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Techies Still Think They're the Good Guys. They're Not

137 points by InclinedPlane 9y ago

Alex3917 9y ago
All of the startups mentioned are venture backed. There seems to be a distinctive lack of scandals from the IndieHackers, IndieWeb, Platform.coop, etc. communities.
- jgh 9y ago
  Scandals? Scandals are hardly mentioned in the article. This is about public perception of the tech - specifically startup - industry.
matte_black 9y ago
Many techies were once also the geeks, the nerds, the rejects, the misfits, the outcasts, the beaten and the downtrodden. This creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.
- noncoml 9y ago
  I disagree. The nerds and the geeks are not rejects, misfits or outcasts. They choose to live in distance from the "popular" folks and the crowd around them because they don't understand them and don't find any enjoyment or meaning in that.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    I don’t think they choose to live at a distance, I think they do it to avoid getting hurt. This is purely anecdotal, but I remember a brilliant nerdy kid back in high school days dared to talk back to some bullies that were messing with him. He ended up getting beat the fuck up and they purposely broke his glasses. At the end of the day though, the bullies were still popular and accepted by everyone, and the nerd was still a nerd who should have known his place. How does a life event like that affect someone’s world view later when the very thing that once made them an outcast is suddenly the source of all their power and wealth in this word?
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  It's slick, privileged, socially-adept tech bros who are calling the shots here. The actual misfits and nerds are just the cogs in their machines.
- csydas 9y ago
  While this may be it in some instances, it could be a lot of things I think. For the same reason (geeks/nerds/rejects etc) may feel they cannot by definition be oppressive because they too were oppressed before by the popular ones. Of course, anyone is capable of oppression and discrimination, to varying degrees of efficacy, but that tends to get lost when you feel pretty beat up from others and suddenly are confronted with the fact that they are doing that very thing. The headline is sensational, though, as it's not all techies, no. But at the same time, there are quite a few who, as the article's opening illustration shows, are happy to put their head in the sand and just tell themselves "It's not me doing it, I know what it's like to be oppressed/discriminated against, I did x/y/z action, so I'm a good guy", all as their colleagues have to put up with such non-sense. I would suspect that is where a lot of the frustration and backlash against a lot of tech folk during these issues over the past few years has come from; the eschewing of any responsibility with mantras and "not all of us do that, some of us were the ones that got picked on in high school!". I don't mean to say that there is a concrete hierarchy of suffering and only those with the most suffering may complain; I don't subscribe to the War Orphans in Darfur clause. What I would say is that suffering is suffering and if we can help, the world is better for it. And I think that is the basis for the complaints against tech folk - there is a lot of potential to stop it or to help, but many do not. I get there may be some awkwardness and even professional risk to confronting bad behavior, and I respect that it's a hard decision for some.
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago
  I am one of those misfits (not an evil or unempathetic one i think...), and people like you are just the shitty bullies all over again. Tech has an abundance of non-nerdy types now, and arguably those are the people with enough business and social savvy to have made it into the force it is today. The VCs who choose what to fund, the advertisers that shape content platforms, the founders who care only about engagement.. These socially "well-adjusted" people are just as culpable (if not more) for the evil tech has done, but yet people like you point the finger at nerds and only nerds. There are many, many socially competent people who do evil things, but they have good social skills so you don't care. Its just a trash regurgitation of the hierarchies of high-school all over again. Its oh-so-convenient to believe "evil" ties in perfectly with your intuitive sense of "well-adjusted", to divide the world so easily into "misfit = evil" and "friendly = good", but truly evil people have to blend in as "good" to get anything done. The sociopaths are running the show.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Nerd types are no better ethically then the rest of population. Not worst either I would say, the major difference is lack of influence. Thinking that being nerd implies good and does not help anything ethical. It makes it worst, because it removes doubt.
    - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
      Yep, exactly. I don't think nerds are all good, but I don't think they are all evil because of their childhood experiences either as OP implies. The fact is good and evil people are everywhere.
      - matte_black 9y ago
        I don’t think they are all evil, but I think the cause for at least some evil is shaped by those experiences. Especially on a young impressionable mind.
        sitkack 9y ago
noncoml 9y ago
Because it is not techies the ones that drive technology anymore. Wealth and fame attracted sociopaths that are now running the show.
- xor1 9y ago
  >sociopaths To be more general, Cluster Bs.
  - drdeadringer 9y ago
    I had to look this up. Is this a usual consideration these days?
  - sitkack 9y ago
    I think this overly broad. I can't just label everyone I don't like a Google employee.
