4 ms·

Author wants to “Abolish Silicon Valley” to save it from capitalism

27 points by 8bitsrule 7y ago

RubenSandwich 7y ago
Nonpaywall link? I checked Google Cache and it's still paywalled. Impossible to have an informed opinion without reading the article. As "saving from capitalism" can mean so many different things.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  It's a teaser for a book which comes out next week. There will be much more informative reviews and articles then, I'm sure.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Reading between the lines I see two complaints: - the VC system is pretty messed up. Paul Graham made himself and others rich by recognizing some deficiencies. That there are still massive problems would not be a controversial statement here. - Private companies controlling, exploiting and monopolizing platforms. Tech companies effectively self-organize to disrupt monopolies that harm them (Linux, Postgres, Kubernetes, etc) while these same companies are trying to gain their own monopolies. I think most people here would agree that these are problems. Most here would probably be happy if the US enforced its existing anti-trust laws better, but it sounds like Liu's proposed solutions are much more radical. I'll be interested to hear them.
sudosteph 7y ago
I guess I'll have to read that book. I'm a similar age to the author and have also experienced a good deal of disillusionment about the tech industry. Like her, I absolutely did idolize tech companies as a kid, despite only ever reading about them from afar. I even bought into the concept of these places being pure meritocracies and forces for good. I still love tech and most people who work in the field, but it's apparent that it's not a pure meritocracy by any means. Not that any industry is, to be fair. I still have no regrets about choosing this career and think that technology jobs in general offer an outsized opportunity compared to most other jobs, especially for ambitious working class kids. I do think though that the highly regional nature of top-tier jobs and capital heavily favors the SF area excludes a good portion of talent from the tech startup scene, especially black people and rural people. You would think the absurd housing costs in that area would provide incentives to branch out, but network effects are powerful and the wealthy investor class don't feel the pain from that issue. The end result is a physical and cultural bubble around tech in SV that will decrease the ability of tech startups to contribute genuine innovation moving forward. Like many things related to capitalism, it's not terribly hard to identify problematic patterns and unequal outcomes - but proposing solutions is much harder. Will be curious to read what the Author believes can help, and why.
lazylizard 7y ago
Why is "silicon valley" only websites n smartphone apps?
DeathArrow 7y ago
>Reclaim the wealth from capital, push back capital and fund public innovation. Being born in Eastern Europe, having experienced communism when I was a kid - which meant lack of food, living in improper conditions (cold, frequently shutdowns of utilities), scarcity of common goods, relative poverty, low development, poor healthcare, censorship, violation of most rights - and thinking of tens of millions of deaths caused worldwide by communism, I don't really understand why some westerners are pushing to it instead of being happy they didn't experience it.
- pcmaffey 7y ago
  Socialism != communism Democratic socialism !== socialism
  - pgcj_poster 7y ago
    Socialism ⊇ communism Democratic Socialism ⊆ Socialism
    - pcmaffey 7y ago
      Also, Government ⊇ communism. Communism being a bad form of government says very little about the set of all forms of government. Likewise with socialism. However equating communism with democratic socialism as the GP and many others do is a false equivalency.
- solotronics 7y ago
  They push it because they have no concept of the consequences. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. By no means do I think capitalism is perfect and we have no room for improvement. At this point it seems that there have been enough examples of communism that we can see the results of that system.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Oh great, yet another communist who thinks the solution is destroying and stealing. Sure there are valid conerns about utility being skewed but their solutions all are wrong and dogmatically stuck to. Seriously the reason why they have always failed is because they never try to build anything that competes. A scaled iteration of models that responds to inputs is something which actually works! Instead communists assume apriori "first we need to seize power and then after our fixed rigid dogmatic input unresponsive model utopia". Then things fall apart when they try to start large. Again. Shallow imitations of the Silicion Valley model are many ans yet they win a prize for this proposed copy which misses the point most. This is what my gripe is with the ideology - that and being so goddamn spammy and invasive. The means are the ends and they stubbornly refuse to recognize it just as stubborbly as they refuse to recognize that fixed universal value is an insane notion and insist that any merchant has to be enslaving or defrauding many people off to get rich. I am starting to be nostalgic for the 90s and 00s as the fall of the Soviet Union caused them all to shut up.
musicale 7y ago
> This is manifest in the way tech companies are funded through venture capital firms, going public or taking money from stock and the public. The problem is the fact that tech is ultimately interrelated to capital and right now capital is in a very concentrated and not representative group of people Software and web service startups don't require a lot of capital to get off the ground. In many cases I would agree that venture capital is unnecessary and can do more harm than good as the company shifts focus toward investor happiness rather than customer and employee happiness. The same bad focus can happen in a public company when the stakeholder balance sometimes shifts overwhelmingly toward investors at the expense of everyone else. In a non winner-take-all market, funding a company the old-fashioned way - paying out of pocket until you have enough paying customers to sustain the business - may be a good way to go.

