Bookmarker tag: archive/abolish-silicon-valley (28 notes)

And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

[...]

In the public sphere, meanwhile, EFF’s vision won out. Concerns about private surveillance were pushed out of the spotlight, crowded out by utopian proclamations about how companies like Google and Big Data would change the world for the better. Privacy would come to mean “privacy from government surveillance.” And corporations? Corporate intentions were assumed to be good—or, at worst, neutral. Corporations like Google didn’t spy; they “collected data”—they “personalized.”

The defeat of SOPA was naturally a time of great celebration for EFF. The group’s campaign was successful, effectively short-circuiting any possible discussions about using copyright and anti-piracy enforcement to make sure people aren’t getting exploited. From 2012 forward, the bid to license and preserve online copyright has been monstrously, and misleadingly, framed as struggle against totalitarianism, conflating Silicon Valley’s right to pirate content at will with liberty and freedom for the masses. As such, the SOPA battle was just one more successful application of EFF’s rhetorical public relations strategy: frame any attempt to regulate Silicon Valley power with totalitarianism, all while conflating the interests of regular internet dwellers with the plutocrats who own the internet.

[...] Section 2030 from the 1996 Communications Act is a piece of deregulation that says that a platform isn't responsible for the content that a user posts.

I'd like to see it amended in one specific way. There are a lot of people posting content for which you can't necessarily make the platform responsible. But if the platforms were to make the curatorial choice to promote that content in a recommendation engine, and it reached a certain number of people, they would then have to be responsible for it. I think that would have the effect of curtailing, for example, YouTube's pushing of conspiracy theories by placing certain videos in their 'top trending' boxes. [...]

Is there any way to give ourselves antibodies versus targeted persuasion?

To me this is about using everything we know about design and human psychology to fight back. For example, Amazon famously found that for every hundred milliseconds more slowly their page loads, they lose one percent of revenue. So we know that attention is directly correlated to how fast apps or pages load. Why not just turn that back around and design it whereby the more you use something you know you don't want to use, you insert a longer and longer delay, and soon you'll just ask 'why am I here anyway?' It would give your brain the chance to catch up with its impulses.

[...]

After Apple recently won the race to surpass a $1tn valuation, CEO Tim Cook emailed staff to explain, “Financial returns are simply the result of Apple’s innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values.”

While seductive, this story is, like the Apple store itself, a managed fiction.

Apple’s system of operation is less the result of genius than of capture and control. Semiconductors, microprocessors, hard drives, touch screens, the internet and its protocols, GPS: all of these ingredients of Apple’s immense profitability were funded through public dollars channeled into research through the Keynesian institution called the US military. They are the basis of Apple’s products, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato has shown.

The company’s extraordinary wealth is not simply a reward for innovation, or the legacy of “innovators” like Steve Jobs. Rather, it flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying “crash”. The profits have been stashed offshore, tax free, repatriated only to enrich those with enough spare cash to invest.

[...] Apple's profits, at root, are a product of its power to control.

Apple's ability to govern its employees, supply chains, and image allow it to restrict behavior and creativity in its interests - try getting a genius to say "crash," the company to pay tax, or your music out of your iPhone. Apple's ability to assert proprietary control over public goods, from the town square to government research, allow it to generate income far in excess of anything it could hope to wring from its staff. Apple's performance of friendliness and innovation allows it to soothe customers while convincing both them and investors that it is the source of a happier, richer destiny. Apple's profit does not come from packaging the labor of the past, in other words, but from the power to organize the present in a way that makes others believe that is inventing the future.

When we consider the social effects of computers in political and social life, we usually think in terms of expanded power and new possibilities. This perspective on computation permeates even our critical visions of technology. But we should also be attentive to the power that computers and the accompanying language of “systems” and “complexity” have to narrow our conception of the politically possible.

Another fallacy in the lead-up to the financial crisis was the assumption that financial markets were so efficient that participants didn’t need to do the underlying work to figure out what the securities were actually worth. Because you could rely on the market to efficiently incorporate all available information about the bond. All you need to think about is the price that someone else is willing to buy it from you at or sell it to you at.

Of course, if all participants believe that, then the price starts to become arbitrary. It starts to become detached from any analysis of what that bond represents. If new forms of quantitative trading rely on assumptions of market efficiency—if they assume that the price of an instrument already reflects all of the information and analysis that you could possibly do—then they are vulnerable to that assumption being false.

Is Uber worth $60 billion? Well, Uber is worth $60 billion because we believe someone is willing to pay $60 billion for it. But maybe Uber is worth zero. Maybe that’s the actual value of the revenues that Uber will make in the future. In the current environment, we rely on liquidity to sustain prices for financial assets. When liquidity dries out and you’re forced to rely on the things that those financial assets actually represent, however, you could see painful shocks if there’s a big disconnect between price and reality—the kind of shocks you saw during the financial crisis.