- briantakita 9y ago
  Or the atomization, consolidation, & networkization of culture encourages sociopathic behavior in otherwise normal people while emboldening the psychopaths. Excessive amounts of ill gotten gain & subsidies adds fuel to the disconnect built on faulty presuppositions.
- Top19 9y ago
  Tim Ferris mentioned this recently when asked why he moved to Austin, Texas (from SF) during his reddit AMA. His term was “fair-weather entrepreneurs”. Essentially guns for hires without vision who will go wherever easy capital funding is to be found.
  - goldfeld 9y ago
    Isn't Tim Ferris a good reminder of everything that's been going wrong with the web for a while?
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    fwiw Tim Ferris (a fellow alum) is not a techie/nerd type, though he is certainly an entrepreneur.
aikinai 9y ago
Wow, clicked on the Lisa McIntire Tweet linked in the article[0], and that thread is gross. Sure, the company sounds like a terrible idea, and making fun of the concept is fine, but half the replies there are assuming and ridiculing the founders’ names and personalities based on their appearance. [0] https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816 https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816
- sitkack 9y ago
  I am angry at you for showing me that projection of reality.
jswizzy 9y ago
The author seems like a very angry person and I couldn't help but not that they seem to think that Capitalism is somehow to blame for all the world's woes.
- rekado 9y ago
  I think it is time to stop seeing anger as misplaced in discussions. Being labelled "a very angry person" does nothing to invalidate that person's position.
- dingle_thunk 9y ago
  The author is simply reflecting the rising anger in the community. If you don't believe me, look for public polling on trust in Si valley and social media companies, look at politics, or just talk to anyone outside the bubble.
bsder 9y ago
Large, entrenched, heavily-funded tech firms were never the good guys. It was the underfunded, plucky upstarts that were generally the good guys. That hasn't changed. What has changed is that what little accountability we ever had against those large tech firms has completely collapsed. Even the mere thought of an AT&T style breakup would be laughable nowadays.
- emerged 9y ago
  Eh. Plenty of underfunded, plucky startups are the same sort of garbage. No particular lens can encapsulate our woes on its own. Reality is too complex to summarize in a few sentences.
mc32 9y ago
The author has some points --like Netflix and its creepy disclosures that it knows of people's predilections. But, I wish the author were more self aware of their own industry and how it is complicit in what the author is complaining about (the I scratch your back you scratch mine --i.e., I give you juicy scoops, you give me positive words) but also their industry at large --pretending to be agendaless when they all have agendas and biases and use their position of trusted source to push their slants. And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow. Few people outside New York City know what a bodega is. Next thing "deli" or "Danish" is frowned upon cuz... ??? someone saw someone seeing an idea and running with it?
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow." Bodegas are small family businesses generally run by immigrants. So yeah they are kind of sacred. Wanting to disrupt small family run businesses is kind of a shitty aspiration. And a good example of being out of touch and tone deaf. The rapper referenced in the article if from NYC where bodegas are an institution. bodega.ai's slogan is "Everyday Essentials, Instantly" which is the exact functionality that a real bodega already provides. It's like something right out Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley."
  - mc32 9y ago
    So where was all the opposition and outcry to disrupting all small biz taxi drivers by Uber, or all the mom and pop bookstores by Amazon, etc? It's no different. People celebrate disruption, until they don't. There is no difference in why on the one hand Uber is celebrated but Bodega isn't. Or any number of disruptors who displace small biz and automate and make the biz more efficient, etc.
    - veridies 9y ago
      That opposition is constant. Huge numbers of people object to Uber and are concerned about taxi drivers, while Uber has made no effort to alleviate the externalities of their business. And small bookstores, their owners, and their patrons complain constantly about Amazon. Have these criticisms really not reached you?
Veratyr 9y ago
I'm not sure if the title has been editorialized or changed. The current title is "The Other Tech Bubble".
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Hover your mouse over the tab the article is loaded in that is the title.
goldfeld 9y ago
Have people longing to sell out their team and vision for a get rich scheme and inspire others to do the same ever been qualified as "good guys"?
jessriedel 9y ago
It is striking how honest this journalist is being about purposely determining the slant of stories (rather than being driven by the facts at hand). He used to have a general positive impression of the startup community, so he chose to write positive stories about individual startups. Now he has a general negative impression and he chooses to write negative stories about individual startups. You only see that sort of honesty because he's convinced himself he sees the overarching truth so clearly.
- code_scrapping 9y ago
  It's a "she". But I agree. The article reads as "these guys seem desperate, let me kick them one more time, it's for their own good". It's one thing to be driven by facts, calling out bad things when you see them, this reads like an opinion piece saying "they still haven't learned". And "they" is wildly generalized. It seem that "entrepreneur" is becoming synonymous to "arrogant, sexist asshole", and if think that, you're actually creating another problem, not solving the existing one.
