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This headline is valuable in being so precisely mistaken. I've been around Silicon Valley since the late 90s. It hasn't changed. What has changed is the amount

This headline is valuable in being so precisely mistaken. I've been around Silicon Valley since the late 90s. It hasn't changed. What has changed is the amount of attention you can get by attacking it. When Google was little, it seemed cute and inconsequential. To attack it would have seemed mean (and inconsequential). Now that Google is big, attacking it reads instead as "speaking truth to power." But Google is no more evil now than it was in the past. Which is not to say that Google was ever perfect, just that the change in reporters' attitudes toward it derives – whether the reporters realize it or not – from nothing more than its increased size.

maxxxxx 9y ago
I think companies have to become more evil or oppressive the bigger they get. They turn from nimble, innovative and disruptive to dominant and mainly maintaining the status quo. Happened to google, Microsoft, Apple and lots of others. I think the current backlash comes mostly from the fact that Google got a lot of good PR out of slogans like "don't be evil" until it turned out that they are just another greedy big corporation.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Google got a lot of good PR out of slogans like "don't be evil" When was this? I admit I only started reading English media around 2002, but I always remember it being used as a rhetorical device against them.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Maybe it started to tilt then, but definitely they had a good aura to them. They had a solid connection (imagined or real) to open source and Linux. They were very different from old evils. The old evils walked in suits and wielded contracts, we had come to recognise them by their appearances.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I don't disagree that Google had a much better public image, I'm just saying it was despite that slogan, not because of it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sowbug 9y ago
    The original public phrasing was something like "We believe it's possible for a corporation to make money without being evil." The original motto was meant as a snarky summary of a typical long list of positive corporate values. "Look, you can remember all these things, or just remember to pick the not-evil choice." More: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html
  - ikeyany 9y ago
    In the early 2000s, people were saying "Google is going to take over the world" with a smile. Not so much now.
jamra 9y ago
Well, given the Snowden leaks and knowing the forced complacency with government surveillance, I think that people are just waking up to just how invasive technology is in our lives. The direction we're moving towards seems to be one in which Amazon controls what you can buy by blocking out competing products. Google controlling what you can learn by censoring results based on politics. Facebook controls which news you read by allowing for purchased content. It may be related to the size of the company, but I think it's more related to the general conscientiousness of society as a whole and the awareness of how dangerous these companies are.
- skj 9y ago
  > Google controlling what you can learn by censoring results based on politics. Is there an example of this?
  - random4369 9y ago
    China. Searching 'tiananmen square' or 'tank' man' won't show any traces of those events.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Are you sure? Google.cn still redirects to Google.com.hk for me, and Google.com.hk finds "tank man" just fine.
      - random4369 9y ago
        This is a comparatively recent change, to which China responded by temporarily blocking google. Earlier in their history, they did facilitate Chinese state censorship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
        icebraining 9y ago
        I don't excuse Google for having ceded to China's censorship. But that doesn't mean it isn't factually false to say "Searching 'tiananmen square' or 'tank' man' won't show any traces of those events" when that stopped happening almost a decade ago.
vadimberman 9y ago
> I've been around Silicon Valley since the late 90s. It hasn't changed. I haven't been there physically but observed it from the distance. Google or not, wasn't the Silicon Valley of the 1990s more about creating new technologies and less about kissing VC asses, repackaging crap, pumping valuations, and screaming "innovation"?
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  You are forgetting the .COM bubble which was pretty much a pile of pure bullshit without much substance.
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    There was a lot of bullshit but there was a lot of substance. Off the top of my head: * server-side web * first web-based payments * VoIP * first mobile devices * e-commerce * text messaging * music piracy... I mean, sharing * search engines And I could go on forever.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      I think it's very similar to now. A lot of good stuff is happening but way too many companies copying each other fueled by an excess of investment money.
      - vadimberman 9y ago
        A lot of good stuff, yes. But the advances of the last decade are dwarfed by the advances of 1990s.
    - amelius 9y ago
      It wasn't high-tech. Just what IT is supposed to be for.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Lots of honest naïveté then though. Edit: also what vadimberman said
rvail2 9y ago
While their intentions may not have changed, the power and influence they have accumulated has changed a lot. Face recognition and virtual assistants that seem to always be listening without your consent or knowledge bothers people.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
peterwwillis 9y ago
> the change in reporters' attitudes toward it derives [..] from nothing more than its increased size An ant becomes pretty scary when it grows to 100 feet tall.
x2398dh1 9y ago
