The Silicon Valley rich are famously stingy philanthropists and a defense I’ve heard more than once is that the tools they spend their time building are inherently good. “Why donate money when people can just download my app and instantly have a better life?”
Maybe I have a different view on the this from most on HA as I live in Africa, but products like cheaper cellphones have had a far more massive effect for the masses than a few philanthropists donating some money to charities. Charities in general have almost no effect on the ground.
Charity is not the way to make the world better. The only way to make the world better is by building methods for more people to take part directly in the global economy - and as Americans are now realizing, this isn't necessarily going to be a good thing for Americans who will only gain more competition.
Philanthropy and charity aren't the same thing. The Gates Foundation does much, much more than just walk around handing out cheques. I'm not even sure they do charity in any significant way, but the money they're putting towards, for example, vaccinating large numbers against the rotavirus, is hugely effective in actually improving things. You can't partake of the global economy when you're shitting yourself to death.
I think they're more alike than different. They have in common the act of giving for the benefit of others. From the Oxford English Dictionary:
Charity. a) Beneficence; liberality to or provision for those in need or distress; alms-giving. b) Money, a gift, or other assistance to relieve need or distress. c) A trust, foundation, organization, etc., for the benefit of those in need or distress; such trusts, etc. viewed collectively.
Philanthropy. Love of human kind; the disposition or effort to promote the happiness and well-being of one's fellow people; practical benevolence.
The difference between the Gates Foundation and other charities is not that it does "philanthropy" rather than "charity"; it's that it operates on a much larger scale and with a greater emphasis on measurement and accountability than do most other charities.
Leave aside that I don't think the analogy to African aid is quite relevant here, I agree with you. Charity alone isn't necessarily helpful nor does it define the good a person has done. But the lack of philanthropy in SV is indicative of the attitude and culture I'm trying to describe: individualistic, not integrated into a diverse community, divorced from a sense of civic responsibility.
Does it have to be indicative of those things? To me, it indicates a data driven personality instead of an emotionally or socially driven one. Are they really divorced from a sense of civic responsibility? Don't they pay taxes and serve on juries? And, at the risk of placing data above my easily manipulated emotional state, where's your data?
I keep a bunch of money in rotation on Kiva myself. But it's not angel investing, it's just small loans for very small businesses. If a decent sized business showed up on there then they wouldn't get sponsors I think because they would seem too well off.
and actually angel investors or crowd funding for african tech entrpreneurs is a much needed thing right now.
Charity isn't just about direct ROI, it's about the attitude of the people giving. I think that speaks to the idea of SV being in a bubble when a simple idea like charity is so easily dismissed.
>Charities in general have almost no effect on the ground.
Founded in 2006 and 2008, so it actually clarifies his point - too often an established and older charity would focus on micro-optimization instead of disruption. Which would have more effect on quality of education in a third-world country:
- A charity that figured out how to ship thousands of textbooks in a single container, thus optimizing their shipping cost
That's an interesting perspective. Though it sounds like Dambisa Moyo is singling out "system aid" between governments, not all charitable/philanthropic giving.
Their goal is to make themselves as appealing—or threatening—to a big player as possible so they can get bought out for a few hundred million dollars and then devote the rest of their lives to a) building Burning Man installations, b) investing in other people’s widgets, or c) both. They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it.
They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it.
It's a disturbing attitude, but it's one that our culture and our public sphere have more-or-less explicitly encouraged.
Nobody is supposed to live in the world as a whole anymore. You're supposed to build a perfect little bubble of your own possessions designed by your own mind to suit your own ego, and live in that. Anyone who cannot or does not do so is deemed a failure.
The problem being, someone has to scrub the toilets, someone has to farm the food, there's only so much beachfront real-estate in the world, and many of us like having a world.
She's talking about others as well. Instead of helping people get better education to find better jobs, or even creating jobs, they'd much rather take the unemployed and say "why don't they just buy my app, smart phone, tablet, PC, etc and have a better life?" Well because most of the unemployed and poor cannot afford them and go without them.
Then you have a lot of unemployed and poor who do buy that app, smart phone, tablet, PC, etc and suffer because they cannot afford food and shelter, but they got nifty things to improve their life. Just walk around homeless with a backpack and sleep near a dumpster, but use that shiny tech at the nearest library or Starbucks.
Alright, I'll bite. I intensely care about maximizing my positive impact. After looking at a lot of things in college, including academic research, finance, consulting, nonprofits, and engineering at a big company, I concluded starting a company was the best way to have an outsized impact on other people's lives. That is why I'm running a company now. I am trying to build a Microsoft.
It's very easy to be dismissive of widgets. For example, the entire internet is a mechanism to instantly teleport bits of information from one place to another. That's all the widget does. It doesn't help you do anything physical. It just lets you send bits from one place to another, nothing else. It sounds so trivial. Who would have thought that a widget for sending bits from one place to another could have such a big impact?