rdtsc 9y ago
> Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. This is kind of how I feel. Both about Google and Facebook - on one hand they are large companies, Google for example lobby the government [1] more than Verizon, Shell or say Goldman and somehow the irrational part of my brain is still telling me "Oh but they are just the cutesy little startup with colorful letters and a nice search feature and their motto says they are not evil and such". For many people especially in some countries being on the internet is effectively being on Facebook. I like how India fought back against Facebook's "free internet". There was a collective push-back. There should be a similar one against Google and others. These companies are holding more information about people than any state security service out there. It's not just people who volunteered the info (even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2]), I for one never signed up for Facebook, but I have no doubt they know who I am and have a profile on me. How is Facebook going to use that info? What if some repressive government wants it and subpoenas Facebook to give it to them or they simply get hacked like Equifax. People should at least be afraid of them more than they are afraid of the bankers and the oil or tobacco executives like the article alludes to at the end. [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D000067823&year=2017 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D0000678... [2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
- RyanZAG 9y ago
  > even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2] Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That seems counter intuitive to me.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    > Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That seems counter intuitive to me. Well I'd hope they wouldn't be lies and he would actually care a bit more about storing and using that data and have more respect for his users. But I think you are saying given his motivations and personality, wouldn't it be better if he is honest about his feelings, then yes, that's certainly preferable.
d--b 9y ago
People commenting here are negative about the article, saying "yes, the industry has its share of douchebags but...". And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a whole bunch of jobs. Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought quality college classes to a large audience, etc. However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the general public distrusts big tech companies.
- lyndonjohnsonbe 9y ago
  > The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.
  - lafar6502 9y ago
    And in EU we have government grants - free money for all kinds of tech-scams , created just for the purpose of consuming these funds. Of course destroying any legit businesses that suddenly have to compete against these state-funded parasites. Thanks, socialists
    - tnzn 9y ago
      Nice bait and nice misuse of the word "socialist". Capitalists are taking advantage of state funds, duh it's socialism fault.
NiklasMort 9y ago
I can't be the only techy who got more and more technophob over the last 10 years, which many of my friends find so funny and if they ask me why I usually respond with "because I know what's on the dark side"
- bogomipz 9y ago
  Technophob in what sense?
- cJ0th 9y ago
  So am I. Computers looked like the perfect solution to many problems - and perhaps they are, but then things on the human side went very wrong. Too many 'wrong people' in the right place at the right time (Founders with shitty ethics, politicians/lawmaker with zero technological understanding, way too many lobbyists per activist ...)
- feistypharit 9y ago
  Me too. I've moved from spending nearly every waking hour on the computer to about 10 hours a week. Basically transitioned from developer to stay at home dad. I try to be careful what my kids do and see me do with technology.
watwut 9y ago
The issue is that people idealized both techies and startups. Put them on pedestal. The trouble is, techies and startups were never movie good guys. They were ... just mix of guys. Some good, some bad and generally normal and all that much different from any body else. A bit arrogant and believing that they are something special, but other groups habe that too. Now it turned out they could not stay on pedestal, because no real group of people can. They are people, not mystical Madonnas.
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InclinedPlane 9y ago
Note that the underlying problem isn't that "tech" is good or bad, the problem is that tech workers over the past many years have evaded their responsibility to ensure that the work they do is beneficial rather than harmful by pretending that this responsibility didn't exist. That the responsibility lay elsewhere (on users, for example) or that the technology they were creating was somehow orthogonal to the issue of morality. And, further, you can see this influencing behavior at all levels, including behavior in the office and between coworkers. People see software like a bridge or a highway and imagine that simply building such things is morally neutral. But if you build a highway by destroying a neighborhood full of black businesses that has implications on society and racial equality. If you build a highway in a way that excludes the addition of a rail line along it or that has unusually low overpasses which limit where buses can take people then you are deepening socio-economic divisions and exclusions. (These aren't just hypotheticals, look up the history of Robert Moses for a prime example.) Stop thinking of tech workers as being part of some scrappy, underdog