
Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn’t Exist - dredmorbius
https://032c.com/fred-turner-silicon-valley-thinks-politics-doesnt-exist
======
pdkl95
_No Neutral Ground in a Burning World_

[http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-
burn...](http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burning-
world/)

> I know that you didn’t ask for this job. You didn’t ask for this role in
> soci­ety. None of you, not one of you, wants to think about the many peo­ple
> that can be affect­ed by one fuck­ing per­fect­ly nor­mal bug or mis­take in
> the tech­nol­o­gy that you built. And this is one of the rea­sons we keep
> our heads down. No one became a geek because they want­ed to be the cen­ter
> of polit­i­cal atten­tion.

> That just hap­pened.

> You don’t get to choose. You don’t get to choose what era of his­to­ry you
> live in and what that era wants to do with you. And this is a moment when
> it’s all up for grabs. That’s what it means to say we’re on a burn­ing
> plan­et. And what it means to say that we don’t have neu­tral ground is that
> you’re at the cen­ter of that fire. You set it. You’re one of the peo­ple
> that set it. You’re one of the peo­ple that tend it. And every­thing you do,
> the changes you make over the next months and years are going to chime down
> decades and cen­turies and shape the lives of peo­ple you will nev­er know
> [...]

~~~
husw
The solution to social problems are not going to come from nerds sitting in
ivory towers, who so far have been happy to take credit for unintended
positive consequences and look the other way or get defensive when negative
consequences show up.

The is the wrong class of people to be guilt-tripping. As dumb as trying to
guilt trip someone on Wall Street. Not that guilt tripping works at all any
class of people. It just produces short term fixes under pressure with costs
down the line.

Techies need to be guided by social scientists, psycologists, anthropologists,
politicians local to different cultures. These are the people on front lines
dealing with the consequences. That is the only route to a better place.

~~~
freeone3000
If these people are so important, why aren't they making the millions and the
decisions? The money and the power are in the technologists and management. We
need a route to your proposed route. Some way to convince large organizations
of software developers that ethics is, somehow, more important than money.

~~~
jonny_eh
> If these people are so important, why aren't they making the millions and
> the decisions? The money and the power are in the technologists and
> management.

You literally answered yourself. The key is that "important" != "earns money
or has power".

------
ThrustVectoring
"Apolitical" spaces are a tool. Specifically, it's a polite fiction that lets
people drop their overt political agendas in favor of getting shit done,
working together, enjoying a hobby, remaining on good terms with people,
eating dinner with family, or whatever other highly valuable thing people get
together for.

It's not "politics doesn't exist". It's that the advantages of declaring a
political cease-fire in many contexts outweighs the cost of not being able to
advance your personal agenda. This is _especially_ true in many engineering
and technology contexts, where creating a product that generates business
value for your company is orders of magnitude more important than your
political concerns. Even if you think your politics is extraordinarily
important, the answer is likely to donate a portion of your salary to
political groups rather than politicizing the workplace.

~~~
pjc50
That depends on what you mean by "politics" \- if you're being unfairly
discriminated against on race, gender etc grounds, that's something that other
people have already brought to the space. Your options are to accept it (at a
permanent disadvantage) or complain (risk being dismissed as "politics").

Sometimes the political is really personal.

("Apolitical" is like "leaderless" or "self-driving": there really is a leader
or a driver or a politics, it's just that everyone agrees to pretend that they
don't exist or their intermittent intervention isn't crucial)

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Well yeah, your choices _in general_ with an apolitical space are to either
break the no-politics cease fire or decide that it's bad enough that you're
not getting a good enough deal to stay quiet. People tend to underestimate the
value of the cease fire, though - I wouldn't break it at my workplace for a
$5k/yr raise, more than that might be worthwhile though.

------
AnthonyMouse
It isn't that politics doesn't exist, it's that politics and engineering are
two different things.

Nobody designs an infrastructure to change your desire such that you desire a
red Popsicle and not a green Popsicle. They design a generic infrastructure
that can influence your desires and the specific desires are fungible
parameters. It's equally capable of making you want red over green or green
over red, or want to conserve water, or stay home from the polls on election
day, or drink more Ovaltine. The engineering portion is the same in each case.
It's a general-purpose tool.

The politics is in what you use it for. But that's the same as anything. A
wall or fence with the same engineering specs has very different consequences
when it's used to corral livestock than when it's used to imprison people.

The issue is that some companies (e.g. Facebook) are not just doing the
engineering, they're also making the political decisions. They're not just
creating a general-purpose technology, they're also deploying it in a specific
way. And making the decision for everyone because they don't have enough
competition.

~~~
bumholio
> It's a general-purpose tool. The politics is in what you use it for.

That's exactly the view they are arguing against. There is no hard border
between tool and decision to use it, the infrastructure will always shift the
context of what's possible and alter society.

Once nuclear weapons become possible, a coldwar and arms race becomes
imminent. Once a massive, uncensorable communication network becomes
pervasive, the old social institutions that guide public communication become
irrelevant and we build new ones or face massive misinformation and propaganda
campaigns. It's not that we choose to use social media to propagate fake news,
it's the inevitable political consequence of their technical structure.

This is not an argument against building things. But an argument for taking
responsibility for what you build and acknowledging that building technology
is a political move, it strongly affects the inner life of the polis.

~~~
zaarn
If a smith makes a hammer for nails, makes the blueprint available for
everyone and someone uses that hammer model to kill someone, is the smith
evil? Should the smith no longer make the blueprint available because hammers
can be used for evil?

Has the smith made a political move by making the hammer available to
everyone? Because all the smith wanted to do is share his knowledge to
everyone, so everyone can smith their own hammers.

