
Don't Be Evil: Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers - imartin2k
https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/
======
emacsgifs
This is one of the more insightful and interesting reads posted on HN.

I took issue with the statement that Apple have always cynically coopted
counterculture and utopian motifs. Then I thought about it for a second.

Getting people pumped up about Apple using utopian imagery and counterculture
suggestions _was_ always cynical. It just happened to work very effectively on
me in the 80s, and may very well have fuelled a lot of my early life's
optimism. In particular my faith that certain tech/companies were inherently
good. I was certainly a big fan of Apple for many years.

If that naivety hadn't already faded significantly, this may have been a more
severe reaction, than ... Hey wait!? ... Oh right!

Obviously Steve had already exploited and cheated Woz on a number of occasions
before the formative Mac 1984 Ads (which made a deep impression on me at the
time.) So it's not that much of a reach to say they are somewhat cynical.

Jobs is a very interesting person, specifically because I think he bought a
lot of his own bullshit. Possibly his LSD experience was something which led
to deep understanding of humans and interpersonal politics, which may have led
to him developing his reality distortions field... Who knows. He may also have
developed the classic [1]Acid Jesus Messianic complex and as a result we have
the enigma we are left with in the public memory of Jobs. Millions who believe
he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many many, who look deeper at
the man think he's quite the piece of (edit for politeness) work.

Speculation on this is ultimately pointless... but it's something I muse about
myself.

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_complex](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_complex)

~~~
coldtea
> _Obviously Steve had already exploited and cheated Woz on a number of
> occasions before the formative Mac 1984 Ads (which made a deep impression on
> me at the time.) So it 's not that much of a reach to say they are somewhat
> cynical._

Sure, but do you know how many bona fide members of the counterculture
themselves exploited and back-stabbed others, especially for petty power
politics and fame/recognition? It's not like the counterculture didn't have a
fair share of BS itself, or cynical people (Leary comes to mind, or take Jerry
Rubin).

A large for-profit non-private company (as opposed to some small co-op or
something) with revolutionary/hippie/counter-culture mottos that otherwise
operates fine within capitalism was always gonna be BS in that aspect.

> _Millions who believe he was an agent of change and a tech god. While many
> many, who look deeper at the man think he 's quite the piece of (edit for
> politeness) work._

Those two things are not necessarily at odds. It's some particular Americanism
(or protestantism relic?) to believe agents of change, national heroes, great
historic figures etc, must also be good, altruistic and warm people.

~~~
emacsgifs
> do you know how many bona fide members of the counterculture themselves
> exploited and back-stabbed others, especially for petty power politics and
> fame/recognition?

I do, and fair point.

> It's some particular Americanism (or protestantism relic?) to believe agents
> of change, national heroes, great historic figures etc, must also be good,
> altruistic and warm people

I don't think it's a Protestant relic, it's more of a general simplistic
perspective that there are through and through good people.

But still I agree it's unrealistic to think this way.

------
Animats
He's completely missed what changed everything - advertising-supported
services.

Before Google/Doubleclick, computing was about selling hardware, software, and
service to people who used them. After Google bought Doubleclick, computing
became about selling users to advertisers. The user is the product, not the
customer. This totally changed the balance of power.

It's really a bit late to be worried about 1960s counterculture. That was half
a century ago. Think of Silicon Valley culture as Mad Men 2.0, instead.

~~~
pavlov
This a million times.

It's not a coincidence that the focus in UI design also shifted at the same
time, in the post-dotcom-bubble years.

Software user interfaces used to be designed for users. Desktop software
didn't try to make you send an endless stream of personal data and content to
the vendor, or trick you into using it again as soon as possible.

Today's software is designed with an advertising mentality. Instead of
customers and human interface guidelines, there are eyeballs and creatives.
Previously it would have been a scandal if a software package sent all your
keypresses to the vendor's server, but today everything is tracked and
monitored. Most designers don't give a shit about things like accessibility
because they fundamentally understand software as something more akin to a
billboard or centerfold ad.

Meanwhile usage of the word "product" creeps to replace "software". To me, it
strongly carries the connotation that consumer-facing software design is
turning into the process of developing ways to surreptitiously extract value
from the user.

------
matt4077
"Infrastructure is not political" is part of the canon here on HN as well.
Bitcoin, as one of many examples, is often touted as being "neutral", or
"unbiased" (in comparison to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy).

The same sort of argument is gaining steam around discriminatory decisions by
AI or "Big Data" systems: "It's an algorithm! It cannot be biased. Technology
is neutral!"

~~~
yorwba
It's never the infrastructure or the algorithm or the data that is political.
It's the people using that infrastructure, algorithm or data in their
decision-making who are responsible.

When a machine learning model determines that according to the available data,
blacks are more likely to default on loans, it's not unfairly biased against
blacks. It is merely reflecting that the world is unfairly biased against
blacks.

