Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

I thought we were all already doing that

the internet is a series of tubes

for me to poop in

this is good content http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

blimey that Scott story is incredible

it's a very different case, but the guy in the admiralty who figured ordering west indian limes instead of lemons reminds me of the people at the waste isolation plant (where radioactive materials are stored) who fucked up and ordered organic cat litter

that was a great read, thank you.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-work-on-atlas/

As part of rubbing elbows online with my tribe, I’ve had contact with another tribe over the years, which is venture-backed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. To paraphrase a remark made by a Japanese businessman of my acquaintance, they’re a society organized around attempting to find the optimal level of crazy.

When you have too much crazy, you start a social network for cat photo sharing and say — in all earnestness — that it will change the world for all days to come.

When you have too little crazy, you end up taking a safe job at a megacorp and staying even though you hate it.

When you have just enough crazy, you found a payments company, heedless of the fact that founding a payments company is doomed to failure because it involves mountains of hard and boring work and the incumbents have billions of dollars.

hmm

^ too glib to be informative

tbf he's joining a payments company that has already survived long enough to gain some traction, which is not that crazy.

there are so many payment companies with different target markets and market niches that exist, and many more that have already closed up shop

i think it's a very charitable spin on the modus vivendi of these people (and clearly doesn't apply to someone taking a job a stripe)

there's a local company that has been working since 2010 or so on payments and they've gone through a handful of iterations. one of the last was actually doing all kinds of due diligence, meeting with people high up in banking and banking regulation, and attempting to come up with a closer-to-realtime, more secure alternative to ACH. they've dialed back a fair bit and now mainly do larger direct payments and I think their main product is a white label API for ACH transfers

it's a really difficult market. afaik stripe is basically a point-of-sale system for the web, which seems ok

"charitable spin" is otm

the payments/financial companies are an interesting case because they're more keyed in (by necessity) to the current legal and social realities than a lot of startups off the bat

things like uber seemed to wing it on a handful of issues until questioned (liability, insurance, whether they could legally operate in cities under existing codes, etc)

then companies like facebook/twitter start with a bare minimum when it comes to legal boilerplate and build whatever they think will get the most users and only look at the problems, which may not even be addressed by law (persistent harassment that might not be illegal unless the law catches up, spam and bot accounts) at the very last minute

i don't think it's a million miles off the mark. but it's just a very glass half full interpretation.

this idea that if you're letting people spew whatever user-contributed data they want on to your servers you don't have to care about it as long as you get those page impressions, because it's just a bunch of words and pictures

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/11/both-parties-stink-let-s-build-a-new-american-politics-2-0.html

counterpoint: the caucus/primary/delegate nomination system is not mindlessly archaic and broken, it's actually pretty good and could be made a little better

Nope, sorry, gotta disrupt that shit

That article's the biggest load of horse tripe I've read in quite a while.

The author simply takes it for granted that once you give The People the correct technology, they'll immediately discover they all agree with each other about taxes, budget priorities, and public policy, because those are mere details compared to getting the technological part sorted out.

I'm really having a hard time understanding Travis Kalanick's claim that a fleet of self-driving cars that are never not driving is going to somehow simultaneously reduce traffic, obviate the need for personal automobiles, and make public transit obsolete. In high-density areas, buses that can carry 15x or trains that can carry 200x as many people as a car will always make more sense. Combining carpooling with robots does not somehow change this. Even if you move to a mass shuttle model -- ever taken one of those airport multi-hotel shuttles? They suck balls and take forever. Meanwhile, in low-density areas, there are never going to be enough people going from/to the same areas at the same time to make this thing at all economical.

I mean I realize they are predicting lower-maintenance cars and not having the labor cost of a driver, but it's still hard to imagine the economics work out.

it's a weird series of diminishing returns

low density areas could still benefit from a hub/spoke type of transportation if automated vehicles only took traffic from local hubs (large downtowns and business areas would be large hubs, shopping areas/suburban centers would be local hubs, cars would go from local hubs to your destination and back)

but even then, you're going to need larger scale transportation to get to those local hubs.

I have a couple friends who attempted that kind of regular commuting doing a park-and-ride system but there was still very low demand, and that was during the work week. The transit authority kept changing the parking location, so my friend who was able to walk or bike to the location eventually had a five or ten minute drive to the parking lot to catch a bus. He could drive downtown in fifteen minutes, so the only benefit was guaranteed parking.

the next great idea is going to be megabus... inside the city

So, uh, drive to the fucking Uber hub no thank you.

park & rides (park and take bus) here are p popular but the parking is free at the park n ride locations which a spot downtown is $8 a day minimum or about $150 a month at least for a contract spot

xpost
my brilliant idea for megabus is to have them hire one employee who knows anything whatsoever about what's going on at the stop they're located at so that they can calm down the dozens of confused people in 3.5 chaotic lines whose buses are 45-75 minutes late

Megabus is definitely run by a 1970s mainframe, there are no supervisory employees of Megabus

when i'm in the megabus line hell i feel like a operations guru from the early 1970s. everything that is wrong is so clear and obvious. for example, you could have an employee who periodically yells out "If you're taking the 12:30 bus to Baltimore, stand in this line!" GROUNDBREAKING