If people didn’t want to do the analysis before, they’re probably even less inclined to do it now. They figure the machine learning models are taking care of it.

Right. The machines are taking care of it. Or other market participants are taking care of it.

I might think that the share of a particular company is worth 20 dollars. But its price can go up to 100 dollars well before it drops down to 20, in which case I can’t sustain my measure of its actual value. So if all of the computers are pushing the price to 100 dollars, I might as well not do the work of figuring out what the company is actually worth because it’s somewhat irrelevant to the price that it trades at. Paraphrasing Keynes, “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

[...] Beneath the specific events that I experienced, I recognised a universal story – the story of what happens when human beings find themselves at the mercy of cruel circumstances that have been generated by an inhuman, mostly unseen network of power relations. This is why there are no ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’ in this book. Instead, it is populated by people doing their best, as they understand it, under conditions not of their choosing. Each of the persons I encountered and write about in these pages believed they were acting appropriately, but, taken together, their acts produced misfortune on a continental scale. Is this not the stuff of authentic tragedy? Is this not what makes the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare resonate with us today, hundreds of years after the events they relate became old news?

When a large-scale crisis hits, it is tempting to attribute it to a conspiracy between the powerful. Images spring to mind of smoke-filled rooms with cunning men (and the occasional woman) plotting how to profit at the expense of the common good and the weak. These images are, however, delusions. If our sharply diminished circumstances can be blamed on a conspiracy, then it is one whose members do not even know that they are part of it. That which feels to many like a conspiracy of the powerful is simply the emergent property of any network of super black boxes.

[...] My informants proclaimed that the smartest people in the world came to work there; Wall Street, in their view, had created probably the most elite work-society ever to be assembled on the globe. Almost all the front-office workers that I encountered emphasized how smart their coworkers were, how "deep the talent" was at their particular bank, how if one just hired "the smartest people," then everything else fell into place. [...] what was most culturally unique about Wall Street was the experience of being surrounded by, as Bern put it, the "smartest and most ambitious people." Logan added that the three qualities of success on Wall Street are to be "smart, hardworking, and aggressive. Everything else is considered tangential." [...] they will be working with "the brightest people in the world. These are the greatest minds of the century."

[...] "They understand that interns coming in knowing basically nothing - but if you're smart and personable, it's worth it to them to hire you." [...] most do not even know what "financial services" is. "Most are going into finance because they haven't figured out what else they could do," yet "finance employers are seeking them out, telling them they're qualified for finance" no matter what their training, major, or department - as long as they are from Princeton. [...]

[...] during the initial meeting between a Wall Street investment bank and a potential client, the managing director (MD) on the deal usually begins the meeting by introducing "the deal team" (the vice presidents, associates, and analysts on the pitch) with the explicit purpose of awing the client with their smartness, and thus, expertise. The presentation (contained in the "pitch book") not only includes the proposal for the deal, the market overview and competitor profiles, and the financial rationale for, and impact of, the deal, but also the relevant biographies and posed pictures of the team members, which painstakingly details their prestigious pedigrees and affiliations as well as profiles their deal experience and industry knowledge in the corporate cllient's area of business. [...] Positioning themselves as smarter, savvier, and more cutting-edge than corporate America by capitalizing on the aura of elite institutions, investment banks construct a mutually reinforcing connection between the market and the Ivy League: because we have "the best of the brightest" working for us, then what we say about the market must be believed and the deals we envision should be executed. [...]

[...] When it came time for my cotrainees to be placed in less prestigious and (much) less well-paid divisions of the bank, the full weight of unequal branding and classification bore down on them. It was also during this time that my GMFTP friends began to go home early, recognizing the fact that no matter how long past 6 p.m. they stayed at work or how much initiative they showed, they were excluded from the front-office positions: for them, hard work was already severed from advancement and reward. [...]

Almost everyone else in the bank is considered "back-office" support staff (which includes operations, account services, trade reconciliation, technical support, word processing) and treated as a "cost center", which is understood as a division that depletes money because of the refusal of investment banks to recognize or compute their contributions as part of revenue generation. [...] They are often from middle- and working-class backgrounds, with an overrepresentation of people of color and women, and tend to receive their jobs through employment agencies, vocational and technical training networks, job postings, and word of mouth. Oftentimes, back-office workers are found not in the bank's "headquarters" building at all, but rather in less expensive locations in Brooklyn, other parts of Manhattan, or across the river in Jersey City. [...]

