
Former Google and Facebook execs are sounding alarms about the power of tech - DrNuke
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/01/silicon-valley-eating-soul-google-facebook-tech
======
ebikelaw
I tire of the traditional media's need to write a negative story about how
Facebook is cancer, and then throw in a legitimate company like Apple or
Google to make it "Facebook and Google" are cancer. And this instance is
particularly obtuse because the "former Google and Facebook execs" are the
_president_ of Facebook, and some random product manager from Google. There's
only one former president of Facebook and there are probably 20000 former
Google product managers. The latter guy is just some rando.

~~~
delhanty
About The Guardian in particular, I've been saying this for a while. [0]

I'll quote #peoplewindow's reply, broadly agreeing with my comment:

>The Guardian has been pushing the line that non-Guardian news sources are
'dangerous for democracy' for a long time now. Other similar publications like
the NYT have the same viewpoint.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573111)

~~~
randomsearch
Utter nonsense.

Check out the Guardian’s history and structure:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian)

The Guardian is about as good as you’re going to get in terms of a mainstream
outlet being able to take an objective view here. Pretty much the opposite of
Facebook.

~~~
delhanty
>The Guardian is about as good as you’re going to get in terms of a mainstream
outlet being able to take an objective view here.

 _That_ statement is nonsense.

Of course The Guardian can't possible be objective w.r.t. Facebook.

Facebook and The Guardian are _competitors_ in the market for online
advertising.

edit: double-down

~~~
ghughes
GP's statement is fairly accurate and so is yours. _All_ mainstream news
outlets are competitors in the online ad market, and The Guardian _is_ about
as good as you get in terms of independence and objectivity.

------
saas_co_de
> The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked
> around the time of the Arab spring

The only people who thought the "arab spring" was a burgeoning utopia are
western military, intelligence, and political elites.

Now those same people see these platforms as a threat and so the "respectable"
media is full of anti-SV stories.

> it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor
> everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it

Yes, that is the real problem: communications that can't be censored and
controlled.

~~~
wpietri
I'm not sure you read this very well. The notion is not that the Arab spring
was a utopia. The notion was that the Arab spring, fueled by direct person-to-
person connection on FB, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc, were symptomatic of the
Internet's power to create freedom and social utopia.

It's part of a persistent strain of technoutopianism. You might read Tom
Standage's excellent 1998 book "The Victorian Internet", which talks about the
adoption of the telegraph during the Victorian era. Many of the same things
people said about the Internet's power to change society were said about the
telegraph: [https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-
Ninetee...](https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth-
line/dp/162040592X)

~~~
MisterTea
Telegraphs didn't have dopamine feedback loops via feedback such as "likes".

~~~
wpietri
I'm not sure that's material to my point, but assuming you're just starting a
tangent, I'd disagree. They had replies.

It was not as immediate and exciting as modern technology, but it was way more
exciting than what previously existed. People even fell in love by telegraph.
See, for example, the 1880 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes":
[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love-
romance...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love-romance-
novel-technology_n_3654634.html)

------
spodek
Maybe because I love Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs, and Henry Thoreau, or
maybe because between Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' legacies, I chose Richard
Stallman's, but I've never felt any appeal from Silicon Valley.

Maybe visiting might change my view, but the realizations in the article seem
obvious and late enough that I think I understand the appeal but don't share
the values.

~~~
amelius
The (disruptive) power of Silicon Valley stems mainly from investors. Make a
pile of money high enough, and you can disrupt anything; that's the premise,
basically.

It is not really the power of tech that we should be worried about, but
instead the power of investment without regard for anything other than
shareholder returns. Google and Facebook could be better companies if they
didn't have to sell their users to their real customers.

~~~
dwaltrip
The money doesn't do it alone. You can't have technological disruption without
technology.

~~~
rhizome
What technology has Facebook given us besides React, a PHP compiler and low-
power server racks? For that matter, what does Facebook even disrupt?

I venture that the technology is usually already there, but the _business_
exploitation is what's different in the dominant companies.

~~~
dwaltrip
Facebook operates mostly in the realm of social communication/organization and
general information sharing, so that is where the "disruption" would take
place.

I'm rather skeptical of Facebook though. I think there are major issues with
its current incarnation.

~~~
rhizome
_Facebook operates mostly in the realm of social communication /organization
and general information sharing, so that is where the "disruption" would take
place._

Sure, but GP was talking about technological disruption.

~~~
dwaltrip
Facebook uses technology to carry out its core operations, so would not they
be performing technological disruption of the social domain?

