The "anti-political" part is probably the most pertinent to modern tech thought. People repeat it here as well - the idea that any kind of specification or statistic is just cold and hard, and there are no lenses.
What I wonder more is: is it a product of the "build it" mentality like Turner says, or is it manipulated by money men with an interest is maintaining the status quo by silencing dissent as non-scientific?
But the former don't repeatedly knock out runaway success stories.
Runaway success stories are incredibly rare. Worse, the people who are most famous for achieving them rarely appear particularly sympathetic or humane.
Edit to add: that was a great read, IMO - unusually interesting and insightful.
In my experience, engineers tend to fetishise the sciences to a degree even scientists don't. Physics and math are among the most influential, and their biggest successes were build on reductionism, or the ability to split large problems into smaller, manageable units. The first instinct is not to immediately solve a problem, but to reduce its size. They also seek axioms, i.e. simple, universal truths from which to build larger solutions.
This approach quickly turns into frustration: people behave irrationally, for example, which turns economics from an offspring of mathematics into something more akin to applied psychology. Laws fail to live up to a standard of "plain meaning", because the myriad conflicts of life are to nuanced to be exhaustively captured in simple language. That's where the distrust of the legal system, as well as "smart contracts" come from.
It's interesting to compare engineers and scientists in this regard: the most successful scientists tend to have a vast appreciation of culture beyond their field of study. Richard Feynman, for example, excelled in music and painting, and became a bestselling author.
I think it comes from not really having a grasp of a lot of the real BS involved in science, which you can really only know from first or secondhand experience. A lot of the magic and awe I found in science was beaten out of me by having close friends and partners who were lab techs, doctoral students, postdocs, etc.
I really hope knowledge of how the scientific process works in practice becomes more common among engineers though, it's very frustrating when someone takes a study as being the word of god, and you can't convince them otherwise, because science. Like some 3-4 years ago there was some lab claiming to be on the cusp of having a real cold fusion prototype, and people just buy in because they want it to be true, and the lab had written a paper.
The lines about engineers I find to be odd. I don't believe that an entire culture could think that way, yet the author states that the news is a out of context problem for these firms. Engineers don't actually think like that as this article claims it to be, right?
Based on my limited experience, most of the good engineers I know measure and care about quantifiable things like latency, throughput etc. They generally tend to get frustrated with fuzzy things like accuracy. (Data) Scientists, on the other hand, seem to be much more happier dealing with things like accuracy. "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.
> "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.
I would add that it is not entirely their job. After all, all the stakeholders have a primary goal, the infrastructure engineer will maximise infrastructure metrics, the VC their own and so do regulators, who society does need, even in our angelic brogrammer society.
This is one of the more insightful and interesting reads posted on HN.
I took issue with the statement that Apple have always cynically coopted counterculture and utopian motifs. Then I thought about it for a second.
Getting people pumped up about Apple using utopian imagery and counterculture suggestions was always cynical. It just happened to work very effectively on me in the 80s, and may very well have fuelled a lot of my early life's optimism. In particular my faith that certain tech/companies were inherently good. I was certainly a big fan of Apple for many years.
If that naivety hadn't already faded significantly, this may have been a more severe reaction, than ... Hey wait!? ... Oh right!
Obviously Steve had already exploited and cheated Woz on a number of occasions before the formative Mac 1984 Ads (which made a deep impression on me at the time.) So it's not that much of a reach to say they are somewhat cynical.
Jobs is a very interesting person, specifically because I think he bought a lot of his own bullshit. Possibly his LSD experience was something which led to deep understanding of humans and interpersonal politics, which may have led to him developing his reality distortions field... Who knows. He may also have developed the classic [1]Acid Jesus Messianic complex and as a result we have the enigma we are left with in the public memory of Jobs. Millions who believe he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many many, who look deeper at the man think he's quite the piece of (edit for politeness) work.
Speculation on this is ultimately pointless... but it's something I muse about myself.
From what I have read, there are quite a few people (including Woz) that recognize that Steve Jobs was still a great man, despite the way how he treated people sometimes.
Steve Jobs was very charismatic and often it’s charismatic people that lead the charge.
One can be an agent of change and a tech god, while also being a piece of work. The one doesn’t exclude the other.
Einstein treated his wife quite horrible as well, but despite this, he was still a genious.
I think a discussion on Steve Jobs' morality is among the least productive uses of this excellent essay.
Yet I'll add that people are complicated. In terms of his accomplishments, it is undeniable that Jobs was a force for good. As for his motives and methods, I have no trouble believing that Jobs (and the vast majority at Apple) used the image of counterculture in good faith, even while they changed it into a sort of hollowed-out version streamlined for capitalism.
