Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

HamNo on the weird White House/SV/Stanford anti-poverty event

Of course, the illusion that poverty can be solved by the ingenuity of civic-minded tech zillionaires is an alluring fantasy for the White House. Silicon Valley is the new cradle of extreme wealth in America. Philanthropy is popular with the rich tech set, and that situation is certainly preferable to them hoarding all their money. More preferable still, however, is what we should be doing: taxing extreme wealth (or making it hard to accumulate outlandish fortunes in the first place by passing laws that ensure wealth is spread more fairly) and then using our democratic process to determine how that public revenue is spent. Philanthropy is the privatization of the social safety net.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/19/14004442/talkspace-therapy-app-reviews-patient-safety-privacy-liability-online

I mean WWWWWWTTTTTTTFFFFFFF Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

I think I got a mailer from my insurance company (or one of the little tier of health services company my employer contracts with) about a therapy over video chat thing that they support, which seems... ok? But a public company doing that, without the right patient services and notification systems in place, seems... very SV

After receiving a list of detailed questions, Oren Frank emailed various editors at The Verge, as well as the CEO of Vox Media. "I will not hesitate to have The Verge answer legally, financially and professionally to any unsubstantiated claim, anonymous quote, or libelous statement that results in damage to our business," he wrote in one.

hey buddy maybe your service should answer legally and professionally before you start threatening others

talkspace is UK-based iirc but the dude who runs it seems like tim ferriss if tim ferriss came up under new labour

I'm a little concerned today that basically all technofuturism seems to have no use for or understanding of consent. Looking at you, Google.

software developers are inhuman garbage is why

it's more like
- wow this system is kind of hard to use, I'll just make some software that connects users and whatever they want and no other strings attached
- people like our service! they get exactly what they want. things are good
- uh it turns out some of those "strings" were actual legal requirements but laws are bad
- it now seems some of those requirements were to keep people from dying or being harassed into oblivion
- day 1385: we have built the perfect system, why must people keep writing about our numerous victims and the pile of trash outside our office door. we will make a profit any day now, we just need another hundred million dollars of investment

you don't hear "don't be evil" very often any more

someone finally figured out extended negligence and evil are on about equal footing in the morality stakes

you don't hear "don't be evil" very often any more

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek)

"well that was never an official slogan anyway, come on don't take it so seriously"

it really captures the smug simplicity of SV and the insistence that everyone else is overcomplicating things, despite strong evidence that things have worked out nicely for these guys because of structural advantages.

see also: paul graham and sam altman's terrible life advice

being white, middle class, and graduating college in 2003 with a computer science degree worked very well for me, feel free to borrow my template

I like how 'disruption' has evolved from shaking up markets to straight up breaking the law for fun and profit

being white, middle class, and graduating college in 2003 with a computer science degree worked very well for me, feel free to borrow my template

― mh

unlike elon musk, i'm having a difficult time leveraging my obvious mental instability for profit

i am unsure why trump allows musk in the same room, elon's hair transplant puts whatever bizarre experiment is on donald's head to shame

im convinced elon musk has a publicist working reddit. there's so many shitty 'TIL Elon Musk did something mildly interesting' articles and their ilk at the top of /all

he inhabits that perfect slice of interest between people who like the environment and modern tech business and people who are five years old and love cars and spaceships

and people who love nikola tesla

Uber now lets you set a person, not a place, as your destination

innovation in the stalking space

there shd be a theranos thread, I love how crazy liz holmes is

yeah, i feel bad for all the people who had to work for her and anyone harmed because they believed in the medical technology

but she is batshit crazy and lol

On Saudi Arabia and Twitter's inability to handle doxxing there, amongst other things:

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/your-app-isnt-helping-the-people-of-saudi-arabia-1790198445

Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself

so this guy is . . . actually a moron?

yes

ahahahahahahaha that picture

“Somehow, I think Silicon Valley got even more spun up than Manhattan. There were hedge fund people I spoke to about a week after the election. They hadn’t supported Trump. But all of a sudden, they sort of changed their minds. The stock market went up, and they were like, ‘Yes, actually, I don’t understand why I was against him all year long.’”

funny

The reaction from the gay community has been harsh, with one writer in The Advocate going so far as to suggest that Mr. Thiel was not even a gay man, because he did not “embrace the struggle.”

“I think Trump is very good on gay rights,” Mr. Thiel says. “I don’t think he will reverse anything. I would obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise.”

