Former Google and Facebook execs are sounding alarms about the power of tech

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/01/silicon-valley-eating-soul-google-facebook-tech

by DrNuke • 9 years ago

250 170 9 years ago

theguardian.com

qrbLPHiKpiux• 9 years ago

Tech will only eat your soul if you let it.

throwanem3• 9 years ago

"Addiction to heroin is a failure of willpower."

andai3• 9 years ago

If you know heroin will eat your soul, perhaps consider not doing heroin? It might be hard, but a lot easier than stopping once you've started.

zxcb13• 9 years ago

In secular world views there is no such thing as a soul, thus it can not be eaten. Finding the proper language for these phenomena is however an interesting topic.

nordsieck• 9 years ago

Enough people either have a dualist world view or are familiar enough with the idea that soul seems to be a serviceable word.

wu-ikkyu• 9 years ago

In the secular world, the mind is akin to the soul. Judging from the first sentence, that is what the author is referring to.

andrepd• 9 years ago

In the reasonable world, people will understand that "soul" here is meant figuratively, not literally, and avoid starting off-topic tangents :)

spodek• 9 years ago

Maybe because I love Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs, and Henry Thoreau, or maybe because between Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' legacies, I chose Richard Stallman's, but I've never felt any appeal from Silicon Valley.

Maybe visiting might change my view, but the realizations in the article seem obvious and late enough that I think I understand the appeal but don't share the values.

EGreg3• 9 years ago

What do you do in NYC?

Do you think it's worth it to make a location-based social activity layer for existing social forums like HN? So people could meet up, date, hire for jobs etc.

No one's actual location would be revealed. But when people post something, others would know they are probably nearby.

OliverJones2• 9 years ago

With respect, that's been done. It was called Yik Yak. It was a disaster for the high school kids of my neighborhood; the geographic steering of messages allowed them to insult and stalk one another. The FOMO factor (fear of missing out) so carefully instilled in them by Instagram and the like made it very hard for them to just delete the app.

Clubber5• 9 years ago

As an interesting aside, that's how BBS's worked pre internet. Long distances calls were so expensive, BBS forums were largely localized. We would have get togethers and people's houses or at libraries, to meet each other once or twice a year, drink beer, play volleyball, etc.

wpietri7• 9 years ago

There was a reply to this, now deleted, that I thought had an excellent point. I suspect the poster did not enjoy the immediate downvotes that come from criticizing Silicon Valley orthodoxies, so I want to paraphrase it.

The poster, a European, said that one of the things they liked about HN was that when the discussion drifted too deep into an SV-centric view, people from other parts of the world would often provide a useful corrective that would then be upvoted.

I appreciate that too, although as the treatment of the poster's comment demonstrated, it's not perfect. I think too many SV orthodoxies are vigorously defended here. The poster gave a footnote with a short list of what they called "Silicon Valley mindcuffs", and I suspect that's what got the instant downvotes.

killjoywashere2• 9 years ago

What were the mindcuffs?! Examples? What a great word!

harryf• 9 years ago

The poster, a European, said that one of the things they liked about HN was that when the discussion drifted too deep into an SV-centric view, people from other parts of the world would often provide a useful corrective that would then be upvoted.

It's actually fascinating to observe how the "tone" of HN varies through the day. My impression (I haven't carefully analyzed) is that during the morning in Europe you tend to have more left leaning points of view politically and more advocacy of Stallman-esque Open Source.

Once the US gets online though the political spectrum of opinions shifts right and towards Libiterianism. You also have people working at places like Google and Facebook adding their 2 cents, which tends to lead to "moral outrage" (European) vs "here's the reality" (US).

amelius• 9 years ago

The (disruptive) power of Silicon Valley stems mainly from investors. Make a pile of money high enough, and you can disrupt anything; that's the premise, basically.

It is not really the power of tech that we should be worried about, but instead the power of investment without regard for anything other than shareholder returns. Google and Facebook could be better companies if they didn't have to sell their users to their real customers.

moretai• 9 years ago

I'm sorry, but this comment is just beautiful

dwaltrip3• 9 years ago

The money doesn't do it alone. You can't have technological disruption without technology.

potluckyears• 9 years ago

Yeah! The rise of addictive, short-term reward technologies seems deeply tied to the fact that Silicon Valley companies make money based on showing growth numbers to investors.