Yet there are some positive strains of this myth Apple created that have an impact on them until today: the willingness to focus on small segments of the market or to quickly abandon legacy technology come to mind. Their affinity to the arts and humanities is also still palpable, and certain political decisions, such as their willingness to invest in clean technology or to support the LGBTQ community also seem to be rooted in spirit of the revolutions in the 60s.
> I have no trouble believing that Jobs (and the vast majority at Apple) used the image of counterculture in good faith, even while they changed it into a sort of hollowed-out version streamlined for capitalism.
This is exactly as I understand it too... Except this being a fairly good example of what counterculture circles generally call, a complete sell out.
It's complicated of course, how else does one stay relevant long term without also being extremely wealthy / i.e. the ability to broadcast a message to many many nodes? Put another way. Money talks.
>Obviously Steve had already exploited and cheated Woz on a number of occasions before the formative Mac 1984 Ads (which made a deep impression on me at the time.) So it's not that much of a reach to say they are somewhat cynical.
Sure, but do you know how many bona fide members of the counterculture themselves exploited and back-stabbed others, especially for petty power politics and fame/recognition? It's not like the counterculture didn't have a fair share of BS itself, or cynical people (Leary comes to mind, or take Jerry Rubin).
A large for-profit non-private company (as opposed to some small co-op or something) with revolutionary/hippie/counter-culture mottos that otherwise operates fine within capitalism was always gonna be BS in that aspect.
>Millions who believe he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many many, who look deeper at the man think he's quite the piece of (edit for politeness) work.
Those two things are not necessarily at odds. It's some particular Americanism (or protestantism relic?) to believe agents of change, national heroes, great historic figures etc, must also be good, altruistic and warm people.
> do you know how many bona fide members of the counterculture themselves exploited and back-stabbed others, especially for petty power politics and fame/recognition?
I do, and fair point.
> It's some particular Americanism (or protestantism relic?) to believe agents of change, national heroes, great historic figures etc, must also be good, altruistic and warm people
I don't think it's a Protestant relic, it's more of a general simplistic perspective that there are through and through good people.
But still I agree it's unrealistic to think this way.
"Infrastructure is not political" is part of the canon here on HN as well. Bitcoin, as one of many examples, is often touted as being "neutral", or "unbiased" (in comparison to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy).
The same sort of argument is gaining steam around discriminatory decisions by AI or "Big Data" systems: "It's an algorithm! It cannot be biased. Technology is neutral!"
It's never the infrastructure or the algorithm or the data that is political. It's the people using that infrastructure, algorithm or data in their decision-making who are responsible.
When a machine learning model determines that according to the available data, blacks are more likely to default on loans, it's not unfairly biased against blacks. It is merely reflecting that the world is unfairly biased against blacks.
The fault inevitably lies with the decision-makers who look at an algorithmic prediction and decide to maximize their profit. Because they confuse what is with what ought to be.
>It's never the infrastructure or the algorithm or the data that is political. It's the people using that infrastructure, algorithm or data in their decision-making who are responsible.
I don't believe that. In a sense, it's like the classic NRA defense, that guns don't kill people, etc.
In reality, certain technologies also come with specific tendencies -- ascribed in their very design and formulation.
In the very least, certain technologies within specific societal contexts tend to have specific outcomes. Which makes placing the blame to "people using that infrastructure" problematic, because those people also operate within that societal context, and are influenced by it, they are not totally free agents.
Yes, guns don't kill people without pulling the trigger. That doesn't mean that everyone else is without responsibility. Obviously there would be no guns to shoot if nobody sold them. There would be no guns to sell if nobody made them. And so on.
I didn't mean to put all the blame on the users of the infrastructure. Actually I was thinking about the case where the user is involved in creating the infrastructure in the first place, and then pulls the "It's an algorithm!" excuse.
If the infrastructure is made available for someone else to use, then part of the blame for abuse also lies with the person who decided to let them use it. But even in that case it's not the infrastructure that is the problem, it is the lack of access control and accountability.
Consider the impact of the machine gun on warfare. Huge impact - and once it existed, armies either got them or lost to enemies who had them.
We could attribute that impact to:
1. Military leaders - but their hands were forced, their only choice was to deploy machine guns or see their troops mown down by them.
2. Gun inventors - but surely if Richard Gatling hadn't invented the Gatling Gun, someone else would have. It was an idea whose time has come.
3. "The system" - but isn't that an unsatisfying cop-out? Doesn't this let the above claim rewards for the upsides of their choices while disclaiming responsibility for the downsides, and by so doing creating perverse incentives?