Now I'm wondering- can you give a specific example of the company/person being described? These criticisms of Silicon Valley are always so abstract, it would be nice to have a few examples.
Instagram. An app for doing what we were all doing already anyway, but now with a lot of faux-effect filters. Sold for a billion dollars. All that time, energy, and money that did not one thing to help anyone else or measurably improve the world.
Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired- not that much effort to impact 30 million people. You might dismiss Instagram's innovations, but dismissing the importance of an interface is like dismissing a new programming language because there are already programming languages that are Turing complete.
Not seeing the impact there. Not seeing anything that couldn't be trivially handled by something already existing.
I'm not saying Instagram is worthless. I'm saying Instagram is a new flavour of toothpaste. There's something kind of distasteful about a new flavour of toothpaste marshalling the attention and money that it did, but it's not that I blame Instagram for that. But I do compare it to, say, the Gates Foundation, and it's hard not to think "boy, that whole enterprise could have had vastly greater beneficial impact to a lot more people than it did."
Where does the billion dollars that Instagram commanded go? Into a constantly recycling pool of geeks and cash in the Valley who keep funding more companies inventing new flavours of toothpaste, hoping to be either the next Instagram or the next Facebook buying Instagram. Ms. Bracy's whole exhortation is just this: Maybe direct some of that energy, some of that attention, some of that money and time, outside of the incestuous enterprise that is Silicon Valley.
At the D.C. TechMeetup groups you can always expect to have a public policy aspect to the tech offerings the problem is the majority of these fail. As someone who works in the government and is part of the start-up culture, I can tell you: these attempts are typically terrible at coming up with ways to blend tech and bureaucracy. I have no idea why. Well, not no idea. I think the main hurdles are as follows:
1. The people who make the best change in industries or start-ups are people who have been working in it a while.
2. Few people who have worked in government are the types to become high-growth entrepreneurs. They exist but in general the mindsets are reciprocals.
3. It takes a long time (in start-up time) to understand how a federal/state/local government does things. Anyone who wants to make a mark from the outside isn't going to identify a problem/solution efficiently. So anyone who has a real solution has likely been in government for 5-10 years and is established in a comfortable position - not likely to break out. Not only that they probably have schooling in something political science-y/history/etc.. versus math/CS/physics
4. As a general rule, it takes a long time (infinitely long in start-up time) to actually get a federal/state/local government to implement anything. Part of this is by design and the other part is incompetence or ignorance because they have...
5. Really really poor understanding of how to implement technology. For example $25,000 for a shitty 4 page web 1.0 government website because that is what was budgeted and Booz Allen took the contract because...
6. ...they promised to make the whole thing comply with the IT requirements (ie: IE7 is the most recent browser) and security requirements.
So yea. It's kind of hard to solve tech problems for the government. Even moreso, having whole programs handed over from the government to a bunch of 18-30 year old's who haven't made all the right friends and gone to the right schools.
I think she has a point about bubble that Silicon Valley and SF lives in.
Where I think she misses the boat is that the solution isn't to lobby government. Rather people need to remember the world outside the bubble so they can see real problems to work on, rather than the latest cool X-sharing (yes it's a cliche but still true) app to brag about in front of their friends in the coffee shop.
Many of the real ground breaking startups are not coming from the bay area nowadays for exactly these reasons.
Cell phones may have done more for international development than charity, but that's a great example of improving things by accident rather than by design.
I moved to the Bay Area to start a startup, before which I worked on international development issues, and having seen both sides of the coin, I totally agree with the author's views.
It would be great if we could harness some of our technological expertise to engage directly with the world's problems, starting at the problems rather than our own individual itches. This is something I personally intend to do in the future, and I would love to engage with others that are interested in doing so too.
In fact, a few years ago, my co-founder and I thought about doing something for-impact rather than for-profit, and we volunteered with Khan Academy (when they didn't have funding), but quickly found that you can't do a great job on something unless it's the main thing you're working on (PG's "top idea in your mind" concept totally applies).
One great example of using technology for social change is SamaSource [http://samasource.org] — I'm a huge fan of their work and the founder's politics.
Let me add my perspective as an Indian living in the SF bay area, spending about 20-25% of my time in India. The poverty of India is inescapable, it is everywhere around you. The reason I got into business, particularly business in India, ultimately is that in my mid-20's I found myself simply very depressed about this, and decided that business was the only way I could make a real difference. I was inspired by the examples of Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan and similar places, which went from miserable third world poverty to middle income prosperity within about 30 years.
About charity, in the here and now, when you are surrounded by such need that you see all around you in India (I personally know hundreds of stories), small and local acts of charity are very necessary and helpful.
At the same time, I do not believe that charity can work on any kind of large scale. First, given the vastness and diversity of India, it is impossible for any one person to know more than a small fraction of India. With that said, I firmly believe that the part of India that I am familiar with - the Southern part accounting for about 25% of Indian population - could have been a Taiwan or South Korea or Southern China, if only the Indian government had pursued a relatively sane economic policy. No I am not complaining about corruption and so on - South Korea or China did not develop because they had enlightened, corruption-free governments. Even today, Indian economic policy is miserably wrong-headed. It hurts the very poor the most, but our political class is simply oblivious to it.