Business models shape the space of architectures that companies are incentivized and disincentivized to make. For people that don't like the current landscape of addictive free technologies, I'd say Silicon Valley has a business model problem, not a technology problem.

doug1001• 9 years ago

i doubt visiting would change your view, because your view--ie, what is the "appeal" and the "values" sounds about right. I've been here eight years and if there's some magic, i haven't seen it yet--just stale ideas conceived in isolation and enough frantic iteration to convince someone to pay for more adolescent experiment

throwaway13337• 9 years ago

Maybe the difference between those that feel fulfilled in life and those who don't are the addiction loops we've found our way into.

It would be nice to hack those loops in a meaningful way. Make creation a drip fed, nicely chunked, and skinner box filled experience.

There are some methods like pomodoro but something software based to use these novel approaches could do a lot of good for the world.

OliverJones2• 9 years ago

B. F. Skinner's box was a scheme for performing controlled experiments. The point was to isolate complex systems (minds) so simple hypotheses about their operation could be falsified or supported. It was scientifically successful.

My mother of blessed memory, daughter of two professors of psychology, in her childhood lived next door to Dr. Skinner on St. Ronan Street in New Haven, CT, USA. Myth in my family says my grandparents had the good sense to refuse a request to make Mom a subject in that box.

In the 21st century West no academic psychologist would even propose using a Skinner box on human subjects. Their institutional review boards (IRBs: scientific ethics watchdogs) would just laugh.

It might be interesting, as an experiment in ethics, to propose some aspect of Facebook's attention hacking as if it were an experiment, and see what IRBs make of it.

In the meantime: human complexity good, Skinner boxes bad. Please be careful.

octaveguin• 9 years ago

Interesting story but not very related to what the parent was saying.

Examples of skinner boxes are everywhere in society today. They've been around longer than they were identified by Dr. Skinner. Anything that gives a variable reward for pressing the same button is participating in a sort of skinner box.

Mobile games use them, slot machines use them, and you can even think of facebook/instagram likes as such variable rewards you get for the same action over and over.

They are pervasive in society already.

pault• 9 years ago

Totally based on hearsay, but: a family member worked with a person who was the child of a research associate of Skinner and that person and their sibling were used as informal research subjects by their parents. Both of them were extremely disturbed humans, and while I never asked for specifics there were whispers of some very dark doings.

saas_co_de4• 9 years ago

The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring

The only people who thought the "arab spring" was a burgeoning utopia are western military, intelligence, and political elites.

Now those same people see these platforms as a threat and so the "respectable" media is full of anti-SV stories.

it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it

Yes, that is the real problem: communications that can't be censored and controlled.

wpietri7• 9 years ago

I'm not sure you read this very well. The notion is not that the Arab spring was a utopia. The notion was that the Arab spring, fueled by direct person-to-person connection on FB, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc, were symptomatic of the Internet's power to create freedom and social utopia.

It's part of a persistent strain of technoutopianism. You might read Tom Standage's excellent 1998 book "The Victorian Internet", which talks about the adoption of the telegraph during the Victorian era. Many of the same things people said about the Internet's power to change society were said about the telegraph: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...

Clubber5• 9 years ago

And it absolutely did, as did the Gutenberg press, the telephone, the radio and television. We just don't recognize it because we've never experienced a pre-telegraph life.

MisterTea• 9 years ago

Telegraphs didn't have dopamine feedback loops via feedback such as "likes".

saas_co_de4• 9 years ago

"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article."

gaius5• 9 years ago

The so-called Arab Spring was interpreted by the entire rest of the world that America can destroy a country purely by “cyber” warfare. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle.

But hilariously, America seems dead-set on using the same weapon on itself...

knowaveragejoe• 9 years ago

The so-called Arab Spring was interpreted by the entire rest of the world that America can destroy a country purely by “cyber” warfare

Considering how much support I saw from outside the US, I'm finding this hard to believe.

yurish• 9 years ago

Can't say about entire rest of the world but that is when Putin changed his domestic policy from more or less liberal to censoring internet etc.

saas_co_de4• 9 years ago

Not purely cyber warfare. The arab spring had well organized and well funded groups operating on the ground using social media tools as part of their efforts.

It is hard to say how much the social media (twitter especially) were really playing a role on the ground and how much they were being used for propaganda to shape opinion in the west.

The arab spring was when CNN and others started reporting on tweets like they were legitimate news, which obviously has to be a discriminatory process, because someone is deciding which tweets are news out of the millions that are not.

