who displace small biz and automate and make the biz more efficient, etc.
That opposition is constant. Huge numbers of people object to Uber and are concerned about taxi drivers, while Uber has made no effort to alleviate the externalities of their business. And small bookstores, their owners, and their patrons complain constantly about Amazon. Have these criticisms really not reached you?
First of all taxis have had a government-sanctioned monopoly[1] since the 1930s. So it's not the same at all. In fact medallion owners actually sued to try to protect their monopoly.[2] Disrupting a monopoly is not the same as disrupting a mom and pop business. Further most taxi drivers don't actually own those medallions they are just renting the car for the shift. The reason for this was the medallions fetched well over a million dollars for decades [3]
Also taxis aren't a vital resource in a city with 24 hours mass transit system. Whereas access to food and water is. So no its not the same at all, not even close.
And the mom and pop book stores were mostly put out of business in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the Barnes and Noble and Borders book chains. The irony is that Amazon had ended up disrupting them.
Lastly your whole argument is a strawman - lack of public dissent on one issue does not mean you forfeit the right to dissent on another issues.
First, taxis exist in more than NYC. Second, what about all the other AutoNation, like automating the jobs of paralegals, and myriad other jobs getting automated, where is the outrage? I don't see it outside affected groups, there is no hashtagrage for all those other sectors being disrupted or flat out shipped overseas. What's so special about bodegas? Why isn't Dominoes ostracized for displaying mom and pop pizza joints?
If you go back and read your own context you asked:
>"And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow."
The "swipe" was not by the author but by a NYC-based rapper on twitter. Someone for whom bodegas would be essential.
I've articulated why bodegas would be considered special to someone for whom they serve an essential neighborhood function. I have also explained how this is different than the Taxi medallion monopoly systems and bookstores.
Yes taxis exist outside of New York City and cities such as Chicago, S.F and Boston also have regulated monopolies via a taxi medallion system.
You really don't seem to have any kind of arguments other than asking "what about __?" questions.
> -like Netflix and its creepy disclosures that it knows of people's predilections.
The incident referenced here seems to be blown up a bit.
Sure, it is a PR nightmare for Netflix and the joke felt flat. But, there is doubt on whether the social media team does have access to people's viewing data directly. It is most likely they thought of a joke and to make it sound real they referenced some numbers. Now everyone thinks not only they have poor taste in jokes but also are looking at people's data.
It is striking how honest this journalist is being about purposely determining the slant of stories (rather than being driven by the facts at hand). He used to have a general positive impression of the startup community, so he chose to write positive stories about individual startups. Now he has a general negative impression and he chooses to write negative stories about individual startups. You only see that sort of honesty because he's convinced himself he sees the overarching truth so clearly.
But I agree. The article reads as "these guys seem desperate, let me kick them one more time, it's for their own good". It's one thing to be driven by facts, calling out bad things when you see them, this reads like an opinion piece saying "they still haven't learned". And "they" is wildly generalized.
It seem that "entrepreneur" is becoming synonymous to "arrogant, sexist asshole", and if think that, you're actually creating another problem, not solving the existing one.
> Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends.
This is kind of how I feel. Both about Google and Facebook - on one hand they are large companies, Google for example lobby the government [1] more than Verizon, Shell or say Goldman and somehow the irrational part of my brain is still telling me "Oh but they are just the cutesy little startup with colorful letters and a nice search feature and their motto says they are not evil and such".
For many people especially in some countries being on the internet is effectively being on Facebook. I like how India fought back against Facebook's "free internet". There was a collective push-back. There should be a similar one against Google and others.
These companies are holding more information about people than any state security service out there. It's not just people who volunteered the info (even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2]), I for one never signed up for Facebook, but I have no doubt they know who I am and have a profile on me. How is Facebook going to use that info? What if some repressive government wants it and subpoenas Facebook to give it to them or they simply get hacked like Equifax. People should at least be afraid of them more than they are afraid of the bankers and the oil or tobacco executives like the article alludes to at the end.
> Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That seems counter intuitive to me.
Well I'd hope they wouldn't be lies and he would actually care a bit more about storing and using that data and have more respect for his users. But I think you are saying given his motivations and personality, wouldn't it be better if he is honest about his feelings, then yes, that's certainly preferable.
People commenting here are negative about the article, saying "yes, the industry has its share of douchebags but...".
And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a whole bunch of jobs.
Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought quality college classes to a large audience, etc.
However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the general public distrusts big tech companies.
> The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem.
The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.