From what little I know - In the same way that vision systems pick out edge and feature detection without being explicitly told what those things are, the kind of algos you're talking about could pick up on biases... and just like DeepDream shows how you can then investigate the features encoded in the system, maybe you could then investigate the biases.
In other words, if these kinds of models encode the existing social biases, it also means those biases are now somewhere very, very examinable.
He's completely missed what changed everything - advertising-supported services.
Before Google/Doubleclick, computing was about selling hardware, software, and service to people who used them. After Google bought Doubleclick, computing became about selling users to advertisers.
The user is the product, not the customer. This totally changed the balance of power.
It's really a bit late to be worried about 1960s counterculture. That was half a century ago. Think of Silicon Valley culture as Mad Men 2.0, instead.
It's not a coincidence that the focus in UI design also shifted at the same time, in the post-dotcom-bubble years.
Software user interfaces used to be designed for users. Desktop software didn't try to make you send an endless stream of personal data and content to the vendor, or trick you into using it again as soon as possible.
Today's software is designed with an advertising mentality. Instead of customers and human interface guidelines, there are eyeballs and creatives. Previously it would have been a scandal if a software package sent all your keypresses to the vendor's server, but today everything is tracked and monitored. Most designers don't give a shit about things like accessibility because they fundamentally understand software as something more akin to a billboard or centerfold ad.
Meanwhile usage of the word "product" creeps to replace "software". To me, it strongly carries the connotation that consumer-facing software design is turning into the process of developing ways to surreptitiously extract value from the user.
DoubleClick deserved a mention, but wouldn't you say that was more of a financial turning point for SV than a cultural one? DoubleClick is just the money faucet. Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook all existed before DoubleClick's acquisition and were enjoying some level of hegemony, and their overall stated purpose hasn't changed. Apple still sells magical gadgets, Google still indexes everything, Twitter still shuffles sound bites around, Amazon still ships cheap goods, etc. If it wasn't DoubleClick, they probably would have found another money faucet at some point.
Also, the advertising focus has only affected some of the SV giants. Apple has resisted the selling-products-to-selling-users shift by becoming more dedicated to user privacy. They still have "customers" in the traditional sense, unlike Google or Facebook. But people still see all these companies as being united culturally or ideologically, especially outside the US where they are referred to collectively as "GAFA" (including Apple). They are exporting something, but what?
The article does a great job explaining what motivates the people behind these SV megacorps and ties the culture of these companies together into this "just build it" or "change the world with tech" school of thought that he identifies as "New Communalism". These companies and their followers seem intent on creating an alternate government system that solves social issues with technology and engineering instead of laws and courts. The focus is on taking heavily regulated things and "disrupting" them, which really means just getting around those regulations so they are no longer relevant. This works so well because the process of creating and spreading technology is now so much faster than removing or changing regulations, however, they don't take the time to learn why those regulations were created in the first place, so they end up reviving or exacerbating old social problems. This has become a pattern now where everything in American life that is regulated must now be "disrupted" by technology.
>It seems that tech companies also prefer the deregulatory approach when it comes to what content to allow on their platforms. Their default is laissez-faire—to not interfere with what people can post.
This is quickly changing for the worse. Twitter verification has become a badge of approval. Facebook and Twitter try to enforce rules beyond what is legal and illegal and do so wildly inconsistently. I see a lot of it happening with "right-leaning" people, but I have also seen complaints with "left-leaning" people as well.
They need to get back to this instead of trying so hard to police what is allowed to be said.
> trying so hard to police what is allowed to be said.
Eh. They feel responsible for people doing bad things with what they've made. Closest simplified analogy I'm coming up with is: Imagine you run a gigantic, crowded open-mic, and someone gets up and starts shouting "Fire!" when there isn't one. You would probably want to prevent that, cuz it's breaking this thing you made.
33 comments
[ 7.9 ms ] story [ 1079 ms ] threadWhat I wonder more is: is it a product of the "build it" mentality like Turner says, or is it manipulated by money men with an interest is maintaining the status quo by silencing dissent as non-scientific?
Runaway success stories are incredibly rare. Worse, the people who are most famous for achieving them rarely appear particularly sympathetic or humane.
Edit to add: that was a great read, IMO - unusually interesting and insightful.
This approach quickly turns into frustration: people behave irrationally, for example, which turns economics from an offspring of mathematics into something more akin to applied psychology. Laws fail to live up to a standard of "plain meaning", because the myriad conflicts of life are to nuanced to be exhaustively captured in simple language. That's where the distrust of the legal system, as well as "smart contracts" come from.
It's interesting to compare engineers and scientists in this regard: the most successful scientists tend to have a vast appreciation of culture beyond their field of study. Richard Feynman, for example, excelled in music and painting, and became a bestselling author.