One example would suffice: today, the second largest textile exporter in the world, after China, is Bangladesh. With all the political turmoil, corrupt government and so on, Bangladesh has made more progress in lifting its poorest citizens than India, and the 3 million textile industry jobs are a primary reason. Why couldn't India do it? Policy, in one word. Textile industry is the classic climb-the-ladder industry. China is just about ready to vacate the lowest rungs of the ladder, and Bangladesh is getting on it. India's poorest are still waiting.
To summarize, I believe in charity-in-the-small, in the here and now, but large scale economic development, lifting hundreds of millions of poverty in India (which accounts for most of the world's poor) needs something different.
TLDR: "What if, instead of imploring people to vote on Facebook’s privacy policies, we were pushing Florida lawmakers into fixing the state’s broken voting system? ... Why can’t we, the tech community, figure out how to harness our talent and influence to fundamentally change the way our democracy works — not just for us, when it suits our interests, but for everyone?"
It surely is embarrassing that California's two senators were strong supporters of PIPA and that they are still in office. Silicon Valley is sending a strong message - "Mess with us, and we'll be very angry for about 4 days. Then we'll go back to trying to get rich."
If the Tea Party could throw out dozens of fiscal moderate Republicans from the Congressional caucus, surely we - the technically savvy citizens of Silicon Valley - can play the political game and win?
Just as a simple example, Nancy Pelosi might retire in the next few years (I'm skeptical that D's are going to retake the house in 2014), if that's the case where is the developer/entrepreneur candidate for that seat?
It's easy to talk about using political power for good purposes when you don't have it yet.
If Silicon Valley actually tried to become a political force, it might discover that the tech community doesn't agree on what the nation's most important problems are. Or that there is little correlation between the ability to make a lot of money putting advertisements on people's screens and the ability to find practical solutions to complex social problems. Or that the rest of the country doubts the goodness of its motives.
I suspect that she's less interested in the big players getting together to lobby effectively, than for the energy of all the small players to be directed at problems outside of the Valley and the Stanford crowd.
My impression is that the tech culture pervading SV is built on a foundation of decentralized problem solving on a global scale, finding people who share an interest in the solution to some problem they're faced with, and working towards that solution with them. Intermediaries such as NGOs and governing bodies are not valued, because their operation isn't transparent or accessible. National borders and the government agencies they contain are becoming increasingly irrelevant as we are able to work and play with people regardless of locality, and the influence of national organizations is seen as a liability for more global-minded projects. The author seems to place a great deal of faith and value in institutions which have failed to keep pace with the workings of modern human society.
I think you're misunderstanding. I think it's exactly that decentralized, networked approach to problem-solving that holds the potential for technologists to fix big problems. The issue is that in SV most are not focusing on those problems. I WANT the tech community disrupting those old institutions, and I'm frustrated we're not doing more of it.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think one issue is actually Silicon Valley's model of "disruption" — ie new solutions replace old ones. For example, instead of fixing public transit in San Francisco (or SF -> SV) we now have all of these new private infrastructures for transit within SF (Uber, Lyft, Cabulous, etc) and SF -> SV (all those shuttles, see: http://stamen.com/zero1/).
What happens then is that the people with apps, the people with jobs at Google, Apple, Facebook, live in a completely different urban landscape than ones who aren't in the ecosystem. When we can't see the problems of MUNI we don't feel them, and when they aren't problems for us we won't feel like fixing them. I'd love for us to have more of a civic sense as well, vs this complicated and classed (but faster to build!) layering of private infrastructures.
Completely 100% agree with you, and have been mildly obsessed with Uber and other ride-sharing apps since I moved here because of their conflict with city government and the implications they have for public transportation.
One of the most jarring San Francisco experiences I had when I first got here was getting off Mission/16th BART and then walking a block to Valencia street. The difference that block makes is a good metaphor for what I'm trying to describe in this article, but I'm not creative or articulate enough to describe it in this context and have it make sense.
Of course, that sort of extreme income gradient exists in a lot of cities, and predates any one particular industry -- try walking south from the University of Chicago buildings to 63rd street to see a non-SF example.
The Technologists have built themselves the equivalent of a new wild west which is still being explored and built upon. I don't think they're very interested in doing the equivalent of sailing back to England to try and reform the British parliament.
To extend the analogy, expanding to the wild west eventually required a revolutionary war with Great Britian. That's a war Silicon Valley is woefully unprepared for.
I absolutely agree. I love the Silicon Valley mindset. But I despair at how inward-facing it is. When I read about pockets of SV culture popping up in other places I cheer, such as an article the other day about a hacker culture forming in Kenya. Those hackers are applying this wonderful decentralized way of solving problems to high-priority problems in the world. In California, we are so far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs that the "problems" we try to address are mostly comical (e.g. I have too many social networks! I need an app to help me browse them).
