Morality? Silicon Valley? This is a place that made its bones developing technology for the military. Now we're talking about ethics?
Google's "don't be evil" has always been a snide joke, as they pull in $60 billion a year selling their users lives to corporate America. The rest of the valley is not any better. Where is the supposition that this place ever had ideals to lose coming from? Amoral commerce is de rigeur here. Not shocking - you don't get to throw that much money around unless you are fucking someone for it.
Yes? They fucking kill people with that stuff, do you know that? Like, literally drop explosive ordinance from the air and kill small children, sever their legs and arms, blind them, and so on. Or sometimes it burns their flesh off, or maybe just gives them cancer twenty years later.
Maybe you're okay with the notion that all of this disgusting violence and death is justifiable in the service of securing our "national interest" (i.e., our access to the natural resources of other countries), but I'm not interested in making this pretense. People who make millions, or billions, selling their effort and expertise to the US military so they can more effectively murder are ethically bankrupt. The more so because they're not doing so in service of specific objectives which you might argue are good (say, the war effort in WWII) - they are just literally supporting the ongoing murderous potential of the military.
Can people use another word beside "narrative". Maybe its just me, in the beginning it was cute to use an adjective like a noun, as philosophy likes to do, but its getting tiresome.
I think this piece brings up some good points. Uber and abnb come to mind. They bypass laws in place to regulate industries and in the process force us to think whether these laws need to be amended, rejected, or enforced on the newcomers as well as the established incumbents.
It may be that in some cases a majority can see a moral issue where others see an impediment to progress.
The difficulty is that morals are subjective and change over time but people like to use or refute morals to further their objectives. A startup might say that they stand in the way of progress and better services, someone else might say morals ensure we don't run roughshod over society and take advantage of a certain group.
I think my take is it's better gauged on a case by case basis rather than all good or all bad, but that doesn't sound very appealing for a "narrative"
I can only painfully imagine what pace progress would take if new businesses had to submit the ideas to the startup equivalent to an FDA who regulate new drug impacts, among other things
Right. But it was mostly on philosophy and artsy contexts that I saw it. Now its everywhere, news to blogs to inane comments. I haven't checked google trends but I think its popularization began some time in the early 2000s and then mainstreamed.
Berkeley? Nuff said. I used to be well left of center before I moved here but have since turned into a raving libertarian.
just this morning I heard of a young man from the startup Chariot being grilled that the service was morally failing the homeless in handicapped who are less likely to have credit cards. I also wish to be chauffeured to work in a Bentley and to have a private cessna on weekends. but that doesn't make providers of these services morally obligated to make it affordable for me. if it takes a homeless person in an extra 10 minutes to take Muni to occupy their usual place in the Public Library I'm not going to lose sleep over that. anyone who suggests otherwise to my face better be wearing a spit shield
Capitalism has never been about morality. Every single paradigm shift centers more and more value and wealth in the hands of increasingly elite few, while more people fall into poverty. Is this moral? Well, the author drives a car, uses the Internet, buys clothing made in Asia, doesn't he? Who gives a fuck? Obviously not him.
Software is just the next paradigm shift. It allows you to do, cheaper, faster, and better, what we previously did with more inefficiency. Having your secretary or personal assistant or "people" book you a table somewhere is exactly the same as having an automated service do it and buying it at auction later. The former is just way more expensive. Software lets more people be assholes. That's capitalism. That's why we're here.
Do we need to have a conversation about whether new products are moral? What about a conversation about whether existing products are moral? What about a conversation whether the prison-industrial or military-industrial complexes are moral? What about a conversation about the kids we kill in drone strikes or the unemployment generated by NAFTA or any amount of suffering caused by the existing order of the world?
I'm sorry if I have to be the one to break it to anyone but the world is a horrifically fucked up place. You probably have never seen how fucked up it is and if I linked you to some videos that are just the tippy-top of the iceberg of fucked up I'd probably get banned from HN and never hired again. Software doesn't change this at all.
What software does is make it much, much easier to be part of the horrific system we find ourselves in. Uber is an 80's taxi managers wet dream. Absolutely anyone in that industry would have loved to get their hands on that! Does anyone seriously think that if you said to anyone in the taxi industry in 1970 "Hey, fire all your employees, get them back on as contractors making way less, use this software to dispatch them and sit on your ass watching the cash roll in" they would have turned you down?
The reason the world is shit is because everybody is waiting for a chance to screw everyone over. American culture has explicitly celebrated this since the 20's, because it's been profitable for the elites to make it so. There isn't any conspiracy -- this is just plain market forces. Any CEO that wanted to be "ethical" is going to get fired by shareholders for a CEO that gets share prices higher. Even if everyone at Uber quits in a massive crisis of conscious and lobbies for regulation, health care for drivers, and puppies and rainbows for everyone, someone will come around the next day and do the same thing. And people will use it, because it'll be cheaper.
