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What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn't actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they're profitable. That's it. There's no morality invol

What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn't actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they're profitable. That's it. There's no morality involved in this machine. It's genuinely wonderful that ideas about inclusivity and diversity are being accepted, but it's because of the understanding that people can do great work regardless of their background or sexual orientation that it happened, and not because of some moral imperative. It's how we can justify and talk up diversity while working on AI tech that can identify homeless people or ex-convicts. It's how we can condemn actions by the Trump administration while criticizing labor activism in Asia by coldly crunching the numbers to demonstrate that you can save money by putting your factory in a country that doesn't allow its people to protest. And you know what, fine. Just keep tossing anyone who doesn't play nice to the wolves. But please just stop pretending there's morality involved. Let's accept it: we're here in pursuit of profit. Any good that we do is just a nice side effect. The sooner we understand that the sooner we can actually do something about it. This applies to the media too, of course. I love the manic obsession with stability and morality combined with a lot of corporate and government money in a lot of US journalists' stories. You get great gems like hit pieces on privacy and encryption painted with a moral coat of paint that are better than anything the alphabet soup agencies could come up with - the Silicon Valley nazis are using Clubhouse, the pedophiles are using Signal, we must let the government monitor communications now! You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it!

legerdemain 6y ago
Finally, a sane voice! It's time that we realized that many things are simply not political in nature, no matter what social justice demagogues want to tell us. Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political. Resisting being forced to classify independent business partners as "employees" is economic, not political. The ethnicity, race, and gender of your applicant pool is economic, not political. Politics has to do with generation-defining issues of our time, like choosing a more rational voting system at the national level and building broad support for a sensible third party that genuinely represents the interests of voters like myself, who are poorly served by the trifling squabbles of the current political "establishment." All this other stuff that certain biased parties want to paint as "political" is just the natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest, nothing more and nothing less. No use whining about cold, hard reality!!
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  What's "politics" anyway? I think we need to be very careful here. Economic problems can be caused by nasty politics and vice versa. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, that's just how economics work, sorry!" while ignoring the underlying political causes of why entire groups of people found themselves barely able to feed their families. At the same time, politics are an unavoidable fact of life for a lot of people. It's hardly fair to tell somebody to just get away from political topics when it's their rights and liberties being debated on C-SPAN.
- jeanjogr 6y ago
  You seem to argue that politics is whatever issues where you support change and "not politics" is whatever issues where you support the status quo. It is quite hard to not see your examples as political _but_ you don't want any of the changes currently being advocated by leftist activists. > Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political If selling customer data was forbidden, then it would not be a natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest. It seems the "natural outcome" is wholly dependent on current laws.
- pell 6y ago
  How are these examples not political? Yes, the entities in question might not do them for political reasons (as in for or because some kind of affiliation) but the issues are absolutely political.
inglor_cz 6y ago
"It's genuinely wonderful that ideas about inclusivity and diversity are being accepted, but it's because of the understanding that people can do great work regardless of their background or sexual orientation that it happened, and not because of some moral imperative." I do not even believe this at all. The corps just do not want to be nagged by activists, so they use a lot of the expected words to signal that they are not to be attacked. I remember the banking boss kneeling during BLM in front of a huge vault [1] - a pure photo-op for the media. It is the same with Google et al. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-snared-in-race-conversation-confronted-by-bleak-legacy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-sna...
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  Of course, I didn't mean to imply that the big corporations just suddenly decided that discrimination is bad - it took centuries and centuries of activism to drive that point in. But that's still ultimately because that position became profitable. They don't give a shit in reality. It's why BLM was filled with empty gestures like that, it's why the likes of GitHub make noise about scrubbing problematic terminology and promoting inclusivity while continuing to work with ICE. No matter how wholesome its branding appears to be, no matter how many rainbow avatars it uses on social media, no matter how many times its executives kneel for photo ops, a big corporation doesn't actually give a shit about anything besides profit.
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
>You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it! Or similarly, you get screeds accusing random bloggers of spreading "alt-right" views that completely gloss over the role of, say, Robin Hanson at George Mason University in spreading the notion that it's actually a humanitarian act to outsource manufacturing to Bangladesh.
ecf 6y ago
> What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn’t actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they’re profitable. That’s it. There’s no morality involved in this machine. I’d argue that is more of a characteristic of Capitalism at this point.

legerdemain 6y ago

Finally, a sane voice! It's time that we realized that many things are simply not political in nature, no matter what social justice demagogues want to tell us. Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political. Resisting being forced to classify independent business partners as "employees" is economic, not political. The ethnicity, race, and gender of your applicant pool is economic, not political. Politics has to do with generation-defining issues of our time, like choosing a more rational voting system at the national level and building broad support for a sensible third party that genuinely represents the interests of voters like myself, who are poorly served by the trifling squabbles of the current political "establishment." All this other stuff that certain biased parties want to paint as "political" is just the natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest, nothing more and nothing less. No use whining about cold, hard reality!!

emptyparadise 6y ago
What's "politics" anyway? I think we need to be very careful here. Economic problems can be caused by nasty politics and vice versa. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, that's just how economics work, sorry!" while ignoring the underlying political causes of why entire groups of people found themselves barely able to feed their families. At the same time, politics are an unavoidable fact of life for a lot of people. It's hardly fair to tell somebody to just get away from political topics when it's their rights and liberties being debated on C-SPAN.
jeanjogr 6y ago
You seem to argue that politics is whatever issues where you support change and "not politics" is whatever issues where you support the status quo. It is quite hard to not see your examples as political _but_ you don't want any of the changes currently being advocated by leftist activists. > Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political If selling customer data was forbidden, then it would not be a natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest. It seems the "natural outcome" is wholly dependent on current laws.
pell 6y ago
How are these examples not political? Yes, the entities in question might not do them for political reasons (as in for or because some kind of affiliation) but the issues are absolutely political.

inglor_cz 6y ago

"It's genuinely wonderful that ideas about inclusivity and diversity are being accepted, but it's because of the understanding that people can do great work regardless of their background or sexual orientation that it happened, and not because of some moral imperative." I do not even believe this at all. The corps just do not want to be nagged by activists, so they use a lot of the expected words to signal that they are not to be attacked. I remember the banking boss kneeling during BLM in front of a huge vault [1] - a pure photo-op for the media. It is the same with Google et al. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-snared-in-race-conversation-confronted-by-bleak-legacy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-sna...

emptyparadise 6y ago
Of course, I didn't mean to imply that the big corporations just suddenly decided that discrimination is bad - it took centuries and centuries of activism to drive that point in. But that's still ultimately because that position became profitable. They don't give a shit in reality. It's why BLM was filled with empty gestures like that, it's why the likes of GitHub make noise about scrubbing problematic terminology and promoting inclusivity while continuing to work with ICE. No matter how wholesome its branding appears to be, no matter how many rainbow avatars it uses on social media, no matter how many times its executives kneel for photo ops, a big corporation doesn't actually give a shit about anything besides profit.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

>You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it! Or similarly, you get screeds accusing random bloggers of spreading "alt-right" views that completely gloss over the role of, say, Robin Hanson at George Mason University in spreading the notion that it's actually a humanitarian act to outsource manufacturing to Bangladesh.

ecf 6y ago

> What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn’t actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they’re profitable. That’s it. There’s no morality involved in this machine. I’d argue that is more of a characteristic of Capitalism at this point.