Someone decides that the tweets of atrocities on one side are news, while atrocities on the other side are not, and that the tweets "proving" that the first tweets were staged fakes are not news either.

cynusx• 9 years ago

I don't think it's a difficult tweak to the feed algorithms to allow for 5% (picked randomly) of diverging viewpoints in somebody's feed. It might even be good for their engagement metrics.

Jgrubb• 9 years ago

Agree. I wish there were actually a slider that you could adjust that would increase the X factor of the algorithm. I’d possibly use Facebook if it weren’t just the same 6 people every time I went on.

baron816• 9 years ago

Ugh, the media has clearly been waiting around for a day when they can cast tech as the bad guy. Russians on Facebook and iPhone batteries are just not that big of a deal.

te_chris• 9 years ago

What do you expect? Big tech has gone to war with the media and taken the majority of their ad revenue, inserting themselves into the middle of the main relationship between them and their audience and advertisers. Only problem is tech didn't finish the job, so now media orgs see a chance to dispatch a few bloody noses back at their hubristic silicon valley 'partners'.

rdtsc3• 9 years ago

Yap. It was a bit of a back and forth.

After the election was lost, the traditional media which Clinton relied on so much was deemed to have failed. Chomsky would say the Manufacturing Consent machine had broken down somewhere. Almost immediately Facebook and Google started talking about "Fake News" and how they'll work twice as hard to combat it.

On the surface it was nice to see these companies saving us from lizard people spam, on another level it was a message to the future presidential or other marketing campaigns saying effectively "Don't spend you billions on MSNBC, spend them on us, we'll be far more effective".

Now the old and crusty media is punching back and writing articles about how tech companies are eating our souls.

I agree in principle with article and never even signed up for Facebook to begin with but like you identified so it has merit, but I think there is also a battle on another level here as well.

autokad2• 9 years ago

i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric.

leaked emails (by help of the russians) surely helped trump, but even democrats concede that information was TRUE. this has nothing to do with social media, but training in the DNC about phishing scams might help.

but honestly, there were so many huge flaws in the hillary campaign (relying 100% on data that was already proven in the primaries to be next to useless, disgust over the shadyness in how the clintons took over the dnc and stacked the deck against sanders, etc).

and lets face it, they didnt have a problem with the internet when obama was using it to win, such as 'obama universities' training people to use a pyramid network on social media to basically create broadcast storms to get the algorithms to push their content to the top and shout out dissenting opinions.

geggam• 9 years ago

Im not sure that many people voted for any of the individuals.

Hillary represented the establishment. The last two presidents were a huge and dramatic shift away from status quo.

I think people are voting for the least likely to be a part of the machine. I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the primary is part of the machine ?

mantas3• 9 years ago

i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric.

I wonder of DNC will stick hard to this and nominate Clinton in next election as well.

Usually loosing political parties change their stance a wee bit to pander to wider demographics next time. Because politicians are, well, representatives. So far it looks like DNC thinks they're correct and people are wrong.

Mc_Big_G• 9 years ago

Wow, you're really dismissing the power of propaganda? You really don't think people seeing anti-hillary memes and posts on Facebook from Russian trolls all day didn't have a huge effect? You're seriously underestimating the power of "advertising".

modi156• 9 years ago

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present form. The biggest problem is that our anti-competitive legislation is ill-equipped to handle tech monopolies.

The extremely complex nature of modern software and its ability to offer unparalled distribution advantage is nothing like the world has ever seen. The ability of Google to push something like a chrome browser comes not only from its galleons of highly paid engineers, but also its ability to advertise/support it for free for decades to come. There simply does not exist another sustainable model to finance a complex product like an internet browser and provide it for free to consumers for decades.

The bigger problem is what is the form of regulation that could be applied to such behemoths. Its extremely hard to regulate it by a case-to-case basis, similar to what happenned in telecom, simply because the business models are too complex and different products monetize differently.

I think a line of thought which might yield some regulatory possibilities is to limit these companies manpower. No single company should be allowed to employ more than X number of engineers. If they go above, they should be required to spin of into multiple entities, each of which do no more than X number of engineers. I dont know what X is - but that is open for deliberation.

The impact that something like this could have on say Google is that Google is forced to split apart its search business with the ads business. This further allows the search business to collaborate with more ad providers to find the best fit. And on the other side, it allows its ads business to experiment with more search providers and open up a market for profitable search engines.