And in EU we have government grants - free money for all kinds of tech-scams , created just for the purpose of consuming these funds. Of course destroying any legit businesses that suddenly have to compete against these state-funded parasites. Thanks, socialists
The capitalist has enough to do just taking care of his own business. But now he has to deal with all these who just took government money for nothing and can compete without any costs on their side. Even offer same service for free because govt pays for it - what kind of business could beat that?
And what kind of government strangles legit businesses and replaces them with state-funded zombies?
Being a capitalist is not defined as a love of obtaining capital. It's more than that: it includes a belief in markets and a dislike of government intervention, which can of course be intervention to prop up his competitors.
central Europe. Variety of funds to pick from, but there is national fund for R&D projects, financing private companies and cooperation between academy & business.
The main problem: goals. The goal is not to develop anything, instead both sides focus on getting rid of the money. The administration clerks make sure they spend all budget (to show they do a great job) and the beneficiaries make sure every penny is utilised and there is a paper for that.
And that's it, millions of EUR just to fund paperwork and fictional research. Plus a generous amount of corruption, but this is just a side effect of this fiction pyramid.
> offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business.
This is very similar to the anti-competitive strategy of "dumping", where you sell something at a loss to undercut a competitor. Again, the primary thing being disrupted here is "laws".
The public at large have shown themselves to have little qualms about trading their privacy for convenience. Knowing this, is it really so egregious to offer decent tools/platforms to said people, to convenience said people, in return for monetizing their formally private data they willingly hand over?
In fact, knowing that people put such a low value on their privacy nowadays, is offering them decent, innovative services in exchange for that data not by definition "doing good things to change the world"?
Snowden risked his life to show the world and public at large that they were being spied on by the US government, facilitated by the big tech companies. The response was at best apathy, at worst a thirst for Snowden's blood. It's very hard to come back now, in 2017, with "muh privacy".
It's not that people are no longer willing to trade privacy for convenience. It's that people are now more aware that the tech companies are hugely profiting from it.
It's like big pharma. You could think of them as the good guys who cure diseases. But the truth is that the big pharma guys are in it for the money and are ready to do anything for it.
People are starting to view the GAFA as they see big pharma and big co in general. And that's a shift from the fix-the-world-from-my-moms-garage image they had in the early 2000s.
Your argument seems to be that "a lot of people do X and have no problems with it even though the negatives of X are described in the general media and its been 5 years, so therefore we should continue with X, because it's by definition 'doing a good thing to change the world'".
Is that the right pattern?
Because it seems that a lot of things don't fit that pattern.
A lot of people smoked, and continued to smoke even after the packages all got warning stickers on them. Yet it took decades before general smoking bans went into place.
People used pull-tab cans for 20 or more years, because it was much more convenient than remembering to bring a church key to open the can. This despite many warnings about how pull-tab litter caused people to cut their feet, and how children accidentally swallowed pull-tabs inserted into the can itself. (To paraphrase, "The response was at best apathy, at worst a third for injury in others"?)
Then there are substances which are now banned for general use: asbestos, DDT, CFCs, lead paint, arsenic as a home rat poison, insecticide, and coloring agent (used in everything from children's toys to wallpaper to candy). All of them had a period where sales were relatively unrestricted, but where people knew, or should have known from its coverage in the general press, about their negatives, before they were banned.
That history of protecting citizens has almost certainly lead people to believe that if a company does X or sells X then the government has evaluated it to make sure it's safe, and has good consumer protections in place.
This isn't true, and is becoming even less true over time as the cult of "let the market decide" becomes more powerful.
Nevertheless, history shows that sometimes it takes more than 5 years (Snowden left the US in 2013) to go from "X is bad, we need to stop doing it" to actually putting laws and regulations in place to restrict X.
The general media describing a 'problem' doesn't mean it really exists. The media has been slating Google and Facebook for years because journalists are envious and angry that these companies have become so influential in news distribution and monetisation. The most visible cases of this are in Europe where there are constant attempts to pass a "Google tax" on linking to news stories, but the same dynamics are present elsewhere.
I tend to agree with the OP that privacy is a red herring. People do not care about sharing their data with large corporations. The idea that they do is the root cause of much wasted effort and malinvestment in the tech sector. It's a pretty idea but it's false. People will happily provide all sorts of information about themselves to get even quite trivial things for free. Companies that bet on privacy usually end up marginalised and struggling. Companies that bet on free+ads take over the world.
If governments give in to the temptation to "fix" this because of powerful newspaper owners, it will be a sad day for everyone. The silent majority that doesn't actually assign much value to trivia like their purchase history or inbox contents and already have enough bills to pay will have been oppressed by the loud minority that massively over-estimates the value and importance of "private data".
