> Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products.
They called it "evil racism" because that's exactly what it is. Your comment is, quite honestly, appalling–integrating minorities into cities is not "politically motivated ethnic cleansing" by any stretch of the imagination.
But until relatively recently San Franciso was SV adjacent, not really part of it, more like the grown up cousin up the road where the traditional bankers lived.
San Jose has always been the big city in Silicon Valley
This is true, those are not the same issues. My understanding is that the center of gravity of the tech scene has moved from Palo Alto and Mountain View to SF in recent years.
It wasn't just this though. Japanese (and later other far eastern countries') cost of labour was far lower, so they could build a better product at a lower price point than American manufacturers. That's not to say that lack of focus on quality and overly-aggressive cost-cutting by Ford and others wasn't a problem - it absolutely was - but the article is substantially oversimplifying the situation. I haven't yet come to a conclusion as to whether that's forgivable in its pursuit of making a bigger point: The Spectator does have a tendency towards superficially high-minded but ultimately ineffectual chatter (which at least fits with its name).
The issue wasn't mainly labor costs, it was a combination of new emissions regulations and rising gas prices along with US Automakers refusal to adopt fuel injection instead doggedly clinging to ever more complicated iterations of the carburetor (the computer controlled carburetors of the early 1980s with their rats nest of wires and vacuum hoses reached peak Rube Goldberg status). Meanwhile, Bosch introduced fuel injection in 1973 and within a couple of years FI was standard on most European and Japanese cars; US automakers waited a decade to adopt it en masse.
Aviation is even more doggedly clinging. You can still buy brand new airplanes with carburetors. The industry is being dragged kicking and screaming into the FI era, and we're also starting to see electronic ignition and even FADEC systems emerging, mostly in the Experimental category.
> The Spectator does have a tendency towards superficially high-minded but ultimately ineffectual chatter (which at least fits with its name).
The article draws rather thinly supported conclusions about SV from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Yes, the bank failed but so did others like First Republic, and for similar reasons: interest rates went up and left them holding low-interest bonds that undermined their balance sheets. This is plain old bad management. The Fed response is similarly explainable by fear of contagion.
It would have been a stronger argument if the Spectotor pointed out that many large VC-funded firms look like pyramid schemes. Wework and Uber are two obvious examples, along with numerous recent database IPOs--firms that still have no clear route to profitability. Not only that, prominent VC firms seemed to double down on the strategy, as evidenced by A16Z funding Adam Neumann (again) after Wework. [0]
Detroit's decline is a product of two main factors:
1. Protectionism
2. Recalcitrant unions
Protectionism from the tariffs like the Chicken Tax made the US auto industry easily profitable for decades. This meant the industry didn't evolve like the japanese/korean/european counterparts. They could profit even with substandard cars.
Unions aren't necessarily bad, on their own. Arguably, the USA needs more unions right now. But they can worsen problems of inefficiency by reducing the adaptability of the org.
I think a good counter example is the pivot of the Ruhr area from a mining and heavy industries hub to an economy centered on tech and services. It happened despite strong union presence in the old sectors. I think one of the deciding factors was a strong social safety net and an active strategy of the state to bring over the employees into the new sectors and don't just leave them stranded with obsolete skills.
Detroit's decline had as much to do with shitty product designs as with protectionism and unions. It wasn't union members who designed the Ford Pinto or Oldsmobile diesel engines.
Those designs are the result of the lack of competitive pressure coming from the fact that the Detroit automakers effectively had the US market captured.
I am not convinced that protectionism was the primary cause. Japan had extensive protectionism for their domestic auto industry in the 1970s but still managed to design generally superior products. I think US auto company managers, designers, and engineers were just generally lazy and incompetent.
Except American automakers designed shit cars that no one wanted. By the time they had fixed their designs they had acquired a reputation for poor performance cars that break down quickly that sticks with them to this day. American automakers quickly moved production to Mexico, but that wasn't enough to save them from their own shitty designs.
> Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better.
This is a rewriting of history. SV started (in the 1950s!) as an outgrowth of the military industrial complex, making tech hardware for DoD radars and missiles. The entrepreneurial, consumer-facing, "change the world" stuff happened afterward.
Indeed. The rush to replace WWII-era vacuum tubes with solid state silicon was driven by the need to get US bombers and then missiles on target, and stop the Russians doing the same.
For example, Fairchild Semiconductor (Santa Clara) was originally part of a (non-SV: Delaware) optics company that made spy satellite cameras. The semiconductor division's first product in 1957 was a transistor used in the B70 bomber computer and the Minuteman ICBM and it cost over $1600 a unit in today's money.
I know you are correct, but if Silicon Valley can have more than one "era", I think many people now regard the one that began with the Homebrew Computer Club as being the more significant one at least for modern times.
> Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products.
Alternatively, they were pushed to such thin margins by competition that they stopped innovating because anything that didn't show RoI by quarter's end was not permitted. You can see the same thing happening with Airplanes (Boeing etc),
My understanding of history was that American car brands lowered the quality of their cars and/or could not keep up with quality of Japanese car brands.
