
Techies Still Think They're the Good Guys. They're Not - InclinedPlane
https://www.wired.com/story/the-other-tech-bubble/
======
d--b
People commenting here are negative about the article, saying "yes, the
industry has its share of douchebags but...".

And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think
we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has
mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from
one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a
whole bunch of jobs.

Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for
traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought
quality college classes to a large audience, etc.

However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves
from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are
hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of
the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of
a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after
theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the
general public distrusts big tech companies.

~~~
lyndonjohnsonbe
> The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then
> monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem.

The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded
by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go
out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then
increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.

~~~
lafar6502
And in EU we have government grants - free money for all kinds of tech-scams ,
created just for the purpose of consuming these funds. Of course destroying
any legit businesses that suddenly have to compete against these state-funded
parasites. Thanks, socialists

~~~
tnzn
Nice bait and nice misuse of the word "socialist". Capitalists are taking
advantage of state funds, duh it's socialism fault.

~~~
peoplewindow
If they're relying on government handouts, are they really capitalists?

~~~
jononor
Why would a capitalist care about where the capital comes from? If the terms
are favorable, all is good.

~~~
peoplewindow
Being a capitalist is not defined as a love of obtaining capital. It's more
than that: it includes a belief in markets and a dislike of government
intervention, which can of course be intervention to prop up his competitors.

------
rdtsc
> Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band
> of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your
> friends.

This is kind of how I feel. Both about Google and Facebook - on one hand they
are large companies, Google for example lobby the government [1] more than
Verizon, Shell or say Goldman and somehow the irrational part of my brain is
still telling me "Oh but they are just the cutesy little startup with colorful
letters and a nice search feature and their motto says they are not evil and
such".

For many people especially in some countries being on the internet is
effectively being on Facebook. I like how India fought back against Facebook's
"free internet". There was a collective push-back. There should be a similar
one against Google and others.

These companies are holding more information about people than any state
security service out there. It's not just people who volunteered the info
(even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have
be nicer I'd think...[2]), I for one never signed up for Facebook, but I have
no doubt they know who I am and have a profile on me. How is Facebook going to
use that info? What if some repressive government wants it and subpoenas
Facebook to give it to them or they simply get hacked like Equifax. People
should at least be afraid of them more than they are afraid of the bankers and
the oil or tobacco executives like the article alludes to at the end.

[1]
[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D0000678...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D000067823&year=2017)

[2]
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg)

~~~
RyanZAG
_> even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have
be nicer I'd think...[2]_

Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That
seems counter intuitive to me.

~~~
rdtsc
> Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer?
> That seems counter intuitive to me.

Well I'd hope they wouldn't be lies and he would actually care a bit more
about storing and using that data and have more respect for his users. But I
think you are saying given his motivations and personality, wouldn't it be
better if he is honest about his feelings, then yes, that's certainly
preferable.

------
InclinedPlane
Note that the underlying problem isn't that "tech" is good or bad, the problem
is that tech workers over the past many years have evaded their responsibility
to ensure that the work they do is beneficial rather than harmful by
pretending that this responsibility didn't exist. That the responsibility lay
elsewhere (on users, for example) or that the technology they were creating
was somehow orthogonal to the issue of morality. And, further, you can see
this influencing behavior at all levels, including behavior in the office and
between coworkers.

People see software like a bridge or a highway and imagine that simply
building such things is morally neutral. But if you build a highway by
destroying a neighborhood full of black businesses that has implications on
society and racial equality. If you build a highway in a way that excludes the
addition of a rail line along it or that has unusually low overpasses which
limit where buses can take people then you are deepening socio-economic
divisions and exclusions. (These aren't just hypotheticals, look up the
history of Robert Moses for a prime example.)

Stop thinking of tech workers as being part of some scrappy, underdog counter-
culture. Geek culture is mainstream culture. The tech industry is the
establishment. Tech workers are elites who are working to maintain the
establishment. If you're a coder working at Facebook or Apple in 2017 you are
little different from the people working at General Electric, Exxon, Union
Carbide, Raytheon, Dow Chemical, or Phillip Morris back in the 1960s. You may
wear a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie while they wore business suits,
but that's a superficial difference.