While you might believe the OP, my comment is that the argument the OP used to justify the argument is incomplete. That is, applying the same reasoning to topics where the problem really does exist, and where the laws were (eventually) changed, shows us that a 5 year time frame is not enough time.
Your statement now seems to be is that no problem actually exists. This is a different argument.
I think the modern trend to put mandatory arbitration clauses into consumer contracts, and to prohibit class-action lawsuits, is a horrid perversion of justice. The government should have strong consumer protection laws and enforcement in place. Failing that, people should be able to sue. And because most people don't have much money compared to companies, they should be able to have a class-action lawsuit, with no statutory limits on possible fines or judgement. Mandatory arbitration is a big fat thumb on the scales of justice, in favor of large companies.
But so far there hasn't been much in the way of problems with mandatory arbitration clauses. There are some, and they make it to the press, but given the current Congress and Administration's view on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we'll have those clauses for some years still.
While in the EU, Japan, and other countries, such clauses are either illegal, or are much less tightly binding as in the US.
I see privacy as the same way. At some point there will be laws which place tighter controls over what a company can do with personal data. It will likely take a massive negative event. (Eg, an anonymous public torrent of all of the URLs accessed by Comcast users, indexed by account owner name and IP address. Or just the visit history of the people that the President appoints or nominates for high positions.)
Sure, but bear in mind class action lawsuits are fairly specific to the USA. Mandatory arbitration clauses are less useful outside the USA because people are less likely to sue to begin with, and cannot sue as a group.
There may at some point be a huge negative event as you describe. I'm not sure there extremely rare events should be used as the basis for sweeping regulations. That has not worked out well in the past.
I switched to that example because the same argument concerning privacy might also hold there, but where there is a difference between US law and the law elsewhere.
I did that to suggest that it may be another counter-example showing how that argument isn't really a strong one.
"That has not worked out well in the past." - the VPPA worked out pretty well, though of course not perfectly. It has been changed since then.
I personally like the requirement that if I no longer am a customer of a company (like Netflix) then they don't keep track of my records. That's a requirement of VPPA for video records, and I don't see how that requirement won't work out well for other areas.
I can't be the only techy who got more and more technophob over the last 10 years, which many of my friends find so funny and if they ask me why I usually respond with "because I know what's on the dark side"
So am I. Computers looked like the perfect solution to many problems - and perhaps they are, but then things on the human side went very wrong. Too many 'wrong people' in the right place at the right time (Founders with shitty ethics, politicians/lawmaker with zero technological understanding, way too many lobbyists per activist ...)
Me too. I've moved from spending nearly every waking hour on the computer to about 10 hours a week. Basically transitioned from developer to stay at home dad. I try to be careful what my kids do and see me do with technology.
The issue is that people idealized both techies and startups. Put them on pedestal. The trouble is, techies and startups were never movie good guys. They were ... just mix of guys. Some good, some bad and generally normal and all that much different from any body else. A bit arrogant and believing that they are something special, but other groups habe that too.
Now it turned out they could not stay on pedestal, because no real group of people can. They are people, not mystical Madonnas.
Note that the underlying problem isn't that "tech" is good or bad, the problem is that tech workers over the past many years have evaded their responsibility to ensure that the work they do is beneficial rather than harmful by pretending that this responsibility didn't exist. That the responsibility lay elsewhere (on users, for example) or that the technology they were creating was somehow orthogonal to the issue of morality. And, further, you can see this influencing behavior at all levels, including behavior in the office and between coworkers.
People see software like a bridge or a highway and imagine that simply building such things is morally neutral. But if you build a highway by destroying a neighborhood full of black businesses that has implications on society and racial equality. If you build a highway in a way that excludes the addition of a rail line along it or that has unusually low overpasses which limit where buses can take people then you are deepening socio-economic divisions and exclusions. (These aren't just hypotheticals, look up the history of Robert Moses for a prime example.)
Stop thinking of tech workers as being part of some scrappy, underdog counter-culture. Geek culture is mainstream culture. The tech industry is the establishment. Tech workers are elites who are working to maintain the establishment. If you're a coder working at Facebook or Apple in 2017 you are little different from the people working at General Electric, Exxon, Union Carbide, Raytheon, Dow Chemical, or Phillip Morris back in the 1960s. You may wear a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie while they wore business suits, but that's a superficial difference.
What we build and what we do affects the world in profound ways. We must develop the skills to wrestle with the morality and the social consequences of what we build as well as take on the responsibility to build things that make the world a better place. We are not simply cogs in a machine, when we decide to go to work at amazon, or uber, or facebook we are making a choice in how our talents will change the world and affect people's lives. We need to be mindful of that. Every day.
>pretending that this responsibility didn't exist.
