archive/abolish-silicon-valley
Karen Ho,
Logic Magazine,
Yanis Varoufakis,
Mary L. Gray,
Siddharth Suri,
Kai Brach,
Mel Krantzler,
Patricia Biondi Krantzler,
Cary McClelland
[...] 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.
damn this is great
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.”
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.
[...] 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.
this is terrific
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.”
about a bill that was meant to prevent gmail from showing targeted ads by requiring opt-in consent from all parties relevant to the email. this is mildly interesting, though perhaps a very slanted portrayal; what this makes me think is how limited privacy-centred measures are, from the outset. if you dismantle google's (anyone's) ability to show targeted ads, yes you may reduce ad click-through rates, but do you diminish power? you'll still get ads, just less targeted, possibly more obtrusive (making up for precision with volume). plus google already controls so much ad tech infrastructure. it's too late, now; the cat's out of the bag
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.
this is smart (and obvs applicable beyond the EFF)
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.
breathtaking