What we build and what we do affects the world in profound ways. We must
develop the skills to wrestle with the morality and the social consequences of
what we build as well as take on the responsibility to build things that make
the world a better place. We are not simply cogs in a machine, when we decide
to go to work at amazon, or uber, or facebook we are making a choice in how
our talents will change the world and affect people's lives. We need to be
mindful of that. Every day.

~~~
tomjen3
>pretending that this responsibility didn't exist.

We are not pretending that responsibility does not exist: we are denying it. I
spent 12 years in school being told to care about people who didn't give any
shit about me, just so they could exploit how naive I was. It took me way to
long to see through that shit and I am not falling for it again.

------
mc32
The author has some points --like Netflix and its creepy disclosures that it
knows of people's predilections.

But, I wish the author were more self aware of their own industry and how it
is complicit in what the author is complaining about (the I scratch your back
you scratch mine --i.e., I give you juicy scoops, you give me positive words)
but also their industry at large --pretending to be agendaless when they all
have agendas and biases and use their position of trusted source to push their
slants.

And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow. Few people
outside New York City know what a bodega is. Next thing "deli" or "Danish" is
frowned upon cuz... ??? someone saw someone seeing an idea and running with
it?

~~~
tluyben2
> like Netflix and its creepy disclosures that it knows of people's
> predilections.

Bit offtopic, but people keep saying this and it turns out to 'not be true for
my friends and me' ; we might not be the norm, but if they know the
predilections of the norm, they know nothing of value, so what exactly does it
mean /or/ what's creepy about it? Google & Facebook (the latter I stopped
using because it became rather useless of late) know _everything_ about my
life, and, as a human, I can predict what my profile likes or wants at mostly
any given time, and yet they are always(!) wrong. And so is Netflix. For all
of these; I am an avid reviewer and I rate; I usually rate binary; 1 or 5. And
yet, they cannot predict _anything_ I would want and routinely give me things
to buy/watch that I would never even consider using or buying. So where is
this creepy thing that knows so much about me? Is it not used to advertise to
me? Or does this mean; 'we get it right for 80% so it's really great?'?
Because that really means nothing; it is really easy to predict for the
masses.

I would say the 'evil' in the industry is more around homogenizing everything;
taste, friendships, contact, dating, looks, feels; trying to make them the
same as what you are selling and actually have people falling for it. Which
turns 'predicting taste' upside down; mold people, then predict they will like
the mold. Not many tv shows, movies and music I see/hear that fall outside of
the mold.

~~~
lh7777
Totally agree re: Netflix recommendations. I rarely ever review/rate, but
Netflix _should_ still be able to easily figure out what I like based on the
genres I watch most and shows that I've watched more than a few episodes of.
Instead, I mostly see what's popular on Netflix plus a bunch of
recommendations that look like they could've been selected by a random number
generator. It seems the best Netflix can do is to recommend the next season of
a series I've already watched the rest of, which is definitely helpful but
pretty disappointing given the amount of data they have available.

------
jessriedel
It is striking how honest this journalist is being about purposely determining
the slant of stories (rather than being driven by the facts at hand). He used
to have a general positive impression of the startup community, so he chose to
write positive stories about individual startups. Now he has a general
negative impression and he chooses to write negative stories about individual
startups. You only see that sort of honesty because he's convinced himself he
sees the overarching truth so clearly.

~~~
code_scrapping
It's a "she".

But I agree. The article reads as "these guys seem desperate, let me kick them
one more time, it's for their own good". It's one thing to be driven by facts,
calling out bad things when you see them, this reads like an opinion piece
saying "they still haven't learned". And "they" is wildly generalized.

It seem that "entrepreneur" is becoming synonymous to "arrogant, sexist
asshole", and if think that, you're actually creating another problem, not
solving the existing one.

------
noncoml
Because it is not techies the ones that drive technology anymore. Wealth and
fame attracted sociopaths that are now running the show.

~~~
Top19
Tim Ferris mentioned this recently when asked why he moved to Austin, Texas
(from SF) during his reddit AMA.

His term was “fair-weather entrepreneurs”. Essentially guns for hires without
vision who will go wherever easy capital funding is to be found.

~~~
mistermann
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferri...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/)

This was interesting to read:

5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a
peculiar form of McCarthyism
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism))
masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get,
and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply
out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me)
are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn't
this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus
reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That's the whole
reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I
feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer
neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their
jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really
dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable.
If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but
I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're
headed for big trouble.

~~~
jgh
Hrm. I'm not really sure exactly what he's referring to there but it does kind
of come off as something someone would say if their ideas on _race realism_
were being shot down by people. Not that Tim Ferris is such a person (I have
no idea) but you can see it all over the internet and wider media these days.
Small, seemingly innocuous, doubts being sewn into the greater conversation of
the time. The current cultural battle is an enormous push for civil rights,
recognition, and acceptance. It's faux-pas to attack people who have generally
been targets in the recent past (transgender people, for example), so the
proxy war is "free speech". "My free speech is being encroached because I
can't speak _realistically_ about [transgender people, black people,
whatever]".

Note: I do not live, and have not lived, in Silicon Valley. So it could be my
context is wrong.

~~~
mistermann
I have no idea of what his exact meaning was, but your comment to me seems
like a perfect example.

