
Silicon Valley: A Reality Check (2017) - ctoth
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/11/silicon-valley-a-reality-check/
======
3xblah
"When Capitol Hill screws up, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis get killed.

When Wall Street screws up, the country is plunged into recession and poor
families lose their homes.

When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled
juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes
pretty good juice."

When Silicon Valley _succeeds_ consumers get mass surveillance of the minutiae
of their lives.

Contrary to the author's statement, there is a point to the Wi-Fi enabled
juicer.

For one, it can continuously gather data and can transfer it over a network to
an organization that can use it strategically/monetize it.

~~~
cm2012
The most common outcome of this terrifying mass surveillance is people are
shown ads more relevant to them. Most people are rationally fine with this.

The government doesn't need ad cookies to track you.

~~~
deogeo
s/people are shown ads more relevant to them/people are better manipulated by
ads

Plus the information and therefore power asymmetry between people and
corporations increases. Imagine a business-to-business 'analytics' service to
identify or predict insider threats such as whistleblowers or labor
organizers. Background checks already get help from the private sector - this
is just the logical next step. I'm sure they'll think of _many_ more uses, if
they haven't already.

------
uniformlyrandom
The article makes a good argument against simplifying Silicon Valley down to
its faults:

> stop talking about how Silicon Valley only makes ridiculous overpriced
> juicers

But who are those people who simplify Silicon Valley, and mock the useless
innovation?

I feel like the author falls victim to the same blind-men-and-elephant
problem: he somehow reads all the 'thinkpieces' (whatever that means) that
focus on strange things SV does. I personally do not see this phenomenon,
probably because I get my news from aggregators with different bias. The
(successfully defeated) strawman is just that, a strawman.

~~~
Kalium
> But who are those people who simplify Silicon Valley, and mock the useless
> innovation?

In my obviously very much less than completely thorough experience, they're
often people with clear goals who want them advanced. They're frustrated with
useless innovation, seeing it mainly as resources that could have been used to
advance a more worthy goal. They lament the waste of resources and the
failures of vision to bring those resource to bear on the proper goals and
problems. All the solvable problems that so many smart, driven people and so
much money could hardly fail to solve. The lives that could be enabled, the
societies that could be changed.

I've known a number of such people. I've seen a series of such pieces over
time, no few of which pass through HN.

~~~
jihoon796
Who I am to judge what innovations are useful or useless to society? In a
sense, one could very well argue that the market cap or valuation of a company
is at least a decent proxy for "usefulness".

With that said, however, my personal opinion is different. Although I think
innovation of any kind is great for society, what I'm frustrated by is the
_relative mindshare_ of where we focus our attention on.

I like to use the term "farsighted" \- many people in SV are able to see very
far distances into the future, but ignore some of the immediate problems that
are right under our noses. That's what I'm frustrated by.

~~~
Kalium
One thing I've always found useful is _asking_ the people I think of as having
mis-allocated their attention. Very often they have good reasons for their
decisions. It's surprisingly rare that they're actually ignoring the immediate
problems right under their noses. It is very common that they don't share my
assessment of what the resources they command could do if applied elsewhere,
and understanding why is educational for me.

The other tool I find useful is to remember that my _perception_ of where our
collective mindshare is going is necessarily going to be less than fully
informed. It can easily be quite far off the mark, leaving me thinking that a
major problem is going completely unaddressed when there are in fact vast
resources being directed at it without any visibility to me.

------
fullshark
The Silicon Valley bashing that came into vogue around the juicero days was a
healthy overcorrection I think. For like 10+ years at least the “media” was
probably overly kind about the industry and its startups. Basically just
taking PR press releases and doing marketing for tiny startups explaining how
they were going to change the world.

~~~
stcredzero
_For like 10+ years at least the “media” was probably overly kind..._

This is one of the things which we need to get better at calling out in the
media in 2019.

 _Basically just taking PR press releases_

Too much media in 2019 is just parroting other media and official
pronouncements and press releases.

------
tribune
The company didn't sell a product that people wanted and its investors lost
money; sometimes that's how things are supposed to work.

~~~
squirrelicus
The mere fact that it got so much investor money says a lot in my opinion

------
TomMckenny
A blender with bells and whistles is a towering benevolent achievement
compared ice cream and make-up. And no one much frets about those. The only
thing Hollywood makes are movies and TV. And although not really comparable,
even renaissance Italy spent vast resources just making paintings and
sculptures.

And when an unethical product is made, and there certainly are some,
occasionally employees pressure their company to stop. That is unusual
historically.

Of course there are serious problems like exclusivity due to cargo cult
hiring, exploding cost of both doing business and living. And of course the
related tidal wave of homeless. But even there, occasional effort is made to
address them. Historically the typical pattern is for industries to blame
victims for the harm inflicted on them.

While those problems are pretty good reasons not to have it in your back yard,
as an industry located far away, it's obviously well above average.

------
taurath
I feel like the juicer got traction simply because of how much MONEY they got
to do it. $120 million - and the end product was okay but kind of obviously
not amazing and too expensive.

That calls into question the abilities of the VCs doling out the money, which
gets popular because it works as a confirming data point to peoples pre-
existing cynical worldviews.