I really hope knowledge of how the scientific process works in practice becomes more common among engineers though, it's very frustrating when someone takes a study as being the word of god, and you can't convince them otherwise, because science. Like some 3-4 years ago there was some lab claiming to be on the cusp of having a real cold fusion prototype, and people just buy in because they want it to be true, and the lab had written a paper.
I would add that it is not entirely their job. After all, all the stakeholders have a primary goal, the infrastructure engineer will maximise infrastructure metrics, the VC their own and so do regulators, who society does need, even in our angelic brogrammer society.
I took issue with the statement that Apple have always cynically coopted counterculture and utopian motifs. Then I thought about it for a second.
Getting people pumped up about Apple using utopian imagery and counterculture suggestions was always cynical. It just happened to work very effectively on me in the 80s, and may very well have fuelled a lot of my early life's optimism. In particular my faith that certain tech/companies were inherently good. I was certainly a big fan of Apple for many years.
If that naivety hadn't already faded significantly, this may have been a more severe reaction, than ... Hey wait!? ... Oh right!
Obviously Steve had already exploited and cheated Woz on a number of occasions before the formative Mac 1984 Ads (which made a deep impression on me at the time.) So it's not that much of a reach to say they are somewhat cynical.
Jobs is a very interesting person, specifically because I think he bought a lot of his own bullshit. Possibly his LSD experience was something which led to deep understanding of humans and interpersonal politics, which may have led to him developing his reality distortions field... Who knows. He may also have developed the classic [1]Acid Jesus Messianic complex and as a result we have the enigma we are left with in the public memory of Jobs. Millions who believe he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many many, who look deeper at the man think he's quite the piece of (edit for politeness) work.
Speculation on this is ultimately pointless... but it's something I muse about myself.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_complex
Steve Jobs was very charismatic and often it’s charismatic people that lead the charge.
One can be an agent of change and a tech god, while also being a piece of work. The one doesn’t exclude the other.
Einstein treated his wife quite horrible as well, but despite this, he was still a genious.
Yet I'll add that people are complicated. In terms of his accomplishments, it is undeniable that Jobs was a force for good. As for his motives and methods, I have no trouble believing that Jobs (and the vast majority at Apple) used the image of counterculture in good faith, even while they changed it into a sort of hollowed-out version streamlined for capitalism.
Yet there are some positive strains of this myth Apple created that have an impact on them until today: the willingness to focus on small segments of the market or to quickly abandon legacy technology come to mind. Their affinity to the arts and humanities is also still palpable, and certain political decisions, such as their willingness to invest in clean technology or to support the LGBTQ community also seem to be rooted in spirit of the revolutions in the 60s.
This is exactly as I understand it too... Except this being a fairly good example of what counterculture circles generally call, a complete sell out.
It's complicated of course, how else does one stay relevant long term without also being extremely wealthy / i.e. the ability to broadcast a message to many many nodes? Put another way. Money talks.
Sure, but do you know how many bona fide members of the counterculture themselves exploited and back-stabbed others, especially for petty power politics and fame/recognition? It's not like the counterculture didn't have a fair share of BS itself, or cynical people (Leary comes to mind, or take Jerry Rubin).
A large for-profit non-private company (as opposed to some small co-op or something) with revolutionary/hippie/counter-culture mottos that otherwise operates fine within capitalism was always gonna be BS in that aspect.
>Millions who believe he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many many, who look deeper at the man think he's quite the piece of (edit for politeness) work.
Those two things are not necessarily at odds. It's some particular Americanism (or protestantism relic?) to believe agents of change, national heroes, great historic figures etc, must also be good, altruistic and warm people.
I do, and fair point.
> It's some particular Americanism (or protestantism relic?) to believe agents of change, national heroes, great historic figures etc, must also be good, altruistic and warm people
I don't think it's a Protestant relic, it's more of a general simplistic perspective that there are through and through good people.
But still I agree it's unrealistic to think this way.
[0] http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
The same sort of argument is gaining steam around discriminatory decisions by AI or "Big Data" systems: "It's an algorithm! It cannot be biased. Technology is neutral!"
When a machine learning model determines that according to the available data, blacks are more likely to default on loans, it's not unfairly biased against blacks. It is merely reflecting that the world is unfairly biased against blacks.
The fault inevitably lies with the decision-makers who look at an algorithmic prediction and decide to maximize their profit. Because they confuse what is with what ought to be.
I don't believe that. In a sense, it's like the classic NRA defense, that guns don't kill people, etc.
In reality, certain technologies also come with specific tendencies -- ascribed in their very design and formulation.
