
Morality and the Idea of Progress in Silicon Valley - sinak
http://berkeleyjournal.org/2015/01/morality-and-the-idea-of-progress-in-silicon-valley/
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mc32
Can people use another word beside "narrative". Maybe its just me, in the
beginning it was cute to use an adjective like a noun, as philosophy likes to
do, but its getting tiresome.

I think this piece brings up some good points. Uber and abnb come to mind.
They bypass laws in place to regulate industries and in the process force us
to think whether these laws need to be amended, rejected, or enforced on the
newcomers as well as the established incumbents.

It may be that in some cases a majority can see a moral issue where others see
an impediment to progress.

The difficulty is that morals are subjective and change over time but people
like to use or refute morals to further their objectives. A startup might say
that they stand in the way of progress and better services, someone else might
say morals ensure we don't run roughshod over society and take advantage of a
certain group.

I think my take is it's better gauged on a case by case basis rather than all
good or all bad, but that doesn't sound very appealing for a "narrative"

I can only painfully imagine what pace progress would take if new businesses
had to submit the ideas to the startup equivalent to an FDA who regulate new
drug impacts, among other things

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anigbrowl
Narrative has always been a noun; this is not a new usage by any means,
although the word has arguably become more fashionable in recent years.

~~~
mc32
Right. But it was mostly on philosophy and artsy contexts that I saw it. Now
its everywhere, news to blogs to inane comments. I haven't checked google
trends but I think its popularization began some time in the early 2000s and
then mainstreamed.

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sedachv
"Morality is inherently subjective and a-rational."

This could have been a good article, but I stopped reading after this
assertion. The thesis is based on a false premise.

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tedks
What total crap.

Capitalism has never been about morality. Every single paradigm shift centers
more and more value and wealth in the hands of increasingly elite few, while
more people fall into poverty. Is this moral? Well, the author drives a car,
uses the Internet, buys clothing made in Asia, doesn't he? Who gives a fuck?
Obviously not him.

Software is just the next paradigm shift. It allows you to do, cheaper,
faster, and better, what we previously did with more inefficiency. Having your
secretary or personal assistant or "people" book you a table somewhere is
_exactly the same_ as having an automated service do it and buying it at
auction later. The former is just way more expensive. Software lets more
people be assholes. That's capitalism. That's why we're here.

Do we need to have a conversation about whether new products are moral? What
about a conversation about whether existing products are moral? What about a
conversation whether the prison-industrial or military-industrial complexes
are moral? What about a conversation about the kids we kill in drone strikes
or the unemployment generated by NAFTA or any amount of suffering caused by
the existing order of the world?

I'm sorry if I have to be the one to break it to anyone but the world is a
_horrifically_ fucked up place. You probably have never seen how fucked up it
is and if I linked you to some videos that are just the tippy-top of the
iceberg of fucked up I'd probably get banned from HN and never hired again.
Software doesn't change this at all.

What software does is make it much, much easier to be part of the horrific
system we find ourselves in. Uber is an 80's taxi managers wet dream.
_Absolutely anyone_ in that industry would have _loved_ to get their hands on
that! Does anyone seriously think that if you said to anyone in the taxi
industry in 1970 "Hey, fire all your employees, get them back on as
contractors making way less, use this software to dispatch them and sit on
your ass watching the cash roll in" they would have turned you down?

The reason the world is shit is because everybody is waiting for a chance to
screw everyone over. American culture has explicitly celebrated this since the
20's, because it's been profitable for the elites to make it so. There isn't
any conspiracy -- this is just plain market forces. Any CEO that wanted to be
"ethical" is going to get fired by shareholders for a CEO that gets share
prices higher. Even if everyone at Uber quits in a massive crisis of conscious
and lobbies for regulation, health care for drivers, and puppies and rainbows
for everyone, _someone will come around the next day and do the same thing._
And people will use it, because it'll be cheaper.

Maybe society advances technologically faster by screwing everyone over all
the time, except for the people that can afford to defend themselves well
enough. We'll never really know, because those elites are so entrenched now
that you'll never, ever see a world they don't own. Table reservations are the
least of your worries.

~~~
killbill3
Thanks. Exactly my thoughts. 90% of everything is crap (Sturgeon's law).

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millermp12
Berkeley? Nuff said. I used to be well left of center before I moved here but
have since turned into a raving libertarian.

just this morning I heard of a young man from the startup Chariot being
grilled that the service was morally failing the homeless in handicapped who
are less likely to have credit cards. I also wish to be chauffeured to work in
a Bentley and to have a private cessna on weekends. but that doesn't make
providers of these services morally obligated to make it affordable for me. if
it takes a homeless person in an extra 10 minutes to take Muni to occupy their
usual place in the Public Library I'm not going to lose sleep over that.
anyone who suggests otherwise to my face better be wearing a spit shield

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astazangasta
Morality? Silicon Valley? This is a place that made its bones developing
technology for the military. Now we're talking about ethics?

Google's "don't be evil" has always been a snide joke, as they pull in $60
billion a year selling their users lives to corporate America. The rest of the
valley is not any better. Where is the supposition that this place ever had
ideals to lose coming from? Amoral commerce is de rigeur here. Not shocking -
you don't get to throw that much money around unless you are fucking someone
for it.

~~~
sliverstorm
Selling technology to the military is implicitly ethically bankrupt now?

~~~
astazangasta
Yes? They fucking kill people with that stuff, do you know that? Like,
literally drop explosive ordinance from the air and kill small children, sever
their legs and arms, blind them, and so on. Or sometimes it burns their flesh
off, or maybe just gives them cancer twenty years later.

Maybe you're okay with the notion that all of this disgusting violence and
death is justifiable in the service of securing our "national interest" (i.e.,
our access to the natural resources of other countries), but I'm not
interested in making this pretense. People who make millions, or billions,
selling their effort and expertise to the US military so they can more
effectively murder are ethically bankrupt. The more so because they're not
doing so in service of specific objectives which you might argue are good
(say, the war effort in WWII) - they are just literally supporting the ongoing
murderous potential of the military.