I ask if he’s comfortable with the idea that Vice President-elect Mike Pence, regarded in the gay community as an unreconstructed homophobe, is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

“You know, maybe I should be worried but I’m not that worried about it,” he replies. “I don’t know. People know too many gay people. There are just all these ways I think stuff has just shifted. For speaking at the Republican convention, I got attacked way more by liberal gay people than by conservative Christian people.

weird

When I remark that President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness, Mr. Thiel flips it, noting: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

When I ask if he is concerned about conflicts of interest, either for himself or the Trump children, who sat in on the tech meeting, he flips that one, too: “I don’t want to dismiss ethical concerns here, but I worry that ‘conflict of interest’ gets overly weaponized in our politics. I think in many cases, when there’s a conflict of interest, it’s an indication that someone understands something way better than if there’s no conflict of interest. If there’s no conflict of interest, it’s often because you’re just not interested.”

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tim-and-eric-mind-blown.gif

loooool

David St. Hubbins: Well, I don't really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It's like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how - what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what's stopping it, and what's behind what's stopping it? So, what's the end, you know, is my question to you.

people know too many gay people according to Thiel, huh

on the other hand, a friend and her husband recently had a niece stay with them for a week, and the description of the whole thing sounded like some sort of caricature of "rural girl graduating high school, trying to plan out her life" when I asked how it went. the niece said she'd never met a gay person

o_O

Dowd isn't the interviewer who's going to tease anything revelatory from Thiel but I appreciated that left-field question about whether he'd thought about marriage and kids

I dug this episode:

-
Listening to On Being with Krista Tippett (Anil Dash — Tech’s Moral Reckoning)

A wildly popular blogger, tech entrepreneur, and Silicon Valley influencer, Anil Dash has been an early activist for moral imagination in the digital sphere — an aspiration which has now become an urgent task. We explore the unprecedented power, the learning curves ahead, and how we can all contribute to the humane potential of technology in this moment.

http://www.onbeing.org/program/anil-dash-tech-s-moral-reckoning/9132
-

Here's some Silicon Valley Techno Dystopianism:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

And because these dickbags are all libertarians, they just dumb their savings into shit like abandoned Y2K shelters in abandoned missile silos, rather than say using billions to avert any coming catastrophe

https://www.facebook.com/leanincommunity/ not a single mention of the inauguration of the protest

Wow, there is a _lot_ of hopeful-yet-clueless assumptions going on in this article. How many years do you think it'll take tech culture as a whole to finally realize tech ain't neutral? Also that "progress as a society" and "technical sophistication" are far from the same thing?

https://backchannel.com/we-need-techies-to-work-for-trump-b66367b7f621#.idhvua61n

deeply deeply unsurprised that this dude in sam altman's mentions is a ruby on rails person. what is wrong with those people? they're like lambdaconf people if lambdaconf people had an iq of 85 instead of 160.

http://i.imgur.com/LFRcnNI.png

http://i.imgur.com/Ffrx6ed.png

isn't ruby on rails the perfect emblem of thoughtless low-entry-bar-tech-provides-disruptive-social-solutions boosterism?

ah yes, the analysis where doing really offensively racist and xenophobic scapegoating and aggressively knee-jerk reactions are good

the ruby on rails community is extremely shitty.

it's probably the preferred platform at this point for small businesses that create web presences and small apps for local business. it's a huge slice of the web work that actually gets done and you get this perfect storm of small business skepticism and technology utopianism

'so if we pay you for this we'll be able to grow our business exponentially at virtually no cost???'

'o yes'

That reminds me of one of my favorite tweets from Erowid Recruiter, an account that generates mash-ups from drug trip reports and tech recruiter emails. It read simply "don't do Rails".

erowid recruiter is good

The bigger you are, the weaker your sauce

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/28/14426550/silicon-valley-trump-immigration-response

http://avc.com/2017/01/make-america-hate-again/

note this in the comments

http://i.imgur.com/5G29mS4.png

omg yessss pull beetbort's comments

respect to sergey brin for going to an airport protest!

has this been posted? http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2017/01/26/elon-musk-is-ready-to-bore-under-l-a-as-the-tunnel-market-takes-off/#79eed3924a40

Speaking of Musk, ain't no industry has a Union didn't deserve one:

https://theoutline.com/post/1069/tesla-worker-jose-moran-elon-musk