Google and people deep in Silicon Valley do not have the capability to judge whether they are seen as evil because evilness is a matter of taste and ideology. Of course no one sees themselves as evil - that is never the question. The question is, "do others see us as evil?" One perspective is that monopolies are not inherently evil, because 1) It's a matter of perspective - what is Google a Monopoly in - advertising? Or web search? They may be completely dominant in web search, but they are a tiny player in web advertising in the grand scheme of things, which is interesting because that is their main business. 2) Monopolies are regularly supplanted by new monopolies, and provide stable financial ground upon which other "hard innovation," can happen, as with AT&T in the 50s and IBM in the 70s. Of course, if you are someone like Theodore Rosevelt, then you would say, "trusts, a form of monopoly, are horrible, and more competition increases the amount of innovation, so therefore Google must be broken up." However if you are a Peter Thiel type ideological person, then you might say, "Yeah well, times change and monopolies will provide a huge amount of value for the time that they exist, and then they will inevitably die out, like Sears." So, the conversation people are having around the world today, regardless of what is being talked about in Silicon Valley...is - has Silicon Valley (as a construct, rather than a physical place) created a feudalistic system, and should we create legislation to take that power and money away from them? Silicon Valley, similar to Wall Street (also a construct, not a physical place), will either innovate a way to maintain that power and convince the rest of the world that they are "not evil," or change the conversation in some way, or politics will keep moving in the direction where they eventually break up all the huge tech companies. You can scream and say, "hey, we're not evil!" all you want - I'm not sure whether that communication strategy will work or not. Post 2008 folks on Wall Street seemed to have embraced the fact that they were perceived as evil and that they monopolize banking, and it seems that their power has been curtailed very little. I could see Mark Zuckerberg and all the tech execs coming out with a unified message saying, "yeah, online data isn't about us, it's about supporting millions of other small businesses, so an attack on cookies and pixels is an attack on freedom," - a similar tack that Wallstreet takes, and I could see people going forward in believing in that. Regardless of whether spying on people is actually evil, they could create some argument that it's a necessary evil, and therefore is not evil, and get anyone who might oppose them politically on their side, and hence we will continue forward in the United States having a completely separate legislative philosophy around data than Europe.
RobertoG 9y ago
I understand what you are trying to say here and I mostly agree, but.. two comments: 1. Size is important: A mischievous kid can be cute, but a mischievous general can be terrifying. 2. Incentives: A small start-up has space to grow, in many cases, it's in its interest to be nice. A giant could be out of ways of to grow and, in many cases, hungry, it will bite the hand that fed them. In the case of Google, Facebook and company, could be their users. Maybe it's the circumstances of the beast what have changed, instead of its nature but that's enough to deserve some criticism.
- milesvp 9y ago
  3. Ability: when google simply indexed the web and showed ads that others bid on there wasn't a lot to be evil with. As soon as you develop sophisticated tracking techniques and become the defacto leader in surveillance there is so much more to be evil with. And worse, the tendency is always to flex one's ability which means there's always danger of 'flexing in the wrong direction'. 4. Mottos matter: if you explicitely remove the tenet to not be evil, and replace it with doing the right thing. You open up a lot more wiggle room philosophically. Right for whom? society? shareholders? employees? advertisers? advertisees? the company? Part of the problem with google is that they have the same problem that all advertising supported products have, in that there is a misalignment of incentives for people who use the product. In the end they harvest eyeball (or earballs) (or personal data) to sell to advertisers, this means there is big incentive to do things that the eyeballs don't like. The best newspapers have historically tried to counter this problem by segregating advertising and editorial, and promoting a culture where advertising has no say in the stories that get run. But the tension is always there, and I'm positive 'do the right thing' does not have enough context to encourage siding with the eyeball at every opportunity, and I think the corruption has started to take hold.
thisisit 9y ago
So you are saying Google and other companies in the SV are not guilty of things highlighted in the article. > Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation. Everything is about attacking a big company?
jxub 9y ago
Thank you for kind of psychoanalizing that. The motivation behind attacking tech giants (at least in my case when I bash Google or whatever), is mostly to show others how ethic I am and consequently to feel good about my worldview. This is, virtue signaling in purest form. Meanwhile, I'll stop my signalling hamster for a moment to say that Google has maybe been the single biggest net positive to the society among all corporations ever, mainly because of the ease of access to information that Search provides, that propelled Internet to became ubiquitous and grease many wheels of information storage and transfer that were mostly manual and hard to scale (this is, to broadcast to many people at once). This new paradigm has his problems, disruption of previous model of society being one, but is the best way forward I know.
untangle 9y ago
> Google is no more evil now than it was in the past. Maybe not, but its capacity to do evil has changed dramatically. Size matters. Absolute power - in citizen data and web advertising - corrupts absolutely.
bassman9000 9y ago
True evil requires true power, as without its manifestation, evil can't be spotted. If Google was small and inconsequential, it didn't hold power, then it couldn't be evil.
dlwdlw 9y ago
Any order of magnitude change fundamentally changes the problem. Computers are not just fast calculators. Scaling to a millions users is different than 100k. I'd say that power corrupts even the most well intentioned and that history has many examples of this. I don't see how tech is differently immune.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I think companies have to become more evil or oppressive the bigger they get. They turn from nimble, innovative and disruptive to dominant and mainly maintaining the status quo. Happened to google, Microsoft, Apple and lots of others. I think the current backlash comes mostly from the fact that Google got a lot of good PR out of slogans like "don't be evil" until it turned out that they are just another greedy big corporation.

