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Why is there so much bullshit in tech?
Part of it must be that we live in a golden age of bullshit. Bullshit is easier to generate, easier to spread, easier to get into mainstream conversation than at perhaps anytime in the modern era, perhaps any era. Part of it must be simple economics. With low interest rates creating easy money, venture capitalists could afford to more readily make stupid bets in the hope that some of them would pay off. Part of it is functional stupidity – get enough money, deserved or not, and the press and your employees will eventually start treating you as if you are a genius in all areas. It takes a lot of willpower to prevent yourself from believing that nonsense, and when you stop being able to hear no, you rapidly lose your ability to act intelligently. Some of it is the hammer/nail issue – when all you have is a computer program, all problems start to look like software problems, even if they are social or political.
All of the above likely play a role, but I think the issue is simpler. I think that too many tech and business leaders simply hold people in contempt.
“All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights …” etc., etc. You’ve read the thing. I believe that and so does likely most everyone reading this. I suspect that many tech and business leaders do not, not really. This manifests itself in small and large ways.
Take Paul Graham, for example. He has written that the way out of poverty is to not be lazy and create a startup, because startups create wealth. This is nonsense, of course – most startups fail and Graham himself admits that VC like him are biased against people who do not speak like he does. It is a bullshit argument apparently meant to elide the fact that Graham only thinks successful startup founders are deserving of a good life. Nurses, teachers, firemen? Fuck ‘em – should been a founder who spoke perfectly accented English and built an app.
Or take Rob Manfred. He is the commissioner of Major League Baseball -- he carries the water for the owners, in other words. Recently, to protest the owner of the A's destroying the team in order to force a move to Vegas, some A's fans staged a reverse boycott in order to attempt to show that there was a fan base there, that the owner was lying. They got about 26 thousand fans to show up to see a game, a near miracle given the quality of the team and the terrible way the owner has treated the city. A normal human being would have responded with some version of understanding that the fans are upset but that the owner feels the team can be more successful some place, and while we understand it's a tragedy when a city loses a team, circumstances sometimes dictate, etc., etc., etc. A PR intern could have done it in their sleep. And considering that the reverse boycott was planned well in advance and that the owner's poor treatment of the fans has been an ongoing saga, someone in the MLB PR office probably had a statement prepared. So what did Manfred actually say? "It is great to see what is this year almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That's a great thing."
The contempt could not have been more clear. The owner of the A's could not have treated the fans and the city worse if he had knocked on each door on the city and literally peed on the person who answered, but Manfred treats them, the people who literally are responsible for his multi-million-dollar salary, with utter disdain.
Or take the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman. Reddit is a website where people talk about topics that interest them. It exists because people volunteer their knowledge and expertise to create data that other people read and comment on and because some people volunteer their time to moderate the conversations and keep them tolerable for the majority of other users. None of that work -- the content creation or content moderation is paid by Reddit. Reddit for most of its history has allowed third party developers access to interfaces that allowed them to create tools that allowed the site to be accessed and work with via mobile devices. This was beneficial to the site because their own tools to do the same were garbage and it obviously created more content for them to sell adds against. It also, apparently, provided tools that made the life of their volunteer moderators easier and provided accessibility options not available via the company's own products.
With the online ad market struggling, Reddit decided that they were going to charge exorbitant fees for third party access to APIs in order to maintain a monopoly over user content (this is liekly mostly a response to AI companies sucking up their data for training. If I had to guess, the real end game here is to either use their own data to create their own AI system or to charge AI companies an exorbitant fee for access). Most third-party applications decided to shut down, leading to many moderators making their pieces of the discussion board, called sub reddits, private -- meaning no one could post to or read from them. Huffman's response?
They weren’t subsidizing, but they work with their developers. They need apps for their platforms as well.
Was there like a Google clone out there where they take all of Google’s data and run their own ads on it, that Google let survive for 10 years? Does that exist? Another app store that Apple allows to exist?
I don’t know if I agree with the characterization that Apollo is a fully direct competitor of Reddit.
Okay, hold on, timeout. You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo, which uses our logo, or something like it, takes our data — for free — and resells it to users making a 100 percent margin. And instead of using our app, they use that app. Is that not competitive?
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview - The Verge
"Our data." Huffman thinks he owns the data created by his users. Now, that may be true in a legal sense, but anyone with half a brain understands it is bullshit in every other sense. Huffman no more created that data than he created the concept of message boards -- which is all that Reddit is at the end of the day. And Reddit exists entirely because it existed when the previous large message board on the internet made a change that infuriated its users and they left for Reddit. (That, by the way, is also largely how Facebook got big. It was there when MySpace mangled its site with its add rollout). And yet Huffman thinks he should be the only voice when it comes to how that data is used and accessed.
This contempt for people manifests itself in larger ways as well. Peter Thiel, one of the most prolific investors in Silicon Valley, doesn't think that woman should be allowed to vote. He also a supporter of a neo-reactionary movement dedicated to the proposition that democracy is bad. Elon Musk has allowed hate speech to thrive on twitter since he took over and has himself supported antisemitism.
And we haven't even gotten into the anti-labor and sexist attitudes rampant in Silicon Valley.
These people appear not to like their fellow citizens very much, and they also appear to not care who knows. Under those circumstances, it is not surprising that so much f hat comes out of the tech world is bullshit designed to immiserate the many in order to turn a quick buck for the few at the top. It's not innovation -- it's the same old robber baron scam with a shiny silicon sheeting.
And it is not going to get better if we keep allowing these people to amass fortunes on the backs of the rest of us that insulate them from everyday constraints.