Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

you can sift through that to suss out his likely career arc, and how many years he spent doing each of those things, and it paints a picture

i'm not one to judge others taste in art

"i'll just grab a glass... aand... then i just push a button... for fresh juice?"

http://splitsider.awlnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/01/stevebrule.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYn_iuPueKw

juicifer

The bags should explode if mishandled

Then they can sell a special $200 Juice Cleaner.

I can't live without mine, folks.

owner of company my partner works for cut everyone's commission but then ordered a cold-pressed juice subscription for the office.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tO6l4Timdg

i cannot get over juicero

Z-ro's vegan sidekick

If you need to know how to pronounce the name (and why it makes juicing so much easier), this video is a must: https://youtu.be/X1oHp-VvhDE.

Sometimes money is just sitting around in a venture capitalist's pocket, begging to be wasted, and Doug, the Head of the Juicero Team, was just the man for the job.

http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-juice-bags-1794507811

their rebuttal was to recreate one of those "as seen on tv" product commercials where their head of communications grabs the stuff from inside the bag and ineffectually squeezes it over a bowl

lol

direct link to the grim, strange video, worth it for the single comment that slipped through before they were disabled: https://vimeo.com/214030931

very good comment

For posterity

Joshua Sherman
3 hours ago
The question ringing in my ears is "What's Inside This Filmmaker?" I love the Dogme 95 meets ASMR nouveau cinema -- what's inside indeed? As the filmmaker gets closer to the material, we are struck by a great amount of distance -- why end now? Have we, indeed, seen everything? If you cut me open with a pair of kitchen scissors, would I not bleed like this very carrot blitzed Capri sun? It's disposal into the pure white bowl sums it up: we are damaged goods, all of us, commodities striving for a more perfect and lucrative presentations of ourselves, staining the bowls we are destined to rot in. Juice me, oh rotten capitalism, check the QR code of my soul and protect the holy customer from the foodborne illnesses brewing in my heart.

https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2017/04/19/keeping-america-compatible-with-facebook/

good article, uses my fb/zuck as Robert Moses analogy in it, for which I will be demanding recognition

respect knuckles

I'm no Facebook fan, but comparing Zuckerberg to a guy who intentionally cut black neighborhoods off from public transit is going a little far.

well the point of analogies is usually not that they are exact. Zuck has a ways to go

I get the sinister aspect of designing human affairs with unchecked power. But for me a big part of Moses is how he participated in a tradition of systems designed to exclude black people. Zuckerberg has much better intentions but is constrained by needing to deliver growth, which leads to an obsession with "engagement", which, just as an example, gives us a newsfeed full of ragebait.

They both share a faith in high modernist principles but white supremacy and the economic imperatives of a monopolist are quite independent sources of badness. The analogy conceals as much as it reveals.

Zuckerberg has much better intentions

[Citation needed]

Dude, Moses designed bridges so they'd be too low to allow public transit to reach black neighborhoods. It's a different class of evil.

FWIW he was also just hostile to transit, period, but the structural racism is 100% there also.

I meant it not as an analogy referring to intentional malice, which is evident in Moses' work, but the near-invisibility of systems of control to the masses unless you're either in a discriminated class or really pay attention to how your activity is being shaped. I mean, being Robert Moses is unquestionably bad and no one is saying his racist intentions are the focus.

Creating systems that are both necessary and harmful, when the studies on attention and risk/reward are there and you're priming your audience for immediate risk/reward situations and not fostering long-term engagement on a social website, or any number of other scenarios that codify behavior, requires some reflection on what your work is actually doing, regardless of intent.

Moses left enough of a trail to know that we know his intentions were racist and malicious, but there's a Robert Caro interview where he explains that some of these things weren't evident to him until he went to a beach that should have been diverse and tallied up how many people he saw by white, black, and "other" columns. I remember trying to explain to a friend years ago that a growing suburb's choice to zone an area with a number of big box stores -- now the area's primary/only shopping district next to the interstate on the edge of town -- was harmful in a number of ways. If you're used to all of your shopping being done by driving to the side of town, then driving from box to box because there's no good way to walk between them, you've shaped your infrastructure to affirm a set of norms whether intentional or not. And many of those norms came into play because of decisions made elsewhere.

totally.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics

Essential reading, imo

https://mobile.twitter.com/adamjohnsonnyc/status/857257457000861696

Adam H. Johnson‏ @adamjohnsonNYC

dystopian corporate word salad is all of our futures

https://pbs-h2.twimg.com/media/C-WXGaEUAAEh_SI.jpg

8:37 AM · Apr 26, 2017

"Happify"

Nice detail that they are targeting employers and claiming it will make employees happy by teaching them "how to turn negative feelings into positive ones". So, presumably after you equip your employees with this app, you have already given them all they need to be happy on the job. Then, if they ever have any negative feelings about working for you, either they are perversely resisting the happiness you've put within easy reach or else they are unteachable. God, what bullcrap.

- an idea generated by bullcrapify

I'm going to introduce a new app that will disrupt Silicon Valley, it's called Slapify

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/ajit-pai-announces-plan-to-eliminate-title-ii-net-neutrality-rules/

it's blurbs like that which make me wish i was more miserable just to spite them

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-innovation-silicon-valley-juicero

...At the root of the problem is the story we tell ourselves about innovation. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a lone genius disappears into a garage, preferably in Palo Alto, and emerges with an invention that changes the world. The engine of technological progress is the entrepreneur – the fast-moving, risk-loving, rule-breaking visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs.

This story has been so widely repeated as to become a cliche. It’s also inaccurate. Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators. Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something that, myth-making aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for.

article is very otm. will be interesting to see what an increase in defense spending will mean for DARPA, though. DARPA is a huge contributor to the basic research roots of innovation referenced in the article.

they forgot the part where the fast-moving, risk-loving, rule-breaking visionary has a technology nerd friend who does the actual legwork

that's the two-parter, you have to have a entrepreneur type to guide the business, but you have to have someone technically proficient to actually be the business core

the other, related myth is that technically skilled people make for good leaders or entrepreneurs. like, you come up with a good idea, are one of the few to make it into a real business, and for some reason the world thinks you should be CEO

what makes a good leader is still really poorly understood outside of a very small number of professions, almost all of them physically dangerous (i.e. not entrepreneurship or tech)

there's a bazillion business books on greatness in leadering with true leadery leadershipness but all of it falls apart because they're all counterfactuals in the context of how workplaces and organizations actually behave

imo there are some skills that are important but a whole lot of it is "figure out who you think is successful and document how they do things"

the problem is when people emulate all the wrong things

xxp I can't tell if your post is adding to the myth about innovation from the article or at some point offering what you think is reality. I don't even think the myth, as presented in the article or added to with your post, is necessarily wrong. It's more that a surface reading of the myth misses how the technology nerd friend (or entrepreneur), if truly bringing innovation, probably grew this innovation with some public funding. or she is king wizard of a platform for innovation that was built on public research funding.

"platform for innovation" should probably be "innovative platform"

I only read headlines

i'm in a book club that's reading this btw it's very good https://smile.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=The%20Manager%27s%20Path&qid=1487954081&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

are you for real

tbh, I like the article less the more I think about it. seems to annoyingly conflate "innovation" and "fundamental research". it is ok to still call an innovation in the application of an old science "innovation". you can take that term off the altar.

some of the AI shit happening is an innovative application of many-year-old breakthroughs in silicon and machine learning. it is still innovative and cool (though everyone will enjoy shitting on it around here).

also v confused about whether I should consider buying that book

to be clear it's a practical management book, not "leadership", and the advice only makes sense if you work in tech.