icebraining 9y ago
Google got a lot of good PR out of slogans like "don't be evil" When was this? I admit I only started reading English media around 2002, but I always remember it being used as a rhetorical device against them.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Maybe it started to tilt then, but definitely they had a good aura to them. They had a solid connection (imagined or real) to open source and Linux. They were very different from old evils. The old evils walked in suits and wielded contracts, we had come to recognise them by their appearances.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I don't disagree that Google had a much better public image, I'm just saying it was despite that slogan, not because of it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sowbug 9y ago
  The original public phrasing was something like "We believe it's possible for a corporation to make money without being evil." The original motto was meant as a snarky summary of a typical long list of positive corporate values. "Look, you can remember all these things, or just remember to pick the not-evil choice." More: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html
- ikeyany 9y ago
  In the early 2000s, people were saying "Google is going to take over the world" with a smile. Not so much now.

jamra 9y ago

Well, given the Snowden leaks and knowing the forced complacency with government surveillance, I think that people are just waking up to just how invasive technology is in our lives. The direction we're moving towards seems to be one in which Amazon controls what you can buy by blocking out competing products. Google controlling what you can learn by censoring results based on politics. Facebook controls which news you read by allowing for purchased content. It may be related to the size of the company, but I think it's more related to the general conscientiousness of society as a whole and the awareness of how dangerous these companies are.

skj 9y ago
> Google controlling what you can learn by censoring results based on politics. Is there an example of this?
- random4369 9y ago
  China. Searching 'tiananmen square' or 'tank' man' won't show any traces of those events.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Are you sure? Google.cn still redirects to Google.com.hk for me, and Google.com.hk finds "tank man" just fine.
    - random4369 9y ago
      This is a comparatively recent change, to which China responded by temporarily blocking google. Earlier in their history, they did facilitate Chinese state censorship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
      - icebraining 9y ago
        I don't excuse Google for having ceded to China's censorship. But that doesn't mean it isn't factually false to say "Searching 'tiananmen square' or 'tank' man' won't show any traces of those events" when that stopped happening almost a decade ago.

vadimberman 9y ago

> I've been around Silicon Valley since the late 90s. It hasn't changed. I haven't been there physically but observed it from the distance. Google or not, wasn't the Silicon Valley of the 1990s more about creating new technologies and less about kissing VC asses, repackaging crap, pumping valuations, and screaming "innovation"?

maxxxxx 9y ago
You are forgetting the .COM bubble which was pretty much a pile of pure bullshit without much substance.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  There was a lot of bullshit but there was a lot of substance. Off the top of my head: * server-side web * first web-based payments * VoIP * first mobile devices * e-commerce * text messaging * music piracy... I mean, sharing * search engines And I could go on forever.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    I think it's very similar to now. A lot of good stuff is happening but way too many companies copying each other fueled by an excess of investment money.
    - vadimberman 9y ago
      A lot of good stuff, yes. But the advances of the last decade are dwarfed by the advances of 1990s.
  - amelius 9y ago
    It wasn't high-tech. Just what IT is supposed to be for.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Lots of honest naïveté then though. Edit: also what vadimberman said

rvail2 9y ago

While their intentions may not have changed, the power and influence they have accumulated has changed a lot. Face recognition and virtual assistants that seem to always be listening without your consent or knowledge bothers people.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

peterwwillis 9y ago

> the change in reporters' attitudes toward it derives [..] from nothing more than its increased size An ant becomes pretty scary when it grows to 100 feet tall.