I am also not sure about the claim that Boeing’s competitors’ low profit margins (Airbus?) caused it to sacrifice quality. Why would we exclude the possibility of Boeing (and McDonnel Douglas) execs wanting to cash out by temporarily boosting their stock price (temporarily being on the order of ~10 to 20 years before their changes could be noted to have an effect on the product).
I highly recommend reading this article [1] re: Boeing. It's the ultimate parable of late-state technocapitalism; and Airbus has really nothing to do with it.
Huge distances in-between your predictions. Why approach it as Chinese big tech when it is us earthlings developing tech? Not that public stops trusting tech but it should not become a burden to give or take trust. Full remote, I guess was always here, we just allowed it once in a while, in rotations, I guess if a company has top MRR, ARR, wont be caring about it. I believe tagging not a good practice, makes no sense at all, even creates disgust.
To be honest, out of all the FAANG, I think Apple still mostly holds true to it's original promise of trying to make the world better.
Do I think they're perfect, absolutely not, not even close. But compared to Google, Amazon and Facebook (which IMO just seem like total and utter nightmare fuel freak shows), they just seem sane, trustworthy and purposeful to me.
Netflix, I'm fairly neutral about, I just think their products and their shows are absolutely shit so I plan to cancel my subscription soon, I don't feel strongly about it.
open source, long termism, transparency, interoperability, one login, no monitoring of personal data without control, no walled garden, no dark patterns, no weasel words, unions, basic respect for human rights, good ESG, that sort of thing :)
They can’t build that. Nobody else can either. Nobody will pay for it.
People will generally only pay for things that make them pay by being closed. So we can’t have nice open completely free (as in freedom) things because there is no way to finance their creation.
The iPhone literally created the smartphone/mobile market and killed off flip phones, where Windows Phone, Blackberry, Palm, et al. all failed to do so.
Android was already going to happen if the iPhone never came out; that said, Apple's influence over the direction of the devices probably killed Flash on the web in general, and made it both easy, cheap, and a viable business strategy to develop mobile apps… but Google may have done the same on both anyway and for similar reasons.
That they killed off Blackberry and Windows Phone is impressive from a business standpoint, but which fruit the phones have as a logo probably didn't change the world all that much.
I owned an ipaq hx4700 in 2004, two years before the first iPhone came out. Take a look, that device was actually better than early iPhones. The screen was better, the specs were better. It even supported 3rd-party apps (and there were many), while early iPhones did not have app store at all.
Apple is very good at marketing, but they did not invent the concept of PDA (that's how these devices were called back then) with the iPhone - they just came up with a yet another PDA which was decent, and were very good at marketing.
I never said anything about Apple inventing smartphones, there were plenty of earlier examples of smartphones.
What Apple did was achieve bringing the first smartphone to market that reached critical mass in sales and mainstream adoption. They didn't invent smartphones, but they did create the mobile market.
> Apple is very good at marketing, but they did not invent the concept of PDA (that's how these devices were called back then) with the iPhone - they just came up with a yet another PDA which was decent, and were very good at marketing.
The term Personal Digital Assistant was coined by John Sculley while CEO of Apple when describing the Newton MessagePad, so akshually they did invent the concept.
Yes there were Windows CE devices that predate iPhone. I had a few, including the hx4700. They universally sucked.
I know downplaying Apple’s role in computing history is the cool thing to do on the orange site, but get real. The mobile world completely changed when Apple announced iPhone. We know that Google pivoted on the acquired Android OS. Would they have done so as quickly had the iPhone never happened? Given their track record, probably not.
> I was on windows mobile before iPhone and the browsers were essentially useless. It was a game changer when safari mobile was a thing.
I'm a couple decades late with this advice, but - did you try Opera Mobile on PocketPC back then?
It was good. I had no chance to compare with early Safari on iOS, but it was on par or better than the default browser on my early-2010s Android device.
I think that’s why they are able to hold to their vision to some extent. They have margin, which makes it possible for them to resist the siren call of ads and dark patterns to at least some extent.
A deflationary race to the bottom ends at the bottom.
>I think Apple still mostly holds true to it's original promise of trying to make the world better.
Not by a wide margin. Steve Job's Apple and Tim Cook's Apple is very different. To the point I would even argue you might as well call it a different company.
At least the "Better World" in Tim Cook's view is very different to Steve Jobs's "Better World". The message Tim Cook is sending in its PR and marketing is very different to the message Steve Jobs is trying to tell/sell.
Think we’re about 3-5 years from public completely losing trust in anything online.
Political party propaganda cells are already using AI tools to distribute fake images. Once the tech gets a little better, we’ll likely get videos and audio too.
The Indian elections in 2024 will likely be the testing grounds for large scale AI generated propaganda. Just a few days ago, the ruling party’s IT cell was circulating morphed images of protestors that were impossible to tell from the real thing. I suspect this will ramp up to a massive scale within the next 12 months.
