A Guy Said Something That Freaked Me Out So The Wall Street Journal Would Like To Remind Silicon Valley On Behalf Of The Establishment That It Is Not The Establishment And It Should Stay Aware Of Its Place
Silicon Valley may have an arrogance problem, but Wall Street, DC, Hollywood, and the mainstream media have pretty much ruined the United States of America, so pardon me for being mostly unmoved when an ancient and beholden behemoth of the Murdochian trumpet parade decides to bellow it.
I think there is an arrogance problem, and it arises when MBAs from Ivy League schools, lawyers who worked their way through the byzantine federal government legal and lobbying system, Hollywood moguls who have mostly fueled their careers on deceptive accounting, and heads of large moribund media organizations, suddenly decide that they need to get in on this whole tech thing, almost invariably at the executive level, yet lack even basic knowledge of how computers, the internet, software, or for that matter, online marketing, work.
I think this is a fifth-level recycling of progressively more sensationalistic reporting about a talk that was, I thought, quite humble and thought-provoking. I expect this kind of journalistic garbage in the tech press and in lesser (read: most) mainstream news outlets; I definitely do not expect it from the WSJ. I know it was merely an opinion piece, but still very disappointing.
Can you explain to me the opinion here? I think it's very cut-and-dry telling like it is. SV needs customers and customers are in US, living US ways. Where is the opinion?
Interestingly, I do not even think the main point of the talk is to actively seek independence for Silicon Valley, but rather, it's simply projecting a future that will happen, and in fact, is mostly a continuation of the trend that's been going on for a while. It's not a matter of if, but when and how. Technology is going to be more powerful than many laws and regulations, and "code" becomes the de facto law in many contexts. This insight suggests that you'll have leverage if you build things that will facilitate life in that future society that will inevitably happen.
What I do not see in this talk directly is arrogance. That is not to say that people in Silicon Valley are not arrogant. This talk is not.
Also, I personally think the WSJ article is pointless and whiny. Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
> "Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified."
Uhhhh... Way to prove the point, man.
> "Technology is going to be more powerful than many laws and regulations"
Yes and no. And this is part of Silicon Valley's arrogance: it is so utterly full of itself that it has usurped the entirety of the word "technology".
Think about it for a second, step back from your day to day writing code and think about the word "technology". We software people occupy a tiny portion of tech, even though we're so loud and so good at attracting attention to ourselves that it seem to everyone else (and us) that we are technology.
Forget nanotech, forget good old mechanical engineering, forget aerospace, forget biotech, forget electric, civil, geological engineering. Apparently those don't exist, and the only technology that matters is code.
What a load of shit, and I say that as someone who writes code for a living.
We are part of a much, much greater whole. We do interesting things, occasionally they are immensely impactful, 99.9% of the rest of the time it's really not.
There's a old Chinese parable: "the frog at the bottom of the well" - about a frog stuck at the bottom of a well, who is immensely self-satisfied with his situation, because the rest of the world is just one boring little blue circle.
> Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
Were you around in 1999? People said the same stuff then too and look how that turned out.
> "code" becomes the de facto law in many contexts.
"It's the New Economy! Everything is different now."
I never thought that I would get to quote Jane Austen on HN, but here's a perfect one :
"Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation."
So says Mr Darcy before he realises that he's actually a bit of a dick...
SV: Also, I personally think the WSJ article is pointless and whiny. Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
All the hardware that enables code to do anything.
Code lives in an ivory tower. It's pretty easy to build something productive in that kind of environment, but then thinking that your productivity in an ivory tower will be matched in the real world is just ignorant.
To demonstrate this property, consider iTunes, probably one of the most key pieces of software today, responsible for distribution of many types of media across the globe while paying authors instantly, at a small cost of freedom for both parties.