You have absolutely no context of any of these conversations, yet your first
presumption that he has some opinions on _race realism_? This mainstream
behavior of seeing a racist behind every rock, or every innocent comment
having some underlying racial motivation is I suspect exactly what he's
referring to.

~~~
jgh
No I didn't say that he's a race realism pusher, what I'm saying is that it
reads like the kind of shit you'd see someone who is write. I'm not sure if
you're new to the internet or not but there is a major culture war happening
these days, and there is a lot of fighting over free speech that is just a
proxy for other agendas.

~~~
mistermann
Oh I'm aware, and you are clearly on the side that thinks it is 100% right and
everyone better step in line with your beliefs, or else they're racist....oh
sorry, on second thought, they just sound like someone who is racist.

------
aikinai
Wow, clicked on the Lisa McIntire Tweet linked in the article[0], and that
thread is gross. Sure, the company sounds like a terrible idea, and making fun
of the concept is fine, but half the replies there are assuming and ridiculing
the founders’ names and personalities based on their appearance.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816](https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816)

~~~
sitkack
I am angry at you for showing me that projection of reality.

------
Alex3917
All of the startups mentioned are venture backed. There seems to be a
distinctive lack of scandals from the IndieHackers, IndieWeb, Platform.coop,
etc. communities.

~~~
jgh
Scandals? Scandals are hardly mentioned in the article. This is about public
perception of the tech - specifically startup - industry.

------
NiklasMort
I can't be the only techy who got more and more technophob over the last 10
years, which many of my friends find so funny and if they ask me why I usually
respond with "because I know what's on the dark side"

~~~
cJ0th
So am I. Computers looked like the perfect solution to many problems - and
perhaps they are, but then things on the human side went very wrong. Too many
'wrong people' in the right place at the right time (Founders with shitty
ethics, politicians/lawmaker with zero technological understanding, way too
many lobbyists per activist ...)

------
tobbyb
There has been a clear betrayal of the people. All the loud claims of freedom
and liberalism by techies from the 90s has come to nought and infact moved the
other way. Techies have dropped any pretense of ethical behavior and are
hiding behind user ignorance to abuse them.

Google, Facebook and others creepy surveillance behavior has been more or less
normalized and few seem to have a problem working for them and furthering
their agendas. Once the infrastructure for surveillance exists, things change
whether you like it or not.

You can't be a victim all the time, at some point you need to take
responsibility, if you can behave with integrity you can't expect it from
society.

~~~
peoplewindow
I worked for Google for a long time. I never had a problem working for him or
"furthering their agenda" because back then they didn't really have an agenda,
beyond doing cool stuff on the web.

The idea that these organisations are unethical doesn't stick. Here's the
brutal reality - people care about privacy from the people immediately around
them. They value Incognito Mode because they want to hide their browsing
history from partner/friends/family/etc. They don't value encrypted email
because they assign a value of near zero to hiding messages from Google.

And why not? Privacy leaks out of these organisations are so rare as to be
non-existent. They control their employees access very tightly and I can
remember exactly one case of a genuine scandal involving a Google SRE
maliciously accessing accounts. For a company coming up to 20 years old that's
a good track record. Moreover, it's convenient to trust a large corporation.
They will help you if you forget your password instead of saying "sorry, no
key no access". They back things up for you, give you magical search
functionality, filter stuff for you, show you useful stuff. And it costs you
nothing! It's a deal so great everyone takes it.

The day I really came to understand that whinging about online privacy was
just a crappy form of journalistic champagne socialism was when I took part in
a system that showed me how much money advertisers were spending in the
auction to appear on my screen during an ordinary few days of browsing. I saw
that data because I was interested in the idea of letting people bid
themselves out of seeing online ads. It was a staggering amount of money. Many
many multiples the cost of my cable TV/internet subscription. Even as a well
paid engineer I'd not have considered actually doing it. And for people on a
more average salary? Trying to get rid of online ads or making them less
efficient would just mean they couldn't afford to use the internet at all. I
came to realise that no people would ever agree to pay for the true cost of
their own web browsing. It was well targeted ads or it was no web sites.

Since then articles like these moaning about the evil ad-driven tech industry
just make me roll my eyes. Don't like it Ms Journalist? Get rid of all the
advertising and sleasy agenda-driven copy in your own industry first, _then_
lecture others.

------
bsder
Large, entrenched, heavily-funded tech firms were _never_ the good guys.

It was the underfunded, plucky upstarts that were generally the good guys.

That hasn't changed.

