Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

mh he's not doing research he's soliciting pitches

yeah, fuck that approach

or at least figure out who you should solicit pitches from, other than "random twitter people"

the people who actually know their shit are probably busy doing research, but I guess there's the chance a couple might be hunting around for monetization strategies or funding

That Sam Altman tweet just seems like he's plowing the ground for someone to pull off The Big Con on him.

good afternoon NYC, what fresh hell is this pic.twitter.com/y6gv32emdy

— Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) April 5, 2018

lol @ genetically engineered plansourcing. i suppose he never opened a 3rd grade science textbook

I'm going to "schedule time" and rent jabbbbbrrrrboxes and tell homeless people they can spend the night.

Nice ep of On the Media on the ideology of FB and SV as a whole:

http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-2018-03-23/

(Even mentions Comte)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/17/get-rich-quick-silicon-valley-startup-billionaire-techie

oh boy

“I worked until 9pm because dinner is free if you work that late ... And they’ll pay for your cab home,” he went on. That became his routine, and he never questioned it. Come to think of it, like a lot of his contemporaries, he never questioned anything.

Corey Pein has been hitting the lefty podcast circuit on his book tour, and this was a fun appearance on the Michael Brooks Show:

http://michaelbrooksshow.libsyn.com/website/37-stomping-fascist-nerds-w-h-bomberguy-corey-pein

Lots of dumping of Elon Musk and the bizarre cult around him online

The chief executive and co-founder of WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app, is leaving the company over disagreements about privacy and encryption.

Jan Koum will also step down from Facebook’s board of directors, a role he negotiated when WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $19bn in 2014, according to the Washington Post.

“It’s been almost a decade since Brian [Acton] and I started WhatsApp, and it’s been an amazing journey with some of the best people. But it is time for me to move on,” wrote Koum on his Facebook profile.

“I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee. And I’ll still be cheering WhatsApp on – just from the outside.”

i am leaving the company i founded because its current direction conflicts with my high-minded principles

don't worry tho i'm still an asshole

No he feeds the Porsches to his cars.

you don't understand, 'rare air-cooled porsches' is the name of my dog

imagine being a human being and thinking that is an even vaguely acceptable thing to say

Sounds like the kind of shit professional athletes say all the time and nobody bats an eye

But yes who can we drag at Facebook if not the people actually resigning from Facebook? Can’t think of anyone

if i ever listened to anything professional athletes had to say i'm sure i'd feel the same 'ready the guillotines' way i do about this dipshit

Anyway, between this and the other WhatsApp founder putting a bunch of his millions into Open Whisper Systems (the Signal people), I assume WhatsApp’s default encryption is going to be Zuck-read-all sooner rather than later

But yes who can we drag at Facebook if not the people actually resigning from Facebook? Can’t think of anyone

― El Tomboto

the enemy of my enemy is still an insufferable prick

I think a more legitimate criticism of WhatsApp is: what did they think was going to happen to WhatsApp at Facebook? The answer of course is they knew precisely what would happen, but it was worth 19bn to them, and they knew they could resign 4 years after the acquisition with the vested money in the bank, and that would be long enough for them to claim it was a principled privacy stand.

or facebook would have actually succeeded at some point in ousting their messaging platform supremacy -- fat chance on that one for every country that isn't in north america -- and it was take $19bn now or not much of anything much later after fighting facebook for a few grueling years

if this was the late 90s/early 00s and it was microsoft instead of facebook, we'd have been treated to a couple shittier versions of whatsapp before they decided to roll it into a product with a name like Skype International Messenger and then quietly killed it off a few years later

See also Google Hangouts, Google Allo, etc

I think hangouts has a boost from people using android phones but I'm unsure

No that strategy is over. the new Google thing is bullying carriers into implementing a richer SMS successor that is totally transparent to the carrier and not encrypted at all

what could possibly go wrong

I lol'd

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/aaron-traywick-dead-biohack-ascendance-tank-herpes-12878414.php

that is some Darwin Awards shit

I've got so much morbid curiosity about what the hell actually killed him

injecting weird shit is definitely the obvious answer, but...

assholism

a good summary of why foucault was right and the techno-utopians were wrong:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/i-watched-an-entire-flat-earth-convention-for-my-research-heres-what-i-learned/

https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29638/html

i haven't fully digested this, but i do agree that IDEO extremely sucks

there's a hell of a lot to digest in there

the dissection of the Creative Commons/Lessig stuff really hits home. when all you have is the US-model copyright system as a lens..

