11 ms·

The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley’s Dysfunction Fetish

68 points by dnewms 13y ago

avty 13y ago
Well, nothing like a little crash to bring these kind of people's head back to earth.
- dtx 13y ago
  "These kind of people" might come across as wrong to a few, which is completely fair and justified. But as you said - "getting them back to Earth" is a wrong idea. That implies that current situation is completely fine and these people are eccentrics, which is most definitely not correct. Rather than silencing a few who speak their minds and getting things back to (ab)normal; we need to find our own ideas on how things can be fixed, if not by the ideology proposed by such people. We need to collectively work towards a solution than silencing a few.
  - avty 13y ago
    “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. ... I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” — Then-Sen. Barack Obama, floor speech in the Senate, March 16, 2006
molecule 13y ago
> His statement mirrors what venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said last year, when he proclaimed, "I love gridlock!" I doubt Marc Andreessen loved gridlock when he was working on Mosaic @ the NCSA > The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Supercomputing_Applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Supercomput...
molecule 13y ago
Those expressing the views described in this article seem to be painfully ignorant of the Federally financed origins of Silicon Valley: http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
- bas 13y ago
  Not to mention a certain Fort Meade-based agency that had them apoplectic with rage.
- chubot 13y ago
  Yup. I was watching a video about the history of BSD recently and I was surprised at how closely DARPA was involved. Marshall McCusick was describing how he, Bill Joy and others were at Berkeley and literally implementing the Internet in BSD! They were funded by DARPA and were overseen by DARPA admnistrators. But they actually were not doing all of it -- DARPA was also paying private contractors for other components. (Which ended up in some technical disagreements as I recall.) That BSD code is of course not only the foundation of the Internet, but of your iPhones and iPads as well. Actually I believe it is fundamental to Windows as well, since my understanding is that the TCP/IP implementation in Windows is BSD code. Silicon Valley doesn't have the foresight for the technical foundations of society (and I say that having worked here for over a decade). The web wasn't invented by Silicon Valley either. Neither was e-mail. Neither was Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. Python was actually government funded too. Also don't forget that Bill Clinton and the government made all your location-based apps possible, by opening GPS satellites to the public in the 90s.
  - gcb1 13y ago
    historic significance does not matter much. what it is doing now? it is no wonder that someone who has private transportation, private insurance, private retirement, private everything... does not care about government. he is the embodiement of the capitalistic dream. government for those people is only for taxation. of course they would cheer. the weird part is the middle class worker with the obama bumper sticker cheering for them. this i will never understand,
robg 13y ago
Without extensive government funding, it would never have become Silicon Valley. http://video.pbs.org/video/2332168287/ http://video.pbs.org/video/2332168287/
NathanKP 13y ago
Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. That doesn't sound like a better world. That sounds like a worse one. Governments tend to at least have some interest in keeping their citizens alive, healthy, and happy. The primary purpose of a company is to make money and as history has shown time and time again companies in general are all too willing to sell people dangerous products, work their employees to death, and do other unsavory things in order to make money. Sure the US government is seeming ineffective, and in many cases less than satisfactory. But a system in which companies have the power definitely isn't better.
- orblivion 13y ago
  > Governments tend to at least have some interest in keeping their citizens alive, healthy, and happy. Where would such an interest come from?
  - Apocryphon 13y ago
    We the people.
    - orblivion 13y ago
      But what gives the politicians the incentives to care about We the people? I'm just trying to challenge the notion that government inherently cares about The People because it's chartered to do so, whereas companies supposedly are chartered to care about only themselves.
      - NathanKP 13y ago
        Another way to think about it is to ask "Where does the incentive come from to keep members of your family alive, healthy, and happy?" A government defines a group of people who tend to have some sort of patriotic emotional bond with each other, much like the emotional bond that ties a family together. This is why people all across America felt the pain of the 9/11 attacks despite the fact that realistically the vast majority of us did not have family members or friends that died in the attack. At a fundamental level this patriotic bond alone seems to make the majority of governments considerably more altruistic toward their citizens than a company would be towards their customers. After all the leaders of government are also citizens with that bond of shared country and patriotism that they share with other citizens. In a company there is a much larger "us and them" divide between people in the company and people the company is selling to. So in this light the grandparent's response of "We the People" though short is pretty meaningful and accurate. Governments tend to have interest in their citizens because of this patriotic bond which says that both the leaders and the ordinary citizens are "We the People".
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. Becoming? Corporations have been the transcendant power in the developed world since the collapse of feudalism.
Apocryphon 13y ago
The cyberpunk genre has existed for almost three decades. His embrace of the fears of that dystopian movement is pretty disconcerting. Not to mention inaccurate. Companies are certainly powerful, but what is the power or influence of Silicon Valley compared to the titans of industry such as IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon, and yes, the financial firms and banks of NYC?
mseebach 13y ago
This is a ridiculous article. It leaps from a couple of government-critical comments to declaring a "fetish" for "dysfunction"? Based on what, exactly? Why aren't the people tirelessly defending the clusterfuck that is democratic government in most of the western world the fetishists? And for the comments on this thread suggesting that silicon valley can't be critical of government because government once had a hand in the valley? That's roughly the same level of hypocrisy as a government-fan shopping at Walmart.
