

Why Violence Against Tech Firms May Only Be Beginning - cebuyer
http://www.realcleartechnology.com/articles/2014/01/24/violence_against_tech_firms_may_only_be_beginning_916.html

======
gtirloni
When I saw the title of this article I knew it would mention the Luddites.
Yet, this has nothing to do with people fearing the technology. They are
complaining about a social phenomenon that is increasing rent prices. Had the
prices stayed the same, few would care.

Some personal anecdote: when the company I work for opened a huge chocolate
factory in a very small and poor city, and had to hire employees from outside
that area, the citizens complained (and still do) that rent and groceries
price are very high. People hide their badges when going outside of the
factory to avoid any hostilities.

This has nothing to do with technology.

~~~
tokenizer
I think it does have something to do with technology, in the sense of how
technology, which is a neutral toolset, is being used by the powerful.

For instance, Luddite's first paragraph in wikipedia:

> The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested
> against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817. The
> stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during ^^the
> Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled,
> low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.^^

Emphasis mine.

What we're seeing is another revolution. A technological/economical revolution
that potentially threatens to replace most workers in general with automated
machines on an unprecedented scale. I feel like their is a concern here, and
that some people within the aggressive group would most likely identify with
this concern.

Links regarding this potential revolution:
[http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-
tec...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-
technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-
less) [http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/half-of-all-us-
jobs...](http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/half-of-all-us-jobs-will-be-
automated-but-what-opportunities-will-be-created/)

I don't know what will be the case, whether we create new employment for
people like in our history, or not, because we're treading in new territory.
But regardless of what direction we take, ignoring the masses in terms of
basic needs will be met with violence, death, loss of growth...

Another important factor to include regarding new technologies and industries
are that normal people create them. This requires economic freedom to do, and
stifling future generations with mandatory credentials and debt is not the
most efficient way of doing this.

~~~
cma
You haven't read enough Veblen. Once machines could make things like perfectly
machined aluminum silverware, people just began to desire imperfections that
were hard to produce by machine.

A carpeted dwelling was the pinnacle of opulence until machines and synthetic
fibers made plywood+carpet cheaper than hardwood floors. Once that happened,
after a brief carpet opulence arm race going all the way to shag, carpet was
for low class people and hardwood floors were the new thing.

In this new revolution you are talking, people will just literally start
wearing printed coats made of solved auditable captchas, to prove how
important they are and how much labor they can command and put to waste.

There will be plenty of jobs for a while to come. The revolution will be
dampened by zero-sum status wars. By the time domination over machine
overtakes domination over man as a primary status signal, there won't be any
humans left anyway.

~~~
sbierwagen
Veblen goods are the exception, not the rule. Some products are just killed
outright by advancing technology: the newspaper industry is doomed, those
profits are gone forever now, because there's no market for "hand-written"
investigative stories. Ditto music (to an extent), ditto cable TV.

 _Some_ industries can survive being automated, _most_ cannot.

~~~
humanrebar
Point well taken, but you could argue that news, music, and cable TV are
sectors of the information and entertainment industries, which certainly
contain veblen goods.

------
brudgers
The protest in Berkley was only tangentially about technology. It was mainly a
traditional NIMBY [meant neutrally] anti-developer [in the traditional sense]
protest that happened to ride the zeitgeist of the populist protest across the
bay dressed up with a glaze of Berkeley's anti-war activism [ _The past is
never dead. It 's not even passed. - Faulkner_].

The proposed condominium project which mobilized these activists is in fucking
Berkeley where the poverty rate is 4 points lower than San Fransisco or
Oakland (where 1 in 6 families live below the poverty line).

It wasn't about tech at all.

------
DanBC
For an example of extremist protesting have a look at the animal rights
movement in the UK.

For a long time there were a broad range of groups. There were people involved
in letter writing and politcal campaining at one end, and lab-raiding at the
other end.

Some of the people raiding labs tried to exploit loopholes in English law to
get hold of documents. If you have no i tent to permanently deprive the owner
it isn't theft, so they would take documents, copy them, and return them. They
lost that argument.

And then things got a bit more extreme.

Anti fur campaigners set "smoke bombs" in coats, with the intent to trigger
sprinkler systems and cause water damage. The sprinkler systems didn't work
and the shops burnt down.

Some people involved in animal industries faked bombs - someone involved in
running a hunt claimed activists had set a bomb in his vehicle when he'd done
it.

Then anti hunt activists dug up corpses for ransom.