Centralized institutions and intermediaries are necessary to running an enterprise, namely society, that contains everyone.
You're not solving the problem of broken institutions, you're just coding workaround after workaround. Eventually, the workarounds collapse under their own weight and are labeled Windows ME.
Reading between the lines it sounds like the author is just struggling with the amoral nature of most businesses. Superficially company mission statements and slogans may appear to contradict this assertion, but they are best guidelines rather than constitutional legislation. At least in Tech as a creator you can find a path within your job to generate something meaningful if at worst only for personal / technical pride.
Personally, I cordially dislike most attempts by corporate (and entertainment) celebrities to influence domains outside their primary interest. It's easier to appreciate Bill Gates as a full time philanthropist than Bono the singer and part time pamphleteer.
So, as I read through the comments on this post I see a lot of indifference to her argument and a lot of anger toward the government. Government is broken. Government uses outdated, bespoke technology from the 90s. Technology is not a priority. Government is inefficient. (I could say the same things about much of the not-for-profit community as well).
Those are all true, but that's partially because the exact people in Silicon Valley who are capable of bringing expertise to the table are not willing to. Government's so broken it is not worth fixing is exactly the attitude that ensures that government continues to be broken. There aren't many people who live in the Valley who ask themselves how they could give back or improve society with the skills they have.
For example, there was just a search conducted for a new CIO of San Francisco--what would that position look like if one well-qualified engineering manager from HN left their job at Google or Facebook, sucked it up and dove in? I'll tell you what would happen--a lot of good stuff for our city and our society. I'm currently in the civic tech community of practice nationally (Today is perhaps the last day I can claim that, more on that below), and there aren't enough people who “get” it who are willing to work in government, but that's exactly the problem that needs to be solved. The person I know who is doing the most innovative work in civic technology is Brett Goldstein, the CIO of Chicago, who use to be the head of IT Services at OpenTable before becoming a beat cop, director of analytics for Chicago Police, Chief Data Officer of Chicago, and now CIO.[1]
Lets take another view of this point--there is to my knowledge no software developer in Congress. That seems like a problem to me and one that comes from the fact, perhaps, that developers are less likely to throw themselves in to politics in their 40s because of a lack of expertise. That doesn't seem to stop lawyers and other businesspeople though. I think we would be having a slightly different national conversation about technology, innovation, the internet and even the very methods by which we solve problems in our society (for the better) if some Silicon Valley folks sucked it up and got a little more involved in politics or, you know, in improving the lives of poor people. The I AM a geek campaign.
(By the way, I'm inherently skeptical of Ron Conway's Sf.Citi, which is basically a glorified lobbying organization against the payroll tax in SF. But, having said that, I think the attitude could be useful. I've heard it said by a few Silicon Valley billionaires that they don't want to give money to, for example, education because they don't know anything about education. What they know is how to build software products. Since that's so, why can't we come up with software products as philanthropy rather than give up on giving back [2]).
I think some of the passion is there but there needs to be new ways to focus that energy collectively. Just as an example, I co-founded Datakind (formerly Data Without Borders), which matches pro bono data science capacity from people who work at, for example, Google or Bit.ly, with not-for-profits that have defined data science needs and projects. The hard part here was not in finding the data science capacity--tons of people volunteered--or the not-for-profits--tons of them have signed up--but in the interface between the two. That's why the organization needs to exist, but it also points to the fact that the ecosystem of doers in Silicon Valley should give some thought of how to act as a community to bridge those gaps and provide support and help beyond the peninsula.
Lastly, as a personal note, I am keenly interested in this whole thing. Today is my last day as Senior Tech Policy adviser to Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker. I am starting next week at Stripe. The more I have worked on civic technology, the more I realized I wished I knew more about and had experience in technology in the private-sector. I feel like a sort of false prophet — one who had read about revelation but who has never experienced it himself. But my passion is in and around using technology to innovate in the civic space, particularly within government. I feel the best long-term play to do that is to work at an engineering-focused, growing, tech company for a few years. Then I can tack back to civic tech--because innovation rarely comes from people who are too far down the rabbit hole of any field. I can likely come back to civic tech after working in the private sector but there are only a few years (without a wife/partners and kids) where I am willing to work my ass off at a startup.
I mention all this about my own life to say that although government is hard and addressing societal problems is hard it's only by choosing to care that we can make a difference. That sounds corny, but if government is broken and you're an expert at revolutionizing business process, why don't you spend a few years working on it. I am not suggesting that everyone organize their life as I have, but if you really cared about the hardest problems you could find why isn’t addressing civic and social problems on your list?
> if you really cared about the hardest problems you could find why isn’t addressing civic and social problems on your list?