- dfc 13y ago
  I am curious about: "That's roughly the same level of hypocrisy as a government-fan shopping at Walmart." I try not to engage in political discussions on HN so please do not interpret my question as me challenging your point. I am merely interested in what you find hypocritical in the Wal-Mart shopping example.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    Somebody in favour of the government benefiting from the services of the private market = not very hypocritical at all. Just like I don't think it's very hypocritical for someone who once worked for a company that got a subsidy from the government to be against the government. We live in the world we live in, and failing to live a perfectly pure life should not disqualify you from having opinions.
- bashinator 13y ago
  Wouldn't a fan of "big government" want to shop at Walmart, in order to further promulgate the necessity of welfare addiction to the working classes?
Uhhrrr 13y ago
For all the rhetoric in the article, Mr. Roose never actually refutes this belief: "For them, government is mostly a hindrance — a regulatory obstacle to the kinds of disruptive start-ups they fund, and an enemy of a looser immigration policy that would allow their portfolio companies to recruit more talented foreign engineers."
joyeuse6701 13y ago
It's funny, people's loyalty seem to almost always lie with their largest patron.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
Kevin Roose clearly misunderstands what "functioning" means in Congressional terms. Perhaps he was absent on the day that his 4th grade class learned: - The Executive branch enforces laws. - The Judicial branch interprets laws. - The Legislative branch makes laws. Think about that: The Legislative branch's ONLY JOB is to make laws. Now, I'm a big-government-loving bleeding heart liberal, but even I have to admit that it's completely ridiculous to put 535 people representing 3.8 million square miles of land into one building for 11 months out of every year for the sole purpose of making new laws. How could you not end up with tons of unnecessary cruft and bloat? What this means is that the only time we aren't adding more restrictions to our lives is when Congress is gridlocked. Gridlock is the system functioning as designed. What's not to love about it? We don't want a government that moves fast and breaks things. For startups and lean companies, it can be a real pain in the ass! It's hard enough to keep up with compliance issues when you're just starting out; having to change your policies every 6 months due to the whims on Congress would be practically anti-business.
- vermontdevil 13y ago
  I personally believe the following things should happen: 1) increase the # of representatives. Why was the # capped? Now I believe there are an average of 700k per representative. I am going by memory here. But I know the original recommendation was 35,000 per rep as per the Constitution. This needs to be allowed. So what if we end up with about 6,000 representatives! At least we would have a more direct access to our rep. 2) House of Representatives shouldn't run for 11 months a year. Make it 6 or 7 months. Let them come back to their districts for one month every 3 or 4 months. They need to spend more time with their constituents.
  - gohrt 13y ago
    > 2) That's basically how it is now. > They need to spend more time with their constituents That's what campaigning is, and they do it.
- gjm11 13y ago
  > The Legislative branch's ONLY JOB is to make laws. I don't think that's quite right. Its job is to change the laws. That can mean adding laws, repealing laws, updating existing laws in the light of changing circumstances, etc. And "changing the laws" includes one-off things that do something once and don't leave much enduring cruft behind, like the Hurricane Sandy relief bill. There's no reason in principle why they couldn't do their job while keeping the total amount of law constant or even reducing it. If in practice they do spend almost all their time (when not gridlocked) making new laws without trimming the resulting bloat, the problem isn't simply that their job requires them to do that.
cylinder 13y ago
It's frustrating that someone with such poor critical thinking skills can become so rich. Anyone with even mediocre critical thinking abilities and a general knowledge of markets would understand that the reason the stock market went up during the shutdown is because investors know the government will be back. This understanding and expectation is obviously priced into the market. If they are implying that the stock market would remain resilient if the federal government disappeared overnight never to return, they are quite simply idiots. The #1 reason the US and other western nations are able to attract capital and have sophisticated economies is because of their predictable, reasonable legal systems and regulatory environments. Capital commands extremely high rates of return in risky legal frameworks, when an investor doesn't know whether they will be hit up for a bribe or seized by a populist government, they are obviously going to demand much more. A well-developed legal system and the power of the government to enforce laws and judgments is the reason the US is a "safe haven."
- wozniacki 13y ago
  He is much more erudite than you give him credit for. This is a much better instance of him speaking on various affairs, not just on government: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59uTUpO8Dzw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59uTUpO8Dzw
- dnautics 13y ago
  >because of their predictable, reasonable legal systems and regulatory environments... Isn't there a argument, then, that increasing the number of laws (or pages in any given law) beyond a certain point begins having negative returns on your predictability and reasonability, because of the power-law increase in interactions between laws?
mixmastamyk 13y ago
Hmm, the author seems to imply the idea is wrong or dangerous, then the article ends. Not sure what to think.
drvdevd 13y ago
Strange that there seemed to be no mention of why the US government shut down in the first place: they failed to raise the debt ceiling on time, right? And who has primary interest in US debt? Other governments, like China for example. So if Silicon Valley were to become the true seat of power in the US, how would they approach international relations? And how would they handle the military? And what would they do in the event of a war? This does seem like an article written about an off-hand, not so serious comment. But it touches a nerve on something I hear echoing around my world (and I don't live in California) -- people believe Tech companies are the new driving direction of the economy and they think that makes them the new direction of power. I can't help but feel it's the wishful thinking of a new middle class.
argumentum 13y ago
I don't like this Chamath guy, but he has recognized something that's real. Though his words are mostly hyperbole, power is shifting to the valley.