Relevant to this thread is the amount of activity around Huntingdon Life
Sciences. Activists used a variety of tactics such as campaigning outside
suppliers to HLS. Those suppliers increased their prices or dropped out, which
increased costs. Some activists campaigned outside the homes of people who
worked at HLS or their suppliers.

While I support peaceful vigorous protest (and I hold a gently anti-
vivisection viewpoint) I found a lot of the protesting really troubling.

There was talk of changing the law. I'm not sure if that worked or not. (I'd
have thought that English police have plenty of tools to target such
demonstrations).

~~~
makomk
Yeah, I think animal rights activists got to the point of firebombing the cars
of random low-level employees of the banks that provided financial services to
the construction firms that built the buildings the research was happening in,
because everyone more directly involved was under heavy police protection and
too difficult a target.

------
lostcolony
Page 1: Straightforward, a bit boring, but generally accurate that jobs will
be lost, and society will have to adapt. It sucks, but it may lead to a better
outcome in the end (my personal hope is that those who can't find a job still
make a decent living because we as a society have realized that if society can
tick along without everyone working, then that's okay; we can spread the
wealth and either create demand, thereby getting more people working, or
spread the wealth, still have people not working, but living to acceptable
standards, and that -that is okay-).

Page 2: Goes right off the deep end. Speculating what will happen if we manage
to get AI is the realm of science fiction. It's fair to pontificate on, but to
try and tie it as the next stage from people getting angry over rising real
estate prices is incredibly alarmist.

------
seivan
Firms? This is targeting engineers. Engineers who have to go through shit like
crunch months or deal with ageism.

~~~
walshemj
well of course its easy to fire up sentiments against some one who is
"different" rather than dealing with the substantive issue.

This is just the "nationalist" strain in American politics for the 21's
century and techies are an easy target as we are passive and put up with shit.

If I where Google i would suggest to all the tech company's the they

1 shut down the shuttles

2 give every one a day off and suggest they use it for a mass lobby of the
local politicians

~~~
dkuntz2
Why? Shutting down the shuttles is only going to "prove" to the protesters
that their protests are working, which will lead to them trying to go farther.

Giving in to and placating the protesters isn't going to make them stop, it's
just going to make them try for more, and potentially more outlandish, things.

~~~
walshemj
Having what 25/30k techies turn up at sf town hall in a mass in person lobby
wont make a point?

You could also do a french solution and have all the shuttle drivers drive
their buses into central Sf and shut traffic down.

~~~
dkuntz2
Lobby for what though? That requires a group of typically complacent people
(in this context) to come together to say "something is wrong", and point to a
specific thing. And they'd probably be asked to offer some solutions.

The problem is that there really isn't a problem. Non-techies are angry that
rent is getting higher and that the local government isn't going to loosen
restrictions. From what I can tell the techies don't have a problem with the
rent, because they can pay for it, or are moving to places they can pay for
because they don't have some ridiculous attraction to a specific location.

It seems to me to be entirely one-sided, and the techies don't care, they'll
just wait it out.

------
joesmo
Considering humans haven't built a single, intelligent machine yet, talking
about far-fetched science fiction ideas like singularity and predicting the
future (as if this is ever possible) removes any credibility the author and
article might have had. With the sensationalist headline out of the way, we
just have the current incidents, something not worth addressing. If it ramps
up, these idiots will go to jail. They likely know that and it's likely why
they are protesting google busses and an engineer's home rather than
executives. The upper class has once again turned the lower class on itself
and the lower class is just too stupid to realize it.

------
cognivore
There's something about the dynamic proposed (and said to exist currently)
that I'm not understanding (I know little of economics).

You would think that because of all the automation causing the low employment
and the aggregation of wealth into only a small number of people's hands that
prices would _not_ go up because most people had less money to spend cause
they're not working.

But in many places (Bay Area) it seems like a _lot_ of people are benefiting
from the tech boom, enough that they do drive up prices. But how can such a
small percentage of the population (what percentage of the population in the
Bay Area works in tech?) affect things so universally?

It seems like there might be enough benefit to the automation to go around but
would require people to shift their skill sets?

~~~
nkoren
> You would think that because of all the automation causing the low
> employment and the aggregation of wealth into only a small number of
> people's hands that prices would not go up because most people had less
> money to spend cause they're not working.

Prices are determined not by what most people can afford, but by what makes
the most money for the seller.