We are not pretending that responsibility does not exist: we are denying it. I spent 12 years in school being told to care about people who didn't give any shit about me, just so they could exploit how naive I was. It took me way to long to see through that shit and I am not falling for it again.
As a specialist in building efficient processes, it's nearly certain that you are complicit in un-employing or weakening the position of the workers involved in the processes you're attacking.
Technology is the instrument with which competitors under capitalism destroy each other. If you think we have a moral obligation to abstain from competing because the destruction is too painful, well okay, but we had better rip out the rest of capitalism too.
(Personally, I'd rather we directly provision a social safety net, rather than selectively protect certain inefficiencies to maintain the facade of earning a living).
There has been a clear betrayal of the people. All the loud claims of freedom and liberalism by techies from the 90s has come to nought and infact moved the other way. Techies have dropped any pretense of ethical behavior and are hiding behind user ignorance to abuse them.
Google, Facebook and others creepy surveillance behavior has been more or less normalized and few seem to have a problem working for them and furthering their agendas. Once the infrastructure for surveillance exists, things change whether you like it or not.
You can't be a victim all the time, at some point you need to take responsibility, if you can behave with integrity you can't expect it from society.
I worked for Google for a long time. I never had a problem working for him or "furthering their agenda" because back then they didn't really have an agenda, beyond doing cool stuff on the web.
The idea that these organisations are unethical doesn't stick. Here's the brutal reality - people care about privacy from the people immediately around them. They value Incognito Mode because they want to hide their browsing history from partner/friends/family/etc. They don't value encrypted email because they assign a value of near zero to hiding messages from Google.
And why not? Privacy leaks out of these organisations are so rare as to be non-existent. They control their employees access very tightly and I can remember exactly one case of a genuine scandal involving a Google SRE maliciously accessing accounts. For a company coming up to 20 years old that's a good track record. Moreover, it's convenient to trust a large corporation. They will help you if you forget your password instead of saying "sorry, no key no access". They back things up for you, give you magical search functionality, filter stuff for you, show you useful stuff. And it costs you nothing! It's a deal so great everyone takes it.
The day I really came to understand that whinging about online privacy was just a crappy form of journalistic champagne socialism was when I took part in a system that showed me how much money advertisers were spending in the auction to appear on my screen during an ordinary few days of browsing. I saw that data because I was interested in the idea of letting people bid themselves out of seeing online ads. It was a staggering amount of money. Many many multiples the cost of my cable TV/internet subscription. Even as a well paid engineer I'd not have considered actually doing it. And for people on a more average salary? Trying to get rid of online ads or making them less efficient would just mean they couldn't afford to use the internet at all. I came to realise that no people would ever agree to pay for the true cost of their own web browsing. It was well targeted ads or it was no web sites.
Since then articles like these moaning about the evil ad-driven tech industry just make me roll my eyes. Don't like it Ms Journalist? Get rid of all the advertising and sleasy agenda-driven copy in your own industry first, then lecture others.
lol, the Sam Altman quote is classic... what a duche:
“This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,”
I absolutely abhor arguments that are based on the quest for pure excellence. I promise you nearly every discriminatory argument in history was based on excellence. And yes, to have civility we have to get over that and say: no, you can't say shit about gay people. If that changes some elite collectives overall IQ, get the fuck over it. Your novel comment on physics is simply lower on the scale of priorities.
What's happened in Silicon Valley is that primarily white young men have had power and are funded and listened to in a fairly bubble-like way. It seems incorrect to say, "tech is bad," by citing a bunch of bro disasters. It might be fair to say, "as a journalist, I plan to be highly skeptical of tech startups looking for press who are led by a team of 20-something white dudes." At least that seems plausible. But if there are solutions to a lot of the mess that we've made pre- and post- the rise of Silicon Valley, they're likely to be technological.
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[ 1924 ms ] story [ 391 ms ] threadThis creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.
This is purely anecdotal, but I remember a brilliant nerdy kid back in high school days dared to talk back to some bullies that were messing with him. He ended up getting beat the fuck up and they purposely broke his glasses. At the end of the day though, the bullies were still popular and accepted by everyone, and the nerd was still a nerd who should have known his place.
How does a life event like that affect someone’s world view later when the very thing that once made them an outcast is suddenly the source of all their power and wealth in this word?
For the same reason (geeks/nerds/rejects etc) may feel they cannot by definition be oppressive because they too were oppressed before by the popular ones. Of course, anyone is capable of oppression and discrimination, to varying degrees of efficacy, but that tends to get lost when you feel pretty beat up from others and suddenly are confronted with the fact that they are doing that very thing.