I don’t know what happens once no one trusts anything online. Maybe we’ll finally give up our black mirror prisons.
If that were true, then manipulation of the masses through media would be impossible. And you wouldn't see so much resources in to advertising and propaganda.
We are susceptible to changing our minds. Some of us more by logical arguments, most of us by emotional means. The emotional response by itself is very complicated. It's influenced by your core values, which you usually indoctrinated into as a child, and by multiple other cultural and personal tendencies.
We are not susceptible to changing our minds. A mind is a hard thing to change once it’s been made up. Manipulation is done by feeding information that already sounds like it’s true, but carries a payload of false information intended to influence people toward a certain goal.
If you say the President is a pedophile, and provide fake evidence to people who don’t like him, they’ll just dislike him more, they aren’t going to go against their own thoughts and think “I don’t like the President but clearly he isn’t really a pedophile.” That is too complex for most people. They don’t want to defend something they don’t like. People are simpletons.
Agreed, but positions like yours tend to get dismissed by calling you a doomer.
My enjoyment and optimism as a software engineer towards the internet at large has gone down dramatically, and I too believe we're 5 years away before quitting the Internet will be fashionable as not having a TV was in the 90s.
Between government control, Big Tech, toxic social media and now AI generated bullshit, the Internet as we know it, the single virtual space where everything is accessible from everywhere by everyone, won't last for very long.
But already today we're living on a dead Internet made of siloes and a single search engine hegemony. You can call it a meme, but the signs are all there, we're all enjoying our cozy FAANG jobs and any kind of tech activism pushing against this devolution, like the old cypherpunk movement or the hacking scene of the 90s, is pretty much extinct or too busy doing bug bounties for money.
> I too believe we're 5 years away before quitting the Internet will be fashionable as not having a TV was in the 90s
Can you elaborate?
My memory of the 90s was my mother saying that TV was considered so important that not having one was the official reason for her friends being denied the opportunity to adopt until they got one.
Internet today is like that except quite a more than adoption depends on it.
I probably meant towards the end of the 90s, early '00s, when it started to be cool among some young people to say "I don't have a TV. I don't need to be bombarded with ads and other nonsense." I know I did.
That’s tremendously optimistic. What’s really happening is that people are being pulled into fantasy worlds that align with their preexisting beliefs and prejudices.
This, not helmets, is actual “virtual reality” and it’s quite dystopian.
In the US we are almost to the point where liberals and conservatives cannot even have a discussion because they have no shared context. They inhabit parallel universes with entirely different “facts,” many of which are either bullshit or cherry picked without context to support a narrative. At the center of each mob is a loose knit group of special interests and amoral online propagandists. It feels like the beginning of something incredibly dark. I can’t see it getting better since the incentives point the other way, including large monetary incentives and winning elections.
Some people are turning it off but I fear they are very much in the minority.
I think it’s more akin to virtual because the vast majority are passive consumers or their reality. Reality is created by political propagandists, social media entrepreneurs, and soon AI.
Consensus seems to imply that it’s a grassroots thing.
I like your use of "Virtual Reality" to describe filter bubbles. That's really what filter bubbles are: virtual, parallel realities, built up from virtual, parallel first principles, distinct from everyone else's reality. They're even more virtual than actual "visual" VR systems.
> In the US we are almost to the point where liberals and conservatives cannot even have a discussion because they have no shared context.
I don't think that's because of tech.
I'm still optimistic about tech and the internet; I think the split society that we seem to have arrived at has other causes.
The internet and cheap computers made it possible for kids to invent cool stuff in their bedrooms, without having to invest in expensive manufacturing machinery or employing people. That's still possible; CPUs, memory and storage are cheaper and more faster than ever, and 3D printers have democratized the prototyping of physical objects.
I think the problem that hit tech was big money. Nowadays, if you invent something cool, one of two things will happen: either you'll get a cash offer so generous you can retire at 25, or you'll get hit with a meritless lawsuit that it's pointless to defend, because your adversary is backed by megabucks, and can litigate until you're bankrupt.
It seems the part that is missing in the 1984 novel and Truman Show kind of films: you can build an entire reality and you know that but it is impossible to differentiate from the real thing. The two are simultaneous. It is more schizophrenic that dictatorial.
I feel like SV has just become a hostile and quite frankly a "weird" place. I guess it always has been but the emperor really has no clothes now.
Not much can be done honestly. I think the mix between AI and social media is a poisonous and hyper dangerous mind control cocktail which really needs to be shutdown.
The big money in SV just seems quite rudderless and out of control. Dangerously out of control. Now we'll just throw some "AI" into the mix and hope for the best.
The US government is unlikely to help, they're totally reliant on the tech companies to help win elections so we're in for a very bumpy, hopefully not catastrophic ride while things plays out and hopefully improve.