68 points by dnewms 13y ago

avty 13y ago

Well, nothing like a little crash to bring these kind of people's head back to earth.

dtx 13y ago
"These kind of people" might come across as wrong to a few, which is completely fair and justified. But as you said - "getting them back to Earth" is a wrong idea. That implies that current situation is completely fine and these people are eccentrics, which is most definitely not correct. Rather than silencing a few who speak their minds and getting things back to (ab)normal; we need to find our own ideas on how things can be fixed, if not by the ideology proposed by such people. We need to collectively work towards a solution than silencing a few.
- avty 13y ago
  “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. ... I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” — Then-Sen. Barack Obama, floor speech in the Senate, March 16, 2006

molecule 13y ago

> His statement mirrors what venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said last year, when he proclaimed, "I love gridlock!" I doubt Marc Andreessen loved gridlock when he was working on Mosaic @ the NCSA > The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Supercomputing_Applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Supercomput...

molecule 13y ago

Those expressing the views described in this article seem to be painfully ignorant of the Federally financed origins of Silicon Valley: http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

bas 13y ago
Not to mention a certain Fort Meade-based agency that had them apoplectic with rage.
chubot 13y ago
Yup. I was watching a video about the history of BSD recently and I was surprised at how closely DARPA was involved. Marshall McCusick was describing how he, Bill Joy and others were at Berkeley and literally implementing the Internet in BSD! They were funded by DARPA and were overseen by DARPA admnistrators. But they actually were not doing all of it -- DARPA was also paying private contractors for other components. (Which ended up in some technical disagreements as I recall.) That BSD code is of course not only the foundation of the Internet, but of your iPhones and iPads as well. Actually I believe it is fundamental to Windows as well, since my understanding is that the TCP/IP implementation in Windows is BSD code. Silicon Valley doesn't have the foresight for the technical foundations of society (and I say that having worked here for over a decade). The web wasn't invented by Silicon Valley either. Neither was e-mail. Neither was Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. Python was actually government funded too. Also don't forget that Bill Clinton and the government made all your location-based apps possible, by opening GPS satellites to the public in the 90s.
- gcb1 13y ago
  historic significance does not matter much. what it is doing now? it is no wonder that someone who has private transportation, private insurance, private retirement, private everything... does not care about government. he is the embodiement of the capitalistic dream. government for those people is only for taxation. of course they would cheer. the weird part is the middle class worker with the obama bumper sticker cheering for them. this i will never understand,

robg 13y ago

Without extensive government funding, it would never have become Silicon Valley. http://video.pbs.org/video/2332168287/ http://video.pbs.org/video/2332168287/