counter-culture. Geek culture is mainstream culture. The tech industry is the establishment. Tech workers are elites who are working to maintain the establishment. If you're a coder working at Facebook or Apple in 2017 you are little different from the people working at General Electric, Exxon, Union Carbide, Raytheon, Dow Chemical, or Phillip Morris back in the 1960s. You may wear a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie while they wore business suits, but that's a superficial difference. What we build and what we do affects the world in profound ways. We must develop the skills to wrestle with the morality and the social consequences of what we build as well as take on the responsibility to build things that make the world a better place. We are not simply cogs in a machine, when we decide to go to work at amazon, or uber, or facebook we are making a choice in how our talents will change the world and affect people's lives. We need to be mindful of that. Every day.
- jboles 9y ago
  One of the best comments in this thread.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  >pretending that this responsibility didn't exist. We are not pretending that responsibility does not exist: we are denying it. I spent 12 years in school being told to care about people who didn't give any shit about me, just so they could exploit how naive I was. It took me way to long to see through that shit and I am not falling for it again.
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tobbyb 9y ago
There has been a clear betrayal of the people. All the loud claims of freedom and liberalism by techies from the 90s has come to nought and infact moved the other way. Techies have dropped any pretense of ethical behavior and are hiding behind user ignorance to abuse them. Google, Facebook and others creepy surveillance behavior has been more or less normalized and few seem to have a problem working for them and furthering their agendas. Once the infrastructure for surveillance exists, things change whether you like it or not. You can't be a victim all the time, at some point you need to take responsibility, if you can behave with integrity you can't expect it from society.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  I worked for Google for a long time. I never had a problem working for him or "furthering their agenda" because back then they didn't really have an agenda, beyond doing cool stuff on the web. The idea that these organisations are unethical doesn't stick. Here's the brutal reality - people care about privacy from the people immediately around them. They value Incognito Mode because they want to hide their browsing history from partner/friends/family/etc. They don't value encrypted email because they assign a value of near zero to hiding messages from Google. And why not? Privacy leaks out of these organisations are so rare as to be non-existent. They control their employees access very tightly and I can remember exactly one case of a genuine scandal involving a Google SRE maliciously accessing accounts. For a company coming up to 20 years old that's a good track record. Moreover, it's convenient to trust a large corporation. They will help you if you forget your password instead of saying "sorry, no key no access". They back things up for you, give you magical search functionality, filter stuff for you, show you useful stuff. And it costs you nothing! It's a deal so great everyone takes it. The day I really came to understand that whinging about online privacy was just a crappy form of journalistic champagne socialism was when I took part in a system that showed me how much money advertisers were spending in the auction to appear on my screen during an ordinary few days of browsing. I saw that data because I was interested in the idea of letting people bid themselves out of seeing online ads. It was a staggering amount of money. Many many multiples the cost of my cable TV/internet subscription. Even as a well paid engineer I'd not have considered actually doing it. And for people on a more average salary? Trying to get rid of online ads or making them less efficient would just mean they couldn't afford to use the internet at all. I came to realise that no people would ever agree to pay for the true cost of their own web browsing. It was well targeted ads or it was no web sites. Since then articles like these moaning about the evil ad-driven tech industry just make me roll my eyes. Don't like it Ms Journalist? Get rid of all the advertising and sleasy agenda-driven copy in your own industry first, then lecture others.
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cyphunk 9y ago
lol, the Sam Altman quote is classic... what a duche: “This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,” I absolutely abhor arguments that are based on the quest for pure excellence. I promise you nearly every discriminatory argument in history was based on excellence. And yes, to have civility we have to get over that and say: no, you can't say shit about gay people. If that changes some elite collectives overall IQ, get the fuck over it. Your novel comment on physics is simply lower on the scale of priorities.
laurex 9y ago
What's happened in Silicon Valley is that primarily white young men have had power and are funded and listened to in a fairly bubble-like way. It seems incorrect to say, "tech is bad," by citing a bunch of bro disasters. It might be fair to say, "as a journalist, I plan to be highly skeptical of tech startups looking for press who are led by a team of 20-something white dudes." At least that seems plausible. But if there are solutions to a lot of the mess that we've made pre- and post- the rise of Silicon Valley, they're likely to be technological.
squozzer 9y ago
If we were only so lucky that people in government could acquire the self-consciousness that the writer wishes for tech.