Yes. As someone who also grapples with applying technology to public policy issues, I think part of the reason that more people from the tech sector don't dive into civic issues is that the challenge there is frequently 10% tech and 90% organizational/personal. Like you said though, those that can revolutionize business process (and I would add have excellent people skills) can add a lot to government.
I definitely wish you luck in your next endeavor and would love to connect as you're making the switch to the private sector (I have been contemplating a switch of my own).
I spent a few months there and I think the post touches on a lot of truths. I found the place to be pretty unreal - an idyllic and unique slice of America, both in a good and bad kind of way.
The good part is that there's a lot of energy and optimism there, a great openness to new ideas and a general sense of building the future. I think this is the part that attracts people and allows for new companies to take hold and grow big.
The bad part is expressed as a kind of refusal to engage with the rest of society. The analogy I would make is when one is building a company - the easiest part is to put on some headphones and start coding, it is most geeks' comfort zone. But that's only part of it, you also have to do engage with your users, do support, get the word about about your product and a myriad of other things that are not pleasant but absolutely necessary.
Likewise, doing your own thing out west is very appealing and comfortable, but do get anything done you have to engage in the dirty, messy, horse-trading cacophony that is politics. The tech industry for example is notable for not having any significant lobbying capacity in Washington.
Silicon Valley != San Francisco. In fact, the idea of San Francisco being a part of Silicon Valley is a very recent one. The article makes some good points. But if you're going to write about Silicon Valley, the first thing you must do is understand what it is.
Yeah, as you can probably tell I struggled a lot with the term "Silicon Valley." I meant to describe more the culture than the geographic place, but since I'm based in SF it all kind of got conflated. Good point, I'm going to think a bit more about how to make that distinction clearer.
The underpinning idea in US governance is the idea that if you don't like the society you live in you can build a new one a little further out west.
Until seasteading becomes feasible SF/the internet is as west as it gets. Amazingly, or unsurprisingly to libertarians, we can build our own society with out government telling us what to do.
What is wrong with people solving their own problems rather than lobbying government to provide a half-assed solution for them?
Frankly, it's rude to go to Washington and tell them how to live their lives, they can see how others live and decide for themselves whether they want to operate that way.
It's particularly hilarious because the west coast wouldn't exist without massive federal investment over decades. From getting people out there to irrigating what is mostly a desolate wasteland, places like Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California are creatures of federal investment.
That's not how investments work. If someone invests $100,000 in your startup, and you IPO for $10 billion, you don't just pay back $100,000 and call it even. The way I see it, the federal government should own basically half of California.
I don't understand why you think it's instructive to compare government investments to venture capital. The government engages in plenty of investments, and none of them operate that way.
The fact that government makes an investment on favorable terms does not change the underlying nature of the investment. The point is to challenge the self aggrandizing west coast narrative of rugged individualists setting out and building civilization from the desert. In reality, the west coast was an investment of the taxpayers of the east coast. Without that investment, California would be Mexico, or perhaps a private colony--a wholly owned subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase.
Its not an investment, its a public good. By definition, that is how they work. You're using a very flawed anology.
Parkland is common public good, and most of the west is publicly accessible. And where it is not, it is most often military in use. Or, it has been set aside for rich people to benefit from.
Think about who really gets the value of Central Park in NYC vs Who can afford a home closeby.
Right, but this is a minor subset of your initial premise. And even in that subset, outside of water/mineral rights[1], you are talking edge cases. A road is a quasi-public-good until there is a traffic jam. Central park is a quasi-public good until it is occupied by a permit holder, etc.
Second, The public policy rationale for these "investments" is to provide quasi-public good as services. For example, the public ownership of military installations is not a "public good" in terms of property (you cant take a walk at area 51) but defense is a quasi-public good (avail at ~zero marginal cost to the broad public).
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Its important to just keep some perspective. Public goods and "profitable investments" (eg, rent seeking ones) are quite distinct concepts. And in part we entrust assets subject to massive rent-seeking to be held in common ownership "for the public good" expressly to avoid exploitation their rent seeking potential.
[1] The exploitation of water/mineral rights relating to public land are often well trodden areas of legal and policy debate, and span levels of abstraction (state/local/regional etc).
The west coast was populated by the taxpayers of the east coast in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of another power. Those "favorable terms" weren't charity; they were an investment that has paid off.
Because the government chooses not to monetize and propertize them that way. In a very real sense, the government has ownership rights to a massive amount of valuable stuff and writes it off their books every year.
The easiest example is how logging rights in federal lands are basically given away for near-free rather than sold at a market rate for a profit to the government.
Of course, none of those successive societies built in the West were ever even possible without the support of the Federal government, which continues to this day.
> What is wrong with people solving their own problems rather than lobbying government to provide a half-assed solution for them?
Nothing is wrong with it. It's ideal. That being said, the main issue with lobbying is that if you're not doing it, someone else is, and they're generating an outcome that impacts you. Even if you were a purist who truly didn't want to lobby the government, everyone else's rent-seeking puts you at enough of a disadvantage, that you'll eventually have to do it, just to maintain your status quo (not to mention moving forward).