Maybe society advances technologically faster by screwing everyone over all the time, except for the people that can afford to defend themselves well enough. We'll never really know, because those elites are so entrenched now that you'll never, ever see a world they don't own. Table reservations are the least of your worries.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] threadGoogle's "don't be evil" has always been a snide joke, as they pull in $60 billion a year selling their users lives to corporate America. The rest of the valley is not any better. Where is the supposition that this place ever had ideals to lose coming from? Amoral commerce is de rigeur here. Not shocking - you don't get to throw that much money around unless you are fucking someone for it.
Maybe you're okay with the notion that all of this disgusting violence and death is justifiable in the service of securing our "national interest" (i.e., our access to the natural resources of other countries), but I'm not interested in making this pretense. People who make millions, or billions, selling their effort and expertise to the US military so they can more effectively murder are ethically bankrupt. The more so because they're not doing so in service of specific objectives which you might argue are good (say, the war effort in WWII) - they are just literally supporting the ongoing murderous potential of the military.
I think this piece brings up some good points. Uber and abnb come to mind. They bypass laws in place to regulate industries and in the process force us to think whether these laws need to be amended, rejected, or enforced on the newcomers as well as the established incumbents.
It may be that in some cases a majority can see a moral issue where others see an impediment to progress.
The difficulty is that morals are subjective and change over time but people like to use or refute morals to further their objectives. A startup might say that they stand in the way of progress and better services, someone else might say morals ensure we don't run roughshod over society and take advantage of a certain group.
I think my take is it's better gauged on a case by case basis rather than all good or all bad, but that doesn't sound very appealing for a "narrative"
I can only painfully imagine what pace progress would take if new businesses had to submit the ideas to the startup equivalent to an FDA who regulate new drug impacts, among other things
"A spoken or written account of connected events; a story: 'the hero of his modest narrative'"
just this morning I heard of a young man from the startup Chariot being grilled that the service was morally failing the homeless in handicapped who are less likely to have credit cards. I also wish to be chauffeured to work in a Bentley and to have a private cessna on weekends. but that doesn't make providers of these services morally obligated to make it affordable for me. if it takes a homeless person in an extra 10 minutes to take Muni to occupy their usual place in the Public Library I'm not going to lose sleep over that. anyone who suggests otherwise to my face better be wearing a spit shield
Capitalism has never been about morality. Every single paradigm shift centers more and more value and wealth in the hands of increasingly elite few, while more people fall into poverty. Is this moral? Well, the author drives a car, uses the Internet, buys clothing made in Asia, doesn't he? Who gives a fuck? Obviously not him.
Software is just the next paradigm shift. It allows you to do, cheaper, faster, and better, what we previously did with more inefficiency. Having your secretary or personal assistant or "people" book you a table somewhere is exactly the same as having an automated service do it and buying it at auction later. The former is just way more expensive. Software lets more people be assholes. That's capitalism. That's why we're here.
Do we need to have a conversation about whether new products are moral? What about a conversation about whether existing products are moral? What about a conversation whether the prison-industrial or military-industrial complexes are moral? What about a conversation about the kids we kill in drone strikes or the unemployment generated by NAFTA or any amount of suffering caused by the existing order of the world?
I'm sorry if I have to be the one to break it to anyone but the world is a horrifically fucked up place. You probably have never seen how fucked up it is and if I linked you to some videos that are just the tippy-top of the iceberg of fucked up I'd probably get banned from HN and never hired again. Software doesn't change this at all.
What software does is make it much, much easier to be part of the horrific system we find ourselves in. Uber is an 80's taxi managers wet dream. Absolutely anyone in that industry would have loved to get their hands on that! Does anyone seriously think that if you said to anyone in the taxi industry in 1970 "Hey, fire all your employees, get them back on as contractors making way less, use this software to dispatch them and sit on your ass watching the cash roll in" they would have turned you down?
The reason the world is shit is because everybody is waiting for a chance to screw everyone over. American culture has explicitly celebrated this since the 20's, because it's been profitable for the elites to make it so. There isn't any conspiracy -- this is just plain market forces. Any CEO that wanted to be "ethical" is going to get fired by shareholders for a CEO that gets share prices higher. Even if everyone at Uber quits in a massive crisis of conscious and lobbies for regulation, health care for drivers, and puppies and rainbows for everyone, someone will come around the next day and do the same thing. And people will use it, because it'll be cheaper.
Maybe society advances technologically faster by screwing everyone over all the time, except for the people that can afford to defend themselves well enough. We'll never really know, because those elites are so entrenched now that you'll never, ever see a world they don't own. Table reservations are the least of your worries.
This could have been a good article, but I stopped reading after this assertion. The thesis is based on a false premise.