10 ms·

Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

160 points by iSpiderman 10mo ago

wolfcola 10mo ago
I don’t think any silicon valley leaders believe themselves to be progressive at this point.
wslh 10mo ago
At the end of the day I don't think Silicon Valley represents anything fundamentally different from the world at large. The world is unfair, and it may become even less fair. What is disturbing is how the hype-machine around "startups" and the unicorn myth encourages people to believe they can be the next big thing. But basic arithmetic makes that impossible: you can't have an abundance of unicorns when the attention economy, capital, and market share are structurally limited.
- fooqux 10mo ago
  People have a tendency to think they're special, that they won't (or will) be the outlier. Gambling, unprotected sex, etc. We're not great at risk evaluation/comparison. But hey, without this, our public schools wouldn't get funding from lottery tickets! So I'm forced to conclude it's a good thing.
  - garg 10mo ago
    The lottery paying for schooling is a clever self-defeating policy because it moves the tax-burden to the same people who would most benefit from a good public school system.
  - morcus 10mo ago
    It is not your main point, I know - but for everyone I know who buys lottery tickets, they're more thought of as an entertainment purchase than a financial purchase.
    - JKCalhoun 10mo ago
      Might tell us more about the people you know than the typical lottery ticket purchaser? (Or perhaps they're when they tell you it is "for entertainment" they're entertaining fantasies of winning—which is probably what you can say for a lot of people buying lottery tickets.)
    - fooqux 10mo ago
      I've heard this argument before about casinos, but never lottery tickets. I'm not sure I personally buy that, but let's go with it. If they're entertaining, then presumably it's from the thrill of maybe winning. Why would winning be thrilling? Why, because you get money- potentially a life-changing amount of it. If they made a lotto game with a maximum payout of a dollar I'm reasonably certain nobody would play it. Or hell, anyone could write down a series of heads/tails on a paper and then flip a coin to see if they're a winner! Yet, we don't see that, even though it's free and (I would argue) has the same entertainment value. So yeah, I'm sure entertainment is the facade, but underneath it all, it's financially motivated for the vast majority.
  - wslh 10mo ago
    True, people consistently overestimate their chances of being the exception. But in parallel, I think we also lack hype around the opposite direction: learning to live with less, intentionally and intelligently. I'm not talking about UBI or forced austerity, but about developing smarter ways to live frugally without feeling deprived. That mindset would relieve a lot of the pressure that the "you must win the startup lottery" narrative creates.
    - fooqux 10mo ago
      That's antithetical to capitalism and consumerism. Not to mention human nature. While I agree with you in principle, I don't know how one would even start to effect any change here at a societal level. Especially when it's impossible to not be bombarded with marketing from people who are extremely good at using your emotions against you here. Well, I suppose I do know of one. Mindfulness training I think has been shown to help with this, but that's still at a very personal level.
      - JKCalhoun 10mo ago
        "Christ's teachings" (well, many religions in general) should also have that effect? (I'm an atheist though, so what do I know. Some of my best takeaways from the Second Testament though are that we should be kind, content…)
      - wslh 10mo ago
        Capitalism or consumerism don't define human nature. Human behaviour existed long before those systems, and it will exist long after them. What has changed, and this is where I agree with your point about difficulty, is the scale and precision of behavioural manipulation. We've never had a period where advertising, content, and emotional triggers were personalized with such speed and accuracy. Tobacco harmed the body, today's hyper-personalized content ecosystems can easily harm attention, mood regulation, and overall mental health. So yes, it's hard to shift things at a societal level when the environment is engineered to keep people reactive. On mindfulness: in its modern form it's often packaged as another consumer product, but its roots, like those of yoga, Zen, and other contemplative traditions, come from outside capitalist logic. The original practices were tools for resisting impulse and cultivating awareness, not selling calmness subscriptions.
- JKCalhoun 10mo ago
  Silicon Valley is different in my mind because, well, back in the 1970's, it was arguably not evil. Woz and the nerds were making machines at home, later hooking them up to one another with the janky telephone service as the interconnect. And this kid, just getting a taste of BBSs in Kansas in the mid 1980's, was so envious of the outrageous number of BBSs in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose…—all strange names to me. But I saw that they were all in California. When a job offer got me to move out to the Bay Area in the early 90's there was still a kind of soft echo of those times. Plenty of electronics recycling warehouses you could wander through (and recognizing some of the same faces, often older men, as you moved through your morning circuit to the next warehouse). Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, etc. I had a career there, raised a family there. I watched the dot-com boom/bust, the rise of the internet, Google, and the slow decline of the hardware focus of "The Valley". When the last of my daughters left the nest, the wife and I sold the house and I retired back to the Midwaste where the two of us grew up. Weird Stuff Warehouse had recently closed up shop and that seems now as fitting a time as any to have said goodbye to The Valley.
  - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
    All that is different is that you and I have had bargaining power and scarcity far far beyond the average skilled worker. That bargaining power came from our ability to surf the crest of the wave that was over and over crashing through existing industries, turning them on their head with the promise and practice of automating via computation. In many cases deskilling the jobs of other workers. We could play the part of magicians who knew these arcane arts and get paid accordingly. There is precisely zero guarantee that any of this will continue. In the latest wave it seems like it is we ourselves who are being submerged beneath the wave.
  - wslh 10mo ago