Zing really needs to let you change your DN so I can become “the howl of whiteness” right now

the money quote via twitter

Fascinating article by @gleemie on the invention of "design thinking" as a new form of expertise mobilized to defend (white) North American design from Asian competition https://t.co/HrUh1QHKWf pic.twitter.com/IVFwKulKcb

— Ben Tarnoff (@bentarnoff) May 15, 2018

Yes. Because Asians can't design things, the Japanese automakers in the 1970s and 1980s slavishly copied the stunningly creative designs coming out of Detroit, like the fondly remembered AMC Gremlin, the Chrysler K-cars, and every boxy model of Cadillac. Except they were too dumb to design them to get 10 mpg and fall apart in four years, and other features US customers were demanding.

In how many ways is this entire thread really about taking a dump on Stanford, when Harvard dropouts are the REAL problem?

Or: do Stanford grads exist as the legitimizing engine to explain that the lottery winnings of Harvard dropouts are the products of genius and not borrowed sparks, accidental timing and fucking over your partners?

Europeans are only good at designing free stuff which nobody wants, and that’s why the Internet runs on Windows Server.

jfc these people

1) https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/med/d/burning-man-camp-lead/6585499994.html

2) https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy

In how many ways is this entire thread really about taking a dump on Stanford, when Harvard dropouts are the REAL problem?

i forget where i saw it but i recently saw someone argue that the change in valley culture can be dated to (but probably started before) the facebook IPO. that's when the word got out that there was banking-scale money available for undergrads who are smart enough to realize they are not brilliant, and maybe didn't major in STEM, but do want to be insanely wealthy. these people go to harvard.

it wasn't in this interview with fred turner, but it is good:

https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/.

some good quotes

Engineering culture is about making the product. If you make the product work, that’s all you’ve got to do to fulfill the ethical warrant of your profession. The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun."

About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don't be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what's good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what's good for people is what's good for Google, and vice versa. And that is a challenging space to live in.

Engineers try to do politics by changing infrastructure. That’s what they do. They tweak infrastructure. It’s a little bit like an ancient Roman trying to shape public debate by reconfiguring the Forum. “We’ll have seven new entrances instead of six, and the debate will change.” The engineering world doesn’t have a conception of how to intervene in debate that isn’t infrastructural.

At Burning Man, what you’re rehearsing is project-based collaborative labor. Engineers flowing in from the Valley are literally acting out the social structures on which Valley engineering depends. But they can do something at Burning Man that they can't do in the Valley: they can own the project. They can experience total “flow” with a team of their own choosing. In the desert, in weirdly perfect conditions, they can do what the firm promises them but can’t quite deliver.

look i'm not saying that murdering everyone with a college education is an ideal way to restructure a society, i'm just saying maybe it's time to reintroduce the idea to mainstream discourse

wired has a fun extract from a forthcoming book about the endlessly entertaining insanity of theranos: https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-look-inside-theranos-dysfunctional-corporate-culture/

some highlights:

Employees were Balwani’s minions. He expected them to be at his disposal at all hours of the day or night and on weekends. He checked the security logs every morning to see when they badged in and out. Every evening, around 7:30, he made a flyby of the engineering department to make sure people were still at their desks working.

With time, some employees grew less afraid of him and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span. Arnav Khannah1, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Balwani off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than 500 words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Balwani simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails. Another strategy was to convene a biweekly meeting of his team and invite Balwani to attend. He might come to the first few, but he would eventually lose interest or forget to show up.

While Holmes was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Balwani was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Khannah’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Balwani didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Balwani two weeks later, Khannah’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Khannah flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Balwani might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.

The resignations infuriated Holmes and Balwani. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. Copies of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s famous novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy who finds his destiny by going on a journey to Egypt, had been placed on every chair. Still visibly angry, Holmes told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Balwani put it more bluntly: Anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.”

Musk has been everywhere on twitter lately, and a response:

on a scale of “said you liked his band” to “publicly defended his union busting” what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done for a boyfriend

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) May 22, 2018

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

Anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.”

The only correct answer to such a demand would be for everyone paid more than a bare living wage to stand up in unison and leave.

Copies of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s famous novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy who finds his destiny by going on a journey to Egypt, had been placed on every chair. 

the only correct answer to such a display of bad taste would be etc etc.

Lol, crossover with relationship dealbreakers thread- an ex gf once tried to get me to read that book. I mean, it wasn't a dealbreaker as such then, but it would be now.

Trying to get me to read a damn book like some nerd

Started watching Wild Wild Country and was thinking a lot about how much Silicon Valley culture likely owes to the Osho phenomenon (and of course other similar phenomena that were occurring simultaneously).