Now write that code on pamphlets and drop it from a plane over Africa. Pay close attention to what happens. If you look close enough you'll notice not a god damn thing happens that is not related to the physical medium being re-appropriated for productive uses. They won't reverse engineer the code, they won't abstract away the key business principles and build a new prosperous Africa, they won't learn how to program either.
You see, Africa has no need for a digital distribution system with DRM. They don't even have a network capable of carrying it's data to 99% of the population. Even if you set one up and gave away iCrap to every African, you'd never recoup the astronomical costs selling copies of bits.
The thing SV needs to realize is they are not the first coders and they are already surrounded by code, at the level of societies, religions and governments. These coders are much better because they've been dealing with inconsistent platforms for hundreds of years without the benefit of virtualization layers or government-enforced standard protocols.
Sure, you can generate the same kind of code that runs governments and religions from a computer, but you're forgetting the fact that that computer exists inside the system of government.
As soon as you remove the government, your hardware gets stolen by people with better hardware, your software gets stolen by people with better software, and your communications data gets mined by deep packet inspection, extracting value just like an invisible tax or inflation. That last one was a joke, you need government for that.
People cite everything from arrogance as a defense mechanism against failure, to the necessity of entrepreneurial delusion, to youth, to denying that people in SV are arrogant at all.
Yeah "Silicon Valley has an Arrogance problem" not the Banks this rag is a mouthpiece for that created the worst economic collapse since the great depression and then held the American people hostage for Billions of dollars in tax payer bailouts.
The problem is that the WSJ's main premise about SV needing the rest of the US is wrong. The internet is decentralizing that control faster than SV's economy of locality can produce more.
Look at Berlin, Kiev, Riga, and a dozen other places. SV's monopoly on world-changing does not have "USA" as a dependency.
Indeed, soon if not already "not US-based" will be or already is a feature.
Well Silicon Valley does need America's consumer market, legal infrastructure, security, and skilled work force. The author of the article is not wrong in that sense. How successful would your start up be if you had to waste time worrying about your clients breaching contracts (with no legal resource for you to recover the money owed to you)? Or waste time worrying about populist policies destroying your business model? Or figuring out ways to cope with extortionary behavior from local organized crime/and or government?
These are all legitimate problems businesses in other parts of the world face (though not in places like Germany or UK).
Even the markets developed countries like Germany are not as large as the US consumer market. Having close, easy access to the biggest consumer market in the world has its perks.
Sheesh. Balaji here. Clearly this touched a nerve, so will be writing on this at some length. But this is the bit I don't get:
But when I asked him what harms techies faced that might
prompt such a drastic response, he couldn't offer much
evidence.
He pointed to a few headlines in the national press warning
that robots might be taking over people's jobs. These, he
said, were evidence of the rising resentment that
technology will foster as it alters conditions across the
country and why Silicon Valley needs to keep an escape
hatch open.
But I found Mr. Srinivasan's thesis to be naive. According
to the industry's own hype, technologies like robotics,
artificial intelligence, data mining and ubiquitous
networking are poised to usher in profound changes in how
we all work and live. I believe, as Mr. Srinivasan argues,
that many of these changes will eventually improve human
welfare.
But in the short run, these technologies could cause
enormous economic and social hardships for lots of people.
And it is bizarre to expect, as Mr. Srinivasan and other
techies seem to, that those who are affected wouldn't
criticize or move to stop the industry pushing them.
But that was actually exactly my point: as Farhad states, people may indeed "move to stop the industry", so we need to keep an escape hatch open. A huge chunk of the people here in the Valley are first or second generation emigrants who picked up stakes from their home countries and currently work from a laptop. They left their N home countries because those locales weren't favorable to technology. Is it impossible to think that backlash could make it necessary for us to leave an N+1st, as our ancestors (recent or distant) did?
I can only speak for myself, but the motivating emotion here isn't arrogance. It's one part apprehension, knowing what happened to the Chinese in Malaysia, the Indians in Uganda, and the Jews in Europe. And it's one part hope, thinking that we can build something better with a clean slate, without 230 years of legacy infrastructure and cruft.