    I conjecture that what you're describing was deeply tied to the size, quality, and spirit of that original community (and consumers). A relatively small cluster of tinkerers, shared physical spaces, and a sense of discovery created a moral atmosphere very different from today's massive global tech hub shaped by billions in capital. To put the scale shift in perspective: Apple sold only a couple of million Apple IIs in that entire era. Today, the iPhone sits in the multi-billion range since 2007. Once a technology ecosystem expands by three orders of magnitude, its culture cannot remain the same. The early Valley wasn’t "good" in an absolute sense, it was simply relatively small, intimate, and guided by shared values. As growth, global competition, and finances took over, the culture changed in ways that were probably inevitable.
__MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
[flagged]
- endofreach 10mo ago
  ...yet kids are pretty quick (and eager) to understand "mine"... and seem to struggle understanding "not mine" at first. Transgenerational greed? And still, not respecting these concepts make you the thief today. So, what now?
  - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
    The person who coined the "Property is theft" quote (Proudhon if I recall) clearly made a distinction between capital-p Property and personal possession. And I think most regular people do, too. I don't necessarily think of my stocks and bonds in my retirement funds in the same category as my toothbrush, suit jacket, or even my house or garden or whatever. Classical liberalism and its descendants want to blur the distinction between the two. And you're welcome to adopt that view. But you shouldn't assume there aren't legitimate challenges to that point of view. Proudhon himself wasn't terrible coherent. Marx I think clarified the distinction between dominance and control of capital and production vs personal private property better. From a certain perspective, capitalism has been the process of enclosing things that were once common, or could be common, into "private" property. And despite the rhetoric of free exchange and liberty, it has mainly done this by force and coercion since the acts of enclosure and the age of colonialism until now. My 6 acres of "private property" that my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago. What does that do its status -- and to me -- now?
    - Avicebron 10mo ago
      > my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago. This argument can be used for practically any piece of earth, it's nonsensical to fixate on it. The issue has always been that capital (and it's quiet sibling power) can compound itself endlessly absent any checks against it. Societal unification against power and wealth consolidation should be the same as it would be against a plague or cancer in a body.
mentalgear 10mo ago
Just like their predecessors: Big Tobacco, Big Fossil, Big Tech. The Playbook is always the same: Run global Propaganda (ads/PR), while behind the public's back extract the capital from the general public into the private hands of a select few and "socialise" the costs (health, mental-health, polarisation, extremism, populism, ...) to the state (taxpayer). Basically: screwing the public and letting them pay the bill, but hidden by X-layers of obfuscation.
- mentalgear 10mo ago
  PS: Of course all the SV hipster boys and wanna-be billionaires (do you still believe you will make it?) downvote this. Well, let "that sink in" as your poster boy would say. From the article: > And I’m talking to you now, fellow workers of the Valley! If you really want to do no evil, to be good, disrupt the status quo and make the world a better place, then don’t create a capitalist firm: it’s a top-down dictatorship, where the dictators steal the money. There’s nothing progressive about this kind of social institution. Founding such a startup is deeply unethical, represents institutionalised theft, and is a prime cause of diverse social ills.
  - dangusmaximus 10mo ago
    [dead]
omarhaneef 10mo ago
At the heart of this article is the claim that buying equity is a form of theft. That is an extreme claim (in the sense of surprising, remarkable, unusual, and one that needs a lot more support than ordinary claims). It is inadequately defended here. The argument that it violates fair exchange is tautological.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  The article is clearly written from a bit of a Marxian perspective and I think there's a lot assumed ... presuppositions about exploitation and value theory. So yeah, even though on first skim I think I agree with the thrust of this article, I think you're right it's poorly defended, assuming it's at all for an audience outside of people who already think this way.
  - rixed 10mo ago
    I haven't read Marx since I left college, but in my remembering the only thing that is "theft" in the capital is the initial accumulation. There is no idea that any form of ownership beside that is theft (I don't believe there is any notion of "evil" either.) To be honest, you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting. Marx is like those ancient greek phylosophers and classical scientists who are "quoted" more often than read. One could probably say that the privatisation of human communication is a form of "initial accumulation", or maybe just another step toward appropriation of culture, but that's apparently not the angle that the author decided to explore (can't be sure, I couldn't do better than skim that text which looked wrong in too many ways).
    - Retric 10mo ago
      I think you misunderstood his viewpoint. Marx’s writing predates the US civil war. When you “own” someone and then “own” their labor the fruits of that labor aren’t yours any more than the person. By that reasoning, if you then use the fruits of that labor to buy a house it’s a stolen house.
    - 10mo ago
gsky 10mo ago
Worse thing is they preach like they are saviours
- throwacct 10mo ago
  This x100.
- gguunhcyyd 10mo ago
  [dead]
geetee 10mo ago
Is the author's point that every business should be an employee-owned cooperative? How do we get there?
- wildrhythms 10mo ago
  Unionize
- gguunhcyyd 10mo ago
  [dead]
- xhkkffbf 10mo ago
  Aren't many or even most of the startups essentially "employee owned"? I've heard that the average employee at NVidia is worth $25m.
  - yunwal 10mo ago
    So 900b total among its 36000 employees for a total of 900b/4.3 trillion market cap. Or roughly 20% employee owned (if that 25m number is correct). This article (warning: obnoxious ads) is the only one I can find that claims to know who nvidea’s shareholders are and puts the number at 4.3% https://capital.com/en-int/analysis/nvidia-shareholder-who-owns-most-nvda-stock https://capital.com/en-int/analysis/nvidia-shareholder-who-o... I would not consider that to be employee owned (although I certainly wouldn’t mind the 25m)
    - xhkkffbf 10mo ago
      I think the phrase "employee owned" means that employees own some of the company. Do you feel that outside shareholders invalidate the claim?
