meh/analysis

The robots are the most visual example of Bezos’s obsession with automating whatever he can to free his employees to work on more creative tasks. “I don’t think I can remember a time where he wasn’t interested in using computing to help us achieve our mission,” Wilke said. “From the earliest days, he would look at a process, and if there was repetitive work being done by people who can be freed up to be more inventive, he would say, ‘How do we automate that process? How do we automate that routine so that our people can be as creative as possible?’”

New York Sunday night, London Saturday morning. You fly the round trip regularly for work. But the attendant stops you. At Heathrow, Sunday afternoon, the attendant lunges into your path before you can reach the business desk. Places a firm hand against your upper arm. The attendant’s fingers – who knows what else they’ve touched? – now press into the soft, grey wool of your coat. You look down at this hand on your body; at the flecks of dirt beneath its fingernails, the pale hairs sprouting from its clammy skin. And then its owner, the attendant, points and speaks loudly, as though you won’t understand, says: Regular check-in is over there.

The attendant won’t acknowledge your ticket, no, just waves you over to the long queue. It winds back and forth, penned in between ropes, all the way to the regular check-in desk. The attendant says: Yes, there’s your line, over there.

Let's imagine a world where women hold half the jobs in Silicon Valley. Where half of entrepreneurs, executives, venture capitalists, board members, and employees - including engineers - are women.

[...] "I think there would be two enormous differences," the longtime tech investor Roger McNamee told me. "I think Silicon Valley would be wildly more profitable. I think there would be a significant reduction in the number of absolute failures. And so I think success would go up dramatically."

Eich: [...] But it was definitely painful and it takes too long. As Oscar Wilde said of socialism, “It takes too many evenings.”

Why the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.

Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive. Suits, for example. Suits do not help people to think better. I bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That's when you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work. People do in startups, at least some of the time. (Half the time you're in a panic because your servers are on fire, but the other half you're thinking as deeply as most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)

Next door, in the house just like ours, lives an actual African American grandmother, the wife of the retired postal worker. We’re getting paid to have our house made over to look like what a set designer imagines their house looks like so that Walmart can try to sell things to people who look like them. John tells all this to his friend Dan, who says, I think that’s the definition of white privilege.

I later told Dusty Michael’s theory of history being dead and she went goggle-eyed. Dusty said conspiratorially, “Michael may be a crypto-Marxist.” (Oh God …) She kept blabbing, and it’s so weird to see Dusty’s mouth moving and genuine political words emerge. It just doesn’t mesh with her computer image. I get the impression she should be discussing exfoliation or tanning factors instead, but then, bodies are political, too. Or so Dusty has informed the office.

I surprised Dusty. I said that, “Since Marxism is explicitly based on property, ownership, and control of means of production, it may well end up being the final true politik of this Benetton world we now live in.” She said, “Hey, Danster—I underestimated you.”

It was interesting to briefly enter the political realm—as such.

[...] Spending time with open, optimistic people reminded me that it might be possible to fix some of what was broken in our country - particularly the deep divisions between the rich and poor and between those at the center at those at the margins. I felt renewed and excited. I remembered why I loved tech. When I got home I felt, more than ever, committed to making a difference through my work.