To use a contrived example, imagine you are selling a product with no marginal
cost to a population with very high inequality. This population consists of 50
people who can afford to pay $1 for your product, and 1 person who can afford
to pay $100. How much do you, the seller, charge for your product? You can
sell it to 50 people and make $50 profit, or one person and make $100 profit.
Therefore you charge the higher price for the product, even though the
population is overwhelmingly poor.

With a more realistic income-distribution, this same phenomena causes prices
to be dictated more by _mean_ incomes rather than _median_ incomes. As society
becomes more unequal and the gap between mean and median widens, you therefore
can have prices increasing even as the vast majority of people get poorer.

(There's a traditional mechanism for dealing with this: price discrimination.
In the contrived example above, the perfect solution would be to differentiate
your product into a $1 product for poor people, and a $100 product for rich
people; this results in the optimum utility for buyers and sellers alike.
Unfortunately, this kind of price discrimination is becoming increasingly
difficult in today's disintermediated world: the millionaires I know are as
happy as anyone else to order off Amazon. So goods and services increasingly
tend to have a single price, and that price is increasingly set by the mean.)

~~~
yummyfajitas
_This population consists of 50 people who can afford to pay $1 for your
product, and 1 person who can afford to pay $100...You can sell it to 50
people and make $50 profit, or one person and make $100 profit._

This is true for a single monopolistic market incumbent. On the other hand, if
I (the upstart) want to make money, I'll charge $1. I don't care if I just
cost you $100 and I only gained $50 in profit - my choices were either getting
$50 (by selling at $1) or $0 (by selling at $100).

The real estate market is pretty competitive - it's not as if a small
oligopoly owns all the land. So if rent is going up, you should be asking what
what prevents upstarts from buying up a city block and building a gigantic low
cost tower block to house everyone. (Hint: insane SF zoning regulations.)

~~~
nkoren
I'd love to see San Francisco have much more open zoning regulations. They're
clearly a contributor to the high real estate costs. However even if I built a
low-cost arcology in the middle of SF, I can guarantee that it would find a
ready market of rich people willing to pay premium for it. Until the supply of
real estate exceeds the demand of rich people willing to pay for it, the
market will cater primarily to the wealthy and prices will remain high. A
vasty liberalised zoning regime would probably help -- but not until it had
saturated the market to the point where the wealthy were no longer crowding
out the rest.

Unfortunately the financialisation of the real estate industry makes this very
difficult to achieve, as the wealthy will keep acquiring real estate as an
investment long after their need for it as an actual _place to live_ has been
sated.

Solutions to this will almost certainly need to include all of the following:

1.) Liberalisation of zoning & development, as you suggest (see Germany for a
good example of this).

2.) Ending tax breaks which reward the accumulation of real estate. Probably
other measures to de-financialise the real estate sector somewhat, such as
requiring significantly higher reserves for banks.

3.) A Universal Basic Income to provide automation-proof social support /
monetary redistribution in the face of the end of wage labour.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...the wealthy will keep acquiring real estate as an investment long after
their need for it as an actual place to live has been sated._

Negligible problem. SF has a very low vacancy rate. Worry about it if it
happens.

[http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-
vacancy...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-vacancy-
remains-low-despite-building-boom/Content?oid=2622906)

As for (3), we are nowhere near the point where that is necessary. No
developer should ever clean their own house unless labor is scarce. Yet
strangely, we have people claiming they can't find work, and we also have high
costs for domestic labor.

The real problem is that taxes and transfers drastically reduce the incentive
for people to do low skill work:
[http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-
cliffs...](http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs.html)

~~~
nkoren
> Negligible problem. SF has a very low vacancy rate. Worry about it if it
> happens.

But we're not talking about the vacancy rate of housing, we're talking about
the availability of housing for those who aren't housing.

Besides, I live in London, where this issue is accutely non-theoretical.

> As for (3), we are nowhere near the point where that is necessary.

We have large-scale structural underemployment and unemployment; real median
incomes have been falling for a generation and a half; and half the workforce
will be automated out of existence with a decade. We are _right there_.

> The real problem is that taxes and transfers drastically reduce the
> incentive for people to do low skill work:

That's almost precisely wrong. It's not the _provision_ of social transfers
which disincentivises people from working: it's the _withdrawal_ of social
transfers which creates high marginal tax rates. Make the transfers universal
and unconditional, and those disincentives are gone. (I favour a flat UBI
funded by a flat income tax: equality for all).

~~~
yummyfajitas
_We have large-scale structural underemployment and unemployment;..._

And yet you still can't find a maid for $7.25/hour and companies continue
outsourcing work because Americans are too expensive. That shouldn't be
happening if humans were unnecessary, unless of course some other factor was
inducing Americans not to work.