      - yunwal 10mo ago
        Yes, my definition of employee owned would be “employees own a controlling share of the company”
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
> like an Apple, Facebook, or Google One of these, is not like the others.
- layer8 10mo ago
  One of these has better marketing for sure.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
    Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company. I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then. I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then. That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a very different creature, and lumping it in with them, seems like a cheap grab for Apple-haters.
    - layer8 10mo ago
      The article is about the evils of capitalist profit maximization. I don’t see how Apple is any better there. If anything, they are the masters of profit maximization. I’m not an Apple “hater” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I use their products more than Google’s or Meta’s. But I don’t like the trajectory they’ve been going down for the past decade or so, and the arguments made by the article fully apply to them.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
        That doesn’t change the fact that the context was inappropriate. I completely agree with most of the stuff in the article, and even that I’m quite unhappy about Apple’s trajectory, recently. But I still believe that looping in irrelevant data, poisons the dataset. Either the article should expand its scope, or it shouldn’t include older SV companies into its dataset. Salesforce, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, Oracle, etc. have many of the same attributes as Apple (even worse, in some cases). A fairly typical thing that some folks like to do, is attach unpopular people to their targets. It energizes people that might not otherwise care. We’re seeing quite a bit of that stuff, nowadays.
frankest 10mo ago
This seems like a throw back in time - as if one of the Communist propaganda arms of Eastern Europe wrote it. This article doesn’t understand tech or modern evil. It just spews worker vs equity owner arguments. Any engineer today could start their own business. They could instantly become equity owners. Especially with AI. Many giants paid salaries and equity packages to the best, to keep them from starting competition. En engineer can also leave a tech giant and in California, unlike NY, non-competes don’t apply. Tech work scales infinitely - so you can make a product for millions of users with your own two hands, unlike manual labor workers, who are limited by physics. The evil not recognized is when the scalability of tech and AI is used to create and power up addictions that drain human brains, instead of giving them bycicles of the mind. Leaches on the brain. Industries where you can do well by the customers but you make a LOT more money if you do badly by them: Advertising (pumping ad impressions by refreshing pages, putting ads under common buttons to create unintended clicks that charge small businesses dollars per click, not delivering traffic or real audiences and making the small business pay even more thinking it’s their fault). Making gambling and games with horrible dark patter dynamics that wake users at night and expose them to chronic sleep depravation and wallet draining just to keep them addicted or with some status or in some league. If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource - think about how much of it is killed by true evil. VC funding won’t be needed when AI is used to build things without the need for much funding anymore. What truly matters is not building evil things.
- fluoridation 10mo ago
  >If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource But it's not, though. Human brain time (just in general, with no additional conditions) is pretty worthless, that's why people piss it away in idle activities. Just look at services like Mechanical Turk. The so-called attention economy is not about the attention itself. It's about getting the brains that give the attention to spend money.
  - frankest 10mo ago
    The brains are being skewed with the content making fears disproportionate to reality and raising anxiety which disables rational thought and constructive activity.
gguunhcyyd 10mo ago
[dead]
jaybrendansmith 10mo ago
As a democratic socialist, I find this article fails to back its claim that equity is theft. Workers at startups get equity; this is why they work so hard. Would a worker cooperative be better? Possibly, but there is little incentive for the person with the capital to risk their wealth if they don't get a stake that is commensurate to the risk they are taking. I think if anything, startups are a massive improvement over public corporations because they regularly provide a means for a talented person with no capital to become an owner. If I were to critique capitalism, I would hardly start with a startup, which is the closest thing we have to a worker cooperative. I would go after private equity, which is perhaps the most evil of all of capitalism in its various forms, the equivalent of a blood sucking creature straight out of the D&D Monster Manual.
- DonHopkins 10mo ago
  You're saying Peter Thiel is a Beholder? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beholder_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beholder_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons...
  - jaybrendansmith 10mo ago
    Excellent, but was thinking more of a Cloaker, Soulleecher, or Succubus. These creatures seem safe/helpful or innocent, but then attack, draining your life force and leave you as a discarded husk.
    - jaybrendansmith 10mo ago
      Not really sure what he is but this comes immediately to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strahd_von_Zarovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strahd_von_Zarovich "He is a malignant narcissist trapped by his malignant narcissism – forever alone, forever feared and unable to change. Salvation is beyond him. He is framed as inhumanity personified, often serving as a cautionary tale: once you lose your humanity, you can never get it back."
tutanosh 10mo ago
This article oversimplifies things...and then comes to some bold conclusions. It helps to look at different perspectives, rather than looking at everything through an ideological lens. I guess thats the age we live in, unfortunately.
- fogzen 10mo ago
  What is the ideological lens that characterizes our society? Greed. The individual owes nothing to society: no limit to what I can own. Society owes nothing to me: my share of the wealth is my own fault. Might makes right. A deal is fair regardless of the terms: a deal is a deal. Workers don’t deserve a vote: they agreed to their servitude.