This is not something I have completely thought through, but whatever little I have, this seems to be the cleanest approach to fix tech.

specialist3• 9 years ago

I'd be satisfied with radical cashectomies. Fees, taxes, fines, whatever. Level the playing field. Keep the money moving.

danjoc• 9 years ago

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present form.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but then Baidu, WeChat, Alibaba, and Xiaomi win.

ocdtrekkie2• 9 years ago

None of those companies have demonstrated an ability to "win" in Western markets.

modi156• 9 years ago

I dont really understand why Baidu, WeChat etc. are allowed to play in outside markets like US/India when China is closed off from outside markets. The Chinese case is special and might be better of with special treatment.

mrexroad• 9 years ago

There simply does not exist another sustainable model to finance a complex product like an internet browser and provide it for free to consumers for decades.

At least it also funds Chromium and WebKit...

killjoywashere2• 9 years ago

The Alphabet conglomeration seems similar to your proposal, no?

modi156• 9 years ago

Not at all:

1. Even Google itself is too big. It needs to be broken up further.

2. Management control needs to reside in separate individuals. You cant have two different companies having the same/common management control.

evv• 9 years ago

Do you really expect that sort of regulation to happen in the US, considering that most of the regulators golf with the executives? Its not just about the tech industry here- every industry has conglomerated into a handful of behemoths.

These days, large corporations and industries are more powerful than government entities- just look at how they avoid paying taxes. Until we figure out how to get money out of politics, mega-corps will continue to get their way.

modi156• 9 years ago

I agree its extremely unlikely too happen in the US. However, most big tech companies arent seen to be clearly alligned to Trump - so maybe Trump has a perverse incentive to pull it off.

That being said, I think with the rise of AI, smaller tech companies are the future. A tech ecosystem comprised of smaller companies will be forced to take a standards based approach to each industry and also aim to maximize efficiency because of constrains on head count.

This requirement to maximize efficiency will further result in a boost to SAAS and in the longer term create the springboard for the next big jump in tech.

jedmeyers• 9 years ago

large corporations and industries are more powerful than government entities

This is simply not true, since only goverment will be able to force compliance with its requests by sending armed people to your door.

juandopazo• 9 years ago

When did HN become so... radicalized? There's nothing inherently wrong with these companies being big. The problems are with them being too board. Should Google own the creation of content (Blogger, Youtube), finding content (search) and transmitting content (fiber)? Should Comcast transmit content (TV, Xfinity) and create content (NBC, Hulu)? This is where the problems arise like conflicts of interest, diminished competition, etc. We saw this clearly in Argentina, when as soon as the government started working on legislation to prevent the telecoms from becoming monopolies, since they own newspapers and TV news, they started bombarding the public with negative press.

It shouldn't be hard to regulate this. Just split them up.

modi156• 9 years ago

It shouldn't be hard to regulate this. Just split them up.

Actually this is exactly what I suggested. The bigger question is 'how' to split them up - and to be able to do it consistently across ever shifting market dynamics.

The telecom case is easy to define and split cleanly. The ads/search/browser and the like marketplaces will take the entire US government to make sense of.

And then there is stuff like Bitcoin and AI.

raguuu• 9 years ago

I would like Europe to either hack up or straight up block them so we can develop our own products.

Apocryphon• 9 years ago

The world has become radicalized, and HN is no exception.

krapp• 9 years ago

When did HN become so... radicalized?

More and more hackers and programmers from outside SV/startup culture started showing up. Outside of that bubble, hacker culture leans far more anarchist, and fundamentally mistrusts large scale power structures and centralized authority. And then Snowden and Aaron Swartz happened.

So in a way, HN isn't becoming radicalized, it's becoming normalized.

tensor2• 9 years ago

Why is it not ok for tech companies to be big, but a-ok for telecom, oil, banks, law firms, audit firms, and all the other traditional companies to be huge?

The cynic in me wonders if it's simply "old conservative money holders" being upset about the "new liberal rich." Ever since Trump took power, the media has been beating the "evil tech company" drums loudly and clearly.

modi156• 9 years ago

Why is it not ok for tech companies to be big, but a-ok for telecom, oil, banks, law firms, audit firms, and all the other traditional companies to be huge?

The thing which makes tech companies different from every other is the 'infrastructure' effect of software and the absence of 'geographical' limits on monopolies.

Banks, law firms, audit firms are fundamentally limited by geography. A law firm in New York will find it very hard to service clients in San Francisco without having employees there. Tech firms arent 'boxed' in by these limits, which are preset for most traditional businesses, thereby greatly expands their ability to become monopolies and strangle competition.