The headline is sensational, though, as it's not all techies, no. But at the same time, there are quite a few who, as the article's opening illustration shows, are happy to put their head in the sand and just tell themselves "It's not me doing it, I know what it's like to be oppressed/discriminated against, I did x/y/z action, so I'm a good guy", all as their colleagues have to put up with such non-sense.
I would suspect that is where a lot of the frustration and backlash against a lot of tech folk during these issues over the past few years has come from; the eschewing of any responsibility with mantras and "not all of us do that, some of us were the ones that got picked on in high school!". I don't mean to say that there is a concrete hierarchy of suffering and only those with the most suffering may complain; I don't subscribe to the War Orphans in Darfur clause. What I would say is that suffering is suffering and if we can help, the world is better for it. And I think that is the basis for the complaints against tech folk - there is a lot of potential to stop it or to help, but many do not. I get there may be some awkwardness and even professional risk to confronting bad behavior, and I respect that it's a hard decision for some.
Tech has an abundance of non-nerdy types now, and arguably those are the people with enough business and social savvy to have made it into the force it is today. The VCs who choose what to fund, the advertisers that shape content platforms, the founders who care only about engagement..
These socially "well-adjusted" people are just as culpable (if not more) for the evil tech has done, but yet people like you point the finger at nerds and only nerds. There are many, many socially competent people who do evil things, but they have good social skills so you don't care. Its just a trash regurgitation of the hierarchies of high-school all over again.
Its oh-so-convenient to believe "evil" ties in perfectly with your intuitive sense of "well-adjusted", to divide the world so easily into "misfit = evil" and "friendly = good", but truly evil people have to blend in as "good" to get anything done. The sociopaths are running the show.
Thinking that being nerd implies good and does not help anything ethical. It makes it worst, because it removes doubt.
I don't think nerds are all good, but I don't think they are all evil because of their childhood experiences either as OP implies. The fact is good and evil people are everywhere.
It is a fact that the abused are more likely to abuse. We all have to be cognizant of why we are where we are.
I have no idea where you're getting the notion that it was an indictment of technologists, writ large. It observed that many of us — myself included — were very much on the outside, socially, as young people. I mean, how do you know that 'matte_black wasn't bullied, too?
No matter what, that leaves a mark. That some subset of those people developed consequently in a way that manifests a lack of empathy and an "Oh, yeah? I'll show you!" kind of attitude is neither surprising, nor worthy of condemnation for acknowledging aloud.
There is however something cultural that makes us assume (in these discussions) that techies were all bullied and are all unadjusted. Up to the point where pretending you don't get social nuance occasionally, when it suits you, is a brag point and makes people assume you are smarter. (Of course crutial difference is that people who really don't get social make mistakes when it does not suits them)
People throw around weird techie stereotype, but when I ask names, they can't answer. Because their real world colegues are not stereotypes mostly.
Even saying "many" is perpetuating a stereotype, and its harmful in the way all stereotypes are.
See how controversial saying "Many women tend to gravitate away from technology & towards people-focused disciplines" is, for the same reasons. It subtly disempowers people within the stereotype by implying they must be a certain kind of person or do only certain things.
Didn't you misinterpret him? I thought his point was that "tech nerds" were generally thought to be "better" than the cool people or jocks, but now that they themselves have the power, turns out they're just like everyone else. Which seems about right to me.
There are very few people I can think of who've made it big in tech and haven't compromised the "generally accepted" principles of "don't be evil".
He seems to be saying, yeah we always knew they were icky and weird, of course they are evil too!!
Techies are "misfits". Being a "misfit" "creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.".
i.e being a misfit = higher chance of being an evil person.
Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, no matter who you're talking to or how wrong they are. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do this again. Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site to heart and you'll be fine.
Edit: I'm sorry to see that you've posted several other uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN recently too. Really, please don't do that.
To be more general, Cluster Bs.
Excessive amounts of ill gotten gain & subsidies adds fuel to the disconnect built on faulty presuppositions.
His term was “fair-weather entrepreneurs”. Essentially guns for hires without vision who will go wherever easy capital funding is to be found.
This was interesting to read:
5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn't this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That's the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're headed for big trouble.
Note: I do not live, and have not lived, in Silicon Valley. So it could be my context is wrong.
You have absolutely no context of any of these conversations, yet your first presumption that he has some opinions on race realism? This mainstream behavior of seeing a racist behind every rock, or every innocent comment having some underlying racial motivation is I suspect exactly what he's referring to.
If he was born 30 years earlier he would be saying the exact same things about Wall Street.
[0] https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816
It was the underfunded, plucky upstarts that were generally the good guys.
That hasn't changed.