137 points by InclinedPlane 9y ago

All of the startups mentioned are venture backed. There seems to be a distinctive lack of scandals from the IndieHackers, IndieWeb, Platform.coop, etc. communities.

jgh 9y ago
Scandals? Scandals are hardly mentioned in the article. This is about public perception of the tech - specifically startup - industry.

matte_black 9y ago

Many techies were once also the geeks, the nerds, the rejects, the misfits, the outcasts, the beaten and the downtrodden. This creates the perfect foundation for personalities with something to prove and little to no empathy to stop them from doing it.

noncoml 9y ago
I disagree. The nerds and the geeks are not rejects, misfits or outcasts. They choose to live in distance from the "popular" folks and the crowd around them because they don't understand them and don't find any enjoyment or meaning in that.
- matte_black 9y ago
  I don’t think they choose to live at a distance, I think they do it to avoid getting hurt. This is purely anecdotal, but I remember a brilliant nerdy kid back in high school days dared to talk back to some bullies that were messing with him. He ended up getting beat the fuck up and they purposely broke his glasses. At the end of the day though, the bullies were still popular and accepted by everyone, and the nerd was still a nerd who should have known his place. How does a life event like that affect someone’s world view later when the very thing that once made them an outcast is suddenly the source of all their power and wealth in this word?
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
It's slick, privileged, socially-adept tech bros who are calling the shots here. The actual misfits and nerds are just the cogs in their machines.
csydas 9y ago
While this may be it in some instances, it could be a lot of things I think. For the same reason (geeks/nerds/rejects etc) may feel they cannot by definition be oppressive because they too were oppressed before by the popular ones. Of course, anyone is capable of oppression and discrimination, to varying degrees of efficacy, but that tends to get lost when you feel pretty beat up from others and suddenly are confronted with the fact that they are doing that very thing. The headline is sensational, though, as it's not all techies, no. But at the same time, there are quite a few who, as the article's opening illustration shows, are happy to put their head in the sand and just tell themselves "It's not me doing it, I know what it's like to be oppressed/discriminated against, I did x/y/z action, so I'm a good guy", all as their colleagues have to put up with such non-sense. I would suspect that is where a lot of the frustration and backlash against a lot of tech folk during these issues over the past few years has come from; the eschewing of any responsibility with mantras and "not all of us do that, some of us were the ones that got picked on in high school!". I don't mean to say that there is a concrete hierarchy of suffering and only those with the most suffering may complain; I don't subscribe to the War Orphans in Darfur clause. What I would say is that suffering is suffering and if we can help, the world is better for it. And I think that is the basis for the complaints against tech folk - there is a lot of potential to stop it or to help, but many do not. I get there may be some awkwardness and even professional risk to confronting bad behavior, and I respect that it's a hard decision for some.
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
I am one of those misfits (not an evil or unempathetic one i think...), and people like you are just the shitty bullies all over again. Tech has an abundance of non-nerdy types now, and arguably those are the people with enough business and social savvy to have made it into the force it is today. The VCs who choose what to fund, the advertisers that shape content platforms, the founders who care only about engagement.. These socially "well-adjusted" people are just as culpable (if not more) for the evil tech has done, but yet people like you point the finger at nerds and only nerds. There are many, many socially competent people who do evil things, but they have good social skills so you don't care. Its just a trash regurgitation of the hierarchies of high-school all over again. Its oh-so-convenient to believe "evil" ties in perfectly with your intuitive sense of "well-adjusted", to divide the world so easily into "misfit = evil" and "friendly = good", but truly evil people have to blend in as "good" to get anything done. The sociopaths are running the show.
- watwut 9y ago
  Nerd types are no better ethically then the rest of population. Not worst either I would say, the major difference is lack of influence. Thinking that being nerd implies good and does not help anything ethical. It makes it worst, because it removes doubt.
  - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
    Yep, exactly. I don't think nerds are all good, but I don't think they are all evil because of their childhood experiences either as OP implies. The fact is good and evil people are everywhere.
    - matte_black 9y ago
      I don’t think they are all evil, but I think the cause for at least some evil is shaped by those experiences. Especially on a young impressionable mind.
      - sitkack 9y ago

noncoml 9y ago

Because it is not techies the ones that drive technology anymore. Wealth and fame attracted sociopaths that are now running the show.