renegade-otter 10mo ago
It's like accusing a pig of being a pig. Pig gonna do what pig does. What DOESN'T work is legally-enforced "norms" that we the people decide everyone has to follow. Businesses are "people" now, according to the US Supreme Court, so it's our job to make them face consequences if they refuse to behave like actual "humans" bound by laws. But it's only if we elect representatives who are not corrupt grifters.
- fogzen 10mo ago
  Is it really so crazy to extend democracy to the enterprise?
  - esseph 10mo ago
    Absolutely, unless we're going to start jailing tons of executives from tons of companies.
    - queenkjuul 10mo ago
      Sounds good to me
  - dirtbag__dad 10mo ago
    I think so. People will behave in the guardrails they are provided. If we have a problem with those rails, then in the US at least, democracy is (ostensibly maybe) the tool to make them more aligned with what we want.
- underlipton 10mo ago
  I think we just need to get rid of corporate personhood. If you want to do something big, you need to have skin in the game. Criminal prosecution for corporate action taken under your purview should be more common. If you can't handle the heat, just come watch TV with the rest of us plebs.
  - phendrenad2 10mo ago
dsjoerg 10mo ago
i ask "what details does the piece offer about how to make the proposed alternative happen?" === i'm told "Almost none. The only concrete mechanisms mentioned are: Founding worker-owned cooperatives instead of equity-based startups. Raising capital as loans rather than selling equity. “Creative ways to solve the political problem of capitalists’ monopoly on capital.” This is referenced but not elaborated. No operational steps, no policy proposals, no institutional models, no financing frameworks, no examples of working co-op ecosystems, no strategy for scaling co-ops, and no plan to change investor incentives." === Dear author, please come back with more specific recommendations. I'm curious what you think early stage startup founders and funders should be doing instead of what they're currently doing. I think you want founders and funders to effectively make massively unilateral economic concessions to early employees, since they are "labor". And then you want those early employees to in turn make massive unilateral concessions to later employees because those are "labor" too. But what about the rest of labor in society? Why not instead have massive tax rates on the gains, so that all of society's labor can get in on the fruits, rather than the startups relatively few employees?
acheron 10mo ago
There are many reasons why SV and its culture are terrible and have been a negative force on the world over the past few decades. None of those reasons are related to Marxist bullshit. Grow up.
immibis 10mo ago
I'm not sure this is allowed to be posted here, on the discussion forums of a Silicon Valley startup incubator. I don't think Y Combinator likes being called evil.
cm2012 10mo ago
Seems a rather expansive definition of evil
anovikov 10mo ago
It's just a simple primitive far leftist piece not worthy of any discussion, just a commie junk.
DrierCycle 10mo ago
Efficiency is the path to cybernetic issues of control and eventually the functional takeover from the processual, ie biology. Imposing function on evolution eventually embeds maladaption that is fatal to the species.
supportengineer 10mo ago
After thinking about this problem for a while, I think that there is a potential for someone to make a nonprofit software company for the public good. And yet it would still pay high developer salaries.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
  There’s not because you can’t find the initial capital to start it
silexia 10mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
silexia 10mo ago
The argument that profit equals theft as a fundamental misunderstanding of system mechanics. The article relies on the outdated notion that labor is the sole input for value, ignoring the critical function of capital as fuel for risk. Investors and founders absorb the high probability of total system failure, which allows employees to receive guaranteed, low-latency salaries regardless of the product's success. If workers wanted the full residual profit, they would need to accept the full downside risk, including working for zero pay until revenue stabilizes. The preference for traditional corporate structures over cooperatives is not a conspiracy but an optimization for speed and scalability. Centralized decision-making allows startups to pivot rapidly in competitive markets, whereas committee-based governance often introduces fatal latency. Furthermore, employment is a voluntary exchange where engineers trade skills for compensation, often including equity to align incentives. Labeling this voluntary cooperation as "evil" ignores that this model has driven the greatest reduction in information costs in history. We are not victims of a theft-based institution but participants in a high-performance engine that rewards efficiency and problem-solving.
pickledonions49 10mo ago
Nothing is ever going to be completely equal in society. Innovation is driven by labor being capital (thus profit), or by influence (state backed stuff loses money in exchange for influence). I have a right to make money with resources at my disposal. Taxes are exchanged for the privileges of citizenship, and hopefully, someday, the ability to not get screwed by insurance. Correct me if I am wrong, I am open to ideas. My knowledge of economics is all from social studies class, my brother almost dying because insurance at first denied to pay for his surgery, and making money from yard work and fixing electronics because I am not old enough to get a legit job. I have never paid taxes, but I somewhat understand disdain towards taxation in an age where the cost of living is as high as it is relative to the amount of money one is capable of making.
helpfulfrond 10mo ago
Excellent piece.
1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo ago
About the author, former Google intern https://web.archive.org/web/20190204123209/https://notesfrombelow.org/article/silicon-inquiry https://web.archive.org/web/20190204123209/https://notesfrom...
sershe 10mo ago
This is basically saying wage labor is theft, nothing to do with silicon valley as such Comically though, it's also self-refuting, since it leads with how voluntary exchange of something for money is ok, even if someone gets a bad deal. Buy, you see, if you voluntarily exchange your labor for money - creating that something (notably your employer is not interested in your labor especially in the case of the startup, only that you give them the product); and then your counterparty voluntarily exchanges that product for somewhat more money with someone else, that is now theft, and also evil. This is just propaganda. Collectivism is evil, startups are fine.

