Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/08/dear-silicon-valley-americas-fallen-out-of-love-with-you/

by Caveman_Coder • 9 years ago

325 406 9 years ago

After living in SV for most of my life, I decided to move to the Southwest to work in an industry that, in my opinion, is actually a public good (utility industry). It's a bit slower paced, but the engineering problems are the same and the community is much better.

bluetwo2• 9 years ago

I'm curious about 'community is much better'... any more info?

I don't live in SV.

Caveman_Coder7• 9 years ago

Warning: totally subjective opinions to follow...

The PHX community is "much better" in my opinion because the people I meet at various Dev groups aren't doing it because they want to be "software-developer famous"...if you know what I mean. When I was in SV I went to tons of meetups where it seemed like the devs were just trying to create something to get themselves "likes/favs/PRs/followers/etc" on HN/GitHub/Twitter. It was a weird kind of in-group celebrity that I detest.

Here in PHX, I don't really see any of that. I went to a Linux Users Meetup and it was pretty chill, nobody was pushing their GitHub repo/blog/Twitter on the audience, it was just a laid back discussion on the latest happenings, but not the software-developer-gossip nonsense. When I go to a .NET developer group meetup, we discuss .NET Core and Azure...just the facts. We don't discuss the latest thing Scott Hanselman said on Twitter, or what so-and-so said about the latest <insert topic>. The discussion tend to be about the tech, how to use it, and what the new features allow us to do, that's it.

Some of us don't want to be famous for our GitHub, we want to work with nice teammates on cool engineering problems that matter. I found my current employment (working on electrical grid software for a major SW utility company) to fit perfectly with my interests and background.

wtflmaohnisdumb3• 9 years ago

Do you get similar salary / benefits (adjusted for rent)?

dsfyu404ed4• 9 years ago

No. We're full. Stay in SV please /s

There's good companies and bad companies, just like everywhere else.

wpietri• 9 years ago

The description of the symptoms here has a lot of resonance for me.

I was just talking with the CEO I worked for in 2001; she's busy putting together her next startup. We had a good conversation about what I was calling "unicorn fever", the way the desire for instant massive valuation has distorted so much of what we thought good about the startup ecosystem. The article calling this factory farming seems spot on to me.

8draco8• 9 years ago

It's not the problem of Silicon Valley it's the problem of investors throwing money at anything that is located in SV. You can still make some good money in SV you just have to invest in a startup with real future not just a good pitch. I don't think there will be big D-day when all unicorns will fail. We will see more and more stupid startups to fail (Juicero, Soccer Genomics etc.) and lower willingnes to invest into dumb startups but those that have the future like Dropbox, Github, WeWork etc.

hienyimba• 9 years ago

Techcrunch forgets its a "Part" of Silicon Valley. Most Valley stories cannot be told without Techcrunch in it e.g the T.v show - Silicon Valley.

FussyZeus• 9 years ago

I don't understand the point of this observation; are you saying they aren't allowed to criticize? Or that they are guilty of the same things? Or that they're somehow complicit? What are you getting at?

snerbles5• 9 years ago

We become desensitized to certain forms of stimuli over time. Someone with horrendous body odor may not even notice it at first, but once he can actually smell it the stench is making his neighbors gag.

In other words, it's bad enough that TechCrunch has noticed.

snerbles5• 9 years ago

The author danced around but missed the detached, holier-than-thou elitism that radiates from the entire Bay Area.

dsfyu404ed4• 9 years ago

That's like saying an atom bomb produces a warm glow.

CalChris6• 9 years ago

There's a huge difference between being elite (we are and I sure am) and elitism. In fact the author stabs at the heart of Silicon Valley elitism:

  Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room.
  And your door is shut to most people.

carbocation• 9 years ago

As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark.

I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates.

The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).

The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.

wtflmaohnisdumb3• 9 years ago

The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.

People don't like new people getting money. A story as old as time.

xversilov• 9 years ago

There is no a priori reason that society feels comfortable acknowledging, but for anybody without those hangups, the reasons are actually quite obvious.

jacalata• 9 years ago

Do explain.

ivraatiems3• 9 years ago

The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).

The problem with Juciero and Theranos isn't that they failed. The problem with them is that Juciero was an immensely dumb idea that was never checked or questioned and thereby wasted tons of money, and Theranos was so unabashedly, obviously mustache-twirlingly evil that if it were used to script an evil corporation for TV, I'd have called it unrealistic (and thereby, it wasted tons of money). They're the worst parts of SV (dumb companies offering things nobody wants at outrageous prices, and obvious evil pretending things are OK because they're 'changing the world' or some other nonsense) exaggerated to near-comical extremes.

Silicon Valley's problem is deeper than failing businesses or not enough diversity. It's that the entire enterprise is a bold-faced moneygrab for VCs; ethics, diversity, etc. were never really part of the point, and it's only now that the rest of the world is starting to figure that out. SV's problems are at the core of the reasons for its current existence.

Clubber18• 9 years ago

The problem with them is that Juciero was an immensely dumb idea that was never checked or questioned and thereby wasted tons of money

Like bottled water. The idea of people paying 1600x markup for something they got essentially free while creating massive amounts of waste when sports bottles already existed. When bottled water came out, I remember thinking, "that's a friggin' joke."

It sure worked out though.

taysic2• 9 years ago

It may have been dumb to you but what does that matter? The point of capitalism is that it's not anyone else's business. Things you may buy may be considered dumb to another. It doesn't matter in a free market where everyone decides for themselves and has their own reasons for what they buy. If it wasted money, that is on the people who invested in it.

eropple2• 9 years ago

The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV

The rise in income inequality is tied pretty directly to pervasive automation. Economic efficiency is not always social progress, especially when coupled with retrograde politics and social policy. We're not having "more leisure" or whatever because of it, we're having people ground to dust in worthless jobs because the computers are doing more and more.

To that end, tech (and not just the Valley, but the Valley is a particularly visible and awfully smarmy representation of tech) probably should get more shade thrown at it than it does.

then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem

Tech is doing no such thing. Tech is reifying capital, it is not trying to solve the problem on behalf of labor.

323454• 9 years ago

Growing wealth inequality in the United States in the last twenty years was caused mostly by globalisation, the offshoring of jobs that left huge numbers of people out of work and broke while making the owners and investors multiple times wealthier. Automation has played its role in generating inequality at times in history, but the wave we are currently experiencing is not predominantly due to automation: it is instead due to cheap and plentiful foreign labor.

TheAdamAndChe3• 9 years ago

The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.

The issue here is that many people feel SV's ideas of basic income will absolutely never work in the long-term. Heck, it will never work in this country period. We can't even socialize healthcare in this country, and those who collect unemployment are looked down upon.

What makes you think basic income will ever become a reality? What makes you think a major political party wouldn't call those people freeloaders and work ceaselessly to remove those benefits if they are put in place? And what makes you think those millions of people being given subsidized, substandard, meaningless lives won't rise up against a system that has basically sucked as much productivity out of them that they could before abandoning them?

rtx4• 9 years ago

America is already the biggest socialist country in the world.

grabcocque2• 9 years ago

That's not the real reason public opinion has shifted sharply against denizens of the Valley.

That would be Uber. A company so sociopathic, so awful, so entitled, so full of loathsome self-aggrandising bullies they became an unwitting figurehead for hatred of the Valley. And Uber make it so easy to hate them.

onewaystreet• 9 years ago

The fact that Uber hasn't suffered any noticeable loss of business suggests that this is false. Or at least that it doesn't matter if people love you or not.

grabcocque2• 9 years ago

You don't have to be loved to be profitable. That said Uber is currently neither, nor is it likely to be any time soon.

But my point is that Uber's reputation plumbing the abyssal depths, and to a lesser extent AirBnB's, is dragging down the reputation of the rest of the valley.

wavefunction• 9 years ago

I think those early SV days were probably not that way. Hard to see Hewlett and Packard or the folks at Fairchild or some of the other firms out there acting the way SV folks act in 2017.

Can you imagine Bill Hewlett kicking some kids off a field because he had reserved it for his kick-ball team?

atonse• 9 years ago

This article feels mostly spot on.