~~~
contingencies
We've built and patented machines that cook, package and retail arbitrary food
direct from fresh ingredients based on personalized smartphone orders for less
than one. SV VCs, where's my money at?

------
chrisweekly
This is actually a decent article.

> " If a deeply good person crusading for a better world enters Silicon
> Valley, she’ll find herself surrounded by deeply good people crusading for a
> better world. She’ll see mobile apps that track tropical diseases, clean
> energy startups that fight global warming by directly sucking carbon dioxide
> out of the air, companies bringing microbanking to poor Nepalese villagers,
> and boutique pharmaceutical labs searching for cures for orphan diseases.

If a futurist enters Silicon Valley, she’ll find herself surrounded by
futurists. She’ll see neural nets and deep learning, reusable rockets and
flying cars, high-throughput genome sequencing and CRISPR, metamaterials and
nanotechnology.

If a social-media-obsessed narcissist whose view of the world begins and ends
with his own Instagram page enters Silicon Valley, he’ll find himself
surrounded by social-media-obsessed narcissists whose view of the world begins
and ends with their Instagram pages. He’ll see a bunch of streaming video
services and Uber-for-hair-products apps and elite pay-to-play dating scams
and people trying to disrupt the gymwear market.

And if one of those people who talks about “the cloud” all the time enters
Silicon Valley, he’ll find himself surrounded by people who talk about “the
cloud” all the time. I have no idea who these people are or what they’re
doing, but they all seem really happy with each other and I’m glad they’re
enjoying themselves.

They’ll all have their blind-men-and-elephant view of what kinds of things
Silicon Valley “does”. And they’ll all be sort of right.

(thinkpiece writers: “Can you believe that Silicon Valley only makes products
for shallow elites obsessed with the latest fads? It’s the strangest thing!“)
"

------
dmix
Slate Star Codex is such a rare site, outputting high quality content at a
very high rate. I'm always happy to come across an article from it on HN.

------
peisistratos
> Deadspin...a stupid libertarian dystopia

> Y Combinator...Thirteen of them had an altruistic or international
> development focus

SSC mentions criticism, and then counters with the couple of hundred grand of
"altruistic" money YC hands out every year. As puff statements like this are
as easy to predict as anything, it seems analogous to several hundred grand to
a PR department. As his very statement is a usage of it as PR.

Of all the most awful big organizations and groups in the world, I can't think
of any that don't engage in such "altruism" PR.

Then he goes on to say that fault found in Silicon Valley is psychological
projection, a "deeply good person crusading for a better world enters Silicon
Valley, she'll find herself surrounded by deeply good people crusading for a
better world" (Jesus, who swallows this?) and a narcissist will see
narcissists.

He admits an "invasion of rent-seeking parasites and empty suits".

How about another tale - a naive young 21 year old MIT grad who wants to be a
"deeply good person crusading for a better world". They are shown PR projects,
maybe a "peer-to-peer lending service in India" (odd to hear the Christian and
Islamic sin of usury being praised as altruism), or cool tech like 3d
printers. Then they get put in a FAANG division, or dedicated startup, spying
on people for better and targeting. Or generating flamebait headlines to get
more clicks. Pulling the strings behind all this are the rent-seeking
parasites and empty suits - "activist" investors and hedge funds, LPs, VCs,
seeds and angels, executives and management etc.

A lot of talk about what is happening and not who controls it. And who
controls work _ain 't_ the 21 year old MIT grad paying $2000 a month for a
small apartment in Oakland. Who does all the work and creates all the wealth.
Who gets the bulk of the fruits of his labors, and to a very large extent what
he does is determined by said expropriating suits. That the grad has some
choice, although not much, is the reason for the 3 card monte shill game of
cool tech and altruism. The kid will be setting up the ad spying networks
Kubernetes containers, not doing altruism and playing with cool tech.

Of the people working in Silicon Valley, the main victims of expropriation are
the people working in Silicon Valley.

~~~
T2_t2
> Who gets the bulk of the fruits of his labors, and to a very large extent
> what he does is determined by said expropriating suits

At any other ti in history, with any other technology (Tesla vs Edison) that
would be true. But in tech, the billions made the companies. Page, Brin,
Bezos, Gates all got the "bulk of the fruits".

There is this weird idea that work creates value in a vacuum. That's not true.
Work in a context - of a company that has funding/profitability/stores of cash
creates value. Work done in a vacuum does not.

We need to balance those elements carefully, because not enough workers slows
growth, but so does not enough capital/misallocation of capital (see housing).

The ideal world is one in which we all move in the same direction together not
out of compulsion but out of an understanding that we all benefit from moving
in said same direction.