x2398dh1 9y ago

Google and people deep in Silicon Valley do not have the capability to judge whether they are seen as evil because evilness is a matter of taste and ideology. Of course no one sees themselves as evil - that is never the question. The question is, "do others see us as evil?" One perspective is that monopolies are not inherently evil, because 1) It's a matter of perspective - what is Google a Monopoly in - advertising? Or web search? They may be completely dominant in web search, but they are a tiny player in web advertising in the grand scheme of things, which is interesting because that is their main business. 2) Monopolies are regularly supplanted by new monopolies, and provide stable financial ground upon which other "hard innovation," can happen, as with AT&T in the 50s and IBM in the 70s. Of course, if you are someone like Theodore Rosevelt, then you would say, "trusts, a form of monopoly, are horrible, and more competition increases the amount of innovation, so therefore Google must be broken up." However if you are a Peter Thiel type ideological person, then you might say, "Yeah well, times change and monopolies will provide a huge amount of value for the time that they exist, and then they will inevitably die out, like Sears." So, the conversation people are having around the world today, regardless of what is being talked about in Silicon Valley...is - has Silicon Valley (as a construct, rather than a physical place) created a feudalistic system, and should we create legislation to take that power and money away from them? Silicon Valley, similar to Wall Street (also a construct, not a physical place), will either innovate a way to maintain that power and convince the rest of the world that they are "not evil," or change the conversation in some way, or politics will keep moving in the direction where they eventually break up all the huge tech companies. You can scream and say, "hey, we're not evil!" all you want - I'm not sure whether that communication strategy will work or not. Post 2008 folks on Wall Street seemed to have embraced the fact that they were perceived as evil and that they monopolize banking, and it seems that their power has been curtailed very little. I could see Mark Zuckerberg and all the tech execs coming out with a unified message saying, "yeah, online data isn't about us, it's about supporting millions of other small businesses, so an attack on cookies and pixels is an attack on freedom," - a similar tack that Wallstreet takes, and I could see people going forward in believing in that. Regardless of whether spying on people is actually evil, they could create some argument that it's a necessary evil, and therefore is not evil, and get anyone who might oppose them politically on their side, and hence we will continue forward in the United States having a completely separate legislative philosophy around data than Europe.

RobertoG 9y ago

I understand what you are trying to say here and I mostly agree, but.. two comments: 1. Size is important: A mischievous kid can be cute, but a mischievous general can be terrifying. 2. Incentives: A small start-up has space to grow, in many cases, it's in its interest to be nice. A giant could be out of ways of to grow and, in many cases, hungry, it will bite the hand that fed them. In the case of Google, Facebook and company, could be their users. Maybe it's the circumstances of the beast what have changed, instead of its nature but that's enough to deserve some criticism.

milesvp 9y ago
3. Ability: when google simply indexed the web and showed ads that others bid on there wasn't a lot to be evil with. As soon as you develop sophisticated tracking techniques and become the defacto leader in surveillance there is so much more to be evil with. And worse, the tendency is always to flex one's ability which means there's always danger of 'flexing in the wrong direction'. 4. Mottos matter: if you explicitely remove the tenet to not be evil, and replace it with doing the right thing. You open up a lot more wiggle room philosophically. Right for whom? society? shareholders? employees? advertisers? advertisees? the company? Part of the problem with google is that they have the same problem that all advertising supported products have, in that there is a misalignment of incentives for people who use the product. In the end they harvest eyeball (or earballs) (or personal data) to sell to advertisers, this means there is big incentive to do things that the eyeballs don't like. The best newspapers have historically tried to counter this problem by segregating advertising and editorial, and promoting a culture where advertising has no say in the stories that get run. But the tension is always there, and I'm positive 'do the right thing' does not have enough context to encourage siding with the eyeball at every opportunity, and I think the corruption has started to take hold.

thisisit 9y ago

So you are saying Google and other companies in the SV are not guilty of things highlighted in the article. > Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation. Everything is about attacking a big company?

jxub 9y ago

Thank you for kind of psychoanalizing that. The motivation behind attacking tech giants (at least in my case when I bash Google or whatever), is mostly to show others how ethic I am and consequently to feel good about my worldview. This is, virtue signaling in purest form. Meanwhile, I'll stop my signalling hamster for a moment to say that Google has maybe been the single biggest net positive to the society among all corporations ever, mainly because of the ease of access to information that Search provides, that propelled Internet to became ubiquitous and grease many wheels of information storage and transfer that were mostly manual and hard to scale (this is, to broadcast to many people at once). This new paradigm has his problems, disruption of previous model of society being one, but is the best way forward I know.

untangle 9y ago

> Google is no more evil now than it was in the past. Maybe not, but its capacity to do evil has changed dramatically. Size matters. Absolute power - in citizen data and web advertising - corrupts absolutely.

bassman9000 9y ago

True evil requires true power, as without its manifestation, evil can't be spotted. If Google was small and inconsequential, it didn't hold power, then it couldn't be evil.

dlwdlw 9y ago

Any order of magnitude change fundamentally changes the problem. Computers are not just fast calculators. Scaling to a millions users is different than 100k. I'd say that power corrupts even the most well intentioned and that history has many examples of this. I don't see how tech is differently immune.