160 points by iSpiderman 10mo ago

I don’t think any silicon valley leaders believe themselves to be progressive at this point.

wslh 10mo ago

At the end of the day I don't think Silicon Valley represents anything fundamentally different from the world at large. The world is unfair, and it may become even less fair. What is disturbing is how the hype-machine around "startups" and the unicorn myth encourages people to believe they can be the next big thing. But basic arithmetic makes that impossible: you can't have an abundance of unicorns when the attention economy, capital, and market share are structurally limited.

fooqux 10mo ago
People have a tendency to think they're special, that they won't (or will) be the outlier. Gambling, unprotected sex, etc. We're not great at risk evaluation/comparison. But hey, without this, our public schools wouldn't get funding from lottery tickets! So I'm forced to conclude it's a good thing.
- garg 10mo ago
  The lottery paying for schooling is a clever self-defeating policy because it moves the tax-burden to the same people who would most benefit from a good public school system.
- morcus 10mo ago
  It is not your main point, I know - but for everyone I know who buys lottery tickets, they're more thought of as an entertainment purchase than a financial purchase.
  - JKCalhoun 10mo ago
    Might tell us more about the people you know than the typical lottery ticket purchaser? (Or perhaps they're when they tell you it is "for entertainment" they're entertaining fantasies of winning—which is probably what you can say for a lot of people buying lottery tickets.)
  - fooqux 10mo ago
    I've heard this argument before about casinos, but never lottery tickets. I'm not sure I personally buy that, but let's go with it. If they're entertaining, then presumably it's from the thrill of maybe winning. Why would winning be thrilling? Why, because you get money- potentially a life-changing amount of it. If they made a lotto game with a maximum payout of a dollar I'm reasonably certain nobody would play it. Or hell, anyone could write down a series of heads/tails on a paper and then flip a coin to see if they're a winner! Yet, we don't see that, even though it's free and (I would argue) has the same entertainment value. So yeah, I'm sure entertainment is the facade, but underneath it all, it's financially motivated for the vast majority.
- wslh 10mo ago
  True, people consistently overestimate their chances of being the exception. But in parallel, I think we also lack hype around the opposite direction: learning to live with less, intentionally and intelligently. I'm not talking about UBI or forced austerity, but about developing smarter ways to live frugally without feeling deprived. That mindset would relieve a lot of the pressure that the "you must win the startup lottery" narrative creates.
  - fooqux 10mo ago
    That's antithetical to capitalism and consumerism. Not to mention human nature. While I agree with you in principle, I don't know how one would even start to effect any change here at a societal level. Especially when it's impossible to not be bombarded with marketing from people who are extremely good at using your emotions against you here. Well, I suppose I do know of one. Mindfulness training I think has been shown to help with this, but that's still at a very personal level.
    - JKCalhoun 10mo ago
      "Christ's teachings" (well, many religions in general) should also have that effect? (I'm an atheist though, so what do I know. Some of my best takeaways from the Second Testament though are that we should be kind, content…)
    - wslh 10mo ago
      Capitalism or consumerism don't define human nature. Human behaviour existed long before those systems, and it will exist long after them. What has changed, and this is where I agree with your point about difficulty, is the scale and precision of behavioural manipulation. We've never had a period where advertising, content, and emotional triggers were personalized with such speed and accuracy. Tobacco harmed the body, today's hyper-personalized content ecosystems can easily harm attention, mood regulation, and overall mental health. So yes, it's hard to shift things at a societal level when the environment is engineered to keep people reactive. On mindfulness: in its modern form it's often packaged as another consumer product, but its roots, like those of yoga, Zen, and other contemplative traditions, come from outside capitalist logic. The original practices were tools for resisting impulse and cultivating awareness, not selling calmness subscriptions.
JKCalhoun 10mo ago
Silicon Valley is different in my mind because, well, back in the 1970's, it was arguably not evil. Woz and the nerds were making machines at home, later hooking them up to one another with the janky telephone service as the interconnect. And this kid, just getting a taste of BBSs in Kansas in the mid 1980's, was so envious of the outrageous number of BBSs in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose…—all strange names to me. But I saw that they were all in California. When a job offer got me to move out to the Bay Area in the early 90's there was still a kind of soft echo of those times. Plenty of electronics recycling warehouses you could wander through (and recognizing some of the same faces, often older men, as you moved through your morning circuit to the next warehouse). Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, etc. I had a career there, raised a family there. I watched the dot-com boom/bust, the rise of the internet, Google, and the slow decline of the hardware focus of "The Valley". When the last of my daughters left the nest, the wife and I sold the house and I retired back to the Midwaste where the two of us grew up. Weird Stuff Warehouse had recently closed up shop and that seems now as fitting a time as any to have said goodbye to The Valley.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  All that is different is that you and I have had bargaining power and scarcity far far beyond the average skilled worker. That bargaining power came from our ability to surf the crest of the wave that was over and over crashing through existing industries, turning them on their head with the promise and practice of automating via computation. In many cases deskilling the jobs of other workers. We could play the part of magicians who knew these arcane arts and get paid accordingly. There is precisely zero guarantee that any of this will continue. In the latest wave it seems like it is we ourselves who are being submerged beneath the wave.
- wslh 10mo ago
  I conjecture that what you're describing was deeply tied to the size, quality, and spirit of that original community (and consumers). A relatively small cluster of tinkerers, shared physical spaces, and a sense of discovery created a moral atmosphere very different from today's massive global tech hub shaped by billions in capital. To put the scale shift in perspective: Apple sold only a couple of million Apple IIs in that entire era. Today, the iPhone sits in the multi-billion range since 2007. Once a technology ecosystem expands by three orders of magnitude, its culture cannot remain the same. The early Valley wasn’t "good" in an absolute sense, it was simply relatively small, intimate, and guided by shared values. As growth, global competition, and finances took over, the culture changed in ways that were probably inevitable.

