http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all
Long article but well worth the read. I could quote the whole thing.
There's also a follow up article here.
Given the amount of Gaffers in tech related industries I'd be interested in hearing what people think.
Long article but well worth the read. I could quote the whole thing.
The industrys splendid isolation inspires cognitive dissonance, for its an article of faith in Silicon Valley that the technology industry represents something more utopian, and democratic, than mere special-interest groups. The information revolution (the phrase itself conveys a sense of business exceptionalism) emerged from the Bay Area counterculture of the sixties and seventies, influenced by the hobbyists who formed the Homebrew Computer Club and by idealistic engineers like Douglas Engelbart, who helped develop the concept of hypertext and argued that digital networks could boost our collective I.Q. From the days of Apples inception, the personal computer was seen as a tool for personal liberation; with the arrival of social media on the Internet, digital technology announced itself as a force for global betterment. The phrase change the world is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of early-stage investing and beta tests.
When financiers say that theyre doing Gods work by providing cheap credit, and oilmen claim to be patriots who are making the country energy-independent, no one takes them too seriouslyits a given that their motivation is profit. But when technology entrepreneurs describe their lofty goals theres no smirk or wink. Many see their social responsibility fulfilled by their businesses, not by social or political action, one young entrepreneur said of his colleagues. Its remarkably convenient that they can achieve all their goals just by doing their start-up. He added, They actually think that Facebook is going to be the panacea for many of the worlds problems. It isnt cynicismits arrogance and ignorance.
A few years ago, when Barack Obama visited one Silicon Valley campus, an employee of the company told a colleague that he wasnt going to take time from his work to go hear the Presidents remarks, explaining, Im making more of a difference than anybody in government could possibly make. In 2006, Google started its philanthropic arm, Google.org, but other tech giants did not follow its lead. At places like Facebook, it was felt that making the world a more open and connected place could do far more good than working on any charitable cause. Two of the key words in industry jargon are impactful and scalablerapid growth and human progress are seen as virtually indistinguishable. One of the mottoes posted on the walls at Facebook is Move fast and break things. Government is considered slow, staffed by mediocrities, ridden with obsolete rules and inefficiencies.
The conflicting pressures of Silicon Valleyits work ethic, status consciousness, idealism, and greedwere summed up in an ad for the University of San Francisco that I spotted on a public bus shelter south of Market Street: Become wildly successful without becoming a jerk no one likes. Change the world from here.
The technology industry, by sequestering itself from the community it inhabits, has transformed the Bay Area without being changed by itin a sense, without getting its hands dirty. Throughout most of Silicon Valleys history, its executives have displayed a libertarian instinct to stay as far from politics and government as possible. Reid Hoffman described the attitude this way: Look what I can do as an individual myselfeveryone else should be able to do that, too. I can make a multibillion-dollar company with a little bit of investment. Why cant the whole world do that? But the imperative to change the world has recently led some Silicon Valley leaders to imagine that the values and concepts behind their success can be uploaded to the public sphere.
People in tech, when they talk about why they started their company, they tend to talk about changing the world, Green said. I think its actually genuine. On the other hand, people are just completely disconnected from politics. Partly because the operating principles of politics and the operating principles of tech are completely different. Whereas politics is transactional and opaque, based on hierarchies and handshakes, Green argued, technology is empirical and often transparent, driven by data.
Andreessen described to me the stages of the industrys attitude toward political engagement. The first, prevailing in the seventies and eighties, was Just leave us alone. Let us do our thing. T. J. Rodgers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, said that anyone who got involved in politics was making a big mistake, warning, If you talk to these people, theyll just get in your ass. The Valleys libertarianismwhich ignores the federal governments crucial role in providing research moneyis less doctrinal than instinctive. Andreessen said, Its very possible for somebody to show up herea twenty-four-year-old engineer whos completely state of the art in building companies and productsand have had absolutely no exposure at all to politics, social issues, history. When the government shows up, its bad news. They go, Oh, my God, government is evil, I didnt understand how bad it was. We must fight it.
Horowitzwho is the son of David Horowitz, the radical turned conservative polemicistattributed Silicon Valleys strain of libertarianism to the mentality of engineers. Libertarianism is, theoretically, a relatively elegant solution, he said. People here have a great affinity for that kind of thingthey want elegance. Most people here are relatively apolitical and not that knowledgeable about how these large complicated systems of societies work. Libertarianism has got a lot of the false positives that Communism had, in that its a very simple solution that solves everything. The intellectual model is not the dour Ayn Rand but Bay Area philosophers and gurus who imagine that limitless progress can be achieved through technology. Stewart Brand, now seventy-four, popularized the term personal computer and made hacker the tech equivalent of freedom fighter. His Whole Earth Cataloga compendium of hippie products, generated by users, that is now considered an analog precursor of the Webcan still be found on desks at Facebook.
Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency. But it has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value. Evgeny Morozov, in his new book To Save Everything, Click Here, calls this belief solutionism. Morozov, who is twenty-nine and grew up in a mining town in Belarus, is the fiercest critic of technological optimism in America, tirelessly dismantling the language of its followers. They want to be open, they want to be disruptive, they want to innovate, Morozov told me. The open agenda is, in many ways, the opposite of equality and justice. They think anything that helps you to bypass institutions is, by default, empowering or liberating. You might not be able to pay for health care or your insurance, but if you have an app on your phone that alerts you to the fact that you need to exercise more, or you arent eating healthily enough, they think they are solving the problem.
Steven Johnson, the author of many books about technology, recently published Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. Johnson argues that traditional institutions and ideologies are giving way to a new philosophy, called peer progressivism, in which collective problems are solved incrementally, through the decentralized activity of countless interconnected equalsa process that mirrors the dynamics of the Internet. In politics, peer progressivism could mean the rise of citizen journalists tweeting and posting on social media, or an innovation that Johnson calls liquid democracy, which would allow you to transfer your vote to a friend who is more knowledgeable about, say, the school board. In this thin book, Johnson takes progress as a given, without seriously considering counter-arguments about stagnation and decline. It would be foolish to argue that Americas mainstream media and political system are functioning as they should, but its worth wondering if peer networks really have the answers. An essay in the journal New Media & Society, by Daniel Kreiss, of Yale; Megan Finn, of Berkeley; and Fred Turner, of Stanford, points out that a system of peer production could be less egalitarian than the scorned old bureaucracies, in which a person could achieve the proper credentials and thus social power whether they came from wealth or poverty, an educated family or an ignorant one. In other words, peer networks could restore primacy to class-based and purely social forms of capital, returning us to a society in which what really matters is whom you know, not what you could accomplish.
Newsoms successor, Ed Lee, was elected with the support of a technology investor named Ron Conway, who organized several hundred companies into an interest group called sf.citi. Conway told me, We got Lee elected mayor, and he did two things for the tech community: he stopped the private companies stock-option tax, and he kept Twitter in San Francisco. Conway also spent money to help a challenger take Olagues seat on the Board of Supervisors. (Olague was considered an obstacle to development projects.) Once in office, Mayor Lee intervened in regulatory matters in ways that benefitted two companies in which Conway is a major investor. Conway is involved in Zuckerbergs immigration-reform group, and after the Newtown massacre he enlisted members of sf.citi in a campaign against gun violence. But the main purpose of sf.citi is to persuade the city government to make policies that benefit the technology industry. When I asked Conway if sf.citis interests might ever diverge from the general publics, he couldnt think how they might. The handshake between the industry and City Hall is so strong that people in San Francisco insisted on going off the record before saying that Lee has made himself look like Conways man.
One question for technology boostersmaybe the crucial oneis why, during the decades of the personal computer and the Internet, the American economy has grown so slowly, average wages have stagnated, the middle class has been hollowed out, and inequality has surged. Why has a revolution that is supposed to be as historically important as the industrial revolution coincided with a period of broader economic decline? I posed the question in one form or another to everyone I talked to in the Bay Area. The answers became a measure of how people in the technology industry think about the world beyond it.
Few of them had given the topic much consideration. One young techie wondered if it was really true; another said that the problem was a shortage of trained software engineers; a third noted that the focus of the tech industry was shifting from engineering to design, and suggested that this would open up new job opportunities. Sam Lessin, who leads Facebooks identity product group, which is in charge of the social networks Timeline feature, posited that traditional measures of wealth might not be applicable in the era of social media. He said, I think as communication technology gets less expensive, and people can entertain each other and interact with each other and do things for each other much more efficiently, whats actually going to happen is that the percentage of the economy thats in cash is going to decline. Some people will choose to build social capital rather than financial capital. Given the opportunity to spend an extra hour or an extra dollar, they will choose to spend time with friends. It might be that the G.D.P., in the broader sense, is actually growing quite quicklyits just that were not measuring it properly.
There's also a follow up article here.
Given the amount of Gaffers in tech related industries I'd be interested in hearing what people think.