What has changed is that what little accountability we ever had against those
large tech firms has completely collapsed. Even the mere thought of an AT&T
style breakup would be laughable nowadays.

~~~
emerged
Eh. Plenty of underfunded, plucky startups are the same sort of garbage. No
particular lens can encapsulate our woes on its own. Reality is too complex to
summarize in a few sentences.

------
laurex
What's happened in Silicon Valley is that primarily white young men have had
power and are funded and listened to in a fairly bubble-like way. It seems
incorrect to say, "tech is bad," by citing a bunch of bro disasters. It might
be fair to say, "as a journalist, I plan to be highly skeptical of tech
startups looking for press who are led by a team of 20-something white dudes."
At least that seems plausible. But if there are solutions to a lot of the mess
that we've made pre- and post- the rise of Silicon Valley, they're likely to
be technological.

------
watwut
The issue is that people idealized both techies and startups. Put them on
pedestal. The trouble is, techies and startups were never movie good guys.
They were ... just mix of guys. Some good, some bad and generally normal and
all that much different from any body else. A bit arrogant and believing that
they are something special, but other groups habe that too.

Now it turned out they could not stay on pedestal, because no real group of
people can. They are people, not mystical Madonnas.

------
jswizzy
The author seems like a very angry person and I couldn't help but not that
they seem to think that Capitalism is somehow to blame for all the world's
woes.

~~~
rekado
I think it is time to stop seeing anger as misplaced in discussions. Being
labelled "a very angry person" does nothing to invalidate that person's
position.

------
goldfeld
Have people longing to sell out their team and vision for a get rich scheme
and inspire others to do the same ever been qualified as "good guys"?

------
Veratyr
I'm not sure if the title has been editorialized or changed. The current title
is "The Other Tech Bubble".

~~~
InclinedPlane
Hover your mouse over the tab the article is loaded in _that_ is the title.

------
cyphunk
lol, the Sam Altman quote is classic... what a duche:

“This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say
disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel
things about physics,”

I absolutely abhor arguments that are based on the quest for pure excellence.
I promise you nearly every discriminatory argument in history was based on
excellence. And yes, to have civility we have to get over that and say: no,
you can't say shit about gay people. If that changes some elite collectives
overall IQ, get the fuck over it. Your novel comment on physics is simply
lower on the scale of priorities.

------
squozzer
If we were only so lucky that people in government could acquire the self-
consciousness that the writer wishes for tech.

------
matte_black
Many techies were once also the geeks, the nerds, the rejects, the misfits,
the outcasts, the beaten and the downtrodden.

This creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove
and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
I am one of those misfits (not an evil or unempathetic one i think...), and
people like you are just the shitty bullies all over again.

Tech has an abundance of non-nerdy types now, and arguably those are the
people with enough business and social savvy to have made it into the force it
is today. The VCs who choose what to fund, the advertisers that shape content
platforms, the founders who care only about engagement..

These socially "well-adjusted" people are just as culpable (if not more) for
the evil tech has done, but yet people like you point the finger at nerds and
only nerds. There are many, many socially competent people who do evil things,
but they have good social skills so you don't care. Its just a trash
regurgitation of the hierarchies of high-school all over again.

Its oh-so-convenient to believe "evil" ties in perfectly with your intuitive
sense of "well-adjusted", to divide the world so easily into "misfit = evil"
and "friendly = good", but truly evil people have to blend in as "good" to get
anything done. The sociopaths are running the show.

~~~
watwut
Nerd types are no better ethically then the rest of population. Not worst
either I would say, the major difference is lack of influence.

Thinking that being nerd implies good and does not help anything ethical. It
makes it worst, because it removes doubt.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Yep, exactly.

I don't think nerds are all good, but I don't think they are all evil because
of their childhood experiences either as OP implies. The fact is good and evil
people are everywhere.

~~~
rosser
The top post in this thread said "many". Not "most". Not even "all".

I have no idea where you're getting the notion that it was an indictment of
technologists, writ large. It observed that many of us — myself included —
were very much on the outside, socially, as young people. I mean, how do you
know that 'matte_black wasn't bullied, too?

No matter what, that leaves a mark. That some subset of those people developed
consequently in a way that manifests a lack of empathy and an "Oh, yeah? I'll
show _you_!" kind of attitude is neither surprising, nor worthy of
condemnation for acknowledging aloud.

~~~
watwut
I think that this is red herring. Not all techies were bullied, not even
majority in my experience. Some were lonely, some had small group of like
minded friends and some were average socially. Yes there are people who have
social difficulties, but majority of techies can communicate.

There is however something cultural that makes us assume (in these
discussions) that techies were all bullied and are all unadjusted. Up to the
point where pretending you don't get social nuance occasionally, when it suits
you, is a brag point and makes people assume you are smarter. (Of course
crutial difference is that people who really don't get social make mistakes
when it does not suits them)

People throw around weird techie stereotype, but when I ask names, they can't
answer. Because their real world colegues are not stereotypes mostly.