The other advantage that tech companies have is the fundamentally additive nature of software. Microsoft made a very good OS few decades back, but its ability to keep releasing a competitive OS builds on the work piled on by decades of engineering. It is simply impossible for a startup to release another version of an OS which can compete with Microsoft Windows.

However, if we were to break up Windows into pieces, it opens up the possiblity for a new startup to innovate on a part of the OS and buy existing pieces from the vendors of each part to ship a new offering.

saas_co_de4• 9 years ago

But it is the anti-trump media (NY Times, Guardian, etc) that are beating the drums the hardest.

What they understand is that these companies only care about money. When Democrats were in power they were happy to help the Democrats in exchange for favors. Now the Republican are in power they will be happy to help the Republicans in exchange for favors.

Alphabet is even willing to make someone else CEO because Eric Schmidt was too closely tied to the other side. That shows everyone how friendly they are willing to be.

flamedoge• 9 years ago

Theoretically, there is draw towards big companies offering a package of solution rather than individual pieces. Small companies offering superior piece doesn't get rewarded because of the package-offering-draw effect which rewards suboptimality and pulls towards monopoly. We want competition for getting the best and no monopoly for retaining power balance between customers and companies.

wfo• 9 years ago

It is not OK for these companies to be huge either. Companies, no matter how large are always dictatorially controlled by a tiny group of ultrawealthy oligarchs. Large company == massive concentrated power with zero oversight or democratic input which is always dangerous and bad.

Tech companies are worse because they control the tools we use to communicate and think: this unchecked power can exert massive influence over our minds and thoughts.

bogomipz• 9 years ago

"Why is it not ok for tech companies to be big, but a-ok for telecom, oil, banks, law firms, audit firms, and all the other traditional companies to be huge?"

It's not OK for for telecom, oil and banks. I don't hear anybody saying that nor do I believe it is a popular opinion.

"Ever since Trump took power, the media has been beating the "evil tech company" drums loudly and clearly."

You realize there's a tangent between the Trump election and how social media was used during the election right?

justinmk• 9 years ago

This is not something I have completely thought through

Indeed. "Thar oughtta be a law!" is always the least interesting response to a problem. Essentially your solution to a problem is to outlaw the problem.

Then the fun part is always left to committee. "How do we split it up?" "How do we define the thing we are trying to outlaw...?"

You could brand it the "War on Problems". The president could appoint a Problems Czar. I'm sure we'll need a Anti-Problems Department, too.

qaq• 9 years ago

Why would it be in US interest to do this? You have to make sure each country in the world passes same law which is not realistic. Plus what would be the benefit exactly? Large companies as is now create a ton of fundamental OS tools that everyone is using provide good comp. to their employees etc. The level of their owners influence is fairly modest compared to someone like Koch Brothers. Alphabet has a market cap that is bigger than Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner combined yet does not have enough political clout to influence things important to them like Net neutrality.

StreamBright3• 9 years ago

What do you mean by anti-competitive legislation? Amazon and Apple beat competition by innovation. There are plenty of competition for both companies. You can just buy stuff in Wallmart and buy an Android phone from many manufacturers. What are you talking about?

stale20023• 9 years ago

And why is a company giving away a browser for free a bad thing?

Merely because other people aren't able to themselves?

All I see is consumers winning as they get free products.

cwkoss• 9 years ago

Progressive tax on corporations: the bigger the corporation, the higher the tax rate. Would incentivize companies into breaking to smaller organizations, reduce taxes on start ups and small businesses, and minimize 'too big to fail' situations.

partycoder• 9 years ago

Before social network manipulation there was mass media manipulation. Social networks just made it global.

paulcole• 9 years ago

“I got rich by doing this but you definitely shouldn’t.”

Hard to take this kind of attitude seriously. Things seemed fine enough when they were working there, so what has changed?

drewbug• 9 years ago

Talking about it no longer affects their livelihood?

ebikelaw2• 9 years ago

I tire of the traditional media's need to write a negative story about how Facebook is cancer, and then throw in a legitimate company like Apple or Google to make it "Facebook and Google" are cancer. And this instance is particularly obtuse because the "former Google and Facebook execs" are the president of Facebook, and some random product manager from Google. There's only one former president of Facebook and there are probably 20000 former Google product managers. The latter guy is just some rando.

Sir_Substance• 9 years ago

and then throw in a legitimate company like Apple or Google to make it "Facebook and Google" are cancer.

This is very much a matter of perspective. Prior to Apple launching the app store as a walled garden for ios and then launching it on macos proper, it was generally an untested assumption that users would not be willing to accept such a software delivery model.