Wall Street argues that its greed for money is a "counteracting" interest against other more evil passions such as racism and sexism. Because investment banks are so greedy, so singularly focused on money, they become money meritocracies: whoever makes them money will be rewarded regardless of background or identity. Of course, instead of understanding desire for money as itself a constructed "passion," most Wall Streeters see it as a naturalized state. Similarly, the Wall Street mantra that "money does not discriminate" resonates powerfully with the assumption of neoliberal economic theory that racism and other prejudices form "an impediment to efficient market transactions and [are] therefore likely to be overriden in the long run by the exigency to generate profit" [...]

Using money meritocracy as a dominant discourse of exceptionalism, investment banks differentiate themselves from corporate America, which they imagine to be caught up in the traditional "ol' boys' network." Unlike the bureaucratic, out-of-touch managers of most corporations, Wall Street bankers are a modern, renegade breed whose singular focus on money makes possible color-blind innocence and objectivity. [...] investment bankers did not have to be aristocrats, but could be "geeky quant-jocks" or amazing "chess players off the street". [...]

[...] the poor stewardship and excesses of managers and how it was Wall Street investment bankers who realigned managers to their true purpose of increasing shareholder value. If a CEO did not do what was good for the stock price, then he or she was being self-serving and the only way to guard against management self-interest was to tie compensation (via stock options) to the stock market. In this worldview, corporations exist for the sole benefit of shareholders, and any attempt to separate shareholder interests from those of the corporation was selfish and nonsensical. Although in the modern history of capitalism in the United States, the desire for profit accumulation is not new, what is clearly unique about Wall Street's shareholder value perspective is that employment is thought to be outside the concern of public corporations. Job loss was certainly a sad event, but beyond the responsibility of corporate America. [...]

[...] George Roberts, the "R" of KKR, claimed that since the Oregon public employee pension fund invested in the KKR fund which bought Safeway, "the masses" benefited. He justified the LBO by stating that Safeway employees were finally being held accountable to global competition. [...] The company whose "first store had been opened by a clergyman who wanted to help his parishioners save money" was redefined. Now, "the new corporate statement, displayed on a plaque in the lobby at corporate headquarters, read in part: 'Targeted Returns on Current Investment'" [...]

Given this historical opportunity created by the state's war economy, corporate leaders and Wall Street developed the tenets of shareholder democracy to promote their own long-sought cultural and economic legitimacy, articulate a conservative, anti-regulatory, anticollective political agenda, and obscure unequal class antagonisms through an employee buy-in of the corporate class agenda. [...] Wall Street investment trusts and brokerages argued against the necessity of labor organizations and government-administered social welfare, for the individual can "compensate for his lack of independent proprietorship in the traditional sense by assuming the mantle of corporate shareholder"; in an era of large corporations, it was through "investment, rather than production or consumption," that individual economic betterment could be pursued [...]

[...]

Wall Street and corporate executives advocated for widespread shareholding, not as a vehicle to give shareholders control (as public shareholding was understood and actualized as a dilution of control), but a cultural rehabilitation. Their motives were to promote conservative social and political goals designed explicitly to counter state regulation of markets, foreclose contestation over the control of corporate governance by invoking the semblance of agency via investing, and resist worker unrest. [...]

Stark landscapes spread on both sides of the road, like the bottom of the sea. It was March but there was still snow. Spared of leaved trees, the sky felt immense, even significant. Everything white, brown, or gray, stone colors.

[...] As digital monopolies steadily enclose whatever still remains of a public sphere, an impressive array of PR professionals have worked overtime to make it all sound liberating and democratic. Press releases gush out of all available servers, print articles and op-eds consistently reminding us not of the use value of their products (useful products, it should be noted, are not a Silicon Valley specialty) but, just as Bernays taught us, of the value of the corporations themselves: the great services they provide, the glorious number of jobs they create, their moral and ethical right-mindedness, and their proper place as the cultural and social pillars of all things American and exceptional—which is to say all things Hayekian and free. Far from simply building brand stories and shaping images, modern public relations is a perverse spin on what Bernays originally imagined the profession to be: it seeks to enshrine a privatized technocracy, swathed in the shallow veneer of a rhetorical, and endlessly fungible, commitment to social justice. And if present trends continue, our digitally administered information state may indeed be poised to finally extinguish the irksome throwback legacy that Bernays and his milieu found so threatening: democracy itself.

p,,,[ Audaciously taking its name from the shops it set out to displace and superfluous if not sinister in the actual service it purported to offer - a sort of glorified vending machine with facial recognition software - Bodega crystalllized the venality of the tech economy. All that technical expertise, and for what?