In the very least, certain technologies within specific societal contexts tend to have specific outcomes. Which makes placing the blame to "people using that infrastructure" problematic, because those people also operate within that societal context, and are influenced by it, they are not totally free agents.
I didn't mean to put all the blame on the users of the infrastructure. Actually I was thinking about the case where the user is involved in creating the infrastructure in the first place, and then pulls the "It's an algorithm!" excuse.
If the infrastructure is made available for someone else to use, then part of the blame for abuse also lies with the person who decided to let them use it. But even in that case it's not the infrastructure that is the problem, it is the lack of access control and accountability.
We could attribute that impact to:
1. Military leaders - but their hands were forced, their only choice was to deploy machine guns or see their troops mown down by them.
2. Gun inventors - but surely if Richard Gatling hadn't invented the Gatling Gun, someone else would have. It was an idea whose time has come.
3. "The system" - but isn't that an unsatisfying cop-out? Doesn't this let the above claim rewards for the upsides of their choices while disclaiming responsibility for the downsides, and by so doing creating perverse incentives?
You may be interested in "Fairness in Machine Learning" (https://fairmlclass.github.io/)
From what little I know - In the same way that vision systems pick out edge and feature detection without being explicitly told what those things are, the kind of algos you're talking about could pick up on biases... and just like DeepDream shows how you can then investigate the features encoded in the system, maybe you could then investigate the biases.
In other words, if these kinds of models encode the existing social biases, it also means those biases are now somewhere very, very examinable.
Do anybody care about the fact that they psychologically lead users to multiple tests and use you like a lab rat ? While limiting freedom of speech???
Oh, please
Before Google/Doubleclick, computing was about selling hardware, software, and service to people who used them. After Google bought Doubleclick, computing became about selling users to advertisers. The user is the product, not the customer. This totally changed the balance of power.
It's really a bit late to be worried about 1960s counterculture. That was half a century ago. Think of Silicon Valley culture as Mad Men 2.0, instead.
It's not a coincidence that the focus in UI design also shifted at the same time, in the post-dotcom-bubble years.
Software user interfaces used to be designed for users. Desktop software didn't try to make you send an endless stream of personal data and content to the vendor, or trick you into using it again as soon as possible.
Today's software is designed with an advertising mentality. Instead of customers and human interface guidelines, there are eyeballs and creatives. Previously it would have been a scandal if a software package sent all your keypresses to the vendor's server, but today everything is tracked and monitored. Most designers don't give a shit about things like accessibility because they fundamentally understand software as something more akin to a billboard or centerfold ad.
Meanwhile usage of the word "product" creeps to replace "software". To me, it strongly carries the connotation that consumer-facing software design is turning into the process of developing ways to surreptitiously extract value from the user.
Indeed. He comes across like a former hippie trying to stay relevant. It’s not Kennedy but McCarthy who defines Silly Valley culture.
Also, the advertising focus has only affected some of the SV giants. Apple has resisted the selling-products-to-selling-users shift by becoming more dedicated to user privacy. They still have "customers" in the traditional sense, unlike Google or Facebook. But people still see all these companies as being united culturally or ideologically, especially outside the US where they are referred to collectively as "GAFA" (including Apple). They are exporting something, but what?
The article does a great job explaining what motivates the people behind these SV megacorps and ties the culture of these companies together into this "just build it" or "change the world with tech" school of thought that he identifies as "New Communalism". These companies and their followers seem intent on creating an alternate government system that solves social issues with technology and engineering instead of laws and courts. The focus is on taking heavily regulated things and "disrupting" them, which really means just getting around those regulations so they are no longer relevant. This works so well because the process of creating and spreading technology is now so much faster than removing or changing regulations, however, they don't take the time to learn why those regulations were created in the first place, so they end up reviving or exacerbating old social problems. This has become a pattern now where everything in American life that is regulated must now be "disrupted" by technology.
Sounds like a toxic environment to me.
Because the young are more naive, blind to the things written in this article, and they happily follow the dystopian agenda of big companies.
This is quickly changing for the worse. Twitter verification has become a badge of approval. Facebook and Twitter try to enforce rules beyond what is legal and illegal and do so wildly inconsistently. I see a lot of it happening with "right-leaning" people, but I have also seen complaints with "left-leaning" people as well.
They need to get back to this instead of trying so hard to police what is allowed to be said.
Eh. They feel responsible for people doing bad things with what they've made. Closest simplified analogy I'm coming up with is: Imagine you run a gigantic, crowded open-mic, and someone gets up and starts shouting "Fire!" when there isn't one. You would probably want to prevent that, cuz it's breaking this thing you made.