__MatrixMan__ 10mo ago

[flagged]

endofreach 10mo ago
...yet kids are pretty quick (and eager) to understand "mine"... and seem to struggle understanding "not mine" at first. Transgenerational greed? And still, not respecting these concepts make you the thief today. So, what now?
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  The person who coined the "Property is theft" quote (Proudhon if I recall) clearly made a distinction between capital-p Property and personal possession. And I think most regular people do, too. I don't necessarily think of my stocks and bonds in my retirement funds in the same category as my toothbrush, suit jacket, or even my house or garden or whatever. Classical liberalism and its descendants want to blur the distinction between the two. And you're welcome to adopt that view. But you shouldn't assume there aren't legitimate challenges to that point of view. Proudhon himself wasn't terrible coherent. Marx I think clarified the distinction between dominance and control of capital and production vs personal private property better. From a certain perspective, capitalism has been the process of enclosing things that were once common, or could be common, into "private" property. And despite the rhetoric of free exchange and liberty, it has mainly done this by force and coercion since the acts of enclosure and the age of colonialism until now. My 6 acres of "private property" that my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago. What does that do its status -- and to me -- now?
  - Avicebron 10mo ago
    > my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago. This argument can be used for practically any piece of earth, it's nonsensical to fixate on it. The issue has always been that capital (and it's quiet sibling power) can compound itself endlessly absent any checks against it. Societal unification against power and wealth consolidation should be the same as it would be against a plague or cancer in a body.

mentalgear 10mo ago

Just like their predecessors: Big Tobacco, Big Fossil, Big Tech. The Playbook is always the same: Run global Propaganda (ads/PR), while behind the public's back extract the capital from the general public into the private hands of a select few and "socialise" the costs (health, mental-health, polarisation, extremism, populism, ...) to the state (taxpayer). Basically: screwing the public and letting them pay the bill, but hidden by X-layers of obfuscation.

mentalgear 10mo ago
PS: Of course all the SV hipster boys and wanna-be billionaires (do you still believe you will make it?) downvote this. Well, let "that sink in" as your poster boy would say. From the article: > And I’m talking to you now, fellow workers of the Valley! If you really want to do no evil, to be good, disrupt the status quo and make the world a better place, then don’t create a capitalist firm: it’s a top-down dictatorship, where the dictators steal the money. There’s nothing progressive about this kind of social institution. Founding such a startup is deeply unethical, represents institutionalised theft, and is a prime cause of diverse social ills.
- dangusmaximus 10mo ago
  [dead]

omarhaneef 10mo ago

At the heart of this article is the claim that buying equity is a form of theft. That is an extreme claim (in the sense of surprising, remarkable, unusual, and one that needs a lot more support than ordinary claims). It is inadequately defended here. The argument that it violates fair exchange is tautological.

cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
The article is clearly written from a bit of a Marxian perspective and I think there's a lot assumed ... presuppositions about exploitation and value theory. So yeah, even though on first skim I think I agree with the thrust of this article, I think you're right it's poorly defended, assuming it's at all for an audience outside of people who already think this way.
- rixed 10mo ago
  I haven't read Marx since I left college, but in my remembering the only thing that is "theft" in the capital is the initial accumulation. There is no idea that any form of ownership beside that is theft (I don't believe there is any notion of "evil" either.) To be honest, you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting. Marx is like those ancient greek phylosophers and classical scientists who are "quoted" more often than read. One could probably say that the privatisation of human communication is a form of "initial accumulation", or maybe just another step toward appropriation of culture, but that's apparently not the angle that the author decided to explore (can't be sure, I couldn't do better than skim that text which looked wrong in too many ways).
  - Retric 10mo ago
    I think you misunderstood his viewpoint. Marx’s writing predates the US civil war. When you “own” someone and then “own” their labor the fruits of that labor aren’t yours any more than the person. By that reasoning, if you then use the fruits of that labor to buy a house it’s a stolen house.
  - 10mo ago

gsky 10mo ago

Worse thing is they preach like they are saviours

throwacct 10mo ago
This x100.
gguunhcyyd 10mo ago
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geetee 10mo ago

Is the author's point that every business should be an employee-owned cooperative? How do we get there?

wildrhythms 10mo ago
Unionize
gguunhcyyd 10mo ago
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xhkkffbf 10mo ago
Aren't many or even most of the startups essentially "employee owned"? I've heard that the average employee at NVidia is worth $25m.
- yunwal 10mo ago
  So 900b total among its 36000 employees for a total of 900b/4.3 trillion market cap. Or roughly 20% employee owned (if that 25m number is correct). This article (warning: obnoxious ads) is the only one I can find that claims to know who nvidea’s shareholders are and puts the number at 4.3% https://capital.com/en-int/analysis/nvidia-shareholder-who-owns-most-nvda-stock https://capital.com/en-int/analysis/nvidia-shareholder-who-o... I would not consider that to be employee owned (although I certainly wouldn’t mind the 25m)
  - xhkkffbf 10mo ago
    I think the phrase "employee owned" means that employees own some of the company. Do you feel that outside shareholders invalidate the claim?
    - yunwal 10mo ago
      Yes, my definition of employee owned would be “employees own a controlling share of the company”