Except I do see at least investors like YC making an effort to broaden the kinds of investments they make, more into actual "public good" type companies like in the education, health, and non-profit sectors.

vasilipupkin3• 9 years ago

this article is so nonsensical, it's almost comical, I don't even know where to start. Ok, how about calling it a problem that 19 out of 20 investments will fail. Willing to invest like that is a great thing about SV, not a bad thing!

mixedbit2• 9 years ago

19 of 20 investments fail because VCs equate success with > 1B$ valuation. Among the failed companies there are plenty that produce great and useful products but need to shut down because the VC deals forced them to grow to unsustainable size.

vasilipupkin3• 9 years ago

ok, but those 19 investments didn't have to take VC money. if they produced great and useful products, then why couldn't they grow organically, borrow from a bank, etc.? I mean it's just complete nonsense to complain about the fact that you failed using someone else's money.

dsfyu404ed4• 9 years ago

SV will adapt or die. It's how stuff like this always goes. What's left of domestic manufacturing adapted. Coal is basically dead.

If SV picks latter option I just hope the corpse doesn't stink up the rest of society.

(obviously this is a long ways off because inertia but it's something to think about if you think you'll retire by selling your SV property to the next sucker)

autokad2• 9 years ago

sv has a diversity problem, but I think its more geographic than related to skin color.

ryanb23• 9 years ago

what does that mean?

autokad2• 9 years ago

people from the midwest and south are largely not represented in sv companies. sv has done a great job at basically hiring the same type of person over and over. I believe this is mostly because of their preference for a narrow set of universities, among other things.

imaginenore• 9 years ago

It's more of a gap between the educated in the useful fields vs everyone else. And it's not going anywhere. The people who don't have the capacity to learn complex and useful things are left behind in our quickly accelerating world.

austenallred8• 9 years ago

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.

Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential.

Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy. But the media knows that, so it goes after the losers: It’s easy to point and laugh at the 100 things that look stupid, without realizing that “lol this social network for college kids thinks it’s worth $150m” seems just as crazy. Silicon Valley is the place that will be wrong funding Juicero in order to be right funding Facebook. You can’t have one without the other. (As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.)

But the media that sees itself losing its power, losing influence, and losing money. Of course they hate tech.

jrs952• 9 years ago

I think some of the people that do have a problem with SV or tech in general also just have a problem with people they perceive as having lower social status succeeding. It's not anti-intellectualism exactly, but it sort of parallels it in my opinion.

gt_2• 9 years ago

I agree. It is not the classic anti-intellectualism, but I think a refined version of it.

jes5199• 9 years ago

people in SV aren’t “suceeding” - they’re making twice as much money as everyone else in exchange for creating systems of surveillance. I’m not surprised people are salty about it.

aaron-lebo2• 9 years ago

It's false loyalty. People put up with Facebook, Apple, Google, etc with their fake "we care about you" marketing (could apps stop literally telling me this? it's weird), overpriced, and walled garden megalomania because they are addicted and their other options are mediocre walled gardens (look around).

People aren't stupid, they can sense when they are being used and those companies have treated their customers like cattle for the last decade or more. It's going to come crashing down one day, you can't treat customers with blatant disrespect time and time again and be shocked when they finally leave.

austenallred8• 9 years ago

It’s not loyalty at all, it’s just people using the best product available to them. If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. Until that happens, people will continue to use Facebook, because despite what Hacker News thinks, Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.

tayo42• 9 years ago

you can't treat customers with blatant disrespect time and time again and be shocked when they finally leave.

Has this actually ever happened? Maybe it's just to early but I can't think of any.

sametmax• 9 years ago

No, people can't sense anything. They keep forgiving the biggest cheaters in life and politics and reward thzir misbehavior with power and money. Better that people will do what's best for them assume they put a thought into it. They don't. They just react. And very basically.

ryanmarsh• 9 years ago

shocked when they finally leave

Where are they going to go?

dsacco2• 9 years ago

Why do you believe that people en masse "put up" with these tech companies? In my experience you're right that they're not stupid or unreasonable, but I think you're otherwise mistaken about the opinions of the vast majority. In my experience, they don't think they're being used - it's never occurred to them, because they don't particularly worry about centralized megacorporations having their personal data. And even if they are made aware of that, I think most still don't really care, even if they agree.

I judge how much people care about their personal data being in the hands of large companies based on how much they talk about it (but begrudgingly put up with it) or how much they stop using the products. Most people don't think about, talk about or consider their data being in e.g. Facebook's hands, and most people don't delete their Facebook accounts or diminish their usage, even when something shinier comes along. A lot of people on HN do those things and it's clear they care about their personal privacy, but I see no evidence that even a large minority of people actually care.

untog• 9 years ago

People put up with Facebook

No, people love Facebook. But they love "Facebook", the utility that lets them connect with friends and family from afar, post photos and videos of loved ones and organise events. They do not love Facebook, the monolith company headed up by Mark Zuckerberg.

That's the important distinction here. People like the products they are given, but couldn't care less about how they are given them. By and large, that's fine, but it's highlighted when people assume that Uber customers care about how they were pioneers in innovation or whatever else SV applauds them for. Nope. They just want cheap car rides, please.

sidlls2• 9 years ago

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates.

It's more like they tolerate the 500 pound gorilla in the room because there isn't an alternative.

Non-techies I associate with constantly complain about the poor quality of software, hardware (even Apple's devices, which regularly freeze and fail in all the ways any others might) and support. It's the best we have. It doesn't mean it's good, or that people are "in love" with it.

wutbrodo3• 9 years ago

The non techies I associate with are intelligent enough to understand that they can buy a dumbphone like a Jitterbug if they don't like the downsides of the complexity of a smartphone, and that they get substantially more value out of the upsides than losses from the downsides. This shakes out to them being a lot more excited and optimistic and rosy about technology and technology companies.

Especially when I worked at Google: every non tech person I met would gush over how much they loved their products, how amazing the company must be, etc etc. This was true across a large gamut of people, from "coastal elites" to the rest of the country to people I met across the world once I quit Google and went backpacking for almost a year.

The _only_ place I've seen the level of cynicism you find on this forum is from people _in_ tech, too bitter and concerned with looking cool to even entertain the notion that there could be anything valuable about what these products do for people's lives.

unclebucknasty3• 9 years ago

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.

Respectfully, this may be a biased perspective. Are you in SV? Because there are many non-media people outside of SV who don't share your enthusiasm.

I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.

I think some consider it audacious and see a certain cynicism in it, especially given the context.

That is, we're living through an age of tremendous wealth/income disparity (on a relevant side-note, tech has played a not-insignificant role in that disparity). At the same time, we have massive national and global problems (climate change, rising nuclear regimes, terrorism, mass shootings, etc). Yet, all of this SV brainpower and capital is being deployed to make rich people richer off of over-priced trivialities like Juicero. The guys with the lifeboats are playing music for the people on the Titanic and charging them for the privilege.

When you really step back and look at it, it's a little nuts, really.

unclebucknasty3• 9 years ago

Note to non-commenting down-voters: Down-votes are just bits in a database. Down-voting doesn't actually have the power to alter reality.

Carry on.

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

"People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates."

No, your average non-techie consumer knows and cares very little about Silicon Valley. People like convenience and innovation that leads to convenience in their lives. There is no transitive property where if I "love" ride-sharing I "love" Uber's leadership, business tactics and company culture.

"Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy"

Again people like the convenience of the products these companies produce - being able to keep in touch with far away friends and relatives, and the convenience of on demand car service etc. This does not imply that they love surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist office culture, messianic and arrogant CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance schemes or sweat shop labor.

aylmao10• 9 years ago

This. So much this.

Companies love to think that people "love them" but truth is people like to use their products. I'd say people often dislike the company, but will buy the product anyway because that's what they care about.

Everyone has heard about Apple's douchey tax business, Google and Facebook's extreme data-collection, Amazon's aggressive business practices, etc. I'm not in "love" with any of these brands by a long shot. But we keep using them because we need their products to some degree.

pdimitar2• 9 years ago

That's exactly the truth. Well articulated.

The companies came along and gave us things we needed. There are such events in history that would inevitably happen regardless of the person (or people) who started it. People needed electricity. People needed long-range quick communication. People needed places to form groups, physically or not, etc.

Most of the corporations' products were inevitable. Thing is, they are abusing this fact to infest them with a load of stuff we don't want.

hawski• 9 years ago

I don't know how I first got to this quote, but I like it:

(...) Users don't love your software. They tolerate it. And they will abandon it when they find something that's just 1% better than what you offer, or you do something that makes your software 1% worse than your competition. (...)

It comes from this e-mail: http://blu.org/mhonarc/discuss/2013/05/msg00128.php

plussed_reader• 9 years ago

"This does not imply that they love surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist office culture, messianic and arrogant CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance schemes or sweat shop labor."

