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Why can’t San Francisco’s tech culture solve the city’s social problems?
- megamindbrian2 9y agoBecause they all agree the problem existed before SV became tech capital, so why is it their problem to solve?
- twright 9y agosomewhere in 2038 AD "I didn't start this clock, so I clearly have nothing to do with it and it won't affect me. It predates us, so why should we fix it?" This attitude would be well and good if everyone's actions or lack thereof only affected themselves. Or if the whole point in life was to just constantly screw each other over as much as possible, instead of maybe -and this is a crazy idea- trying to make things a little better for everyone?
- VeronicaJJ123 9y agoWell, may be people were shitting on SF streets well before Twitter and Facebook but the stink affects the current people and they might want to do something about it today.
- saas_co_de 9y agoWhile it isn't the responsibility of the tech industry to fix these problems, per se, it certainly would be a great demonstration of the power of technology if the tech community could use the tools they create to better organize society, elect more effective politicians, enact better legislation, and address the negative social impacts of income and wealth inequality. It is also possible though that the progressive belief that poverty and inequality are "solvable" problems is simply wrong. Maybe there aren't "solutions" to these problems and it is a waste of time to even try.
- jamesmcintyre 9y agoIf you view the societal impact of technology through the lens of systems thinking one conclusion might be that it concentrates economic power. The actors in society which have the means by which to create and leverage new technologies (i.e. automation) will collect much more economic and political power while those without the means will increasingly find themselves with less leverage, less political and economic power. If you can even partly agree that his is one effect of Silicon Valley's modus operandi of relentless, and often ambivalent progress then should we not at least attempt to counter-balance this effect? Imagine you could take a god-like view of the evolution of the human species' capacity for forms of civilization over a long span of time, from something like feudalism to a more robust, modern democracy and then imagine observing from this perspective the increasing anomalous occurrence of an entirely new phenomenon which totally upheaves and restructures forms of order within these budding civilizations. If you could imagine these phenomena, at first isolated and only marginally impactful upon societal structures, becoming more and more frequent only to eventually reveal that what lies in the wake of many of these events is an increased clustering of those who benefit from these events and separately the clustering of those who do not, would it not seem as though the evolution of social order may be regressing? Falling back to a baser form? Perhaps these events are "disruptive spikes" in an otherwise smooth, positive trajectory and we should expect bumps along the way as there have always been with progress. Or perhaps the sum total of our society's approach to harnessing technology is surreptitiously eating away at the very core structures of our evolved forms of fair and just society. Shouldn't we err on the side of caution and at least, if only at first in our intentions, set on a path towards consciously designing ways for technology to better benefit all of society and not just the narrow aims which seem to reverberate from the past?
- VeronicaJJ123 9y agoTech people are mostly useless to solve societal problems as the indoor only geeks are not very smart at realizing the real world problems.