What has changed is that what little accountability we ever had against those large tech firms has completely collapsed. Even the mere thought of an AT&T style breakup would be laughable nowadays.
But, I wish the author were more self aware of their own industry and how it is complicit in what the author is complaining about (the I scratch your back you scratch mine --i.e., I give you juicy scoops, you give me positive words) but also their industry at large --pretending to be agendaless when they all have agendas and biases and use their position of trusted source to push their slants.
And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow. Few people outside New York City know what a bodega is. Next thing "deli" or "Danish" is frowned upon cuz... ??? someone saw someone seeing an idea and running with it?
Bit offtopic, but people keep saying this and it turns out to 'not be true for my friends and me' ; we might not be the norm, but if they know the predilections of the norm, they know nothing of value, so what exactly does it mean /or/ what's creepy about it? Google & Facebook (the latter I stopped using because it became rather useless of late) know everything about my life, and, as a human, I can predict what my profile likes or wants at mostly any given time, and yet they are always(!) wrong. And so is Netflix. For all of these; I am an avid reviewer and I rate; I usually rate binary; 1 or 5. And yet, they cannot predict anything I would want and routinely give me things to buy/watch that I would never even consider using or buying. So where is this creepy thing that knows so much about me? Is it not used to advertise to me? Or does this mean; 'we get it right for 80% so it's really great?'? Because that really means nothing; it is really easy to predict for the masses.
I would say the 'evil' in the industry is more around homogenizing everything; taste, friendships, contact, dating, looks, feels; trying to make them the same as what you are selling and actually have people falling for it. Which turns 'predicting taste' upside down; mold people, then predict they will like the mold. Not many tv shows, movies and music I see/hear that fall outside of the mold.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42323366
Bodegas are small family businesses generally run by immigrants. So yeah they are kind of sacred.
Wanting to disrupt small family run businesses is kind of a shitty aspiration. And a good example of being out of touch and tone deaf.
The rapper referenced in the article if from NYC where bodegas are an institution.
bodega.ai's slogan is "Everyday Essentials, Instantly" which is the exact functionality that a real bodega already provides. It's like something right out Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley."
It's no different. People celebrate disruption, until they don't. There is no difference in why on the one hand Uber is celebrated but Bodega isn't. Or any number of disruptors who displace small biz and automate and make the biz more efficient, etc.
Also taxis aren't a vital resource in a city with 24 hours mass transit system. Whereas access to food and water is. So no its not the same at all, not even close.
And the mom and pop book stores were mostly put out of business in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the Barnes and Noble and Borders book chains. The irony is that Amazon had ended up disrupting them.
Lastly your whole argument is a strawman - lack of public dissent on one issue does not mean you forfeit the right to dissent on another issues.
[1] https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/sites/newyorklawjourna...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newyorkcity-taxis-uber/ta...
[3] https://priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the...
>"And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow."
The "swipe" was not by the author but by a NYC-based rapper on twitter. Someone for whom bodegas would be essential.
I've articulated why bodegas would be considered special to someone for whom they serve an essential neighborhood function. I have also explained how this is different than the Taxi medallion monopoly systems and bookstores.
Yes taxis exist outside of New York City and cities such as Chicago, S.F and Boston also have regulated monopolies via a taxi medallion system.
You really don't seem to have any kind of arguments other than asking "what about __?" questions.
The incident referenced here seems to be blown up a bit.
Sure, it is a PR nightmare for Netflix and the joke felt flat. But, there is doubt on whether the social media team does have access to people's viewing data directly. It is most likely they thought of a joke and to make it sound real they referenced some numbers. Now everyone thinks not only they have poor taste in jokes but also are looking at people's data.
But I agree. The article reads as "these guys seem desperate, let me kick them one more time, it's for their own good". It's one thing to be driven by facts, calling out bad things when you see them, this reads like an opinion piece saying "they still haven't learned". And "they" is wildly generalized.
It seem that "entrepreneur" is becoming synonymous to "arrogant, sexist asshole", and if think that, you're actually creating another problem, not solving the existing one.
This is kind of how I feel. Both about Google and Facebook - on one hand they are large companies, Google for example lobby the government [1] more than Verizon, Shell or say Goldman and somehow the irrational part of my brain is still telling me "Oh but they are just the cutesy little startup with colorful letters and a nice search feature and their motto says they are not evil and such".
For many people especially in some countries being on the internet is effectively being on Facebook. I like how India fought back against Facebook's "free internet". There was a collective push-back. There should be a similar one against Google and others.