Could you differentiate this from the financial sector, please?

thephyber2• 9 years ago

This does not imply that they love surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist office culture, messianic and arrogant CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance schemes or sweat shop labor.

Do you love your parents despite their flaws?

Do you love what your country affords you despite its shortcomings?

Attacks on "Silicon Valley" for what a handful of jerks at a small subset of companies in SV do is just as bad as articles like "Millennials are the laziest generation".

anonacct37• 9 years ago

As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.

Me neither. Sometimes people get upset that the pensions of teachers and firemen are being spent on subsidizing growth of meal delivery and transportation in San Francisco.

Actually I live in a state that has spent a bunch of taxpayer money on a alt-coin currency based company that recently had an ICO.

p.s. I really don't care if someone wants to make a new food delivery/taskrabbit/uber/dropbox. I wish them luck! I just don't particularly like that little old ladies on fixed incomes are essentially forced to participate in that.

austenallred8• 9 years ago

Venture Capital overall is a tiiiiny part of an investment portfolio. Compared to other amounts of capital allocation it’s pretty much a rounding error, and Juicero is a tiny piece of any portfolio.

The funds investing in Juicero and losing will have other 100x wins that will make them not worry about Juicero.

That’s why Silicon Valley works. It’s 1x wrong often, but occasionally 100x right.

Alex3917• 9 years ago

I just don't particularly like that little old ladies on fixed incomes are essentially forced to participate in that.

Pension funds are only allowed to invest a tiny percentage of their funds into alternative asset classes like venture. And even then LPs spread their investments out over several funds.

andrewjl• 9 years ago

These types of investors are largely intermediaries and their role can be automated away with technology and good financial education in high school / community colleges.

romwell• 9 years ago

the pensions of teachers and firemen are being spent on subsidizing growth of meal delivery and transportation

I don't argue against your sentiment, but you could have picked a better example, or be more precise.

Services like public transport and food delivery benefit poor people the most (where in "food delivery", I include "grocery delivery", and by "transportation", I understand "public transport"). Building an infrastructure for people to live without cars is a good thing.

I say that as someone who could not afford a car, and depended on buses and online grocery shopping back in 2005 in NY.

maxxxxx• 9 years ago

"As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money"

These rich people are not risking their own money but they risk the money of other people's pension funds and other sources. That has a real impact in people outside of SV.

pfarnsworth• 9 years ago

Exactly this. Rich people privatize gains and socialize losses. Look at the financial crisis for an exact example. They aren't even playing with their own money! They are playing with investors' money, pension funds and mutual funds, and taking a huge management fee!

rdlecler1• 9 years ago

You need to look at the returns of a portfolio, not an individual investment. Most of the investors in these bad deals were investors in very very good deals based on very similar signaling. Most pension funds would be crawling over each other to get into top funds — which means a fund that’s going to blow up half its portfolio.

louithethrid• 9 years ago

Its so much easier to swing your remaining power at the competitor, then to truely innovate and fight.

flexie• 9 years ago

I think people in general don't care about Silicon Valley. When they do care, they generally loath SV, but not for the reasons stated in the article.

People want the great monopolists regulated because they act like monopolists.

People want the giant companies to pay taxes, because they want them to pay a fair share and because it's unfair they get away with not paying taxes while competing with small companies that do pay taxes.

People realise that the giant companies create few jobs, often terrible ones as temps, but destroy many jobs. People are not sure the giant companies make up for the lost jobs.

People see that giant companies get away with blatantly disregarding laws like the ride sharing or apartment sharing conpanies that disregard taxi laws or employment laws or rental laws or hotelling laws, or like social networks or search engines disregarding privacy laws.

In short, people are tired for reasons that have everything to do with what these companies do as traditional capitalists and nothing to do with whether they innovate or are successfull.

reaperducer4• 9 years ago

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.

Don't blame the messenger. "The media" is a reflection of the people. Not only is it made up of, largely, ordinary people; it spends billions of dollars each year to find out what ordinary people think, want, and feel. It tracks their lives in ways that companies like Google could only dream of, and is sitting on almost a century of trend data.

Look at any failed enterprise from the former Iraqi government to Richard Nixon to movie stars of today and a hundred years ago. Blaming the media is a pretty good indication that you're on the wrong side of things, and would rather point a finger at a scapegoat than take responsibility for and fix your own failings.

People used to love cars made in Michigan. But we found out that we loved cars from Japan more. You're confusing feelings toward Silicon Valley with feelings toward the products it creates. Silicon Valley is replaceable.

austenallred8• 9 years ago

"The media" is a reflection of the people. Not only is it made up of, largely, ordinary people; it spends billions of dollars each year to find out what ordinary people think, want, and feel.

Looking at the last election as an obvious example, I don’t think media is a good barometer at all for how most people feel.

jszymborski• 9 years ago

"The media" is a reflection of the people.

No it isn't. Most of it is a magnifying glass on vocal minorities that have a narrative that can sell ads and set-off talking heads.

A true reflection of the people would be a very boring centrist and apathetic view-point.

rgrieselhuber3• 9 years ago

"The media" is a reflection of the people

Relevance to this particular topic aside, I'd recommend looking into the corporate structure behind the "media" in the US before making that statement.

jnbiche2• 9 years ago

I think you underestimate how much this whole Russian fake news during and after the election has angered many Americans (at least outside of the ~30% of hard-core Trump supporters).

Facebook was already on a lot of people's shit list because they know they're the product, they know their privacy isn't respected, and yet they can't keep in touch with their friends without it. This direct attack on our democracy mounted via Facebook and other social media, while they performed no meaningful monitoring or self-policing of their own network, has made the situation all the worse.

So blame all of this on "old media" to your detriment. Bitter complaints about Facebook and other social media pervade far beyond the media.

Clubber18• 9 years ago

I dare say the Russian fake news didn't do anything that Fox and Limbaugh and Brietbart haven't been doing for decades.

I'd really like to see some samples of Russian planted news and comments. I wonder if they would even be detectable compared to "normal" stuff the aforementioned organizations produce.

Animats4• 9 years ago

Youtube and Gmail, too.[1] Google is trying to sort out the Russian ad buyers from the rest of their bottom-feeder advertisers.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-alphabet...

codingdave• 9 years ago

I'm not sure that you are in touch with the average person if you truly believe that. Because I'm just not seeing the same thing.

The people I talk to (which admittedly are people 35+ or kids, just due to where I am in life) couldn't care less about iPhones, social media, or SV. They don't actively hate it either... they just don't care. They have their own lives, which mostly revolve around their own family, friends and work. And tech exists as tools, sometimes toys, but not the focus of our lives. You are right that we aren't out laughing at mistaken funding choices. Because we aren't noticing.

cyphunk• 9 years ago

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.

Befuddled by the Pinocchio Press again!

taylodl• 9 years ago

I'm finding more and more of my friends and acquaintances are longing for a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, etc., and are taking the steps necessary to eliminate them from their lives. More and more people are reacting negatively to the digital leash to which they've attached themselves.

This pretty much follows the standard adoption pattern of technology. We always overuse and then over time figure out the acceptable use. Just as an example, I see the next ten years of iPhone as being dramatically different than the first ten years - and not in a way that would excite Tim Cook.

jasonthevillain• 9 years ago

Be careful. A little backlash has been brewing all over the place. Some of it's about privacy. Some of it's about power and influence. Some is about addictiveness. It's not much today, but the gap between a little backlash and a popular one is smaller than we're inclined to think.

This thread is full of comments making wild assumptions about cities they've never visited.

Uber and Lyft made the same assumption about Austin--that they could get away with anything because people love their product. They lost.

diabeetusman• 9 years ago

They didn't lose though. They're back without having to change anything on their end.

pnathan• 9 years ago

people love using hammers for nails.

they don't love the maker of the hammer.

cirgue2• 9 years ago

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.

People love some of the products that silicon valley produces. They definitely don't like the tech industry's staggering myopia, arrogance, and disdain for institutions and ideas that are not tech-centric (even if most people would never phrase it this way).

People hate on Juicero because Juicero's creators obviously had very little respect for their potential customers, but the engineers, designers, and backers of the venture did not seem to care.

in order to be right funding Facebook

That Facebook is a net good is far from a universally held opinion, and the media is only now catching up to the fact that a significant portion of the population think that most social media platforms are pretty user-hostile.

alasdair_• 9 years ago

Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace.