The saddest thing I've seen lately is how addictive YouTube has become for children, it's absolutely disgusting. Yes, we can blame parents but can we really only blame parents? Most adults are addicted themselves and don't even understand why or how it's happening. I've seen kids having tantrums after looking at screens for hours watching rubbish like Minecraft commentary videos. They seem quite distressed in a way I've not really seen before. It's quite honestly disturbing. As a kid, I watched TV, yes, but I watched fairly benign shows and then when it was over, some "boring" adult show would come on like the news, and I'd go outside and play. Not take a device with me.
> Today the vast majority of Americans are inclined to fear the tech elite, and the industry’s approval dropped dramatically even before the pandemic. Today’s Valley is a far cry from the life-improving, concrete promise of twentieth-century industrial achievement. People see that tech’s giants reap fortunes from ever greater surveillance and socially destructive social media; tech’s contributions to well-being and economic prosperity are far more difficult to keep front of mind.
This has never been further from the truth, I think people are in shock honestly and I do feel like the average tech user is waking up from their addictions, but these companies truly have a mind an inertia of their own now.
Good luck to all. We can only remain hopeful and optimistic.
I will be pleasantly appraised if the FTC even begins enforcing anticompetitive at all. They might hit some with small fine here and there, and occasionally an acquisition is blocked. But Apple getting away with their ban on third party app stores and browser engines after swinging at Microsft for years over shipping IE pre-installed? Google owning the dominant web brower, search engine, analytics platform, and a major ad sales network?
I'm not a fan of heavy government regulations, but if we're going to have the laws they should at least be enforced equally and fairly.
I might be looking at things with rose-colored glasses, and I'm relatively young (mid-30s) and so my perception about Silicon Valley's past may be completely wrong, but I believe there was a major cultural shift in Silicon Valley that began sometime around 2012 when the area started emerging from the 2008 financial crisis. While making money was always the goal of corporations, I am under the impression that before the past decade there seemed to also be a deep love for technology by Silicon Valley engineers and businesspersons. Think of the innovations that came out of Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, Netscape, early Google, Sun Microsystems, SGI, and many other companies. There seemed to be a passion behind technology and a genuine belief that the world can be made a better place with better technologies. Even Apple under John Sculley and Michael Spindler seemed to be much more visionary than Apple under Tim Cook; think of the Knowledge Navigator, as well as all of the projects that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. In short, Silicon Valley seemed to be a mecca for computer nerds, and I enjoyed moments of this when I started working in Silicon Valley a decade ago.
What changed in the past decade, in my opinion, is this mercenary attitude toward technology. To me it seems that the industry seems to be dominated by those who care about making money at all costs, technological vision, passion, and ethics be damned. "Move fast and break things" has been abused; its original definition of encouraging agile development and taking risks has unfortunately been used by some to promote technological recklessness: applying technology without considering its consequences. Many companies I've once respected seem to no longer be about how they can best serve their users by selling good products and services, it's now about how companies can milk their users as much as they can. Many interesting places that helped define the old Silicon Valley, such as warehouses filled with used computer hardware, are gone now, as the cost of living rose to astronomical levels. Speaking of the high cost of living, this has pushed out many lower-income and middle-income earners, and it's even a squeeze for engineers. I believe this only further promotes a mercenary attitude toward technology: if you want to purchase a house in a safe neighborhood with good schools for your children, you must optimize for money. It no longer seems to be a nerd mecca anymore.
What are some solutions? I really think America needs to deal with its housing and higher education costs. There is a chronic shortage of housing in this country, leading to sky-high home prices in America's job centers. These prices remain stubbornly high despite the doubling of mortgage rates that took place since 2022. There is also a problem with high college costs and large student loan debt loads. The high cost of living combined with high student loan debt loads means that many Americans are not in a position to bootstrap their own businesses or work for employers that may pay less than Big Tech but also don't follow Big Tech's business practices. Dealing with these very high costs may mean that future generations of technically-inclined people may make career decisions that are less driven by money.
>What changed in the past decade, in my opinion, is this mercenary attitude toward technology. To me it seems that the industry seems to be dominated by those who care about making money at all costs, technological vision, passion, and ethics be damned. "Move fast and break things" has been abused; its original definition of encouraging agile development and taking risks has unfortunately been used by some to promote technological recklessness: applying technology without considering its consequences.
I am not seeing the change. Before 2012, there were plenty of businesses "moving fast and breaking things". See the superfund sites in and around Silicon Valley, many caused by the aforementioned businesses, or their suppliers.
The only thing that changed was a more scalable, higher profit margin, lower liability product showed up (software and always on mobile broadband internet), so hardware manufacturing moved elsewhere.
There was also probably some leeway in land prices due to lower population and lower speed of information resulting in more "slack" (lower prices and more arbitrage opportunity). Otherwise, there is no world where the highly desirable features of the California coast are not among the most expensive.
> The start of this decline has coincided with a shift from the physical to the virtual.