Well, we can disagree whether moving a little farther west is really the underpinning idea in US governance. I think that question was basically settled in the Whiskey Rebellion: there was never some idyllic period of liberty in American history where the government just was not on people's back.
Developers and entrepreneurs seem to too often live under this false notion that just because they can build things easily--literally our whole lives have been animated by the fact that we can just make a computer do nearly whatever we want--that somehow that is true for everyone in our society. A world with perfect liberty is a naturally unequal one--and the government can do a lot that is not telling "us what to do" that can address the worst examples of the inequity with a smaller proportionate decrease in overall liberty.
But, I digress in to the deepest and most fundamental question in western political philosophy, so let me move on to simply say what's below.
The federal government exists. It has immense powers. State and local governments exist. They have immense powers. Those things are not changing in our society any time soon (even with sequestration).
Given that fact, I think we're presented with two choices. We can either try to make government work better or we can ignore it. Either way it exists and affects our lives. I, for one, think it might be better if people like the folks on HN (libertarians, liberals, and everyone else) took part in the rule-making, the regulation, the laws, and the services that come out of our government. That we made sure that the folks who opine on the future of the internet were at least cursorily aware of its functioning, etc.
Given [the fact that the federal government exists and has immense powers, and state and local governments exist and have immense powers], I think we're presented with two choices. We can either try to make government work better or we can ignore it.
I hear this argument a lot, and for some reason, I always think of slavery in the US.
Imagine you are a slave. You don't like it, and wish slavery would end. Another slave tells you:
"Given the fact that slavery exists and slave owners have immense power, I think we're presented with two choices. We can either try to make slave owners better or we can ignore slavery."
Put in that light, the suggestion seems absurd: empower slave owners to be even better at slavery? Really? How does that help us not be slaves? And how does ignoring slavery help?
And why are these the only two options? I can see why the slave owners would want these to be the only two options, but you're a slave, too. Surely, surely, ending slavery has to be an option too?
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My favorite slavery thought experiment concerns democratic slavery:
One day, a slave notices that his owner is, well, something of a dictator. He's the only guy in charge, and hey, who picked him anyway?
So the slaves get together and demand the right to vote to choose their slave owner. (The possibility that slavery might be wrong, in and of itself, does not occur to them.)
Two different slave owner "parties" arise (let's call them the Rs and Ds), and every four years, the slaves are given the opportunity to vote for the slave owner candidate from the R party, the D party, and usually one (or sometimes two) fringe candidates not associated with either party.
The slaves do a great "get out the vote" effort to choose their slave owner for the next four years, but still, less than half of the slaves vote.
Those slaves that don't vote for a new slave owner are told to STFU about slavery, since they didn't vote, by the slaves who did vote.
Now replace "slavery" with "government", "slave owners" with "politicians", and "citizen" with "slave".
At the very least, it should be clear that the act of voting doesn't legitimize government, just like voting doesn't legitimize slavery (which is not the same as saying government is illegitimate, it may be, or may not be, but voting doesn't make it so).
Voting also doesn't confer any moral benefit over those that choose not to vote, for similar reasons -- those telling non-voters to STFU are, in fact, wrong to do so.
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All of this is to say that, it seems to me, the mere existence of a thing, regardless of its "immense" power, doesn't mean anything with regard to whether we should attempt to prop it up further, ignore it, or tear it down.
And as with the democratically-elected slave owners, even the presence of things like 'voting' and 'elections' is no guarantee that the system (slavery) is in any way moral -- voting slaves are still slaves, after all.
IMO no one should feel obligated to help an entity they believe is actively hostile to their own, or others, interests -- regardless of the current power and/or respect said entity has with their peers -- government included.
The underpinning idea in US governance is the idea that if you don't like the society you live in you can build a new one a little further out west.
And this is also the basic root of most of what's wrong with the United States. There is not always another Western frontier freshly depopulated by mutated smallpox.
It's about the ecosystem, not the players. The kind of problems the author talks about are offshoots in an ecosystem that is built to develop and sustain massively huge ideas. This is not only expected but required to keep ecosystem healthy. Can you imagine if there were no such companies and only 15 ideal ones? It would make for a very unhealthy startup land because startup is about trying new things, ideal or not.
I really enjoyed this post, and I have a few reactions to it.
The author is lobbying for online advocacy, which I hate to say, will not be fruitful without some kind of major political shift in our country's political processes and institutions. Our two-party system doesn't allow for a member of congress to suddenly say "I'm going to let my constituents decide how I vote on each bill." I'm sure it angers some when I say this, (I only mean to state a fact,) but the real way to make an impact is through lobbying. SOPA and PIPA were amazing, yes, but time has proven that their impact cannot be replicated. When it comes to internet regulations, the bigger players in Silicon Valley have already started to realize this and opened a lobby shop in DC. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/250205-i...