[...] In 2012, a CrowdFlower worker, Christopher Otey, filed suit against the company [...] 19,992 CrowdFlower workers had signed on to the lawsuit [...] CrowdFlower set expectations accordant with a full-time employee, but the pay and benefits were commensurate with those of an independent contractor. [...] "I didn't have control over the work I did. It was all done on their platform. I couldn't choose my own hours. I had to work when they provided the work. They pretty much controlled all the aspects of the work that was being offered." Given the degree to which CrowdFlower set the terms of employment, argued Otey, CrowdFlower owed him and other workers minimum wage, per the Fair Labor Standards Act. The company's legal team countered that, because CrowdFlower's workers were "free contractors," the FLSA didn't apply. Ultimately, in 2015, CrowdFlower paid $585,507 to settle the lawsuit, which left the question of the employment status of its workers unanswered.

FIX 9: UNIONS AND PLATFORM COOPERATIVES AS THE NEW BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU

We need a third-party registry that allows on-demand workers to build their work resumes and accrue reputations, independent of the platform. Workers should be able to take their record of accomplishments with them, no matter where they pick up their next gig. Unlike a typical resume, a registry, managed by workers' representatives, would allow workers to display validated feedback from previous employers and requesters, no matter the platform of origin. Platforms could be required to post this portable stack of letters of recommendation as part of the worker's platform-specific profile. These registries could operate as the on-demand economy's Better Business Bureau, authenticating workers' identities and reputations and saving companies the engineering costs curretnly poured into blocking the relatively few bad actors bombarding platforms with shoddy or fradulent work. In exchange for bringing greater scrutiny for workers' reputations, registries could be used to hold companies accountable to workers' demands. For example, companies could be required to register suspensions and removals of workers.

San Francisco - and the Bay Area in general - has become something of an arcade for the young and plugged in. Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Carbon, Rinse, Instacart, Alfred - a kingdom of cute one-wrod fiefdoms offering chauffer and butler services for the new tech titans. They are shuttled to their corporate campuses - like csummer camp, a world fo priamry colors and playtgrounds and cafes and endless amusement to keep them happy at work. For them, all of life's conveniences can be had at the push of a button; for others, they've got to get running every time the bell rings. The sharing economy meets modern sweatshop. The gamification of life in the city doesn't mean everyone can afford to play.

The companies they worked for created wombs in which all their creature-comfort needs could be satisfied. It seemed great at the time they started their employment, but three or four years later [...] began to understand that a career was just a career, and a company was only a company, not a lifetime culture. For it is the very nature of a company to be solely concerned about its own profits and stock-market price. A company's loyalty is to its own bottom line, not the welfare of its workers. If the welfare of its workforce enhances the bottom line, fine. If not, increased productivity demands and downsizing will substitute for workforce creature comforts. [...]

With few exceptions, these twenty-somethings had boxed their lives into a tiny corner of experience: they were only high-tech workers who thought that their title was the key to the universe. Most of them had chosen a high-tech career because they felt it was a safe place to exist. In school they had been called geeks and nerds by students in the social sciences and humanities, who were adept at connecting their lives with other human beings. But the "geeks or nerds," labeled as such by their fellow classmates, felt demeaned as outcasts. They were "weird," which was the operative word the more socially oriented students used to describe them. [...]

There were many reasons why this kind of self-isolation felt safe and comfortable in contrast to associating with the world where people connected with each other [...] Best to isolate oneself and get away from threatening interpersonal relationships. Machines were the solution: they didn't talk back, neglect you, abuse you, or demean you. Since you were in control of the machines instead of them controlling you, they were safe. Isolation was safe; nobody could harm you.

To build such a crash-resistant system, the designer must be able to imagine - and disallow - the dumbest action. He or she cannot simply rely on the user's intelligence: who knows who will be on the other side of the program? Besides, teh user's intellligence is not quantifiable; it's not programmable; it cannot protect hte system. The real task is to forget about the intelligent person on the other side and think of every single stupid thing anyone might possibly do.

In the designer's mind, gradually, over months and years, there is created a vision of the user as imbecile. The imbecile vision is mandatory. No good, crash-resistant system can be built except if it's done for an idiot. The prettier the user interface, and the fewer odd replies the system allows you to make, the dumber you once appeared in the mind of the designer.

The designer's contempt for your intelligence is mostly hidden deep in the code. But, now and then, the disdain surfaces. Here's a small example: You're trying to do something simple, like back up files on your Mac. The program proceeds for a while, then encounters an error. Your disk is defective, says a message, and below the message is a single button. You absolutely must click this button. If you don't click it, the program hangs there indefinitely. [...] You must say, "OK."