There is certainly a wistfulness I have for when Silicon Valley made things rather than assembled software stacks. For me it was when Fry's Electronics (open until midnight?) sold wire-wrap boards, junk food and porn magazines, not flat-screen plasma TVs and massage chairs. It was Weird Stuff Warehouse, Disk Drive Depot, the Computer Literacy Bookstore, (Halted/Haltek) HSC Electronics and the weekend surplus crawl that would turn up hardware prototypes, power supplies, vintage numerical LED displays....
I suppose ultimately it was a combination of the weight of the internet that settled into the valley and the off-shore commoditization of hardware that caused the gradual shift to where the valley is now.
> the weekend surplus crawl that would turn up hardware prototypes, power supplies, vintage numerical LED displays....
I was living in London at that time (it's not restricted to SV). There were electronic surplus stores in Edgeware Road; you could buy used ham-radio sets, PCBs that might or might not work (depending on whether you knew what they were supposed to do in the first place), nixie tubes, used oscilloscopes and whatever, and all kinds of components.
Then gentrification hit the area, and the shops are all now (and have been for 30 years) big-box outlets for TVs and surround-sound rigs.
Those who win get to write history and SV winning the mindset means that all the other places in the US that were equally as relevant are airbrushed from history. Boston 128 corridor was just as important and innovative as SV in the 80s and early 90s. Also the companies they mention are always names that survived but there are so many better examples of companies that lead and defined the industries, such as Commodore.
>‘We used to build the future,’ Leslie Parks, who formerly directed redevelopment efforts in San Jose, once told me. ‘Then we designed it, now we just think about it.’
Please give the builders the credit they deserve for thinking and designing, too. It's more like: We used to think about, design, and build the future, then we thought about and designed it, now we just think about it.
I went to a "Hackers & Founders" meet-up once, and somebody sat down across from me and asked "Are you a developer, or an idea guy?" I answered, "I'm a developer, but I like to think of myself as capable of coming up with ideas too."
Ideas are the easy part. There are a lot of people who fancy themselves "idea guys", with no development or design skills, who desperately want to find some developers to implement their precious ideas for free or cheap on the promise of equity and visibility, and they insist you sign an NDA before they tell you their unique snowflake of an idea, because they don't realize ideas are a dime a dozen, everybody has lots and lots of them, it's easy to come up with them, the hard part is actually sorting through the bad ones and implementing the good times, and lots of ideas are actually a net negative distraction from sticking to working on one good idea for as long as it takes to follow through and implement it well.
>Today tech is dominated by a cognitive elite of Ivy Leaguers, management consultants and MBAs.
> The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs.......They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money.
( Edit: I would change the make money to bring value, which in itself makes money, subtle but important difference )
>relying on inertia to garner income without worry of competition in what the author David P. Goldman neatly summarises as ‘the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies.’
>Oddly, as the Valley has become more feudal – its reliance on ‘indentured’ H-1B visa holders repeats a very old arrangement – its political culture has become more uniformly progressive. Back in its heyday, the Valley’s disproportionate number of eccentric and oddball engineers and tech visionaries belied a pragmatic political culture.
>Today’s Valley is a political monolith......
> ‘people in tech’ can become ‘one of the most powerful political forces’ in the country since they increasingly ‘control’ what he labeled ‘the avenues of distribution.’ Once known as quirky outsiders, the Valley is now the establishment.
Given half of the article is about politics, especially politics that is anti-US Left and mostly Anti-HN. I wont be surprised if this drop out of front page soon.
Also not surprising this narrative is coming from UK press. As most of the point made will never appear in most US media.
>> To stand up against such wealth and power will require a melding of the two populist movements: the right-wing nationalists and the traditional, pro-worker left.
Right, so what is needed is some kind of national-socialist party with a charismatic, albeit populist leader, that will ... ah... er... uh-oh.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThat sounds familiar…
San Jose has always been the big city in Silicon Valley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era
The issue wasn't mainly labor costs, it was a combination of new emissions regulations and rising gas prices along with US Automakers refusal to adopt fuel injection instead doggedly clinging to ever more complicated iterations of the carburetor (the computer controlled carburetors of the early 1980s with their rats nest of wires and vacuum hoses reached peak Rube Goldberg status). Meanwhile, Bosch introduced fuel injection in 1973 and within a couple of years FI was standard on most European and Japanese cars; US automakers waited a decade to adopt it en masse.
The article draws rather thinly supported conclusions about SV from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Yes, the bank failed but so did others like First Republic, and for similar reasons: interest rates went up and left them holding low-interest bonds that undermined their balance sheets. This is plain old bad management. The Fed response is similarly explainable by fear of contagion.
It would have been a stronger argument if the Spectotor pointed out that many large VC-funded firms look like pyramid schemes. Wework and Uber are two obvious examples, along with numerous recent database IPOs--firms that still have no clear route to profitability. Not only that, prominent VC firms seemed to double down on the strategy, as evidenced by A16Z funding Adam Neumann (again) after Wework. [0]
[0] https://a16z.com/2022/08/15/investing-in-flow/
Edit: typo
1. Protectionism
2. Recalcitrant unions
Protectionism from the tariffs like the Chicken Tax made the US auto industry easily profitable for decades. This meant the industry didn't evolve like the japanese/korean/european counterparts. They could profit even with substandard cars.