~~~
rhizome
If they meant social they would have said social.

------
klokoman
Yeah, this "alarms" are just a way to call for regulations that will in
practice pull up the ladder so other companies will never be able to climb
where fb or google stand now. This has always happened in all industries: some
companies become big and then they use the excuse of limiting their own power
to close off the competitions to enter the market, in fact stabilizing their
power and creating a REAL monopoly. I don't understand how can informed people
still fall for this move.

~~~
rhizome
I've been speculating for months that these companies would _love_ to rotate
out some of their VPs into a regulatory body in order to give their policies
the force of law.

------
modi15
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present
form. The biggest problem is that our anti-competitive legislation is ill-
equipped to handle tech monopolies.

The extremely complex nature of modern software and its ability to offer
unparalled distribution advantage is nothing like the world has ever seen. The
ability of Google to push something like a chrome browser comes not only from
its galleons of highly paid engineers, but also its ability to
advertise/support it for free for decades to come. There simply does not exist
another sustainable model to finance a complex product like an internet
browser and provide it for free to consumers for decades.

The bigger problem is what is the form of regulation that could be applied to
such behemoths. Its extremely hard to regulate it by a case-to-case basis,
similar to what happenned in telecom, simply because the business models are
too complex and different products monetize differently.

I think a line of thought which might yield some regulatory possibilities is
to limit these companies manpower. No single company should be allowed to
employ more than X number of engineers. If they go above, they should be
required to spin of into multiple entities, each of which do no more than X
number of engineers. I dont know what X is - but that is open for
deliberation.

The impact that something like this could have on say Google is that Google is
forced to split apart its search business with the ads business. This further
allows the search business to collaborate with more ad providers to find the
best fit. And on the other side, it allows its ads business to experiment with
more search providers and open up a market for profitable search engines.

This is not something I have completely thought through, but whatever little I
have, this seems to be the cleanest approach to fix tech.

~~~
tensor
Why is it not ok for tech companies to be big, but a-ok for telecom, oil,
banks, law firms, audit firms, and all the other traditional companies to be
huge?

The cynic in me wonders if it's simply "old conservative money holders" being
upset about the "new liberal rich." Ever since Trump took power, the media has
been beating the "evil tech company" drums loudly and clearly.

~~~
modi15
> Why is it not ok for tech companies to be big, but a-ok for telecom, oil,
> banks, law firms, audit firms, and all the other traditional companies to be
> huge?

The thing which makes tech companies different from every other is the
'infrastructure' effect of software and the absence of 'geographical' limits
on monopolies.

Banks, law firms, audit firms are fundamentally limited by geography. A law
firm in New York will find it very hard to service clients in San Francisco
without having employees there. Tech firms arent 'boxed' in by these limits,
which are preset for most traditional businesses, thereby greatly expands
their ability to become monopolies and strangle competition.

The other advantage that tech companies have is the fundamentally additive
nature of software. Microsoft made a very good OS few decades back, but its
ability to keep releasing a competitive OS builds on the work piled on by
decades of engineering. It is simply impossible for a startup to release
another version of an OS which can compete with Microsoft Windows.

However, if we were to break up Windows into pieces, it opens up the
possiblity for a new startup to innovate on a part of the OS and buy existing
pieces from the vendors of each part to ship a new offering.

~~~
stale2002
I mean, what you are effectively arguing is that Microsoft's OS is so freaking
awesome and amazing and good for consumers, that no other competitor is able
to provide value to consumers as much as microsoft is.

And your solution is effectively to make Microsoft's products worse, so that a
different, lower quality product is able to compete.

What about instead of that, we do the thing that helps consumers, instead of
hurting them?

~~~
throwaway2048
The error in your assumption is that windows wins because its "so freaking
awesome" and not because of secondary effects that microsoft has imposed on
the market via its ability to effectively force adoption of stuff.

------
throwaway13337
Maybe the difference between those that feel fulfilled in life and those who
don't are the addiction loops we've found our way into.

It would be nice to hack those loops in a meaningful way. Make creation a drip
fed, nicely chunked, and skinner box filled experience.

There are some methods like pomodoro but something software based to use these
novel approaches could do a lot of good for the world.

~~~
OliverJones
B. F. Skinner's box was a scheme for performing controlled experiments. The
point was to isolate complex systems (minds) so simple hypotheses about their
operation could be falsified or supported. It was scientifically successful.