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago

> like an Apple, Facebook, or Google One of these, is not like the others.

layer8 10mo ago
One of these has better marketing for sure.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
  Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company. I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then. I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then. That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a very different creature, and lumping it in with them, seems like a cheap grab for Apple-haters.
  - layer8 10mo ago
    The article is about the evils of capitalist profit maximization. I don’t see how Apple is any better there. If anything, they are the masters of profit maximization. I’m not an Apple “hater” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I use their products more than Google’s or Meta’s. But I don’t like the trajectory they’ve been going down for the past decade or so, and the arguments made by the article fully apply to them.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
      That doesn’t change the fact that the context was inappropriate. I completely agree with most of the stuff in the article, and even that I’m quite unhappy about Apple’s trajectory, recently. But I still believe that looping in irrelevant data, poisons the dataset. Either the article should expand its scope, or it shouldn’t include older SV companies into its dataset. Salesforce, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, Oracle, etc. have many of the same attributes as Apple (even worse, in some cases). A fairly typical thing that some folks like to do, is attach unpopular people to their targets. It energizes people that might not otherwise care. We’re seeing quite a bit of that stuff, nowadays.

frankest 10mo ago

This seems like a throw back in time - as if one of the Communist propaganda arms of Eastern Europe wrote it. This article doesn’t understand tech or modern evil. It just spews worker vs equity owner arguments. Any engineer today could start their own business. They could instantly become equity owners. Especially with AI. Many giants paid salaries and equity packages to the best, to keep them from starting competition. En engineer can also leave a tech giant and in California, unlike NY, non-competes don’t apply. Tech work scales infinitely - so you can make a product for millions of users with your own two hands, unlike manual labor workers, who are limited by physics. The evil not recognized is when the scalability of tech and AI is used to create and power up addictions that drain human brains, instead of giving them bycicles of the mind. Leaches on the brain. Industries where you can do well by the customers but you make a LOT more money if you do badly by them: Advertising (pumping ad impressions by refreshing pages, putting ads under common buttons to create unintended clicks that charge small businesses dollars per click, not delivering traffic or real audiences and making the small business pay even more thinking it’s their fault). Making gambling and games with horrible dark patter dynamics that wake users at night and expose them to chronic sleep depravation and wallet draining just to keep them addicted or with some status or in some league. If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource - think about how much of it is killed by true evil. VC funding won’t be needed when AI is used to build things without the need for much funding anymore. What truly matters is not building evil things.

fluoridation 10mo ago
>If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource But it's not, though. Human brain time (just in general, with no additional conditions) is pretty worthless, that's why people piss it away in idle activities. Just look at services like Mechanical Turk. The so-called attention economy is not about the attention itself. It's about getting the brains that give the attention to spend money.
- frankest 10mo ago
  The brains are being skewed with the content making fears disproportionate to reality and raising anxiety which disables rational thought and constructive activity.

gguunhcyyd 10mo ago

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jaybrendansmith 10mo ago

As a democratic socialist, I find this article fails to back its claim that equity is theft. Workers at startups get equity; this is why they work so hard. Would a worker cooperative be better? Possibly, but there is little incentive for the person with the capital to risk their wealth if they don't get a stake that is commensurate to the risk they are taking. I think if anything, startups are a massive improvement over public corporations because they regularly provide a means for a talented person with no capital to become an owner. If I were to critique capitalism, I would hardly start with a startup, which is the closest thing we have to a worker cooperative. I would go after private equity, which is perhaps the most evil of all of capitalism in its various forms, the equivalent of a blood sucking creature straight out of the D&D Monster Manual.

DonHopkins 10mo ago
You're saying Peter Thiel is a Beholder? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beholder_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beholder_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons...
- jaybrendansmith 10mo ago
  Excellent, but was thinking more of a Cloaker, Soulleecher, or Succubus. These creatures seem safe/helpful or innocent, but then attack, draining your life force and leave you as a discarded husk.
  - jaybrendansmith 10mo ago
    Not really sure what he is but this comes immediately to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strahd_von_Zarovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strahd_von_Zarovich "He is a malignant narcissist trapped by his malignant narcissism – forever alone, forever feared and unable to change. Salvation is beyond him. He is framed as inhumanity personified, often serving as a cautionary tale: once you lose your humanity, you can never get it back."

tutanosh 10mo ago

This article oversimplifies things...and then comes to some bold conclusions. It helps to look at different perspectives, rather than looking at everything through an ideological lens. I guess thats the age we live in, unfortunately.

fogzen 10mo ago
What is the ideological lens that characterizes our society? Greed. The individual owes nothing to society: no limit to what I can own. Society owes nothing to me: my share of the wealth is my own fault. Might makes right. A deal is fair regardless of the terms: a deal is a deal. Workers don’t deserve a vote: they agreed to their servitude.