Unions aren't necessarily bad, on their own. Arguably, the USA needs more unions right now. But they can worsen problems of inefficiency by reducing the adaptability of the org.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr#Postwar_period
https://www.ruhr-guide.de/freizeit/industriekultur/das-ruhrg... (Couldn't find a good article in english unfortunately)
US didn't squander anything. They just made a choice that the health and wellbeing of workers are important.
Just like China has been making which is why many types of manufacturing are moving to South East Asia and India.
This is a rewriting of history. SV started (in the 1950s!) as an outgrowth of the military industrial complex, making tech hardware for DoD radars and missiles. The entrepreneurial, consumer-facing, "change the world" stuff happened afterward.
For example, Fairchild Semiconductor (Santa Clara) was originally part of a (non-SV: Delaware) optics company that made spy satellite cameras. The semiconductor division's first product in 1957 was a transistor used in the B70 bomber computer and the Minuteman ICBM and it cost over $1600 a unit in today's money.
Alternatively, they were pushed to such thin margins by competition that they stopped innovating because anything that didn't show RoI by quarter's end was not permitted. You can see the same thing happening with Airplanes (Boeing etc),
I am also not sure about the claim that Boeing’s competitors’ low profit margins (Airbus?) caused it to sacrifice quality. Why would we exclude the possibility of Boeing (and McDonnel Douglas) execs wanting to cash out by temporarily boosting their stock price (temporarily being on the order of ~10 to 20 years before their changes could be noted to have an effect on the product).
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...
For any not familiar with The Spectator it's a UK paper that's been a literal UK Conservative Party mouthpiece since its first issue in 1828.
Editors have frequently held significant political positions, eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gilmour,_Baron_Gilmour_of_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson
ie describing it as being edited by (UK) right wing ideologues is factually true.
Chinese big tech? Next gen full remote startups? Or will the public stop trusting tech entirely ?
Do I think they're perfect, absolutely not, not even close. But compared to Google, Amazon and Facebook (which IMO just seem like total and utter nightmare fuel freak shows), they just seem sane, trustworthy and purposeful to me.
Netflix, I'm fairly neutral about, I just think their products and their shows are absolutely shit so I plan to cancel my subscription soon, I don't feel strongly about it.
Personally, I don't own an Apple product I don't constantly get value out of. Whether it's a 10+ year old Macbook Pro, iPhone or an Apple Watch.
I'd never trust anything but iCloud with anything I'd like to keep private. Meta? lol not a freaking chance in hell.
People will generally only pay for things that make them pay by being closed. So we can’t have nice open completely free (as in freedom) things because there is no way to finance their creation.
That they killed off Blackberry and Windows Phone is impressive from a business standpoint, but which fruit the phones have as a logo probably didn't change the world all that much.
Apple is very good at marketing, but they did not invent the concept of PDA (that's how these devices were called back then) with the iPhone - they just came up with a yet another PDA which was decent, and were very good at marketing.
What Apple did was achieve bringing the first smartphone to market that reached critical mass in sales and mainstream adoption. They didn't invent smartphones, but they did create the mobile market.
The term Personal Digital Assistant was coined by John Sculley while CEO of Apple when describing the Newton MessagePad, so akshually they did invent the concept.
Yes there were Windows CE devices that predate iPhone. I had a few, including the hx4700. They universally sucked.
I know downplaying Apple’s role in computing history is the cool thing to do on the orange site, but get real. The mobile world completely changed when Apple announced iPhone. We know that Google pivoted on the acquired Android OS. Would they have done so as quickly had the iPhone never happened? Given their track record, probably not.
I was on windows mobile before iPhone and the browsers were essentially useless. It was a game changer when safari mobile was a thing.
Apple killing off flash by refusing to support it was a great moment for the mobile web.
I'm a couple decades late with this advice, but - did you try Opera Mobile on PocketPC back then?
It was good. I had no chance to compare with early Safari on iOS, but it was on par or better than the default browser on my early-2010s Android device.
It is so weird how this all was forgotten.
A deflationary race to the bottom ends at the bottom.
Not by a wide margin. Steve Job's Apple and Tim Cook's Apple is very different. To the point I would even argue you might as well call it a different company.
At least the "Better World" in Tim Cook's view is very different to Steve Jobs's "Better World". The message Tim Cook is sending in its PR and marketing is very different to the message Steve Jobs is trying to tell/sell.
Political party propaganda cells are already using AI tools to distribute fake images. Once the tech gets a little better, we’ll likely get videos and audio too.
The Indian elections in 2024 will likely be the testing grounds for large scale AI generated propaganda. Just a few days ago, the ruling party’s IT cell was circulating morphed images of protestors that were impossible to tell from the real thing. I suspect this will ramp up to a massive scale within the next 12 months.