My second point is that because our government is so broken already, it makes it even harder for citizens to have an active say in how it operates and the decisions it makes. Even the White House realizes this, but they don't have the power to change this overnight. However, their steps forward have been in the right direction; Obama created the "Chief Technology Officer" position and appointed Todd Park, an extremely accomplished entrepreneur, to the role. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/09/todd-park-named-ne... (Disclosure: I'm a Presidential Innovation Fellow in a program that Todd heads up.) Bringing government technology into the 21st century is something that will benefit every American citizen by allowing government to beter serve him or her.
Finally, I want to stress that the onus to create change is not entirely on Silicon Valley. Tim O'Reilly, in one of his essays, has a great chapter entitled "Government as a Platform". http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596804350/defining_govern... Until our government moves beyond Open Data and to full read/write APIs, there is a significant limit to how we can interface with it. Most government information systems are only accessible via web portals built in the 90s. Think about it... if your internal business tools were restricted to software built in 1995, how productive would your organization be? And we're not talking about the best software of the era, we're talking about custom-off-the-shelf pieces of crap, built by huge government contractors who make most of their money by launching satellites and building tanks.
So if there's an overarching point to my post, it's that the problem is much more nuanced than just "Silicon Valley doesn't care." Changing that apathy, though, is still a good first step.
I think government is starting to move. We could cite CTO Park and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program as you have, but also mention Brett Goldstein (CIO) and John Tolva (CTO) in Chicago, Rachel Sterne (Chief Digital Officer) in New York City, the Offices of New Urban Mechanics in Boston and Philly, etc. But, in general, I think revolutions rarely come from within and that addressing apathy in the technological class is a method through which we could see a lot more change in the way our governments functions.
This post sucks. There are a lot of reasons for sucking, such as describing a non-problem. That's not this posts problem. This posts problem is that it describes a very real problem, and then basically throws up it's hands in defeat. That's actually worse than not saying anything at all, as it leaves the reader upset, but with no balm for the wound.
Thanks for wounding me and not giving me a bandage. Or, as I've heard it put, "If you're going to show someone a pile of shit, you better also show them the shovel."
So, taking my own medicine, here's the shovel for a post like this: stop writing posts describing problems that you have no ability, no ideas, and no real capability to solve. Otherwise you're just indulging in self-centered, self-hating navel gazing which does absolutely nothing for the world. I realize that sounds harsh, but it's a useful filter to apply to yourself. Only share actionable anxieties.
stop writing posts describing problems that you have no ability, no ideas, and no real capability to solve.
This is a moronic thing to say. First, diagnosis is valuable in and of itself. Second, awareness of a problem shouldn't wait on a solution. Third, you're basically saying that, for any problem beyond a certain individually-addressable size, just don't talk about it because the author can't do anything about it. I don't think that's exactly what you meant, but that's what you said.
She didn't wound you. She pointed out that you're bleeding. If she doesn't have a bandage to give you, should she just ignore the spreading pool at your feet?
a) that's an ad hominim. I never attacked the author, and you are attacking me. Apology accepted in advance.
b) there is a large class of problem which only induces anxiety. For example, lamenting the "disconnection" between people in a modern, technology mediated society (which is a lament that's been going since the industrial revolution, and is no less valid now as then).
When we accept that large, impersonal forces shape the world in ways that, when we are thoughtful enough, realize are wrong or flawed, then we give up personal agency in fixing the problem. When you see a large, impersonal force causing a large, impersonal problem, the correct action is to file it away and keep your eyes open for opportunities to help people who both see the problem and have a solution.
That's just how I feel about the matter; others are welcome to have different beliefs.
I called your statement moronic, not you. I will not be apologizing for doing so. If I say something idiotic, calling it such does not entail that I am an idiot.
There may or may not be a class of problems that only induces anxiety, but your example is not a member of that class even if such a class exists. Trivially, I can address the disconnection between people in our technologically mediated society by going out and meeting people in person. If I write a lament about that disconnection, I'm not speaking out solely to induce anxiety, I'm doing so to urge people to turn of their computers, to quit starting at their iPhone, and to go out and make personal connections.
More specifically, Ms. Bracy is not, in any sense, suggesting that the problem she identifies is insoluble, or that it cannot be addressed by individuals. She says, in part:
What if, instead of imploring people to vote on Facebook’s privacy policies, we were pushing Florida lawmakers into fixing the state’s broken voting system? What if prison reform advocates could speak as loudly as the anti-SOPA activists?
More generally, her post is a plea for the participants of the Valley startup scene to look to address problems outside their own, quite limited experience. That's not anxiety-inducing, that's an exhortation. The fact that she doesn't link to a kickstarter for a specific project doesn't undercut that point. It's easy to imagine someone in the Valley casting about for a good idea to decide to say to themselves "We don't need another socially networked tastes-organizing app. What problems are worth solving in St. Louis for people who don't have smartphones?"