NathanKP 13y ago

Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. That doesn't sound like a better world. That sounds like a worse one. Governments tend to at least have some interest in keeping their citizens alive, healthy, and happy. The primary purpose of a company is to make money and as history has shown time and time again companies in general are all too willing to sell people dangerous products, work their employees to death, and do other unsavory things in order to make money. Sure the US government is seeming ineffective, and in many cases less than satisfactory. But a system in which companies have the power definitely isn't better.

orblivion 13y ago
> Governments tend to at least have some interest in keeping their citizens alive, healthy, and happy. Where would such an interest come from?
- Apocryphon 13y ago
  We the people.
  - orblivion 13y ago
    But what gives the politicians the incentives to care about We the people? I'm just trying to challenge the notion that government inherently cares about The People because it's chartered to do so, whereas companies supposedly are chartered to care about only themselves.
    - NathanKP 13y ago
      Another way to think about it is to ask "Where does the incentive come from to keep members of your family alive, healthy, and happy?" A government defines a group of people who tend to have some sort of patriotic emotional bond with each other, much like the emotional bond that ties a family together. This is why people all across America felt the pain of the 9/11 attacks despite the fact that realistically the vast majority of us did not have family members or friends that died in the attack. At a fundamental level this patriotic bond alone seems to make the majority of governments considerably more altruistic toward their citizens than a company would be towards their customers. After all the leaders of government are also citizens with that bond of shared country and patriotism that they share with other citizens. In a company there is a much larger "us and them" divide between people in the company and people the company is selling to. So in this light the grandparent's response of "We the People" though short is pretty meaningful and accurate. Governments tend to have interest in their citizens because of this patriotic bond which says that both the leaders and the ordinary citizens are "We the People".

dragonwriter 13y ago

> Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. Becoming? Corporations have been the transcendant power in the developed world since the collapse of feudalism.

Apocryphon 13y ago

The cyberpunk genre has existed for almost three decades. His embrace of the fears of that dystopian movement is pretty disconcerting. Not to mention inaccurate. Companies are certainly powerful, but what is the power or influence of Silicon Valley compared to the titans of industry such as IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon, and yes, the financial firms and banks of NYC?

mseebach 13y ago

This is a ridiculous article. It leaps from a couple of government-critical comments to declaring a "fetish" for "dysfunction"? Based on what, exactly? Why aren't the people tirelessly defending the clusterfuck that is democratic government in most of the western world the fetishists? And for the comments on this thread suggesting that silicon valley can't be critical of government because government once had a hand in the valley? That's roughly the same level of hypocrisy as a government-fan shopping at Walmart.

dfc 13y ago
I am curious about: "That's roughly the same level of hypocrisy as a government-fan shopping at Walmart." I try not to engage in political discussions on HN so please do not interpret my question as me challenging your point. I am merely interested in what you find hypocritical in the Wal-Mart shopping example.
- mseebach 13y ago
  Somebody in favour of the government benefiting from the services of the private market = not very hypocritical at all. Just like I don't think it's very hypocritical for someone who once worked for a company that got a subsidy from the government to be against the government. We live in the world we live in, and failing to live a perfectly pure life should not disqualify you from having opinions.
bashinator 13y ago
Wouldn't a fan of "big government" want to shop at Walmart, in order to further promulgate the necessity of welfare addiction to the working classes?