Prior to Google, it was assumed that it would be unacceptable to require people sign up to and give personal details for access to software. Most software licences were distributed by emailing codes to the user. The web app with mandatory registration was usually only seen in enterprise grade portal-based software.

Today, the standard software experience requires so many accounts that /average users/ are turning in desperation to password managers to corral the hundreds of accounts they need for their month-to-month computing, and Microsoft has moved from "next-next-done" installers to actively pushing a walled garden on the population. Despite Android having full support for distributing packages as .apk files that can be installed without the app store in the exact way you would use an msi or a deb, I would anecdotally say less than 5% of apps are offered for download from their creators websites in this traditional fashion.

Sure seems like the tumors are metastasizing to me.

ebikelaw2• 9 years ago

Besides the factual mistakes in your comment (for example, the majority of Google's numerous services do not require any kind of account), you seem to be talking about software distribution and licensing, while this article is about attention. There's a pretty strong case to be made that Facebook sucks up all of your attention and gives you nothing in return. You can't make that case against Apple and Google. One of them sells telephones, and the other provides access to all of the information in the world. The reason these can't be lumped together with Facebook is because Facebook lacks any kind of redeeming product. They give you nothing.

sillysaurus33• 9 years ago

On the other hand, if what the rando is saying is true, nothing else matters, and their words should be judged on their own merits.

The question is, is it true?

threatofrain4• 9 years ago

Words ought not be judged solely on their truthiness independent of their person. Evaluating someone's argument is costly, which is why some technical communities might consider the reputation of the author before embarking on the serious task of understanding a complex theory.

HN does offer higher-than-usual quality of discussion, but its ability to discuss is still palpably limited. In this light, waiting for the right starting point of discussion can be productive. A lot of debates are tiresome because they seem to start back from ground 0, and it can wear down community enthusiasm for the subject.

hkmurakami2• 9 years ago

The Rando is the founder of a $1.2B VC fund.

hn_throwaway_99• 9 years ago

You are confusing Chamath Palihapitiya, the former Facebook exec, with Tristan Harris, the former product manager at Google.

delhanty3• 9 years ago

About The Guardian in particular, I've been saying this for a while. [0]

I'll quote #peoplewindow's reply, broadly agreeing with my comment:

The Guardian has been pushing the line that non-Guardian news sources are 'dangerous for democracy' for a long time now. Other similar publications like the NYT have the same viewpoint.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573111

randomsearch• 9 years ago

Utter nonsense.

Check out the Guardian’s history and structure:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian

The Guardian is about as good as you’re going to get in terms of a mainstream outlet being able to take an objective view here. Pretty much the opposite of Facebook.

fineline• 9 years ago

Despite being a progressive-leaning person I find the Guardian's recent political correctness and value-signalling to be grating, and have been looking for an alternative and less hyperbolic sources of news. It's like they abandoned their detachment, independence and integrity in a bid to become the mirror image of the Murdoch press. I guess there's a good market for that, a large and growing choir to preach to.

wbillingsley2• 9 years ago

It may be because in the EU (and The Guardian is a pro-EU UK news organisation), Google is up before the regulators on more than one case, for example recently receiving a record fine from EU authorities that runs into the billions of dollars. They don't appear to have been randomly chosen, but appear to be the European most-wanted in terms of multinational tech companies accused by authorities of abusing their power.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/11/google-ap...

klokoman• 9 years ago

Yeah, this "alarms" are just a way to call for regulations that will in practice pull up the ladder so other companies will never be able to climb where fb or google stand now. This has always happened in all industries: some companies become big and then they use the excuse of limiting their own power to close off the competitions to enter the market, in fact stabilizing their power and creating a REAL monopoly. I don't understand how can informed people still fall for this move.

rhizome5• 9 years ago

I've been speculating for months that these companies would love to rotate out some of their VPs into a regulatory body in order to give their policies the force of law.

perseusprime11• 9 years ago

Not surprising to hear this kind of fear mongering from newspapers like guardian and Nytimes. They are the most threatened by Facebook and Google. Their breakfast, lunch and dinner got eaten by these companies so now they are using these narratives to advance their agendas. American tech companies are just fine. They are run by reasonable people. Bezos actually bought WashingtonPost so it does not die.

pretendscholar• 9 years ago

Bezos actually bought WashingtonPost so it does not die.

Thats a very charitable reading of what he did.

Former Google and Facebook execs are sounding alarms about the power of tech

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