You have an extremely limited view of 'agency' if you think Ms. Bracy's post exists solely to make you feel badly.
Sorry. You're right. But I don't think I'm throwing up my hands. I think there are many solutions and certainly not ones that are easily laid out as a final paragraph in a post like this. I'll definitely follow up when I think I have ideas (or share other good ones when I see them) but for me this post was an important first step to clarify my thinking about what the problem is.
No, he's not right. As I said above, accurate diagnosis is worthwhile in and of itself. Ideas to address it are great, but don't let the lack of ideas prevent you from clearly identifying something worth addressing.
For example it takes having not only a working business plan, but a working business plan that makes sense.
For example it takes a quality control, six sigma program to make sure hardware and software costs less to support than the revenue it brings in.
For example it takes VCs not afraid of investing in teams and organizations of people not heard of before, that have good ideas, but need to hire experienced people to guide them.
For example it requires companies to hire more people in the USA instead of offshoring to cheaper labor markets in foreign nations. Make it affordable by doing cross-training of different factory positions like New Balance Shoes does, only do it for hardware.
For example it takes people who actually know how to run a business instead of the inner circle of elite social kliks who either lack degrees or have the wrong ones.
For example it takes giving the public what they want, instead of telling them what they want and changing how your product works just because it has a 'new look' or is 'shiny' but confuses a majority of the users. (Windows 8/RT)
For example it takes reforming the way business is done in SV, end the overpaying of executives (esp when the company turns a loss) and make executive pay based on how profitable the company is, and pay the employees more salary with better benefits by cutting executive salaries.
I'm aware that many systemic problems require multiple people to resolve as your incredibly insightful comment notes.
This post however, is complaining for the sake of complaining. I for one do not rail against the Second Law of Thermodynamics for destroying my beautiful perpetual motion machine ideas.
Similarly, offering vague pablums on the state of business in Silicon Valley without real solutions is at best indulgent.
I didn't read this as the author giving up. She isn't offering solutions at this point but is asking for increased dialog in hopes of seeding action.
Quote from author:
"I also realize I’m not offering any solutions. But I really can’t think of a better place than right here to start working on some. More to come soon on what shape that actually takes."
For those of us who live in the SF bay region/SV, we do have a say in what goes on here. We start by discussing the problems we see. We brainstorm ideas about how we can change the status quo. We self-organize and begin to enact the changes we want to see. Isn't this what innovation is about and what SV is famous for?
Just because an anxiety is not actionable by you does not mean that it is not actionable by someone else. And one way you, who lack the means to solve the problem, can motivate people who can to do so is by raising the profile of the problem. Writing about it is a way to do that.
When Thomas Paine wrote of "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" in The American Crisis, he didn't have any direct way to stop soldiers from deserting from George Washington's army because the weather was cold and the fighting was rough. All he could do was highlight the problem of desertion and point out the consequences of their actions. Does that mean he shouldn't have written it?
It's my responsibility too. I'm working on it. Just coming off the Obama campaign and rolling into a new gig in the coming weeks. Not ready to announce it yet, but I'm proud of it and think it's part of the solution.
No, I wasn't. I wanted him to win--and am so glad he did--and criticizing him on FISA would have been counterproductive at best. I don't agree with every one of the hundreds of positions he's taken, but I'm not a one-issue voter. Despite his flaws and disagreements I have with him on some issues, he's probably the best President I'll ever see in my lifetime. Helping to get him re-elected is one of the greatest things I'll ever do.
The solution to the SV problem is not to lobby the government or to try to set up some libertarian outpost in the desert.
Just move out of SV. The air is different outside of SV. People don't care about apps, or financing rounds, or VCs.
Want a truly different perspective? Move to Detroit, a struggling city with a half-abandoned core, or to Akron, a former industrial megapower that hasn't been relevant in decades. In both cities, new manufacturing technologies and/or processes are needed to vitalize their local industries. In the Central Valley cities of Fresno and Merced, water and air quality concerns impact both the quality of life and the strength of one of California's primary industries. In the southwest, access to water will be the ultimate arbiter of growth in the decades to come. These are all real problems, but they're not problems that you'd ever come across in SV.
I'm starting with bringing dyslexic fonts to peoples' awareness (my blog is always rendered in Eulexia), and then moving on to building dragons ( http://nerdfiles.net/rattelyr-dragon/ ).
The Silicon Valley rich are famously stingy philanthropists and a defense I’ve heard more than once is that the tools they spend their time building are inherently good. “Why donate money when people can just download my app and instantly have a better life?”
Maybe I have a different view on the this from most on HA as I live in Africa, but products like cheaper cellphones have had a far more massive effect for the masses than a few philanthropists donating some money to charities. Charities in general have almost no effect on the ground.
Charity is not the way to make the world better. The only way to make the world better is by building methods for more people to take part directly in the global economy - and as Americans are now realizing, this isn't necessarily going to be a good thing for Americans who will only gain more competition.