Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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).

Corey Pein has been doing the podcast book tour:

http://majorityfm.libsyn.com/1856-silicon-valley-not-your-friend-w-corey-pein

Aaaaand we had him on my show, too:

https://soundcloud.com/givingthemic/podcasts-good-silicon-valley-bad-with-corey-pein

finished carreyrou's theranos book, and man...

one of the wildest things is that holmes presented her original idea for a device to her stanford professor and he was so blown away by it that he vouched for her and her company for years afterward. and as far as i can tell her proposal was at the same level of detail as an explanation of the star trek tricorder? it sounds kind of cool, and you have some half-assed ideas for mechanisms, but it's basically just pure fiction. that endorsement helped opened up silicon valley doors for her, even though there's not much evidence that she was anything more than a reasonably smart kid who was good at selling bullshit to credulous people with money.

there are some weird class things, too. she and her family were really well connected--the father of her childhood friend was a venture capitalist who invested a million dollars right when they were starting out!--but her dad was jealous of his more successful peers and angry that previous generations had squandered the family fortune.

people at the company were raising red flags about elizabeth lying about the technology and finances in 2006, but somehow she managed to purge everyone who opposed her and things just kept rolling along like that for another decade.

Kill the tech bro, save the world: how CEOs became Hollywood's new supervillains

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/06/tech-bros-ceo-hollywood-supervillains

Yup they are now the stock villains of my generation.

Just needs the next step of their ideology actually being at issue. Iron Man's villains are bad Tony Starks but the things Tony Stark stands for remain intact. SPECTRE's villains have a scheme to replace spies with apps or something, but they're cynically exploiting the government, when it would have been way more interesting for them to be true believers in their efficient, cutting-edge, market-driven solutions etc. I am kinda surprised there hasn't been an "evil Uber" movie with self-driving cars that turn against us or whose hailing app compels the drivers to carry out different pieces of an evil crime or w/e.

Those tend to be based around social media, as obviously kids know a lot less than grownups about the web.

Wait, wasn’t there that thriller a few years back where the villain was Tim Robbins as a Gates/Jobs oligarch type?

Scorpio on the Simpsons?

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BM2VjZjdiYzYtOGU1Yy00NWZmLWEyOTUtM2QzMDlkYmRlYmM2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_.jpg

http://www.tvovermind.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Antitrust-movie-on-hacking-and-Computers.jpg

but tbf 90s/early 00s Bill Gates-y villains feel like a different thing than the villainous "disruptive" app developer of today

RECALCULATING

View To a Kill's Max Zorin controlled access to a resource - computing power - and was a classic Bond villain in that regard. Tomorrow Never Dies' Elliott Carver was a media baron, but he didn't want to use disinfo campaigns as a direct means of accomplishing his goals.

I think there might be a new flavor to our century's monopolist tech villains, in that they choose to use everyday reliance on technology to achieve their nefarious goals, and they aren't all played by dudes over 45 anymore, but the jury's out until I spend the time to watch these shitty films (again) and really pay attention to the boring, paper-thin plots.

Elizabeth Holmes indicted on federal wire fraud charges

yay

about halfway thru bad blood right now and it’s a compelling mixture of ‘haha these corporate dumbasses deserve each other, how did this go on for so long’ and ‘wow these sociopaths really fucked a lot of lives on their way to jail’

Pretty much!

And Carreyrou with the perfect own.

"First they say you're crazy, then they fight you and then all of a sudden, you change the world." https://t.co/a5buw8RnBD

— John Carreyrou (@JohnCarreyrou) June 15, 2018

lmao

🙄✊🍆 pic.twitter.com/kDXWfkWnow

— Quantian📉 (@quantian1) June 16, 2018

An extremely good thread for this thread in turn.

Okay, now let's talk about the history of futurism in @WIRED. There is a ton here, but I think I've settle on a handful of articles that illustrate the broader trend.#wiredarchive

— davekarpf (@davekarpf) July 12, 2018

oh man do I remember that Long Boom issue and how stupid it seemed at the time

I just realized my arc with Wired Magazine has basically been a leading indicator of my arc with
SV & the Bay Area - loved it, then realized it was actually overpriced, largely mediocre and driven by zealous marketing, now just find it kind of pitiable and look for the decent spots in a sea of drying mud

well, I like *my* neighborhood

Speaking as someone standing in mud wait hold on

Everything’s relative. I live up the street from Trump.

that's a good thread! Wired has long been my shorthand for the 90s iteration of the wide-eyed fusion of techno-utopianism and ostensibly countercultural libertarianism (which fusion, circa 1970, you would have found in the overlaps between bucky fuller and stewart brand). great to have that laid out, with links, in one convenient place.