By this logic, Walmart is one of the most beloved companies in the US, right behind the oil companies and the cable companies.

AmIFirstToThink• 9 years ago

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.

The problem is Google/YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are behaving like media companies of past century. They wasted no time in doing that. Amazon + Washington Post is perfect example of bridge from one to other.

May be it would take Silicon Valley (creative minds not necessarily located just in few zip-codes in CA) to take down the giants that are Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, or at least make them behave.

Reddit leadership team must be made to stand in front of photo of Aaron Swartz for one minute each day and be reminded of the cause. May be, just may be then the love would return.

goatlover2• 9 years ago

Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy.

I did used to the live in that world, and wasn't all that bad. There are times when I wish I still did. But better yet would be some reasonable compromise between the two where we had the convenience of smartphones and social media without Facebook, Google, etc and their massive surveillance, annoying advertising, and addictive practices.

qq66• 9 years ago

As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.

I think people are more upset about what companies don't get funded rather than which VCs lose their money (more accurately, the money of California government retirees). Companies like WhatsApp created staggering amounts of value by enabling affordable messaging around the world. WhatsApp is obviously a success story, but for every Juicero that's 20-100 other companies that could have done great things and never got the chance. However -- the outrage is always easiest to point with 20/20 hindsight.

julianozen• 9 years ago

    To you, in the words of one Silicon Valley investor, this seems like “the only logical conclusion.” 
    To the average person, this seems like the height of arrogance. People are uncomfortable with 
    universal basic income because you’re essentially saying their labor isn’t worth anything — but you don’t see it!

I think this point is really missing from most UBI conversations that happen on HN. UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.

I think a lot of start ups have thrived trying to solve the problem of high density cities. Airbnb and Uber are start ups that get created when your biggest problems are high rent and poor public transit. I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide.

dsfyu404ed4• 9 years ago

I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide

You'll have an uphill battle because "environment". Nobody wants to invest in making commuting more bearable or making areas with non-city population densities more environmentally friendly. Everyone wants to hitch their wagon into whatever the latest scheme to cram people into carbon neutral shipping containers.

rjsw• 9 years ago

I don't see UBI as saying that someone's labour isn't worth anything, it just allows them the freedom to keep experimenting in order to find out what it is worth when applied to different jobs.

dragonwriter6• 9 years ago

UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.

No, it's not.

UBI is the answer when you recognize that capitalism directs the gains from productivity (whether made in the US coasts or anywhere else) to a narrow class of megacapitalists, that it's gotten more efficient at that over time, and that the welfare state of the modern mixed economy is an overly complicated, inefficient corrective measure for that that leaves lots of gaps for people to fall through and responds slowly to changes in the details of the mechanisms of capitalist wealth capture. UBI is the simple, low-overhead, responsive implementation of a mixed economy, which gets out of the way—compared to classic welfare state programs—of realizing the value of labor, especially including labor marked as worthless and prohibited from sale by minimum wage laws.

ianai2• 9 years ago

With UBI there wouldn’t need to be a minimum wage. Probably gen the 40 hr work week could be disrupted.

orangecat• 9 years ago

UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.

This is a failure of a common way presenting the UBI as "you should be able to have a comfortable life without working", which is both economically infeasible and not actually desirable. A UBI, at least in the form that I support, isn't something that you should be happy to live off of indefinitely, it's just better protection against homelessness and hunger than our current convoluted welfare systems. The expectation should still be that you'll find something productive to do, and a UBI incentivizes that because it avoids the welfare trap of losing a dollar in benefits for every dollar you earn.

Caveman_Coder7• 9 years ago

"I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs."

In my opinion these aren't technical problems to be solved by a team of engineers in their SF Bay offices. They are political problems that need legislative solutions. To think that we can outsource political problems to the realm of tech is misguided and won't solve our long-standing public policy issues.

RestlessMind• 9 years ago

The article is shallow and it would be easy to rip apart most of its arguments (eg. [1][2]). But the worrying trend is that such articles are now appearing very regularly, and at some point perception becomes reality. At this pace, SV will be the Wall Street in no time, if it is not already.

[1] > You’re churning out companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and going bankrupt in literal satires of themselves

Yes, and that is an aspect of capitalism. You take risk on crazy ideas. Some of them will be a fancy juicer, but some of them will also be an electric car.

[2] > Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice) versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve

Google wants to deploy Loon in Puerto Rico to offer connectivity. Tesla offered to rebuild Puerto Rico electrical grid based on Solar energy. If these are not real world problems affecting everything, I don't know what the author has in mind.

gggdvnkhmbgjvbn• 9 years ago

Yeah I think little has changed in SV in the last year compared to the near 180 in public opinion. My theory is that journalists and readers who used to hate trump as a hobby are bored with the lack of scandal and have turned to SV, the only other interesting new thing in the us.

Applejinx2• 9 years ago

If there was another interesting new thing, how would you know?

fancyfacebook• 9 years ago

Google is not "deploying Loon" and Tesla is not "rebuilding the grid" out of the kindness of their heart, the problem is everyone already sees phase two coming and doesn't like it. It's not a media problem, it's pattern recognition.

chillingeffect• 9 years ago

Just to add on to your point, notice the writer is on the Board of a VC firm that does business inside and outside SV. I see huge potential for him trying to deface SV for the sake of his other projects.

jabot• 9 years ago

This article bashes Juicero - rightfully, in my (humble) opinion; it is a stupid and wasteful idea, and ridiculously overpriced.

However, it has that in common with Keurig - which is a huge success.

My point is that just because something is stupid and wasteful it doesn't have to fail...

ghaff• 9 years ago

That's actually fair and I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point in the whole Juicero debacle, someone uttered the phrase "Keurig for Juice" or something along those lines. The thing with Keurigs and the like is that there's actually a market for making single cups of hot coffee. I don't personally own or want one but it's a compromise that a lot of people are willing to make both at home and the workplace in exchange for convenience. (Really Keurig is effectively positioned as a better instant coffee.)

But there were very real differences between Keurig and Juicero that make one costly/wasteful/but fills a niche and the other just stupid.

JangoSteve• 9 years ago

Ha, that's one of the reasons that my answer is always the same whenever someone asks what I think of their idea: "Whatever I think of the merits of your idea are almost completely irrelevant. I've seen horrible ideas succeed, and I've seen great ideas fail for irrelevant reasons. What I can offer, however, is a list of challenges I think you'll have."

jedrek3• 9 years ago

What this piece misses the obvious financial privilege that many startups have. Uber is slaying yellow/black cabs around the world, but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital. Amazon is the world's largest store, by working on margins that don't let people who actually expect a return on the investment compete.

It's gotten to the point that if a company actually does things the old fashioned way: taking a small seed, creating a product that people want, selling it and expanding based on that revenue... we ooh and ahh, calling it "organic growth". Everywhere else, it's just called "building a business".

Pair that with the "thought leaders" who dismiss businesses that allow people to build a life for themselves and their families. Because Silicon Valley isn't really about making things anymore, it's about making financial bets. And that's a shame - watching billionaires blow money on reinventing the vending machine isn't much fun.

pathseeker2• 9 years ago

but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital

This is not true for many cities. Most of the subsidizing only happens in new markets to get people interested. Uber/Lyft are still better than cabs when unsubsidized.

jedrek3• 9 years ago

The subsidizing happens to find drivers and passengers. When Uber came to my city, it was months before I paid for a ride, and drivers told us all about how they were getting cash bonuses for working high traffic times.

No matter how optimistic you are about the product, Uber isn't worth a fraction of its valuation without the constant expansion, and the constant expansion is impossible without very inexpensive money that is VC.

ExactoKnight3• 9 years ago

The cheaper price comes almost entirely from the driver making less.

Love it or hate it, that's really the big difference now that most existing cab companies now have Uber-like dispatch technology.

jartelt2• 9 years ago

Uber/lyft are also slaying yellow/black cabs because the cabs chose to just milk their monopoly for maximum profit for 30 years rather than invest in any technology or make any improvements to rider experience or comfort. It's not just the subsidies. It's the fact that calling random 800 numbers trying to get a cab is really frustrating, especially when they do not show up 20% of the time.