The fault inevitably lies with the decision-makers who look at an algorithmic
prediction and decide to maximize their profit. Because they confuse what _is_
with what _ought to be_.

~~~
coldtea
> _It 's never the infrastructure or the algorithm or the data that is
> political. It's the people using that infrastructure, algorithm or data in
> their decision-making who are responsible._

I don't believe that. In a sense, it's like the classic NRA defense, that guns
don't kill people, etc.

In reality, certain technologies also come with specific tendencies --
ascribed in their very design and formulation.

In the very least, certain technologies within specific societal contexts tend
to have specific outcomes. Which makes placing the blame to "people using that
infrastructure" problematic, because those people also operate within that
societal context, and are influenced by it, they are not totally free agents.

~~~
yorwba
Yes, guns don't kill people without pulling the trigger. That doesn't mean
that everyone else is without responsibility. Obviously there would be no guns
to shoot if nobody sold them. There would be no guns to sell if nobody made
them. And so on.

I didn't mean to put all the blame on the users of the infrastructure.
Actually I was thinking about the case where the user is involved in creating
the infrastructure in the first place, and then pulls the "It's an algorithm!"
excuse.

If the infrastructure is made available for someone else to use, then part of
the blame for abuse also lies with the person who decided to let them use it.
But even in that case it's not the infrastructure that is the problem, it is
the lack of access control and accountability.

------
danharaj
The first bit about communes reminded me of The Tyranny of Structurelessness
[0]. It has far reaching corollaries.

[0]
[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

------
ivanbakel
The "anti-political" part is probably the most pertinent to modern tech
thought. People repeat it here as well - the idea that any kind of
specification or statistic is just cold and hard, and there are no lenses.

What I wonder more is: is it a product of the "build it" mentality like Turner
says, or is it manipulated by money men with an interest is maintaining the
status quo by silencing dissent as non-scientific?

~~~
matt4077
In my experience, engineers tend to fetishise the sciences to a degree even
scientists don't. Physics and math are among the most influential, and their
biggest successes were build on _reductionism_ , or the ability to split large
problems into smaller, manageable units. The first instinct is not to
immediately solve a problem, but to reduce its size. They also seek axioms,
i.e. simple, universal truths from which to build larger solutions.

This approach quickly turns into frustration: people behave irrationally, for
example, which turns economics from an offspring of mathematics into something
more akin to applied psychology. Laws fail to live up to a standard of "plain
meaning", because the myriad conflicts of life are to nuanced to be
exhaustively captured in simple language. That's where the distrust of the
legal system, as well as "smart contracts" come from.

It's interesting to compare engineers and scientists in this regard: the most
successful scientists tend to have a vast appreciation of culture beyond their
field of study. Richard Feynman, for example, excelled in music and painting,
and became a bestselling author.

~~~
viridian
I think it comes from not really having a grasp of a lot of the real BS
involved in science, which you can really only know from first or secondhand
experience. A lot of the magic and awe I found in science was beaten out of me
by having close friends and partners who were lab techs, doctoral students,
postdocs, etc.

I really hope knowledge of how the scientific process works in practice
becomes more common among engineers though, it's very frustrating when someone
takes a study as being the word of god, and you can't convince them otherwise,
because science. Like some 3-4 years ago there was some lab claiming to be on
the cusp of having a real cold fusion prototype, and people just buy in
because they want it to be true, and the lab had written a paper.

------
amelius
> Why is the tech industry so young? And why does it put such a premium on
> youth?

Because the young are more naive, blind to the things written in this article,
and they happily follow the dystopian agenda of big companies.

------
MrL567
The lines about engineers I find to be odd. I don't believe that an entire
culture could think that way, yet the author states that the news is a out of
context problem for these firms. Engineers don't actually think like that as
this article claims it to be, right?

~~~
engnr567
Based on my limited experience, most of the good engineers I know measure and
care about quantifiable things like latency, throughput etc. They generally
tend to get frustrated with fuzzy things like accuracy. (Data) Scientists, on
the other hand, seem to be much more happier dealing with things like
accuracy. "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.

~~~
patkai
> "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.

I would add that it is not entirely their job. After all, all the stakeholders
have a primary goal, the infrastructure engineer will maximise infrastructure
metrics, the VC their own and so do regulators, who society does need, even in
our angelic brogrammer society.

------
jondubois
To me, Burning man sounds like a weird cross between a frat-house initiation
ceremony and a hippie festival.

Sounds like a toxic environment to me.

------
supreme_sublime
>It seems that tech companies also prefer the deregulatory approach when it
comes to what content to allow on their platforms. Their default is laissez-
faire—to not interfere with what people can post.

This is quickly changing for the worse. Twitter verification has become a
badge of approval. Facebook and Twitter try to enforce rules beyond what is
legal and illegal and do so wildly inconsistently. I see a lot of it happening
with "right-leaning" people, but I have also seen complaints with "left-
leaning" people as well.

They need to get back to this instead of trying so hard to police what is
allowed to be said.

~~~
RangerScience
> trying so hard to police what is allowed to be said.

Eh. They feel responsible for people doing bad things with what they've made.
Closest simplified analogy I'm coming up with is: Imagine you run a gigantic,
crowded open-mic, and someone gets up and starts shouting "Fire!" when there
isn't one. You would probably want to prevent that, cuz it's breaking this
thing you made.

------
damikiova
Why not greet Google and facebook with message "don't be evil?" ??

Do anybody care about the fact that they psychologically lead users to
multiple tests and use you like a lab rat ? While limiting freedom of
speech???

Oh, please