xor1 9y ago
>sociopaths To be more general, Cluster Bs.
- drdeadringer 9y ago
  I had to look this up. Is this a usual consideration these days?
- sitkack 9y ago
  I think this overly broad. I can't just label everyone I don't like a Google employee.
briantakita 9y ago
Or the atomization, consolidation, & networkization of culture encourages sociopathic behavior in otherwise normal people while emboldening the psychopaths. Excessive amounts of ill gotten gain & subsidies adds fuel to the disconnect built on faulty presuppositions.
Top19 9y ago
Tim Ferris mentioned this recently when asked why he moved to Austin, Texas (from SF) during his reddit AMA. His term was “fair-weather entrepreneurs”. Essentially guns for hires without vision who will go wherever easy capital funding is to be found.
- goldfeld 9y ago
  Isn't Tim Ferris a good reminder of everything that's been going wrong with the web for a while?
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  fwiw Tim Ferris (a fellow alum) is not a techie/nerd type, though he is certainly an entrepreneur.

aikinai 9y ago

Wow, clicked on the Lisa McIntire Tweet linked in the article[0], and that thread is gross. Sure, the company sounds like a terrible idea, and making fun of the concept is fine, but half the replies there are assuming and ridiculing the founders’ names and personalities based on their appearance. [0] https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816 https://twitter.com/LisaMcIntire/status/932298481686818816

sitkack 9y ago
I am angry at you for showing me that projection of reality.

jswizzy 9y ago

The author seems like a very angry person and I couldn't help but not that they seem to think that Capitalism is somehow to blame for all the world's woes.

rekado 9y ago
I think it is time to stop seeing anger as misplaced in discussions. Being labelled "a very angry person" does nothing to invalidate that person's position.
dingle_thunk 9y ago
The author is simply reflecting the rising anger in the community. If you don't believe me, look for public polling on trust in Si valley and social media companies, look at politics, or just talk to anyone outside the bubble.

bsder 9y ago

Large, entrenched, heavily-funded tech firms were never the good guys. It was the underfunded, plucky upstarts that were generally the good guys. That hasn't changed. What has changed is that what little accountability we ever had against those large tech firms has completely collapsed. Even the mere thought of an AT&T style breakup would be laughable nowadays.

emerged 9y ago
Eh. Plenty of underfunded, plucky startups are the same sort of garbage. No particular lens can encapsulate our woes on its own. Reality is too complex to summarize in a few sentences.

mc32 9y ago

The author has some points --like Netflix and its creepy disclosures that it knows of people's predilections. But, I wish the author were more self aware of their own industry and how it is complicit in what the author is complaining about (the I scratch your back you scratch mine --i.e., I give you juicy scoops, you give me positive words) but also their industry at large --pretending to be agendaless when they all have agendas and biases and use their position of trusted source to push their slants. And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow. Few people outside New York City know what a bodega is. Next thing "deli" or "Danish" is frowned upon cuz... ??? someone saw someone seeing an idea and running with it?

bogomipz 9y ago
>"And what's with the swipe at Bodega, as if is it a sacred cow." Bodegas are small family businesses generally run by immigrants. So yeah they are kind of sacred. Wanting to disrupt small family run businesses is kind of a shitty aspiration. And a good example of being out of touch and tone deaf. The rapper referenced in the article if from NYC where bodegas are an institution. bodega.ai's slogan is "Everyday Essentials, Instantly" which is the exact functionality that a real bodega already provides. It's like something right out Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley."
- mc32 9y ago
  So where was all the opposition and outcry to disrupting all small biz taxi drivers by Uber, or all the mom and pop bookstores by Amazon, etc? It's no different. People celebrate disruption, until they don't. There is no difference in why on the one hand Uber is celebrated but Bodega isn't. Or any number of disruptors who displace small biz and automate and make the biz more efficient, etc.
  - veridies 9y ago
    That opposition is constant. Huge numbers of people object to Uber and are concerned about taxi drivers, while Uber has made no effort to alleviate the externalities of their business. And small bookstores, their owners, and their patrons complain constantly about Amazon. Have these criticisms really not reached you?

Veratyr 9y ago

I'm not sure if the title has been editorialized or changed. The current title is "The Other Tech Bubble".