These companies are holding more information about people than any state security service out there. It's not just people who volunteered the info (even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2]), I for one never signed up for Facebook, but I have no doubt they know who I am and have a profile on me. How is Facebook going to use that info? What if some repressive government wants it and subpoenas Facebook to give it to them or they simply get hacked like Equifax. People should at least be afraid of them more than they are afraid of the bankers and the oil or tobacco executives like the article alludes to at the end.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D0000678...
[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That seems counter intuitive to me.
Well I'd hope they wouldn't be lies and he would actually care a bit more about storing and using that data and have more respect for his users. But I think you are saying given his motivations and personality, wouldn't it be better if he is honest about his feelings, then yes, that's certainly preferable.
And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a whole bunch of jobs.
Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought quality college classes to a large audience, etc.
However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the general public distrusts big tech companies.
The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.
This is very similar to the anti-competitive strategy of "dumping", where you sell something at a loss to undercut a competitor. Again, the primary thing being disrupted here is "laws".
In fact, knowing that people put such a low value on their privacy nowadays, is offering them decent, innovative services in exchange for that data not by definition "doing good things to change the world"?
Snowden risked his life to show the world and public at large that they were being spied on by the US government, facilitated by the big tech companies. The response was at best apathy, at worst a thirst for Snowden's blood. It's very hard to come back now, in 2017, with "muh privacy".
It's like big pharma. You could think of them as the good guys who cure diseases. But the truth is that the big pharma guys are in it for the money and are ready to do anything for it.
People are starting to view the GAFA as they see big pharma and big co in general. And that's a shift from the fix-the-world-from-my-moms-garage image they had in the early 2000s.
Is that the right pattern?
Because it seems that a lot of things don't fit that pattern.
A lot of people smoked, and continued to smoke even after the packages all got warning stickers on them. Yet it took decades before general smoking bans went into place.
People used pull-tab cans for 20 or more years, because it was much more convenient than remembering to bring a church key to open the can. This despite many warnings about how pull-tab litter caused people to cut their feet, and how children accidentally swallowed pull-tabs inserted into the can itself. (To paraphrase, "The response was at best apathy, at worst a third for injury in others"?)
Then there are substances which are now banned for general use: asbestos, DDT, CFCs, lead paint, arsenic as a home rat poison, insecticide, and coloring agent (used in everything from children's toys to wallpaper to candy). All of them had a period where sales were relatively unrestricted, but where people knew, or should have known from its coverage in the general press, about their negatives, before they were banned.
That history of protecting citizens has almost certainly lead people to believe that if a company does X or sells X then the government has evaluated it to make sure it's safe, and has good consumer protections in place.
This isn't true, and is becoming even less true over time as the cult of "let the market decide" becomes more powerful.
Nevertheless, history shows that sometimes it takes more than 5 years (Snowden left the US in 2013) to go from "X is bad, we need to stop doing it" to actually putting laws and regulations in place to restrict X.
I tend to agree with the OP that privacy is a red herring. People do not care about sharing their data with large corporations. The idea that they do is the root cause of much wasted effort and malinvestment in the tech sector. It's a pretty idea but it's false. People will happily provide all sorts of information about themselves to get even quite trivial things for free. Companies that bet on privacy usually end up marginalised and struggling. Companies that bet on free+ads take over the world.
If governments give in to the temptation to "fix" this because of powerful newspaper owners, it will be a sad day for everyone. The silent majority that doesn't actually assign much value to trivia like their purchase history or inbox contents and already have enough bills to pay will have been oppressed by the loud minority that massively over-estimates the value and importance of "private data".
Your statement now seems to be is that no problem actually exists. This is a different argument.
I think the modern trend to put mandatory arbitration clauses into consumer contracts, and to prohibit class-action lawsuits, is a horrid perversion of justice. The government should have strong consumer protection laws and enforcement in place. Failing that, people should be able to sue. And because most people don't have much money compared to companies, they should be able to have a class-action lawsuit, with no statutory limits on possible fines or judgement. Mandatory arbitration is a big fat thumb on the scales of justice, in favor of large companies.
But so far there hasn't been much in the way of problems with mandatory arbitration clauses. There are some, and they make it to the press, but given the current Congress and Administration's view on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we'll have those clauses for some years still.
While in the EU, Japan, and other countries, such clauses are either illegal, or are much less tightly binding as in the US.
I see privacy as the same way. At some point there will be laws which place tighter controls over what a company can do with personal data. It will likely take a massive negative event. (Eg, an anonymous public torrent of all of the URLs accessed by Comcast users, indexed by account owner name and IP address. Or just the visit history of the people that the President appoints or nominates for high positions.)
For an example of a "loud minority" which changed the law for stronger privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act . This still applies to sites like Hulu, by the way.
Apple, unlike Facebook and Google, isn't an ad company. They've done a pretty good job taking over the world.