The talk did not "dismiss non-techies as unimportant to the nation's future".
BSS was talking about finding new places for trying new things if they aren't allowed in America. Or even within America finding new ways of trying new technologies without affecting the entire society all at once.
This article is overly sensational and reactionary.
Srinivasan is orchestrating a lot of great work with Bioinformatics. In the comments, it's very odd that people think the best and the brightest in SV are only building tools that help give ads more exposure.
But then again I should probably stop reading WSJ comments, and that would also probably get me called arrogant.
Effectively argues, to use an analogy, that China with its explosive market-based growth needs Western debtor nations to buy its stuff, and that acknowledging its superior economic sustainability is "arrogant". And the "paper belt" isn't the arrogant one?
I view this author's attitude a lot like I view that of Fareek Zakaria, whose tripe we're all force-fed in high school: "We may be entering a post-paper-belt world, sure, but we can't be certain how this will all turn out so it's best to speak moderately and carry around a copy of the New York Times."
Is there a single example of arrogance in this entire article? My guess is the headline write/editor was having a bad day. I don't think that was the intent of the writer.
>The government funded the early technologies that led to the Internet, venture capitalists are financed by nontechies' retirement funds, and laws passed in Washington can determine the tech industry's legal future.
Right, and the Spanish and British founded modern America, what is your point? There is quite a bit of precedent for taking the ball from the previous players and starting your own game to their exclusion.
The question I have is what are the values that you want these experimental societies to live by. Tech for tech's sake is pointless.
Sounds like Page and Thiel want to be the experimenters and someone else to be the guinea pigs. I doubt those two want to be in those societies other than as dictators. Too much to lose.
We just need a new frontier like the moon or mars.
One thing that goes completely unsaid in the WSJ article is that people want real representation and self-determination, and the government, and maybe America itself, is too unwieldy to deliver on that.
Small democracies can be restored. Big ones... maybe not.
[+] [-] jerf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Glyptodon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojbyrne|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelmichael|12 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/rupertmurdoch/status/389132604311474176
[+] [-] projectileboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AsymetricCom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehrdada|12 years ago|reply
What I do not see in this talk directly is arrogance. That is not to say that people in Silicon Valley are not arrogant. This talk is not.
Also, I personally think the WSJ article is pointless and whiny. Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
[+] [-] potatolicious|12 years ago|reply
Uhhhh... Way to prove the point, man.
> "Technology is going to be more powerful than many laws and regulations"
Yes and no. And this is part of Silicon Valley's arrogance: it is so utterly full of itself that it has usurped the entirety of the word "technology".
Think about it for a second, step back from your day to day writing code and think about the word "technology". We software people occupy a tiny portion of tech, even though we're so loud and so good at attracting attention to ourselves that it seem to everyone else (and us) that we are technology.
Forget nanotech, forget good old mechanical engineering, forget aerospace, forget biotech, forget electric, civil, geological engineering. Apparently those don't exist, and the only technology that matters is code.
What a load of shit, and I say that as someone who writes code for a living.
We are part of a much, much greater whole. We do interesting things, occasionally they are immensely impactful, 99.9% of the rest of the time it's really not.
There's a old Chinese parable: "the frog at the bottom of the well" - about a frog stuck at the bottom of a well, who is immensely self-satisfied with his situation, because the rest of the world is just one boring little blue circle.
[+] [-] cgh|12 years ago|reply
Were you around in 1999? People said the same stuff then too and look how that turned out.
> "code" becomes the de facto law in many contexts.
"It's the New Economy! Everything is different now."
[+] [-] demallien|12 years ago|reply
So says Mr Darcy before he realises that he's actually a bit of a dick...
[+] [-] grey-area|12 years ago|reply
SV: Also, I personally think the WSJ article is pointless and whiny. Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
QED
[+] [-] AsymetricCom|12 years ago|reply
All the hardware that enables code to do anything.