Uhhrrr 13y ago

For all the rhetoric in the article, Mr. Roose never actually refutes this belief: "For them, government is mostly a hindrance — a regulatory obstacle to the kinds of disruptive start-ups they fund, and an enemy of a looser immigration policy that would allow their portfolio companies to recruit more talented foreign engineers."

joyeuse6701 13y ago

It's funny, people's loyalty seem to almost always lie with their largest patron.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago

Kevin Roose clearly misunderstands what "functioning" means in Congressional terms. Perhaps he was absent on the day that his 4th grade class learned: - The Executive branch enforces laws. - The Judicial branch interprets laws. - The Legislative branch makes laws. Think about that: The Legislative branch's ONLY JOB is to make laws. Now, I'm a big-government-loving bleeding heart liberal, but even I have to admit that it's completely ridiculous to put 535 people representing 3.8 million square miles of land into one building for 11 months out of every year for the sole purpose of making new laws. How could you not end up with tons of unnecessary cruft and bloat? What this means is that the only time we aren't adding more restrictions to our lives is when Congress is gridlocked. Gridlock is the system functioning as designed. What's not to love about it? We don't want a government that moves fast and breaks things. For startups and lean companies, it can be a real pain in the ass! It's hard enough to keep up with compliance issues when you're just starting out; having to change your policies every 6 months due to the whims on Congress would be practically anti-business.

vermontdevil 13y ago
I personally believe the following things should happen: 1) increase the # of representatives. Why was the # capped? Now I believe there are an average of 700k per representative. I am going by memory here. But I know the original recommendation was 35,000 per rep as per the Constitution. This needs to be allowed. So what if we end up with about 6,000 representatives! At least we would have a more direct access to our rep. 2) House of Representatives shouldn't run for 11 months a year. Make it 6 or 7 months. Let them come back to their districts for one month every 3 or 4 months. They need to spend more time with their constituents.
- gohrt 13y ago
  > 2) That's basically how it is now. > They need to spend more time with their constituents That's what campaigning is, and they do it.
gjm11 13y ago
> The Legislative branch's ONLY JOB is to make laws. I don't think that's quite right. Its job is to change the laws. That can mean adding laws, repealing laws, updating existing laws in the light of changing circumstances, etc. And "changing the laws" includes one-off things that do something once and don't leave much enduring cruft behind, like the Hurricane Sandy relief bill. There's no reason in principle why they couldn't do their job while keeping the total amount of law constant or even reducing it. If in practice they do spend almost all their time (when not gridlocked) making new laws without trimming the resulting bloat, the problem isn't simply that their job requires them to do that.

cylinder 13y ago

It's frustrating that someone with such poor critical thinking skills can become so rich. Anyone with even mediocre critical thinking abilities and a general knowledge of markets would understand that the reason the stock market went up during the shutdown is because investors know the government will be back. This understanding and expectation is obviously priced into the market. If they are implying that the stock market would remain resilient if the federal government disappeared overnight never to return, they are quite simply idiots. The #1 reason the US and other western nations are able to attract capital and have sophisticated economies is because of their predictable, reasonable legal systems and regulatory environments. Capital commands extremely high rates of return in risky legal frameworks, when an investor doesn't know whether they will be hit up for a bribe or seized by a populist government, they are obviously going to demand much more. A well-developed legal system and the power of the government to enforce laws and judgments is the reason the US is a "safe haven."

wozniacki 13y ago
He is much more erudite than you give him credit for. This is a much better instance of him speaking on various affairs, not just on government: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59uTUpO8Dzw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59uTUpO8Dzw
dnautics 13y ago
>because of their predictable, reasonable legal systems and regulatory environments... Isn't there a argument, then, that increasing the number of laws (or pages in any given law) beyond a certain point begins having negative returns on your predictability and reasonability, because of the power-law increase in interactions between laws?

mixmastamyk 13y ago

Hmm, the author seems to imply the idea is wrong or dangerous, then the article ends. Not sure what to think.

drvdevd 13y ago

Strange that there seemed to be no mention of why the US government shut down in the first place: they failed to raise the debt ceiling on time, right? And who has primary interest in US debt? Other governments, like China for example. So if Silicon Valley were to become the true seat of power in the US, how would they approach international relations? And how would they handle the military? And what would they do in the event of a war? This does seem like an article written about an off-hand, not so serious comment. But it touches a nerve on something I hear echoing around my world (and I don't live in California) -- people believe Tech companies are the new driving direction of the economy and they think that makes them the new direction of power. I can't help but feel it's the wishful thinking of a new middle class.

argumentum 13y ago

I don't like this Chamath guy, but he has recognized something that's real. Though his words are mostly hyperbole, power is shifting to the valley.