renegade-otter 10mo ago

It's like accusing a pig of being a pig. Pig gonna do what pig does. What DOESN'T work is legally-enforced "norms" that we the people decide everyone has to follow. Businesses are "people" now, according to the US Supreme Court, so it's our job to make them face consequences if they refuse to behave like actual "humans" bound by laws. But it's only if we elect representatives who are not corrupt grifters.

fogzen 10mo ago
Is it really so crazy to extend democracy to the enterprise?
- esseph 10mo ago
  Absolutely, unless we're going to start jailing tons of executives from tons of companies.
  - queenkjuul 10mo ago
    Sounds good to me
- dirtbag__dad 10mo ago
  I think so. People will behave in the guardrails they are provided. If we have a problem with those rails, then in the US at least, democracy is (ostensibly maybe) the tool to make them more aligned with what we want.
underlipton 10mo ago
I think we just need to get rid of corporate personhood. If you want to do something big, you need to have skin in the game. Criminal prosecution for corporate action taken under your purview should be more common. If you can't handle the heat, just come watch TV with the rest of us plebs.
- phendrenad2 10mo ago

dsjoerg 10mo ago

i ask "what details does the piece offer about how to make the proposed alternative happen?" === i'm told "Almost none. The only concrete mechanisms mentioned are: Founding worker-owned cooperatives instead of equity-based startups. Raising capital as loans rather than selling equity. “Creative ways to solve the political problem of capitalists’ monopoly on capital.” This is referenced but not elaborated. No operational steps, no policy proposals, no institutional models, no financing frameworks, no examples of working co-op ecosystems, no strategy for scaling co-ops, and no plan to change investor incentives." === Dear author, please come back with more specific recommendations. I'm curious what you think early stage startup founders and funders should be doing instead of what they're currently doing. I think you want founders and funders to effectively make massively unilateral economic concessions to early employees, since they are "labor". And then you want those early employees to in turn make massive unilateral concessions to later employees because those are "labor" too. But what about the rest of labor in society? Why not instead have massive tax rates on the gains, so that all of society's labor can get in on the fruits, rather than the startups relatively few employees?

acheron 10mo ago

There are many reasons why SV and its culture are terrible and have been a negative force on the world over the past few decades. None of those reasons are related to Marxist bullshit. Grow up.

immibis 10mo ago

I'm not sure this is allowed to be posted here, on the discussion forums of a Silicon Valley startup incubator. I don't think Y Combinator likes being called evil.

cm2012 10mo ago

Seems a rather expansive definition of evil

anovikov 10mo ago

It's just a simple primitive far leftist piece not worthy of any discussion, just a commie junk.

DrierCycle 10mo ago

Efficiency is the path to cybernetic issues of control and eventually the functional takeover from the processual, ie biology. Imposing function on evolution eventually embeds maladaption that is fatal to the species.

supportengineer 10mo ago

After thinking about this problem for a while, I think that there is a potential for someone to make a nonprofit software company for the public good. And yet it would still pay high developer salaries.

AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
There’s not because you can’t find the initial capital to start it

silexia 10mo ago

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deleted 10mo ago

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silexia 10mo ago

The argument that profit equals theft as a fundamental misunderstanding of system mechanics. The article relies on the outdated notion that labor is the sole input for value, ignoring the critical function of capital as fuel for risk. Investors and founders absorb the high probability of total system failure, which allows employees to receive guaranteed, low-latency salaries regardless of the product's success. If workers wanted the full residual profit, they would need to accept the full downside risk, including working for zero pay until revenue stabilizes. The preference for traditional corporate structures over cooperatives is not a conspiracy but an optimization for speed and scalability. Centralized decision-making allows startups to pivot rapidly in competitive markets, whereas committee-based governance often introduces fatal latency. Furthermore, employment is a voluntary exchange where engineers trade skills for compensation, often including equity to align incentives. Labeling this voluntary cooperation as "evil" ignores that this model has driven the greatest reduction in information costs in history. We are not victims of a theft-based institution but participants in a high-performance engine that rewards efficiency and problem-solving.

pickledonions49 10mo ago

Nothing is ever going to be completely equal in society. Innovation is driven by labor being capital (thus profit), or by influence (state backed stuff loses money in exchange for influence). I have a right to make money with resources at my disposal. Taxes are exchanged for the privileges of citizenship, and hopefully, someday, the ability to not get screwed by insurance. Correct me if I am wrong, I am open to ideas. My knowledge of economics is all from social studies class, my brother almost dying because insurance at first denied to pay for his surgery, and making money from yard work and fixing electronics because I am not old enough to get a legit job. I have never paid taxes, but I somewhat understand disdain towards taxation in an age where the cost of living is as high as it is relative to the amount of money one is capable of making.

helpfulfrond 10mo ago

Excellent piece.

1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo ago

About the author, former Google intern https://web.archive.org/web/20190204123209/https://notesfrombelow.org/article/silicon-inquiry https://web.archive.org/web/20190204123209/https://notesfrom...

sershe 10mo ago

This is basically saying wage labor is theft, nothing to do with silicon valley as such Comically though, it's also self-refuting, since it leads with how voluntary exchange of something for money is ok, even if someone gets a bad deal. Buy, you see, if you voluntarily exchange your labor for money - creating that something (notably your employer is not interested in your labor especially in the case of the startup, only that you give them the product); and then your counterparty voluntarily exchanges that product for somewhat more money with someone else, that is now theft, and also evil. This is just propaganda. Collectivism is evil, startups are fine.