Code lives in an ivory tower. It's pretty easy to build something productive in that kind of environment, but then thinking that your productivity in an ivory tower will be matched in the real world is just ignorant.
To demonstrate this property, consider iTunes, probably one of the most key pieces of software today, responsible for distribution of many types of media across the globe while paying authors instantly, at a small cost of freedom for both parties.
Now write that code on pamphlets and drop it from a plane over Africa. Pay close attention to what happens. If you look close enough you'll notice not a god damn thing happens that is not related to the physical medium being re-appropriated for productive uses. They won't reverse engineer the code, they won't abstract away the key business principles and build a new prosperous Africa, they won't learn how to program either.
You see, Africa has no need for a digital distribution system with DRM. They don't even have a network capable of carrying it's data to 99% of the population. Even if you set one up and gave away iCrap to every African, you'd never recoup the astronomical costs selling copies of bits.
The thing SV needs to realize is they are not the first coders and they are already surrounded by code, at the level of societies, religions and governments. These coders are much better because they've been dealing with inconsistent platforms for hundreds of years without the benefit of virtualization layers or government-enforced standard protocols.
Sure, you can generate the same kind of code that runs governments and religions from a computer, but you're forgetting the fact that that computer exists inside the system of government.
As soon as you remove the government, your hardware gets stolen by people with better hardware, your software gets stolen by people with better software, and your communications data gets mined by deep packet inspection, extracting value just like an invisible tax or inflation. That last one was a joke, you need government for that.
[+] [-] brandonb|12 years ago|reply
People cite everything from arrogance as a defense mechanism against failure, to the necessity of entrepreneurial delusion, to youth, to denying that people in SV are arrogant at all.
[+] [-] nextstep|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wavesounds|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
Look at Berlin, Kiev, Riga, and a dozen other places. SV's monopoly on world-changing does not have "USA" as a dependency.
Indeed, soon if not already "not US-based" will be or already is a feature.
[+] [-] pratik661|12 years ago|reply
These are all legitimate problems businesses in other parts of the world face (though not in places like Germany or UK).
Even the markets developed countries like Germany are not as large as the US consumer market. Having close, easy access to the biggest consumer market in the world has its perks.
[+] [-] nostromo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balajis|12 years ago|reply
I can only speak for myself, but the motivating emotion here isn't arrogance. It's one part apprehension, knowing what happened to the Chinese in Malaysia, the Indians in Uganda, and the Jews in Europe. And it's one part hope, thinking that we can build something better with a clean slate, without 230 years of legacy infrastructure and cruft.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wavesounds|12 years ago|reply
BSS was talking about finding new places for trying new things if they aren't allowed in America. Or even within America finding new ways of trying new technologies without affecting the entire society all at once.
This article is overly sensational and reactionary.
[+] [-] DanielRibeiro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agrias|12 years ago|reply
But then again I should probably stop reading WSJ comments, and that would also probably get me called arrogant.
[+] [-] agorabinary|12 years ago|reply
I view this author's attitude a lot like I view that of Fareek Zakaria, whose tripe we're all force-fed in high school: "We may be entering a post-paper-belt world, sure, but we can't be certain how this will all turn out so it's best to speak moderately and carry around a copy of the New York Times."
[+] [-] paul_f|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmacd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|12 years ago|reply
Right, and the Spanish and British founded modern America, what is your point? There is quite a bit of precedent for taking the ball from the previous players and starting your own game to their exclusion.
[+] [-] babesh|12 years ago|reply
Sounds like Page and Thiel want to be the experimenters and someone else to be the guinea pigs. I doubt those two want to be in those societies other than as dictators. Too much to lose.
We just need a new frontier like the moon or mars.
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvdm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
Small democracies can be restored. Big ones... maybe not.
[+] [-] runewell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sentil|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sindrome|12 years ago|reply