If you think that it's Silicon Valley capturing the government and not the other way around, you must have missed your Political Science 101 course. They both sing the same tune because it's the feds writing the script, not Sam Altman and Tim Cook conspiring with Thiel.
All the seed funding in the world won't disrupt the monopoly on violence. We're here because some dolts actually believed the lie that Silicon Valley was on "our side" of the fight.
I wish all the Political Science 101, Civics 101, and Economics 101 people would take another class. First of all, the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, that's silly; the government has a monopoly on legitimate violence. Second of all, the wrestling valet and game show host and his array of dimwits aren't in control of anything, the people who pay them are. The people who pay them are also the people who run silicon valley.
If you hear that the government is coming down on somebody in silicon valley, it's because everybody else in silicon valley wanted him gone.
"The Feds" are people with no interests, no money and no power. They are where they are to execute for American business (and as we've sold off America, that just means any rich guy), and it's literally all they've been doing since WWII.
Why does it have to be either-or? It's more of a revolving door.
One of the clearer modes of how this all looks can be seen when using public records laws to request information that was created through a government contract. On one side, trade secrecy is a legit thing. On the other hand, it's abused to the Nth degree such that just about anything is "trade secret". Government agencies will literally just ask the company's counsel if records in a records request can be released and they'll copy/paste the answer.
For example: I took an uber from an East Chicago, IN restaurant to a Chicago, IL planned parenthood and then FOIA'd for the GPS records that the city legally requires Uber to provide for every trip [1]. In the request I included the trip identifier that I found on the city's open data portal [2]. For months and months they denied, denied, denied, even after a request for emails gave me the exact SQL query they wrote to identify my trip.
Eventually when I narrowed the request down to the exact fields, they finally agreed that they have the records, but argued that the data (edit: just lat/lng of the start/end locations) showing me going to a planned parenthood was a trade secret. It would be trivial for Chicago's counsel to push back on that, but they seemed to have zero interest in reflecting on the risks of holding this category of data.
I'm old enough to remember when Silicon Valley and politics were, for the most part, two separate worlds. The only thing I remember back in the 90's were the arguments about encryption strengths and export controls.
As the governments have grown more powerful and intrusive (in terms of introducing policies which only affect narrow groups), lobbying has grown in importance. I am not sure why anyone is surprised.
When political bs starts into enginerring institutions my suspects are:
- companies have too much money to burn
- company organizational maturity has cratered focusing too much on outside noise
- boards have become lost / distracted ... line engineers, tls, middle level engineers who actually get things done don't have the luxury of being pretty boys on tv talking ** or meeting lobbyists and expensive steak places on the company dime
- eventual customer dissatisfaction and financial stress to come
- corporate boards if they had any brains would keep moat between them and Washington
- getting / controlling business on the cheap through gov hook ups ... is what? Were we supposed to applaud the flex there?
I think Silicon Valley is losing its edge (as evidenced by the widespread enshittification) so it needs to combine with the government to support its rent extraction (available to it as it has amassed so much money).
This is focused on California politics. But even so, energy, utilities, real estate, entertainment, agriculture, and healthcare have a lot of influence on California politics. Tech is most likely not the biggest if you look at lobbying data.
We have become intoxicated by our devices and AI will make it even more so.
Our future politicians will be launched using AI for a party platform and campaign strategy.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] threadAll the seed funding in the world won't disrupt the monopoly on violence. We're here because some dolts actually believed the lie that Silicon Valley was on "our side" of the fight.
If you hear that the government is coming down on somebody in silicon valley, it's because everybody else in silicon valley wanted him gone.
"The Feds" are people with no interests, no money and no power. They are where they are to execute for American business (and as we've sold off America, that just means any rich guy), and it's literally all they've been doing since WWII.
One of the clearer modes of how this all looks can be seen when using public records laws to request information that was created through a government contract. On one side, trade secrecy is a legit thing. On the other hand, it's abused to the Nth degree such that just about anything is "trade secret". Government agencies will literally just ask the company's counsel if records in a records request can be released and they'll copy/paste the answer.
For example: I took an uber from an East Chicago, IN restaurant to a Chicago, IL planned parenthood and then FOIA'd for the GPS records that the city legally requires Uber to provide for every trip [1]. In the request I included the trip identifier that I found on the city's open data portal [2]. For months and months they denied, denied, denied, even after a request for emails gave me the exact SQL query they wrote to identify my trip.
Eventually when I narrowed the request down to the exact fields, they finally agreed that they have the records, but argued that the data (edit: just lat/lng of the start/end locations) showing me going to a planned parenthood was a trade secret. It would be trivial for Chicago's counsel to push back on that, but they seemed to have zero interest in reflecting on the risks of holding this category of data.
[1] https://chicago.github.io/tnp-reporting-manual/trip/ [2] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Transportation/Transportation...
When political bs starts into enginerring institutions my suspects are:
- companies have too much money to burn
- company organizational maturity has cratered focusing too much on outside noise
- boards have become lost / distracted ... line engineers, tls, middle level engineers who actually get things done don't have the luxury of being pretty boys on tv talking ** or meeting lobbyists and expensive steak places on the company dime
- eventual customer dissatisfaction and financial stress to come
- corporate boards if they had any brains would keep moat between them and Washington
- getting / controlling business on the cheap through gov hook ups ... is what? Were we supposed to applaud the flex there?