Income has fallen due to a shift in compensation from taxed wages to untaxed
benefits and due to composition changes in the workforce.

[http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM)
[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/immigrants_simpsons_p...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/immigrants_simpsons_paradox_great_stagnation.html)

 _Make the transfers universal and unconditional, and those disincentives are
gone..._

Nope - diminishing marginal utility reduces it.

This has been borne out by experiment - BI reduces working hours by 10% or so.
(As is common on this topic, fawning reporters don't cite primary sources.
Argh.)

[https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-
money...](https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-
everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00)

------
herbig
Society could, as it always has, adjust to this paradigm shift and life will
continue on, with the same arguments to recur in the next generation.

Or

We could be plunged head first into a dark dystopian world where people eat
each other's children and burn the remains to stay warm.

These two equally likely scenarios should be given the same amount of
legitimacy.

------
gaius
It is interesting that violence against newcomers is stereotypically a far
right thing, but in SF it's the far left who are doing it.

~~~
walshemj
There is a tendency for the far left and far right to merge into their own co
joined weirdness

[http://nevertrustahippy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/believing-
in-...](http://nevertrustahippy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/believing-in-
anything.html)

As Paul Evans says above

 _It 's easy to cloak beliefs. Sloppy thinking results in dangerous allies.
Simplifying to gain popularity can be disastrous. Scapegoating is always a
mistake._

~~~
sliverstorm
The way I like to think of it is the political spectrum is actually a circle.
Go far enough left, and you find yourself on the right. Vica versa.

~~~
chrismonsanto
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory)

------
coldcode
It's not real clear why this article is worth reading.

------
michaelochurch
The second half of this is ridiculous speculation. No one knows what's going
to happen in the future.

I expect this discontent to grow, but I don't think that most people have an
issue with "tech firms". It's unfocused anger about economic stagnation and
real estate malfeasance. I doubt the people being priced out of the Mission
care strongly about PRISM. People are trying to direct this unfocused anger
(which looks like it might be the nebula of a left-wing Tea Party) toward
their own pet issues (surveillance) and it won't work that way in the long
run. If this dog runs loose, it will go where it wants.

Having traveled pretty extensively about the country, I think technology has a
huge problem with "placism", coupled with an unhealthy obsession with
pedigree. There's no good reason for technology to be one of the industries
where location matters most. It should be the other way. But Sand Hill Road
VCs won't take you seriously if you're more than 50 miles away, companies like
Google keep the best projects in the Valley office, and having gone to
Stanford matters more than a 150+ IQ. (That's not to say that "having a 150+
IQ", alone, should mean that much. But it is self-evident that a noisy signal
of intelligence should be taken less seriously than raw intelligence itself.)
It's unhealthy for technology, it's bad for the Bay Area, and it's
catastrophic for the rest of the country. Now we're seeing pushback against
technology's location perversion coming not from the engineers, but from Bay
Area locals who are entirely disinterested in technology's placist dynamics,
and who don't have strong opinions of technology either way, any more than
Parisians in 1793 gave a shit which province got its swamps drained and how
such decisions derived from machinations in Versailles.

If there is a wave of violence in the U.S., it won't be "against tech firms"
because tech is not a day-to-day problem for most angry Americans. (Besides,
most cities would love to steal a few tech firms from San Francisco, whose
people sense saturation and no longer want them.) It will be broader, less
localized, and it will be, toward its end, very differently from what it was
when it started. I don't think it's desirable, either; those sorts of
processes are too nonlinear and volatile for anyone to hold blanket opinions
either way.

------
aashishkoirala
Rise of the machines? Seriously?

~~~
joesmo
I'll take talk about singularity more seriously once we have built at least
one intelligent machine. Until then, I just marvel at supposedly intelligent
people's delusions of said singularity.

~~~
sp332
How intelligent does a machine need to be for you?

~~~
joesmo
Good question. The theory of singularity requires "greater-than-human
intelligence"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)).
Anything even approaching any kind of intelligence would be mind-blowing at
this time, however.

------
badman_ting
The flyer mentioned in TFA reminded me more of pro-lifers' postings about
abortion doctors. They would list factual information about the person and
strongly imply violence (though of course never come out and say it)

I think they had to tone it down or at least take a rest when that one doctor
was finally gunned down in a church. I fully expect something along those
lines to happen here.

------
RevolutionOSX
You just know that the Adbusters reading fantasists took part in this while
having iphones in their pocket.