InclinedPlane 9y ago
Hover your mouse over the tab the article is loaded in that is the title.

goldfeld 9y ago

Have people longing to sell out their team and vision for a get rich scheme and inspire others to do the same ever been qualified as "good guys"?

jessriedel 9y ago

It is striking how honest this journalist is being about purposely determining the slant of stories (rather than being driven by the facts at hand). He used to have a general positive impression of the startup community, so he chose to write positive stories about individual startups. Now he has a general negative impression and he chooses to write negative stories about individual startups. You only see that sort of honesty because he's convinced himself he sees the overarching truth so clearly.

code_scrapping 9y ago
It's a "she". But I agree. The article reads as "these guys seem desperate, let me kick them one more time, it's for their own good". It's one thing to be driven by facts, calling out bad things when you see them, this reads like an opinion piece saying "they still haven't learned". And "they" is wildly generalized. It seem that "entrepreneur" is becoming synonymous to "arrogant, sexist asshole", and if think that, you're actually creating another problem, not solving the existing one.

rdtsc 9y ago

> Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. This is kind of how I feel. Both about Google and Facebook - on one hand they are large companies, Google for example lobby the government [1] more than Verizon, Shell or say Goldman and somehow the irrational part of my brain is still telling me "Oh but they are just the cutesy little startup with colorful letters and a nice search feature and their motto says they are not evil and such". For many people especially in some countries being on the internet is effectively being on Facebook. I like how India fought back against Facebook's "free internet". There was a collective push-back. There should be a similar one against Google and others. These companies are holding more information about people than any state security service out there. It's not just people who volunteered the info (even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2]), I for one never signed up for Facebook, but I have no doubt they know who I am and have a profile on me. How is Facebook going to use that info? What if some repressive government wants it and subpoenas Facebook to give it to them or they simply get hacked like Equifax. People should at least be afraid of them more than they are afraid of the bankers and the oil or tobacco executives like the article alludes to at the end. [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D000067823&year=2017 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientagns.php?id=D0000678... [2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

RyanZAG 9y ago
> even then sadly Zuckerberg called them Dumb Fucks, a "thank you" would have be nicer I'd think...[2] Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That seems counter intuitive to me.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > Why do you think Zuckerberg telling lies you want to hear would be nicer? That seems counter intuitive to me. Well I'd hope they wouldn't be lies and he would actually care a bit more about storing and using that data and have more respect for his users. But I think you are saying given his motivations and personality, wouldn't it be better if he is honest about his feelings, then yes, that's certainly preferable.

d--b 9y ago

People commenting here are negative about the article, saying "yes, the industry has its share of douchebags but...". And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a whole bunch of jobs. Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought quality college classes to a large audience, etc. However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the general public distrusts big tech companies.

lyndonjohnsonbe 9y ago
> The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.
- lafar6502 9y ago
  And in EU we have government grants - free money for all kinds of tech-scams , created just for the purpose of consuming these funds. Of course destroying any legit businesses that suddenly have to compete against these state-funded parasites. Thanks, socialists
  - tnzn 9y ago
    Nice bait and nice misuse of the word "socialist". Capitalists are taking advantage of state funds, duh it's socialism fault.

NiklasMort 9y ago

I can't be the only techy who got more and more technophob over the last 10 years, which many of my friends find so funny and if they ask me why I usually respond with "because I know what's on the dark side"

bogomipz 9y ago
Technophob in what sense?
cJ0th 9y ago
So am I. Computers looked like the perfect solution to many problems - and perhaps they are, but then things on the human side went very wrong. Too many 'wrong people' in the right place at the right time (Founders with shitty ethics, politicians/lawmaker with zero technological understanding, way too many lobbyists per activist ...)
feistypharit 9y ago
Me too. I've moved from spending nearly every waking hour on the computer to about 10 hours a week. Basically transitioned from developer to stay at home dad. I try to be careful what my kids do and see me do with technology.

watwut 9y ago

The issue is that people idealized both techies and startups. Put them on pedestal. The trouble is, techies and startups were never movie good guys. They were ... just mix of guys. Some good, some bad and generally normal and all that much different from any body else. A bit arrogant and believing that they are something special, but other groups habe that too. Now it turned out they could not stay on pedestal, because no real group of people can. They are people, not mystical Madonnas.