I don’t know what happens once no one trusts anything online. Maybe we’ll finally give up our black mirror prisons.
If you say the President is a pedophile, and provide fake evidence to people who don’t like him, they’ll just dislike him more, they aren’t going to go against their own thoughts and think “I don’t like the President but clearly he isn’t really a pedophile.” That is too complex for most people. They don’t want to defend something they don’t like. People are simpletons.
My enjoyment and optimism as a software engineer towards the internet at large has gone down dramatically, and I too believe we're 5 years away before quitting the Internet will be fashionable as not having a TV was in the 90s.
Between government control, Big Tech, toxic social media and now AI generated bullshit, the Internet as we know it, the single virtual space where everything is accessible from everywhere by everyone, won't last for very long.
But already today we're living on a dead Internet made of siloes and a single search engine hegemony. You can call it a meme, but the signs are all there, we're all enjoying our cozy FAANG jobs and any kind of tech activism pushing against this devolution, like the old cypherpunk movement or the hacking scene of the 90s, is pretty much extinct or too busy doing bug bounties for money.
Can you elaborate?
My memory of the 90s was my mother saying that TV was considered so important that not having one was the official reason for her friends being denied the opportunity to adopt until they got one.
Internet today is like that except quite a more than adoption depends on it.
This, not helmets, is actual “virtual reality” and it’s quite dystopian.
In the US we are almost to the point where liberals and conservatives cannot even have a discussion because they have no shared context. They inhabit parallel universes with entirely different “facts,” many of which are either bullshit or cherry picked without context to support a narrative. At the center of each mob is a loose knit group of special interests and amoral online propagandists. It feels like the beginning of something incredibly dark. I can’t see it getting better since the incentives point the other way, including large monetary incentives and winning elections.
Some people are turning it off but I fear they are very much in the minority.
Consensus seems to imply that it’s a grassroots thing.
I don't think that's because of tech.
I'm still optimistic about tech and the internet; I think the split society that we seem to have arrived at has other causes.
The internet and cheap computers made it possible for kids to invent cool stuff in their bedrooms, without having to invest in expensive manufacturing machinery or employing people. That's still possible; CPUs, memory and storage are cheaper and more faster than ever, and 3D printers have democratized the prototyping of physical objects.
I think the problem that hit tech was big money. Nowadays, if you invent something cool, one of two things will happen: either you'll get a cash offer so generous you can retire at 25, or you'll get hit with a meritless lawsuit that it's pointless to defend, because your adversary is backed by megabucks, and can litigate until you're bankrupt.
I feel like SV has just become a hostile and quite frankly a "weird" place. I guess it always has been but the emperor really has no clothes now.
Not much can be done honestly. I think the mix between AI and social media is a poisonous and hyper dangerous mind control cocktail which really needs to be shutdown.
The big money in SV just seems quite rudderless and out of control. Dangerously out of control. Now we'll just throw some "AI" into the mix and hope for the best.
The US government is unlikely to help, they're totally reliant on the tech companies to help win elections so we're in for a very bumpy, hopefully not catastrophic ride while things plays out and hopefully improve.
The saddest thing I've seen lately is how addictive YouTube has become for children, it's absolutely disgusting. Yes, we can blame parents but can we really only blame parents? Most adults are addicted themselves and don't even understand why or how it's happening. I've seen kids having tantrums after looking at screens for hours watching rubbish like Minecraft commentary videos. They seem quite distressed in a way I've not really seen before. It's quite honestly disturbing. As a kid, I watched TV, yes, but I watched fairly benign shows and then when it was over, some "boring" adult show would come on like the news, and I'd go outside and play. Not take a device with me.
> Today the vast majority of Americans are inclined to fear the tech elite, and the industry’s approval dropped dramatically even before the pandemic. Today’s Valley is a far cry from the life-improving, concrete promise of twentieth-century industrial achievement. People see that tech’s giants reap fortunes from ever greater surveillance and socially destructive social media; tech’s contributions to well-being and economic prosperity are far more difficult to keep front of mind.
This has never been further from the truth, I think people are in shock honestly and I do feel like the average tech user is waking up from their addictions, but these companies truly have a mind an inertia of their own now.
Good luck to all. We can only remain hopeful and optimistic.
I'm not a fan of heavy government regulations, but if we're going to have the laws they should at least be enforced equally and fairly.
What changed in the past decade, in my opinion, is this mercenary attitude toward technology. To me it seems that the industry seems to be dominated by those who care about making money at all costs, technological vision, passion, and ethics be damned. "Move fast and break things" has been abused; its original definition of encouraging agile development and taking risks has unfortunately been used by some to promote technological recklessness: applying technology without considering its consequences. Many companies I've once respected seem to no longer be about how they can best serve their users by selling good products and services, it's now about how companies can milk their users as much as they can. Many interesting places that helped define the old Silicon Valley, such as warehouses filled with used computer hardware, are gone now, as the cost of living rose to astronomical levels. Speaking of the high cost of living, this has pushed out many lower-income and middle-income earners, and it's even a squeeze for engineers. I believe this only further promotes a mercenary attitude toward technology: if you want to purchase a house in a safe neighborhood with good schools for your children, you must optimize for money. It no longer seems to be a nerd mecca anymore.