For Amazon... are their margins really that much smaller than Walmart, Target, Costco or anything other big box discount retailer? Many products at Amazon can be found cheaper in a store. It's just really damn convenient to order it on Amazon and have it shipped the next day.

jonbarker• 9 years ago

Amazon's stated goal is to have no margins (Bezos 'your margin is my opportunity'). So yes if they are following their zero margin strategy they should be lower than WMT, whose only claim is low price. If something is cheaper elsewhere it is because Amazon has not figured out how to deliver that particular item to the consumer at cost yet. So for example if you find something cheaper at WMT it may be that WMT has a great distributor license and is an exclusive channel, something like that.

jedrek3• 9 years ago

Online retailers HATE amazon because they've gotten customers to expect free second day shipping.

staticelf2• 9 years ago

As a non-american and as a person who has never been to SV but love the idea that is described in the article that anyone can start up a company I would like to adress the points in the article.

1. Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people.

Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from.

2. Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm.

Totally agree, this is why startups should bootstrap and perhaps not start up in Sillicon Valley. Perhaps it is better to start up somewhere cheaper.

I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it.

I have been wanting to start a company for years but haven't just yet because of the economic game. I am still planning to do it, hopefully pretty soon but I want to save up enough so I can run my company for at least 1-2 years without any other income.

In my country Sweden, unfortunately, smaller companies get taxated pretty hard which makes any earning disappear. You will need a pretty good stream of incoming cash to be able to survive. Since I do want to create a product and not simply be a consultant this is much harder to achieve.

s73ver_10• 9 years ago

"Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from."

Numbers don't lie. And there are countless examples of times where women-led startups couldn't even get meetings with VCs, but after adding a male founder, suddenly were asked to come in for meetings.

"I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it."

Most of the costs are not something that countries can help with. You're still going to need funds for equipment, salaries, and such.

qbaqbaqba• 9 years ago

And there are countless examples

Do you mind posting any?

staticelf2• 9 years ago

And there are countless examples of times where women-led startups couldn't even get meetings with VCs

Lol, please provide countless examples. I dare you to find even one. My guess is that if you find even one, you will find 10 reverse where women get meetings because of their gender.

Most of the costs are not something that countries can help with. You're still going to need funds for equipment, salaries, and such.

What I meant was that new, small companies should not be taxated as much as companies that is established.

CalChris6• 9 years ago

Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm.

If ever any sentence better described YC, its brethren incubators and demo days, I haven’t read it.

redleggedfrog• 9 years ago

The fundamental problem with this article is it presupposes that America used to love Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley loves Silicon Valley, and investors kinda-sorta love Silicon Valley, and the rest of us like Apple and begrudgingly use Facebook, because, well, what else is there?

It'd be nice if Silicon Valley did something other than make software to keep our noses in our phones.

shoefly• 9 years ago

The small midwestern town from which I hail is rotting. The residents could never afford the luxuries flowing here in the valley. They are angry. They are huge Trump supporters. They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.

lostboys673• 9 years ago

So they do want handouts /subsidies then

deadmetheny4• 9 years ago

This is remarkably tone-deaf. I also originally hailed from a small Midwestern town. The lack of available work is not a pretty sight, and suggesting that people should just uproot themselves and move somewhere else is not a solution for a number of reasons (family/friends, lack of money to move in the first place, etc). It's no small wonder that people voted for Trump - even though his promises were pretty obviously full of hot air, the opposition was (and still does) not even attempt to mask their total contempt for 'flyover country'.

You will reap what you sow.

leggomylibro5• 9 years ago

They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes.

Well, they can't have everything. A big part of why America has historically had social and economic mobility is because it also had literal mobility; people willing to go where the work is.

What I hear when I read this is, "they want someone to come along and hand them a stable well-paying job." And who doesn't? But we live in the real world.

Clubber18• 9 years ago

I think this is the main reason the Democrats got swept, and will probably continue to get swept. They aren't offering what most people want, honest pay for honest work. They are offering welfare, which most people are to proud to take, let alone want.

This isn't just a problem in the Midwest, this is a problem for almost anywhere that isn't a large city on the coast (with some exceptions). This problem affects probably 90% of our land mass and the problem has been consistently growing for the past 45 years or so.

Neither political party knows how to solve this, or if they do, don't have the political will to solve it.

s73ver_10• 9 years ago

That's not true at all. Clinton had plans with job retraining for coal miners. They were offering jobs. They got swept because Trump came in and said, "We'll keep coal mining," despite having no actual plan for what to do.

s73ver_10• 9 years ago

The big problem is that they do want handouts; just of a different kind. Jobs retraining programs have been around for quite a while; they were central to Clinton's plan for what to do with people who used to work in coal mines. But they don't want to stop mining coal, no matter how shitty it is for everyone involved (the miners themselves, the environment, those who live near coal plants, etc). They want to keep the coal mining jobs. They want... a handout.

tomjen34• 9 years ago

Valuable comment - because both sides of the spectrum miss something in there. It cost the democrats the election not to understand that these people wanted jobs, not welfare, and the reason they won't get jobs is that they won't go where the jobs are.

yahna3• 9 years ago

Well they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps like good little republicans.

On my team of 8 people 1 grew up anywhere near the Seattle area. Half the team moved to the US from other countries. Maybe these people should move. It sucks, but life isn't fair and sometimes you have to sacrifice what you want for what you actually need.

acchow• 9 years ago

They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.

Government should subsidize relocation to a full time job.

kevmo4• 9 years ago

The overlords of Silicon Valley need to do a bit more to turn America's best minds towards solving serious social problems.

Personal anecdote: Right now, I am building software that automates the process of filing super-simple Chapter 7 bankruptcies. We give the product away for free.[1] Technologically, this is a really straightforward problem and solution: You just collect some documents and fill out a long questionnaire, fill out a PDF, show up to a couple of meetings, then you've discharged a bunch of unsecured debt and have a fresh start in life and the economy.

There should literally be millions of these Chapter 7 bankruptcies filed every year[2]... but nobody has built the software before! Despite its enormous potential impact and amazingly low cost (we have two full-time employees, though we could use more), nobody has really tackled the problem because there's no way to simultaneously get rich while building the most successful product.[3]

There is a crazy amount of low-hanging fruit out there like this. Much of it could be plucked by small, bright teams of the sort Silicon Valley has in abundance. The most powerful people just need to dedicate a little more money and 5-20% of their time to it - not just money, but serious, ongoing advice. [4]

-----

[1] https://Upsolve.org. The product is free and we're a non-profit because you trigger an avalanche of regulatory activity if you try to make money doing this. We've also been able to garner an incredible amount of institutional (judicial) buy-in because we are a non-profit.

[2] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/white-jleo-reprint.pdf

[3] Our #1 success metric is simply "number of Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharges received".

[4] Real advice - not sending it down the black hole of billionaire philanthropy. Without even getting into the subject of how those institutions grind their founders' personal axes, there is a huge qualitative difference between their advice and Silicon Valley-level "Let's build a huge thing on a lean budget" advice.

lostboys673• 9 years ago

And how would SV (outwith funding a civil war) solve the problems cased by an devolved and outdated political system that is more appropriate for serving the needs of 18th century rich landowners?

noonespecial• 9 years ago

That is a really cool idea.

Make sure to do a Show HN on the Monday morning after you launch.

kevmo4• 9 years ago

Thanks! Will do. We applied to YC Winter 2018 batch - waiting to hear if we got an interview.

WSJ profiled us last month if you're interested in reading more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-struggling-consumers-a-chea...

existencebox2• 9 years ago

A tangential curiosity, perhaps you can give some insight on a very naive question I've had regarding nonprofits:

You mention re: avalanch of regulatory activity if you try to make money; where does the line get drawn between providing competitive salaries and "making money"? I've always been somewhat curious of the band Non Profits have to operate in to maintain that status vs. what pragmatic benefits it gives. (I realize this is a very broad question, so any "sparknotes" breadcrumb you have would also be welcome)

kevmo4• 9 years ago

The avalanche I'm referring to there has to do with whether the company itself is for-profit or non-profit, and the legal, institutional, and PR ramifications thereof.

The non-profit competitive salary question is one which people endlessly debate. Some people think it is ridiculous that the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center makes a $300k salary despite SPLC's tremendous success and the fact that he could clearly command much more in the private sector.

doener• 9 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15431938

kpwagner• 9 years ago

This article misses the mark. Spot on.

nsxwolf4• 9 years ago

Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.

There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.

api4• 9 years ago

It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot.

In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building.

Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely dystopian.

I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like to be worthless.

The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling:

- Radically extending the human life span

- Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general.

- Colonizing the Moon and Mars

- Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables, storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient.

- Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more exotic things like underground hyperloop transit.

- Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social impact of the built environment.

Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people.

... and so on.

Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work.

Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise that our children should properly regard us as un-developed, then commit a few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed.

"When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median IQ."

Edit:

I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that "trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he looked.

nsxwolf4• 9 years ago

Interesting that you come along with a hopeful vision for the future where there's interesting and lucrative work for people to do, and your comment is turning grayer and grayer.

brandnewlow• 9 years ago

Your argument is very similar to yesterday's discussions around stock buybacks as a conservative, risk-averse way for companies to control their stock prices and enrich top executives without giving more power to labor.

occultist_throw2• 9 years ago

It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot.
In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building.

Too true. But that was Gibson's way of showing the "bad result" of society. There's plenty of places where scifi authors use constructs of absolutism to show very bad places policies go.

And if you think TV was the great pacifier, then just wait till VR and AR really take off. Live in a 15'x15' room and feels like a mansion.

I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do.

No, basic income was a way to provide the basics of living plus a bit more, so everyone has the innate rights of: water, food, electricity, communication, lodging. To not have this covered for every human should be abhorrent. The converse to this is that some people just don't deserve food, or water, or shelter, or electricity, or communication. And especially with food/water/shelter, we see semi-significant efforts to try to stem those.

Solving lack of food is solved by... providing food. Same with water, but thankfully we don't see coin-op water fountains. We do have homeless shelters, but many have barriers for the people to use. Drug usage is rampant along with mental illnesses. And many a time they have oppressive "closing hours" so homeless cannot simply take any job.

A UBI would provide money in so that people could put it where they need it. Many a times, these are cashflow problems which can be solved by cash.

(List of many non-UBI things that can be done)

Without the requisite resources for #1, it seems torturous to say you can lengthen life spans without the means to keep someone alive respectfully. This seems more like "Keep the rich living 2x-3x life span while the rest of us die in our 60's".

The extermination of mental illness is something I would heartily support. The only problems with those are well cited - you need permission from the very people whom you want to treat. And many times, their illness has them not give permission. This has been well discussed in the homeless/jail/mental health discussions on many places, including HN and Reddit.

But I believe that you have posted UBI as a "UBI -or- Multipoint plan". I disagree with the postulate of "A or B". Both can be done. With people freed from the monotony of tiring drugde-work, people could start working on the very societal things you mention. Not everyone will, of course. But that's the nature of freedom: people can and should be able to choose their destiny. Right now, that's bound by threat of hunger, lack of shelter, being divorced from social net, and poverty.

s73ver_10• 9 years ago

"It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh.""

It only does that if a recipient decides to do nothing but sit on their ass. Otherwise, it provides the opportunity to explore things that one wouldn't have the time to do if they were spending most of their day laboring to afford food and housing.

"Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people."

Would they? Or would robots be doing most of that work?

"The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work."

Work how?

iak8god2• 9 years ago

Not that I agree with everything you’ve said here, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciate this comment and the ensuing thread.

The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling: …

There must be some way to get people to work on all this without dangling homelessness and starvation constantly over their heads. Can’t we have a basic income to at least take care of the basics, and still motivate people to participate in these projects using some carrots like a) desire to be a part of something bigger than oneself, or even b) consumerism?

floatrock4• 9 years ago

Hold up there for a sec. Things like:

Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general

There's been waaay too many stories of how technology like this will only be available to the rich and privileged, furthering their already-sizable inherited wealth and privilege.

That's kinda the... not condescending, but dismissive?... attitude that the article is talking about.

We kinda need to find ways of how to just start having conversations about this stuff, let alone suggest how to avoid going down the dystopia route. Agree with your other comments that something like TNG couldn't even be written now -- look at how the new one is about an unprovoked war with a primal-looking warrior civilization. Yeah, we got interracial female leads, but the conversation being had is about nothing more than space sword fights with space explosions.

The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species.

That part is well-said though. Cheers.

unhinged_wanker• 9 years ago

god what conservative bullshit. you must labor for others or else you are useless! just, no.

There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true

No one says that you disingenuous weasel. Basic income is so that people can survive without being forced to hold a job. This is especially important for those that cannot hold a job - children, elderly, sick, disabled - or those that have lost jobs through automation, where there IS no more job to have.

"put people to work"

Most people already work (95%+) and those that don't - children, elderly, sick, disabled - those people aren't ever joining your work programs. They make up a huge percentage of the total population and you just.. ignore them like they don't count. But i guess in your eyes 'work or starve' is better so there are no 'moral' issues, right?

matt_wulfeck4• 9 years ago

I notice that some of the biggest proponent of basic income are work-aholics, not middle america that’s supposedly at the greatest risk of the incoming AI apocalypse. It’s the same people who eat soylent milkshakes because they don’t have any desire or time to cook for themselves. It’s no wonder they’d love it if the government came by and took away one more obstacle that keeps them from burying their heads in their computers.

codemac• 9 years ago

Or - it's that the work-aholics know that they're never going to get ahead.

Middle America thinks they'll get ahead soon. That it's their gumption and attitude that got them to where they are.

Which of course is a load of horse shit, and they're being used and abused as much as any SV work-aholic, if not more because of their lack of compensation.

Terr_• 9 years ago

Perhaps because the first group doesn't have as much time/effort sunk into learning to use the current social safety patchwork, so changes to it are less scary.

Also, they don't need to keep up any self-denial that well-paying jobs will magically return for coal-mining or buggy-whip manufacture.

tmaly• 9 years ago

I just thought of the trailer parks from the Ready Player One book after reading your comment.

leggomylibro5• 9 years ago

Middle America doesn't seem to be keen on much of anything these days, besides torches and pitchforks.

I'd rather put my money on the people trying to build solutions rather than more problems. Sure, it seems like the actual silicon valley location is mostly making solutions for problems that it created, these days. But there's plenty of tech outside of California.

And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s.

TheAdamAndChe3• 9 years ago

And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s.

You think if the majority of people in this country continue to experience a declining quality of life, there won't be riots in the streets?

This method of shifting blame from economic issues to social issues won't work forever.

edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Am I wrong in some way?

corndoge• 9 years ago

the parent did not say anything about basic income, what exactly are you responding to?

nsxwolf4• 9 years ago

I was talking to Silicon Valley when I said "your".

shortstuffsushi• 9 years ago

They're referencing the article, I believe.

touchofevil• 9 years ago

Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do. Basic Income is meant as a "floor" that those people will not be able to fall below.

reaperducer4• 9 years ago

That used to be true, but the nation's very poor live mostly in the suburbs and rural parts of the country now. It shifted about 20 years ago. You can't go anywhere without encountering desperately poor people these days.

santaclaus• 9 years ago

with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do

You see very few homeless people on street or in trains, and zero tents, in NYC. Its kind of strange -- NYC has a larger homeless population than SF no matter how you slice it (total count, per capita, per square foot) but the issue seems way worse in the major California cities.

I have friends who visit Oakland from NYC and are amazed at the Mad Max quality of the Bay Area.

thesagan2• 9 years ago

Here in the Midwest (MI) people beg for change on every other street corner. It's obvious to us here why things are falling apart politically. Whole cities have collapsed.

maxsilver• 9 years ago

Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday

Sure they do -- there's plenty of homeless people in the suburbs these days, it's just a different interaction.

It's homeless people standing on the sides of freeway offramps and stripmall driveways, dying in front of them on the grassy lawn road medians. It's handing change to a homeless person in the stormwater road ditch while you wait at a red light.

davesque• 9 years ago

Were you responding to the right comment? The point you're making is not relevant to the OP.

AnthonyMouse9• 9 years ago

Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.

Except that all of those things are the exact opposite of what a basic income does. A basic income isn't housing projects and government cheese, it's cash money you can decide how to spend for yourself. Different people will choose to spend it on different things.

What's your alternative? Let corporations accumulate all the wealth generated by technology and subject everyone else to serfdom?

It's not as if people are going to stop inventing things.

aylmao10• 9 years ago

A different approach, one in which people can still work to get paid, but wages are reasonable.

Fulfillment is not all about the money and what you can buy with it. It's about feeling that your'e serving some purpose, and there's value to what you do.

ng122• 9 years ago

And what happens when we inevitably converge on a price point where BI only buys you a concrete block and government cheese?

richardknop3• 9 years ago

What about argument that basic income will cause prices to rise since people will be able to afford X spending per month. Wouldn't this be free market's natural response? Supply of money / disposable monthly income would increase therefor prices would go up?

richardknop3• 9 years ago

Instead of basic income wouldn't it make sense to have some sort of basic "lifestyle" provided by government. Out of the box you get a very small government built apartment (no rent or utility bills, all part of the package), vouchers for 3 meals per day (government run canteens in these government apartment buildings), free healthcare and education also provided by the government.