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InclinedPlane 9y ago

Note that the underlying problem isn't that "tech" is good or bad, the problem is that tech workers over the past many years have evaded their responsibility to ensure that the work they do is beneficial rather than harmful by pretending that this responsibility didn't exist. That the responsibility lay elsewhere (on users, for example) or that the technology they were creating was somehow orthogonal to the issue of morality. And, further, you can see this influencing behavior at all levels, including behavior in the office and between coworkers. People see software like a bridge or a highway and imagine that simply building such things is morally neutral. But if you build a highway by destroying a neighborhood full of black businesses that has implications on society and racial equality. If you build a highway in a way that excludes the addition of a rail line along it or that has unusually low overpasses which limit where buses can take people then you are deepening socio-economic divisions and exclusions. (These aren't just hypotheticals, look up the history of Robert Moses for a prime example.) Stop thinking of tech workers as being part of some scrappy, underdog counter-culture. Geek culture is mainstream culture. The tech industry is the establishment. Tech workers are elites who are working to maintain the establishment. If you're a coder working at Facebook or Apple in 2017 you are little different from the people working at General Electric, Exxon, Union Carbide, Raytheon, Dow Chemical, or Phillip Morris back in the 1960s. You may wear a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie while they wore business suits, but that's a superficial difference. What we build and what we do affects the world in profound ways. We must develop the skills to wrestle with the morality and the social consequences of what we build as well as take on the responsibility to build things that make the world a better place. We are not simply cogs in a machine, when we decide to go to work at amazon, or uber, or facebook we are making a choice in how our talents will change the world and affect people's lives. We need to be mindful of that. Every day.

jboles 9y ago
One of the best comments in this thread.
tomjen3 9y ago
>pretending that this responsibility didn't exist. We are not pretending that responsibility does not exist: we are denying it. I spent 12 years in school being told to care about people who didn't give any shit about me, just so they could exploit how naive I was. It took me way to long to see through that shit and I am not falling for it again.

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tobbyb 9y ago

There has been a clear betrayal of the people. All the loud claims of freedom and liberalism by techies from the 90s has come to nought and infact moved the other way. Techies have dropped any pretense of ethical behavior and are hiding behind user ignorance to abuse them. Google, Facebook and others creepy surveillance behavior has been more or less normalized and few seem to have a problem working for them and furthering their agendas. Once the infrastructure for surveillance exists, things change whether you like it or not. You can't be a victim all the time, at some point you need to take responsibility, if you can behave with integrity you can't expect it from society.

peoplewindow 9y ago
I worked for Google for a long time. I never had a problem working for him or "furthering their agenda" because back then they didn't really have an agenda, beyond doing cool stuff on the web. The idea that these organisations are unethical doesn't stick. Here's the brutal reality - people care about privacy from the people immediately around them. They value Incognito Mode because they want to hide their browsing history from partner/friends/family/etc. They don't value encrypted email because they assign a value of near zero to hiding messages from Google. And why not? Privacy leaks out of these organisations are so rare as to be non-existent. They control their employees access very tightly and I can remember exactly one case of a genuine scandal involving a Google SRE maliciously accessing accounts. For a company coming up to 20 years old that's a good track record. Moreover, it's convenient to trust a large corporation. They will help you if you forget your password instead of saying "sorry, no key no access". They back things up for you, give you magical search functionality, filter stuff for you, show you useful stuff. And it costs you nothing! It's a deal so great everyone takes it. The day I really came to understand that whinging about online privacy was just a crappy form of journalistic champagne socialism was when I took part in a system that showed me how much money advertisers were spending in the auction to appear on my screen during an ordinary few days of browsing. I saw that data because I was interested in the idea of letting people bid themselves out of seeing online ads. It was a staggering amount of money. Many many multiples the cost of my cable TV/internet subscription. Even as a well paid engineer I'd not have considered actually doing it. And for people on a more average salary? Trying to get rid of online ads or making them less efficient would just mean they couldn't afford to use the internet at all. I came to realise that no people would ever agree to pay for the true cost of their own web browsing. It was well targeted ads or it was no web sites. Since then articles like these moaning about the evil ad-driven tech industry just make me roll my eyes. Don't like it Ms Journalist? Get rid of all the advertising and sleasy agenda-driven copy in your own industry first, then lecture others.

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cyphunk 9y ago

lol, the Sam Altman quote is classic... what a duche: “This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics,” I absolutely abhor arguments that are based on the quest for pure excellence. I promise you nearly every discriminatory argument in history was based on excellence. And yes, to have civility we have to get over that and say: no, you can't say shit about gay people. If that changes some elite collectives overall IQ, get the fuck over it. Your novel comment on physics is simply lower on the scale of priorities.

laurex 9y ago

What's happened in Silicon Valley is that primarily white young men have had power and are funded and listened to in a fairly bubble-like way. It seems incorrect to say, "tech is bad," by citing a bunch of bro disasters. It might be fair to say, "as a journalist, I plan to be highly skeptical of tech startups looking for press who are led by a team of 20-something white dudes." At least that seems plausible. But if there are solutions to a lot of the mess that we've made pre- and post- the rise of Silicon Valley, they're likely to be technological.

squozzer 9y ago

If we were only so lucky that people in government could acquire the self-consciousness that the writer wishes for tech.