Ultimately the smith is not morally responsible for what people do with the
hammer IMO. The entire intent behind all actions of the smith was to do good,
can we call him evil for that?

Similarly I don't think simply building tools is a political or moral move.
Rather, it's what you encourage people to do with it and what people do with
it that is politically and moral. If I encourage my tool to be used for the
better of society, am I evil is a small number of people abuse it?

Don't get me wrong, I still think SV is a den of abuse, however that is
because social networks like Twitter and Facebook aren't the hammer. They're
not neutral tools. Both profit from moral abuse of the platform, it is enabled
and encouraged to do so. Google as a search engine is making it's tool with
the only intend to manipulate and abuse users for ads.

There is definitely tools that exist in a moral vacuum (just think of a
selfhosted radioshow software, it can host a show about pro-LGBT and one about
9/11 conspiracies, should the author be responsible for either?). But social
networks and the tools you mention are largely not it. Those tools have been
made with the purpose to do evil.

~~~
lvoudour
Google and co aren't the smiths, they are the ones that hire them

~~~
zaarn
In this example, they hire smiths to do evil and the smiths comply to make
tools for evil. You can equate Google and Friends to the Smiths since the
outcome is the same.

------
wpietri
I think that's fair. Personally, for a long time I didn't _want_ politics to
exist. I wasn't good at it, thought it was a waste of time and resources, and
hoped to ignore it. But that clearly didn't work. E.g., the innocent BBS nerd
havens of my youth turned into an online communication system that has let
terrible people organize around the world.

~~~
darawk
IMO the prior you was correct. We don't even think about all of the good these
tools have done because we take it so for granted. The fact that these tools
were built, without reference or consideration for politics is one of the
greatest things ever to happen in human history. The fact that the internet is
open, free, and (somewhat) decentralized would _never_ have happened had
politics been allowed to worm its way into the design process, and that would
have been a tragedy of unspeakable proportions.

~~~
sincerely
Isn't the internet only (somewhat) open/free/decentralized because of the
politics of the people that built it?

~~~
darawk
Sorry, i'm not sure if i'm understanding correctly. I have two equiprobable
interpretations of your question:

1\. The internet is not completely decentralized due to the politics of its
engineers.

2\. The internet being designed to be open and free was, as much as any other
architecture, reflective of the politics of its framers.

I suppose they are essentially the same question, though. You're right, the
architecture of the internet does reflect the politics of its engineers, to a
degree. But I think it mostly represents an attempt at the most flexible,
simple architecture to provide infrastructure for other applications without
being opinionated about those applications. Which, on the one hand, is sort of
a political choice, though I feel it's only political in the sense that it
avoids any and all political considerations. Its politics are neutrality and
agnosticism.

------
danharaj
When someone dresses up their politics as apolitical, it's impossible to
discuss politics with them. _Usefully_ , anyway.

------
amarkov
It seems to me that these kinds of authors always see the alternative as a
Silicon Valley with _their_ politics. This article describes a bunch of
concrete things that tech companies ought to do: ensure the poor aren't
marginalized, bring local communities together, and don't provide mechanisms
for creating echo chambers. But what neither Turner nor Khan discuss is how
tech companies will realize they ought to do this.

What if Amazon politicizes in the direction of libertarianism, and decides its
only social responsibility is to increase the world's GDP?

What if Facebook politicizes in the direction of social justice, and
determines that segregating people into identity-based safe spaces is the way
to go?

What if Google politicizes in the direction of some political party, and
decides it's duty-bound to tweak its search algorithm to hurt opposing
candidates?

~~~
ubernostrum
Personally I see the alternative as a Silicon Valley which accepts that its
output can never be "neutral" or "apolitical", no matter how many claims are
made to the contrary, and which gives consideration to that _before_ building
things, allowing that consideration to influence the design.

Any time you're building technology with (or with the intention of) mass
reach, "if the person I consider to be the most evil in the world were to
commandeer this, what's the absolute worst they could manage to do with it" is
a useful question to ask. If some companies had asked this question far
earlier in their lifecycles, we might see a very different world around us
today.

~~~
rorykoehler
How many VC's want to see that question answered in the pitch deck?

------
untog
Given the number of topics that are flagged from the HN home page because they
involve politics it's difficult to disagree...

~~~
Alex3917
He's talking about the neutrality vs agency of technology, which is largely
unrelated to most of the political articles on HN. For context, here is a good
thread with a bunch of Ph.D. researchers linking to their favorite academic
resources on this topic:

[https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/oSUhsJffQNCxSFVBQNCLKA/air-
age...](https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/oSUhsJffQNCxSFVBQNCLKA/air-agency-
neutrality-algorithms)

This thread on technological determinism vs social construction of technology
is also very relevant.

[https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QNW9-XK6RdmoeRtUp4b5eQ/air-
see...](https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QNW9-XK6RdmoeRtUp4b5eQ/air-seeking-
short-introduction-tech)

Anyway this is what Turner is talking about when he's talking about
algorithmic bias and actor-network theory. It has nothing to do with random
articles about Trump's immigration policies or affirmative action or whatever,
which is most of what gets flagged on HN.

~~~
untog
I dunno, I've seen a few HN posts about, for example, the Facebook news feed
and its connections to the propagation of fake news. That's absolutely
connected to the "neutrality" of the news feed (it's an algorithm! Algorithms
can't be bad, they're just math!), but will be flagged all the same. It's a
shame for many reasons, but not least that it's a fascinating topic.

~~~
dang
There have been quite a few major discussions of that. I think people start to
flag such a topic when it enters a later stage of repetitiveness. Call it the
Snowden effect.