27 points by 8bitsrule 7y ago

Nonpaywall link? I checked Google Cache and it's still paywalled. Impossible to have an informed opinion without reading the article. As "saving from capitalism" can mean so many different things.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
It's a teaser for a book which comes out next week. There will be much more informative reviews and articles then, I'm sure.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Reading between the lines I see two complaints: - the VC system is pretty messed up. Paul Graham made himself and others rich by recognizing some deficiencies. That there are still massive problems would not be a controversial statement here. - Private companies controlling, exploiting and monopolizing platforms. Tech companies effectively self-organize to disrupt monopolies that harm them (Linux, Postgres, Kubernetes, etc) while these same companies are trying to gain their own monopolies. I think most people here would agree that these are problems. Most here would probably be happy if the US enforced its existing anti-trust laws better, but it sounds like Liu's proposed solutions are much more radical. I'll be interested to hear them.

sudosteph 7y ago

I guess I'll have to read that book. I'm a similar age to the author and have also experienced a good deal of disillusionment about the tech industry. Like her, I absolutely did idolize tech companies as a kid, despite only ever reading about them from afar. I even bought into the concept of these places being pure meritocracies and forces for good. I still love tech and most people who work in the field, but it's apparent that it's not a pure meritocracy by any means. Not that any industry is, to be fair. I still have no regrets about choosing this career and think that technology jobs in general offer an outsized opportunity compared to most other jobs, especially for ambitious working class kids. I do think though that the highly regional nature of top-tier jobs and capital heavily favors the SF area excludes a good portion of talent from the tech startup scene, especially black people and rural people. You would think the absurd housing costs in that area would provide incentives to branch out, but network effects are powerful and the wealthy investor class don't feel the pain from that issue. The end result is a physical and cultural bubble around tech in SV that will decrease the ability of tech startups to contribute genuine innovation moving forward. Like many things related to capitalism, it's not terribly hard to identify problematic patterns and unequal outcomes - but proposing solutions is much harder. Will be curious to read what the Author believes can help, and why.

lazylizard 7y ago

Why is "silicon valley" only websites n smartphone apps?

DeathArrow 7y ago

>Reclaim the wealth from capital, push back capital and fund public innovation. Being born in Eastern Europe, having experienced communism when I was a kid - which meant lack of food, living in improper conditions (cold, frequently shutdowns of utilities), scarcity of common goods, relative poverty, low development, poor healthcare, censorship, violation of most rights - and thinking of tens of millions of deaths caused worldwide by communism, I don't really understand why some westerners are pushing to it instead of being happy they didn't experience it.

pcmaffey 7y ago
Socialism != communism Democratic socialism !== socialism
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  Socialism ⊇ communism Democratic Socialism ⊆ Socialism
  - pcmaffey 7y ago
    Also, Government ⊇ communism. Communism being a bad form of government says very little about the set of all forms of government. Likewise with socialism. However equating communism with democratic socialism as the GP and many others do is a false equivalency.
solotronics 7y ago
They push it because they have no concept of the consequences. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. By no means do I think capitalism is perfect and we have no room for improvement. At this point it seems that there have been enough examples of communism that we can see the results of that system.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Oh great, yet another communist who thinks the solution is destroying and stealing. Sure there are valid conerns about utility being skewed but their solutions all are wrong and dogmatically stuck to. Seriously the reason why they have always failed is because they never try to build anything that competes. A scaled iteration of models that responds to inputs is something which actually works! Instead communists assume apriori "first we need to seize power and then after our fixed rigid dogmatic input unresponsive model utopia". Then things fall apart when they try to start large. Again. Shallow imitations of the Silicion Valley model are many ans yet they win a prize for this proposed copy which misses the point most. This is what my gripe is with the ideology - that and being so goddamn spammy and invasive. The means are the ends and they stubbornly refuse to recognize it just as stubborbly as they refuse to recognize that fixed universal value is an insane notion and insist that any merchant has to be enslaving or defrauding many people off to get rich. I am starting to be nostalgic for the 90s and 00s as the fall of the Soviet Union caused them all to shut up.

musicale 7y ago

> This is manifest in the way tech companies are funded through venture capital firms, going public or taking money from stock and the public. The problem is the fact that tech is ultimately interrelated to capital and right now capital is in a very concentrated and not representative group of people Software and web service startups don't require a lot of capital to get off the ground. In many cases I would agree that venture capital is unnecessary and can do more harm than good as the company shifts focus toward investor happiness rather than customer and employee happiness. The same bad focus can happen in a public company when the stakeholder balance sometimes shifts overwhelmingly toward investors at the expense of everyone else. In a non winner-take-all market, funding a company the old-fashioned way - paying out of pocket until you have enough paying customers to sustain the business - may be a good way to go.