My mother of blessed memory, daughter of two professors of psychology, in her
childhood lived next door to Dr. Skinner on St. Ronan Street in New Haven, CT,
USA. Myth in my family says my grandparents had the good sense to refuse a
request to make Mom a subject in that box.

In the 21st century West no academic psychologist would even propose using a
Skinner box on human subjects. Their institutional review boards (IRBs:
scientific ethics watchdogs) would just laugh.

It might be interesting, as an experiment in ethics, to propose some aspect of
Facebook's attention hacking as if it were an experiment, and see what IRBs
make of it.

In the meantime: human complexity good, Skinner boxes bad. Please be careful.

~~~
pault
Totally based on hearsay, but: a family member worked with a person who was
the child of a research associate of Skinner and that person and their sibling
were used as informal research subjects by their parents. Both of them were
extremely disturbed humans, and while I never asked for specifics there were
whispers of some very dark doings.

~~~
gaius
There probably ought to be laws against psychology grads having kids. They
simply can’t resist experimenting on them.

------
baron816
Ugh, the media has clearly been waiting around for a day when they can cast
tech as the bad guy. Russians on Facebook and iPhone batteries are just not
that big of a deal.

~~~
autokad
i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of
misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric.

leaked emails (by help of the russians) surely helped trump, but even
democrats concede that information was TRUE. this has nothing to do with
social media, but training in the DNC about phishing scams might help.

but honestly, there were so many huge flaws in the hillary campaign (relying
100% on data that was already proven in the primaries to be next to useless,
disgust over the shadyness in how the clintons took over the dnc and stacked
the deck against sanders, etc).

and lets face it, they didnt have a problem with the internet when obama was
using it to win, such as 'obama universities' training people to use a pyramid
network on social media to basically create broadcast storms to get the
algorithms to push their content to the top and shout out dissenting opinions.

~~~
geggam
Im not sure that many people voted for any of the individuals.

Hillary represented the establishment. The last two presidents were a huge and
dramatic shift away from status quo.

I think people are voting for the least likely to be a part of the machine. I
wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the
primary is part of the machine ?

~~~
kazagistar
> I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into
> the primary is part of the machine ?

They stop voting like half the country already has.

~~~
autokad
a lot of them has simply given up, hence the opiod crisis

------
paulcole
“I got rich by doing this but you definitely shouldn’t.”

Hard to take this kind of attitude seriously. Things seemed fine enough when
they were working there, so what has changed?

~~~
drewbug
Talking about it no longer affects their livelihood?

------
cynusx
I don't think it's a difficult tweak to the feed algorithms to allow for 5%
(picked randomly) of diverging viewpoints in somebody's feed. It might even be
good for their engagement metrics.

~~~
Jgrubb
Agree. I wish there were actually a slider that you could adjust that would
increase the X factor of the algorithm. I’d possibly use Facebook if it
weren’t just the same 6 people every time I went on.

------
perseusprime11
Not surprising to hear this kind of fear mongering from newspapers like
guardian and Nytimes. They are the most threatened by Facebook and Google.
Their breakfast, lunch and dinner got eaten by these companies so now they are
using these narratives to advance their agendas. American tech companies are
just fine. They are run by reasonable people. Bezos actually bought
WashingtonPost so it does not die.

~~~
pretendscholar
>Bezos actually bought WashingtonPost so it does not die.

Thats a very charitable reading of what he did.

------
partycoder
Before social network manipulation there was mass media manipulation. Social
networks just made it global.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Tech will only eat your soul if you let it.

~~~
zxcb1
In secular world views there is no such thing as a soul, thus it can not be
eaten. Finding the proper language for these phenomena is however an
interesting topic.

~~~
nordsieck
Enough people either have a dualist world view or are familiar enough with the
idea that soul seems to be a serviceable word.

~~~
zxcb1
Well, my point is that you can not believe that your soul is being eaten
without believing in the metaphysical framework(s) from which the concept
emerged, otherwise the parent comment makes no sense. The closest secular
definition you get is System 1.

~~~
lostcolony
Thank you for being pedantic over a word literally (yes, literally) everyone
reading it, yourself included, understood and interpreted correctly to mean
the author's intent. You are providing a valuable service.

 _/ sarcasm_

~~~
zxcb1
I am sorry for that, but it is not obvious to me at all. Thats why I
commented. One of the problems online is one of meaning, communication,
context, definitions etc that we actually understand what someone is trying to
convey. You for example felt the need to use a sarcasm expression, as you were
unsure of me actually “getting” it.

~~~
andai
You spend too much time on the computer.