There may at some point be a huge negative event as you describe. I'm not sure there extremely rare events should be used as the basis for sweeping regulations. That has not worked out well in the past.
I did that to suggest that it may be another counter-example showing how that argument isn't really a strong one.
"That has not worked out well in the past." - the VPPA worked out pretty well, though of course not perfectly. It has been changed since then.
I personally like the requirement that if I no longer am a customer of a company (like Netflix) then they don't keep track of my records. That's a requirement of VPPA for video records, and I don't see how that requirement won't work out well for other areas.
Now it turned out they could not stay on pedestal, because no real group of people can. They are people, not mystical Madonnas.
People see software like a bridge or a highway and imagine that simply building such things is morally neutral. But if you build a highway by destroying a neighborhood full of black businesses that has implications on society and racial equality. If you build a highway in a way that excludes the addition of a rail line along it or that has unusually low overpasses which limit where buses can take people then you are deepening socio-economic divisions and exclusions. (These aren't just hypotheticals, look up the history of Robert Moses for a prime example.)
Stop thinking of tech workers as being part of some scrappy, underdog counter-culture. Geek culture is mainstream culture. The tech industry is the establishment. Tech workers are elites who are working to maintain the establishment. If you're a coder working at Facebook or Apple in 2017 you are little different from the people working at General Electric, Exxon, Union Carbide, Raytheon, Dow Chemical, or Phillip Morris back in the 1960s. You may wear a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie while they wore business suits, but that's a superficial difference.
What we build and what we do affects the world in profound ways. We must develop the skills to wrestle with the morality and the social consequences of what we build as well as take on the responsibility to build things that make the world a better place. We are not simply cogs in a machine, when we decide to go to work at amazon, or uber, or facebook we are making a choice in how our talents will change the world and affect people's lives. We need to be mindful of that. Every day.
We are not pretending that responsibility does not exist: we are denying it. I spent 12 years in school being told to care about people who didn't give any shit about me, just so they could exploit how naive I was. It took me way to long to see through that shit and I am not falling for it again.
Technology is the instrument with which competitors under capitalism destroy each other. If you think we have a moral obligation to abstain from competing because the destruction is too painful, well okay, but we had better rip out the rest of capitalism too.
(Personally, I'd rather we directly provision a social safety net, rather than selectively protect certain inefficiencies to maintain the facade of earning a living).
Google, Facebook and others creepy surveillance behavior has been more or less normalized and few seem to have a problem working for them and furthering their agendas. Once the infrastructure for surveillance exists, things change whether you like it or not.
You can't be a victim all the time, at some point you need to take responsibility, if you can behave with integrity you can't expect it from society.
The idea that these organisations are unethical doesn't stick. Here's the brutal reality - people care about privacy from the people immediately around them. They value Incognito Mode because they want to hide their browsing history from partner/friends/family/etc. They don't value encrypted email because they assign a value of near zero to hiding messages from Google.
And why not? Privacy leaks out of these organisations are so rare as to be non-existent. They control their employees access very tightly and I can remember exactly one case of a genuine scandal involving a Google SRE maliciously accessing accounts. For a company coming up to 20 years old that's a good track record. Moreover, it's convenient to trust a large corporation. They will help you if you forget your password instead of saying "sorry, no key no access". They back things up for you, give you magical search functionality, filter stuff for you, show you useful stuff. And it costs you nothing! It's a deal so great everyone takes it.
The day I really came to understand that whinging about online privacy was just a crappy form of journalistic champagne socialism was when I took part in a system that showed me how much money advertisers were spending in the auction to appear on my screen during an ordinary few days of browsing. I saw that data because I was interested in the idea of letting people bid themselves out of seeing online ads. It was a staggering amount of money. Many many multiples the cost of my cable TV/internet subscription. Even as a well paid engineer I'd not have considered actually doing it. And for people on a more average salary? Trying to get rid of online ads or making them less efficient would just mean they couldn't afford to use the internet at all. I came to realise that no people would ever agree to pay for the true cost of their own web browsing. It was well targeted ads or it was no web sites.
Since then articles like these moaning about the evil ad-driven tech industry just make me roll my eyes. Don't like it Ms Journalist? Get rid of all the advertising and sleasy agenda-driven copy in your own industry first, then lecture others.
“This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,”
I absolutely abhor arguments that are based on the quest for pure excellence. I promise you nearly every discriminatory argument in history was based on excellence. And yes, to have civility we have to get over that and say: no, you can't say shit about gay people. If that changes some elite collectives overall IQ, get the fuck over it. Your novel comment on physics is simply lower on the scale of priorities.