I like to imagine the Megabus central office is just a nest of wires and conduit all plugging in to a blinkenlights console with a big reel-to-reel storage installation, whining with fan and chiller noise and freezing cold, posting job ads to craigslist, printing schedules and ticketing on teletype paper falling directly into a wastebin, gradually attaining sentience

Buses built in a Czech factory and loaded onto container ships at the behest of faxed orders, nobody at Eurocoach plc has ever spoken to someone at Megabus

after grabbing the last scrap of teletype paper from underneath the breakfast taco and wiping off most of the salsa, it says only

"make the driver buy the $1 ticket so that no one else can ever get it"

So, uh, drive to the fucking Uber hub no thank you.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Monday, September 19, 2016 2:00 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, I meant uber drives you to the public transport hub, where you then catch a bigger uber that goes to the main transit route. Big uber is what you're stuck with because your city doesn't feel its worthwhile to have public transport.

everyone otm about megabus

pretty sure megabus's "free wifi" is some sort of scam where it just tries to find open wifi access points along the interstate and acts as a wifi bridge

I love that we started trying to imagine how the Uber guy's idea was even workable and then almost immediately arrived at oh yeah, bus lines.

if you want a look into the inner workings of how people feel about transportation, the relationships sub-reddit has at least one thread per month about some couple that will never work out because one person refuses to walk anywhere and thinks anything other than driving from door-to-door is for poors

^ spammer shows great discrimination in his choice of thread

I think that's part of an Uber pilot program, they've said they want the driverless cars to be able to post to ILX by 2019.

i wish AI the best in listening to Rod Stewart ablums no one likes

I definitely want to hear what AIs are IA about.

Maybe they could wire up some of the posters who are already robots to offer cabbie-like chitchat with riders. I look forward to cruising to the airport while frustratedly trying to overcome canned spiels on the number of chord changes and melodic lines necessary for true great pop, rendered in the voice of the defense computer from WarGames.

https://twitter.com/duncanrobinson/status/778259408379908096

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cszup6TWEAEWoX-.jpg

as much as i hate Theil & co I feel like being anti-SVTU easily and often bleeds over into Luddism or daft bad sci-fi, like the above quote

it's like when you're young and hipsters don't like a band after the wrong people get into it. we shouldn't not be stoked on technologies just cuz of turds like Benedict Evans being lameasses on twitter

the thing is that a lot of these technologies and companies, outside of the ones that are pure social networking/online stuff, exist outside of silicon valley

it's like silicon valley is LA of some past year and all kinds of bands from there are getting promo money and radio play, everyone in the industry falling over each other to say how they really get music, keep wondering why bands are even trying to start out anywhere else

bands elsewhere are trying to just make music and are doing ok but all the press is about LA because they're just throwing money everywhere

I don't think "we've tried this before, it was called edwardianism" is ludditism any more than "we've tried libertarianism before it was called feudalism"

That said, SV is not as bad as benedict Evans it's true

I mean, SV the geographical place that exists irl sounds like hell on earth, granted. but i would never live there and don't have to. just bummed that the "SV of the mind", generally being stoked on technologies, is now considered in poor taste, in my circles

I don't get why 'property is expensive in London' + 'apps' = Downton Abbey tho?

tbh what rankles me most is the unease at seeing that I (or, well maybe i'm more techno-optimist than yall but many of my gen) will be just as anti-tech as, like, my mom, who takes decades to adopt any new technology, only after a period of intense suspicion that it will either a. give her some form of cancer, b. lead to the wholesale deterioration of society

I'm stoked on technology like agricultural automation and biomedical research and carbon sequestration, which is capable of transforming the material reality and well-being of entire societies if funded and focused in communitarian ways

phone apps are pretty piddly by comparison

That's a good point

I don't get why 'property is expensive in London' + 'apps' = Downton Abbey tho?

i guess the idea is that from the self-taught economist POV of SV, sharing apps are merely more efficient allocation of capital. but if that's true then we learned in the 19th c that unfettered capitalism enables and amplify inequalities that most semi-social democracies (even the US) now seek to correct.

in the particular case that guy is imagining, it's domestic service with payment in room share housing instead of money, which is the downton abbey model. in 1900 housing was inexpensive enough that you needed to supplement the accomodation with money. nowadays housing in places like london and SF is expensive enough relative to local wages (lol 30% of your income on housing ahhahah) that it's not obvious the market would require you to supplement it at all.

yea silby otm

i tihnk it is obv the language customs and culture of SV that is most grating, "disruption" and coders drinking soylent and greed and housing prices in SF and all that shit that turn people off? (and fwiw most people love SV talk still right? eg i think when most people talk about uber they are still talking about how rad it is and not like the effect on urban transportation and the taxi industry and all that)

the SVTU talk drips into other spheres too, like lol do you guys get ads pushed to you by this company? they are all over my twitter and fb feed https://hiburrow.com/

THE FURNITURE INDUSTRY HASN’T EVOLVED IN OVER 50 YEARS. THROUGH YEARS OF RESEARCH AND BY TALKING TO PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU, WE WERE ABLE TO IDENTIFY AND SOLVE THE BIGGEST PAIN POINTS IN THE INDUSTRY.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/575b6a34d210b8173a48796a/t/57aeab35579fb31363782bc5/1471064886507/Scene+Hero.jpg