So you would get all these basic necessities as part of the basic government program. To actually make any money to buy nicer things (car, bigger apartment or house), you'd need to find a job.

This would make sense as the basic income would not work as free market would adjust and increase prices as reaction to the new source of free money to spend available every month for everybody.

wbl• 9 years ago

My advice to those people: Git gud. There are lots of services and goods that can be created. If you want to help the homeless, or devote your life to the works of Bach there is plenty of meaning to be found doing that.

Frondo• 9 years ago

If middle America wants to blame someone for the changes that have hit rural life in the last 50 years, they'd do better than to look at Silicon Valley.

Uber isn't the reason Big Ag took over the family farm, and Google isn't the reason their daughter moved to Brooklyn and is now dating a girl.

But actually, I think the rural folk will be the first to adopt the "basic income" (scare quotes and all), because in a lot of ways, they're already doing it, just under a different name. SSDI, for example, is huge in rural West Virginia, whether you're disabled or no. Doctors there are in on it, as an act of compassion, because the work simply isn't there and there is no other safety net.

So, all middle America needs is appropriate framing. Call it the Real America Dividend instead of "basic income" and they'll line up for it.

aylmao10• 9 years ago

SV is a symptom of the same problem; a system that allows wealth to concentrate and companies to become monopolies.

Buttes• 9 years ago

It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.

If I don't have to work, sign me up.

richardwhiuk2• 9 years ago

It's difficult to imagine a more off-topic comment. If you are choosing basic income as a poster child of Silicon Valley, you need to be much clearer about that.

sctb• 9 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434340.

nadam• 9 years ago

"So, what can you do about it?" As much as I love the Sillicon Valley, disproportional concentration of venture capital and brain drain to a geographical location is not the healthiest thing in the world. I am a big proponent of democratization of early-stage investment for years. Now it started to happen in the cryptocurrency world. It is wild west now, but who knows how it turns out?

nitwit005• 9 years ago

This focuses on finance, and honestly doesn't seem that different than the gripes people had against banks 50 years ago. White men in charge? Not helping solve inequality?

jeffdavis6• 9 years ago

Sincere question: what is problematic about the word "bodega"?

Klockan2• 9 years ago

Cultural appropriation of Mexican small shops. Note that I don't really see the issue, the name describes their business well.

jeffdavis6• 9 years ago

That was my question... I have never heard the word "bodega" is a negative context.

Nearly everything (especially having to do with food) is a cultural reference of some kind -- nothing bad about that.

And a lot is not very authentic and may count as some kind of "appropriation". That's not really avoidable when cultures mix (as they do in the US).

southphillyman• 9 years ago

Bodegas traditionally are run by Puerto Ricans and Dominicians in the NE (Not Mexicans). Taken into a NY-centric context it's easier to understand the backlash in a rapidly gentrifying and appropriating atmosphere.

notthemessiah2• 9 years ago

It's not just the word Bodega, it's the insult to injury added to the death of the American dream. Bodega's were ways that people could people of a community could pool their resources together and make a living for themselves while serving their community. Now some ambitious VC-backed firm not only wants to decimate that road to the American dream, but they also have to steal the name too? That's like killing your neighbor and wearing his skin while fucking his wife.

root_axis3• 9 years ago

That's like killing your neighbor and wearing his skin while fucking his wife.

Somewhat over the top, no?

A bodega is not a religious shrine, it's just a business like any other. I agree that the naming is tacky (it's like "Walmart" rebranding as "Mom & Pop's"), but that's about the extent of it. Certainly, they are not guilty of "decimating the American dream" by starting a business.

Mugwort• 9 years ago

People like Apple. Google and Facebook are a different story.

Mefis2• 9 years ago

What's wrong with naming a startup Bodega?

nailer• 9 years ago

The startup was aiming to replace existing corner stores, which are called 'bodegas' in many parts of the US because they're typically run by Latino people.

Using a Latino name for a company of (likely middle-class, likely Asian and European rather than Latino) engineers seeking to disintermediate working class bodega owners was the problem.

mrexroad• 9 years ago

What about the role that private / investment banks have been increasingly playing in fundraising over past 5-10 years?

Things seemed a lot different 10 years ago. I mean, some of us even had to take pay cuts to join pre-series A startups...

arjie• 9 years ago

Yeah, but Silicon Valley doesn't need their love. It needs their dollars. And they love giving Silicon Valley the dollars.

d_burfoot• 9 years ago

Here's another view of the problem: the "average Joe" American is starting to hate all the centralized and monolithic institutions in the country, because he sees them as being corrupt, privileged, and primarily concerned with cementing their own power. It used to be that SV was a rebel and outsider going against Washington and Wall Street, but increasingly SV is just another pillar of the power structure.

debt• 9 years ago

I think it'd be an interesting startup idea to decentralized all the monolithic services. Create an Uber for City X(ie Uber for London, Uber for Chicago, etc.). Allow the municipalities to run those services. And do the same for Airbnb, Yelp, Google, Facebook etc.

Can_Not• 9 years ago

I love this idea. I use to work for a "The WordPress of $INDUSTRY" startup and letting people rum their own thing and self brand was very fulfilling work. I think it's important to protect specific categories of small businesses (or simply markets that shouldn't need to be overly centralized) from the growth of underhanded heavy hitting centralized monopolies. I call it AmaZoning when a large player comes in and says "I'm the new middle man".

camel_Snake• 9 years ago

I've always thought cities should do this with regard to bottled water. It's one of those things you feel guilty spending money on but the convenience now and then is just worth it.

But if it was local, I wouldn't feel as bad about environmental impact and the profits would hopefully go towards something useful like filling potholes or education.

I'm ambivalent when it comes to bottle water but I certainly don't like giving Nestle my money.

tempodox2• 9 years ago

... cementing their own power.

Of course. That's basic systems theory. And one reason why checks and balances are not just romantic crap but really necessary. The deregulation hype is the real romantic crap.

d0ee670a• 9 years ago

I agree with this statement - as a cybersecurity professional, I feel this. "Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people."

Mefis2• 9 years ago

and eight men control half the world’s wealth.

This is wrong. Eight men control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world's population.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jan/16/w...

binarymax• 9 years ago

The grammar is ambiguous. "half the world" == "the poorest 50% of the population". "half the world's wealth" == "the wealth of the poorest 50% of the population"

have_faith• 9 years ago

Silicon Valley isn't a brand. People don't fall out of love with London or New York when some stupid products fail there.

aylmao10• 9 years ago

Funny how one of your examples is New York, probably one of the world's strongest city brands, especially after the whole "Big Apple", and "I heart NY" campaigns targeted at promoting tourism.

Apocryphon7• 9 years ago

Pretty sure there is a lot of antipathy right now towards London as the centre of European finance. For NY, just replace it with Wall Street.

kazinator• 9 years ago

Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve (getting affordable computers in the hands of everyone; inventing the Internet).

You can understand where these hapless doofuses are coming from, though: whatever you come up with has to have paying customers, and be something someone won't steal two weeks after release. In other words, some plausible return on investment.

Inventing the internet was fun hacking paid by cushy government grants. You're not easily gonna get that today, or not for just any old idea that pops into your head.

Affordable computers in the hands of everyone means optimizing existing commodity stuff down to razor-thin margins (if not indeed taking a loss) plus all the logistics of actually reaching everyone.

Applejinx2• 9 years ago

cushy government grants

Dare we say… 'handouts'? Gee, seems like that might not be such a bad thing after all.

Want flyover America to grow economies and produce stuff to perk up SV's ears? Pay it to do so.

People treat economics as if it's a merit-evaluating system capable of managing the ground its actors grow from, and it's absolutely not. Money is better considered as a vote, or like water in the environment. You can't have it function both in its fundamental property of facilitating commerce, and as a score indicator. I think something akin to 'likes' ought to replace money as the score indicator, and money ought to be entirely allocated to population-wide commerce.

That means entirely abandoning the connotations of 'value' it has, reimagining it as 'abstracted power', and leaning much harder on the capacity of populations to innovate. It is stark madness to assume that the capacity to accumulate abstracted power (money) signifies ANYTHING other than itself, plus the ability of that power to convert back into actions (easily mistaken for merit or virtue!)