What are some solutions? I really think America needs to deal with its housing and higher education costs. There is a chronic shortage of housing in this country, leading to sky-high home prices in America's job centers. These prices remain stubbornly high despite the doubling of mortgage rates that took place since 2022. There is also a problem with high college costs and large student loan debt loads. The high cost of living combined with high student loan debt loads means that many Americans are not in a position to bootstrap their own businesses or work for employers that may pay less than Big Tech but also don't follow Big Tech's business practices. Dealing with these very high costs may mean that future generations of technically-inclined people may make career decisions that are less driven by money.
I happen to think you are spot on — and greed probably should have been the focus of the article.
I am not seeing the change. Before 2012, there were plenty of businesses "moving fast and breaking things". See the superfund sites in and around Silicon Valley, many caused by the aforementioned businesses, or their suppliers.
The only thing that changed was a more scalable, higher profit margin, lower liability product showed up (software and always on mobile broadband internet), so hardware manufacturing moved elsewhere.
There was also probably some leeway in land prices due to lower population and lower speed of information resulting in more "slack" (lower prices and more arbitrage opportunity). Otherwise, there is no world where the highly desirable features of the California coast are not among the most expensive.
One with more tall buildings and less NIMBYism? There's a lot of space in California if you're allowed to build.
There is certainly a wistfulness I have for when Silicon Valley made things rather than assembled software stacks. For me it was when Fry's Electronics (open until midnight?) sold wire-wrap boards, junk food and porn magazines, not flat-screen plasma TVs and massage chairs. It was Weird Stuff Warehouse, Disk Drive Depot, the Computer Literacy Bookstore, (Halted/Haltek) HSC Electronics and the weekend surplus crawl that would turn up hardware prototypes, power supplies, vintage numerical LED displays....
I suppose ultimately it was a combination of the weight of the internet that settled into the valley and the off-shore commoditization of hardware that caused the gradual shift to where the valley is now.
I was living in London at that time (it's not restricted to SV). There were electronic surplus stores in Edgeware Road; you could buy used ham-radio sets, PCBs that might or might not work (depending on whether you knew what they were supposed to do in the first place), nixie tubes, used oscilloscopes and whatever, and all kinds of components.
Then gentrification hit the area, and the shops are all now (and have been for 30 years) big-box outlets for TVs and surround-sound rigs.
I regret the passing of tinkerer shops.
If you need electronics you order from Amazon or Digikey like anywhere else in the US.
>‘We used to build the future,’ Leslie Parks, who formerly directed redevelopment efforts in San Jose, once told me. ‘Then we designed it, now we just think about it.’
Please give the builders the credit they deserve for thinking and designing, too. It's more like: We used to think about, design, and build the future, then we thought about and designed it, now we just think about it.
I went to a "Hackers & Founders" meet-up once, and somebody sat down across from me and asked "Are you a developer, or an idea guy?" I answered, "I'm a developer, but I like to think of myself as capable of coming up with ideas too."
Ideas are the easy part. There are a lot of people who fancy themselves "idea guys", with no development or design skills, who desperately want to find some developers to implement their precious ideas for free or cheap on the promise of equity and visibility, and they insist you sign an NDA before they tell you their unique snowflake of an idea, because they don't realize ideas are a dime a dozen, everybody has lots and lots of them, it's easy to come up with them, the hard part is actually sorting through the bad ones and implementing the good times, and lots of ideas are actually a net negative distraction from sticking to working on one good idea for as long as it takes to follow through and implement it well.
> The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs.......They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money. ( Edit: I would change the make money to bring value, which in itself makes money, subtle but important difference )
>relying on inertia to garner income without worry of competition in what the author David P. Goldman neatly summarises as ‘the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies.’
>Oddly, as the Valley has become more feudal – its reliance on ‘indentured’ H-1B visa holders repeats a very old arrangement – its political culture has become more uniformly progressive. Back in its heyday, the Valley’s disproportionate number of eccentric and oddball engineers and tech visionaries belied a pragmatic political culture.
>Today’s Valley is a political monolith......
> ‘people in tech’ can become ‘one of the most powerful political forces’ in the country since they increasingly ‘control’ what he labeled ‘the avenues of distribution.’ Once known as quirky outsiders, the Valley is now the establishment.
Given half of the article is about politics, especially politics that is anti-US Left and mostly Anti-HN. I wont be surprised if this drop out of front page soon.
Also not surprising this narrative is coming from UK press. As most of the point made will never appear in most US media.
Right, so what is needed is some kind of national-socialist party with a charismatic, albeit populist leader, that will ... ah... er... uh-oh.