Anyone who's seriously dug into the genetic algorithm ought to be able to see the merits of doling out 'power' (money, ability to act in an economic system) across a massive population of organisms who're on the whole still individually more intelligent than AI could hope to be.

Starving populations of humans to death for the crime of not being as economically powerful as Silicon Valley is not only immoral, it's a grotesque and foolish waste of intelligence and innovation resources. Elon Musk is a clever and interesting fellow, but he's WAY less intelligent/innovative than a supported POPULATION of humans. You only think he's that much more clever, because his resources are almost unmeasurable compared to the fellow (times 10,000) in Boise Idaho with just a garage, who've got almost no resources at all.

Genetic Algorithm says to focus solely on giving more resources to Elon is producing a local maximum and screwing yourself in the long run. We can't afford to make that mistake.

fnord77• 9 years ago

tech wasn't always this ... douchey. I don't know what happened. I've been a programming since the early 1990s. It used to be fun. Now I don't tell people what I do.

postramus• 9 years ago

Silicon Valley will eventually be seen as yet another textbook case of a new industry getting away with externalization of costs initially unrecognized as such.

Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess, but don’t expect to escape liability for the foreseeable consequences of the systems you build for all perpetuity.

brm• 9 years ago

I spent a decade of my life in the valley and I do believe it's relevant to remember that what used to be a homebrew mixing of nerds, hippies, academics, researchers, teachers, makers, marketers, tinkerers and capitalists is now in large part skewed to marketers and capitalists. This is not necessarily good, bad, or romanticized it just is. So here are some tips:

Don't hustle.

Don't crush anything.

Try not to have to give a stage presentation with a mic at the corner of your mouth.

Your creation is not completely superlative or world changing yet, speak of it realistically.

The internet is not a substitute or replacement for you having to deal with humanity.

Be nice.

Follow your curiosities and interests. Have curiosities and interests.

Don't claim false passions. You're not passionate about "revolutionizing HR" or "remaking the way people buy nail polish".

Learn how tech relates to the world and how you relate to it, don't make tech its own world.

Maybe get a hobby.

Be kind.

Caveman_Coder7• 9 years ago

+100. I spent almost two decades in SV before moving to PHX and agree completely with your tips.

I've found that since moving to PHX, the hustling and "revolutionizing/world-changing/disruptive" rhetoric is kept to a minimum. Tech isn't its "own world" as much here and most of my friends and co-workers in the tech community end up talking about things we all enjoy doing as hobbies, or our families, more than anything. It's nice to find professional peers who enjoy hiking in Sedona, not worrying about how many PRs their open-source project has, or how many retweets their presentation at RubyConf got.

Its totally subjective, but its my kind of environment.

aj_g• 9 years ago

Hah. I live in Montana, and I find myself lusting sometimes for the inundation of tech in SV. I wish I could nerd out with more of my friends, instead of talking about hiking/skiing/whatever. I guess the grass is always greener :)

calebm2• 9 years ago

"As evidenced by the major backlash over the recent launch of a company called Bodega — where the founders and investors genuinely didn’t understand why the name was problematic — you don’t always have the best handle on how your ideas will be received outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.""

I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name (personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".

calebm2• 9 years ago

"Thoughtfully, Fast Company asked McDonald about that. He replied, “We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’.”" (https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corn...)

Animats4• 9 years ago

The problem with Bodega is not the name. It's that it doesn't carry much of an inventory. It's just another box accessed with an app for in-plant vending. Byte Foods does that.[1] TechShop SF has one of those, as do many hospitals. The vending industry term is "micro-market".

Vending machine micro-markets are a standard item from Canteen Vending.[2] They have 4500 US locations. They're also found in Swiss train stations.

The really creepy player in this industry is Three Square. In their system, employees have implanted RFID tags which identify them to the vending machines. They're in River Falls, WI, not Silicon Valley.

[1] https://bytefoods.co/ [2] http://www.canteen.com/avenue-c/ [3] https://32market.com/public/

tomjen34• 9 years ago

I too was confused - doubly so because here in Denmark a Bodega is a low end bar, and I thought it might be the same in English.

relics443• 9 years ago

I stopped reading when the author suggests that people are falling out of love with silicon valley because most companies hire mostly white males. What a terrible racist/sexist thing to say.

jeffdavis6• 9 years ago

The primary content in this article is a link to a FastCompany article, which actually tries to back up its claims.

joshuaheard• 9 years ago

Great article, but I'm surprised it didn't mention the left-leaning politics. There is the alleged censorship by Twitter and Facebook of conservative views; the firing of the Google diversity memo guy; and even House of Cards raising the nefarious search engine manipulation meme. Silicon Valley is starting to get the "liberal Hollywood" treatment by the conservative media.

thatonechad• 9 years ago

I seen a commercial advertising googles "home" device and was a cringeworthy moment. The partner to the NSA, the SJW brigade is now trying to have me purchase something that sits in my home and reminds me of what a pathetic corporation it has become. No thanks.

johnrichardson• 9 years ago

This article's dumb. 8 men control half the world's wealth? All of a sudden the word 'bodega' is racist? Too many white men contributing value is 'problematic'? Articles like this are the reason why Trump won.

jswizzy• 9 years ago

This author is drinking some serious anti captalist kool-aid. First off both Bannon and Bernie are Leninists. True believers are interchangeable with one another if you believe Eric Hoffer.

Animats4• 9 years ago

You haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since Facebook’s founding in 2003.

That's a significant point.

Of the 15 companies that entered the Fortune 500 this year, only one, Lam Research, is in Silicon Valley. And they're in Fremont. (PayPal made the list, but as a spinoff of eBay.)[1]

[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016...

Apocryphon7• 9 years ago

Two things that the article missed:

1. The startup scene's smarmy feel-good rhetoric and forced friendliness. The cutesy aesthetics, the wacky company names, and most gratingly the lofty mission statements that cover up at best business as usual and at worst actual corporate malfeasance. How did we get to here? When did "making the world a better place" become the mantra of Silicon Valley, and why did this laughable cliche get created? Was SV truly idealistic at one point, or has it been trying to cover up its true mission all along by pretending to be better than Wall Street or Hollywood, those other synonyms for wealth generation and inequality?

2. Silicon Valley can't even make the Bay Area a better place, never mind America, or the world. The extreme inequality in San Francisco and its environs is largely due to local government and broken politics, it is true. But SV companies should spend more of their lobbying efforts not in D.C. clamoring for special statuses, but in local legislatures securing better housing and infrastructure. Both their employees and the local populations will benefit, and like them more for it. Instead, what's the most high profile example of an SV executive interacting with local leaders? Steve Jobs presenting the new Apple headquarters plan to the Cupertino City Council in 2011. How's the traffic on Stevens Creek these days?

tempodox2• 9 years ago

“Making the world a better place” is simply the cheapest marketing gag you can get. And in a way, they did make the world a better place—it's just for a select group of founders and investors only.

Apocryphon7• 9 years ago

That's true, but why did Silicon Valley pick that shtick when other industries don't seem to except maybe when they're trying to greenwash.

SamvitJ• 9 years ago

You haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since Facebook’s founding in 2003.

Facebook was founded in 2004.

yahna3• 9 years ago

I find it kind of ridiculous that the reasons why people supposedly hate silicon valley ("it's all run by old white guys") are pretty much the opposite of the reasons why I hear hate of silicon valley (virtue signally/wrongthink/over concerned with diversity).

emerged• 9 years ago

I'm praying for a day when SV has been replaced by largely remote and decentralized teams. Spreading the wealth and opportunity beyond the privilege bubble and exposing the industry to a more representative distribution of political preferences.

It may just be a dream, but I do feel hope as SV has been getting backlash for it's identity politics and new blockchain tech is looking to be a way to enable decentralized remote organizations.

RickJWag• 9 years ago

It's the synthetic, fascist mono-culture.

Free thought isn't allowed-- Silicon Valley enforces thought control like Weinstein did over Hollywood.

Sooner or later (looks like sooner) everyone realizes Silicon Valley is 90% white and Asian male. All the politically-correct talk is lipservice alone. (That's probably why the self-virtue-signaling went into overdrive in the first place.)

sprague• 9 years ago

These same criticisms were lobbed at Microsoft 15 years ago (and IBM before that), but then, as now, people forget that part of why some of us love technology is that nobody can rest on past success. Ten years from now, some new upstart is going to make everyone wonder what the big fuss was about.

Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

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