“[Silicon Valley] is a dream of a world with new rules and new rulers, based on the principles of meritocracy and efficiency and hacking your way to the top.”
“the negative consequences of technological development under capitalism: the harmful tendencies that are magnified, and the alternatives that are lost”
the dream is innovation without exploitation
“My start-up looked less like a audacious attempt to build something useful and more like an act of myopic self-aggrandisement, one that I found hard to justify once I began paying attention to the rest of the world.”
“a poor use of my limited time on this burning planet”
belief due to it’s comfortable spot in the economic hierarchy
“Silicon Valley’s legitimating myths - the revenge-of-the-nerds fairytales, the straight-faced claims of meritocracy, the propaganda about mission-driven companies solving the world’s problem”
“the dominant narrative within Silicon Valley is that technology is inseparable from capitalism”, humans create, and create technology, under every economic system. capitalism can provide innovations but it actually hinders many more
“You’re either in favour of the tech industry bulldozing over anyone who stands in its way or you’re against innovation entirely” am I a tech advocate
“Silicon Valley is the harbinger of the future, and anyone who opposed it is stuck in the past” - framed as “synonymous with progress” - but progress isn’t necessarily linear
“the present industrial model is a betrayal of the liberating possibilities of technology, as technology that should serve the public good is instead locked up within corporations for private gain” p4
“I respect the craft […] and I’m grateful for what the industry has given me. But I also believe that technology has greater potential than the mundane, profit-seeking ventures to which it has been relegated under the current system. The problem is not technology, per se: the problem is capitalism.”
unethical products, inflated valuations, toxic work environments
“technology that could have genuinely helped people is instead an accelerant for capitalisms most destructive tendencies”
not halting development but developing tech in a new way, fulfil it’s ‘transformative potential’
‘creating a world where technology is developed according to different values, for different goals”
“outside of the logic of capital”
not about the figureheads and their idiosyncrasies but the “cold underlying rationality” and absence of accountability
“Ultimately, the problem is structural, and the solutions will need to be structural, too.”
“We need to see Silicon Valley not as a unique aberration, but instead as the logical expression of technological development under capitalism: technology as a means to further capitalist ends.”
understanding the culture and history of it
capitalism as an “institutionalised social order” (Nancy Fraser) as it governs non economic surroundings to make capital accumulation possible - capitalism requires a particular social arrangement
“capitalism’s very axioms lead to an overarching economic division. Capitalism is fundamentally a system of distinct classes,”
technology as a means to improve output efficiency - used to increase profits and minimise labour cost
“the technology still belongs to capital and it will be designed and deployed according to capitalist aims”
on either side of a societal fissure - those developing and managing and investing vs lives dictated by privately-owned, black box, surveillance, magic algorithms, etc
Silicon Valley as a subjective dystopia - executives are living in the utopian version
“the story Silicon Valley spins about itself is a one-sided tale of the sort told by the victors” narrative privilege
“Abolition, after all means more than the mere destruction. The point of abolishing [something] is to build something better in its place.”
it does call for questioning assumptions, for ‘disruption’, but it is disrupting the wrong things for the wrong reasons
when first shown the inner workings of something you know it’s something you can construct and reconstruct
“it struck me that I could live my life in this virtual world, instead of the messy real world in which I increasingly felt like I did not belong.”
“eventually I realised that most websites were run by corporations, not teenagers”
women online, women in tech
“Through preserving my achievements on the Internet, I could attain a kind of virtual immortality denied to those grounded solely in the flesh”
“I was swayed towards physics because it was the degree with the lowest female enrolment, which I interpreted as a sign of intellectual rigor and therefore worth ”
“Programming, though, seemed like more than merely a job. I pictured it as a stepladder leading to a higher plane of existence, one where the nerds would get their revenge by becoming rich and powerful”
“an unexpected open-source refuge, made possible by as part of publicly-funded research, but such refuges were rare; most programming jobs entailed working on proprietary software, or at last having their salaries indirectly funded by proprietary software”
“irreconcilable contradiction” between money in tech and open source movements
“impassioned arguments frequently erupted over the ethics of advertising”
“The realists wanted to explore new revenue models so we could pay developers to improve the codebase; the idealists saw making money as immoral and argued that developers should be motivated to work on the project because they believed in open source, not because they were getting paid” --- so so common and we desperately need bothhhh
“my impression of Google was that it was where smart people could get paid tons of money to make the world a better place”
“Microsoft, which I saw as the villain in the free software wars”
FB - “I was never especially keen on their product, but they seemed to be in the same engineering calibre as Google, and that was all that really mattered”
“Recruiters dazzled us with statistics about the amount of data Google used and showed us sentimental marketing videos about the amazing things Google was doing for the world. More importantly, we were told that it was a privileged for us to be here, ensued this wonderful and fast-growing corporation, and so we should treat it like a family.”
“the corporate motto : organising the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful”
“it wasn’t clear to me that organising the world’s information should be the provenance of a for-profit company, rather than a democratic effort outside of the purview of the profit motive”
“Still, it was nice to get paid well, so I couldn’t really complain”
“Google’s progressive appearance was another reason to be proud to work there. So convenient that they did politics on my behalf - I could feel virtuous solely through my association with my employer”
“That their office used to be the San Francisco Chronicle building seemed symbolic: a new industry subsuming the old. How fortuitous for me that I was part of the new.”
“the novelty began to wear off, and what settled in its place was an inexplicable, grinding dissatisfaction.”
“The main problem was that I no longer knew what I was supposed to be optimising for”
“I’d spent most of my life trying to succeed at whatever academic challenges were placed in front of me under the unquestioned assumption that it would all eventually pay off”
“Was this supposed to be funny? An employee got fired for a minor and relatively harmless infraction, and other employees took the side of their employer rather than their fellow worker?”
“I was still uneasy - about the extent to which Google surveilled its own employees, about billionaire founders publicly firing a low-level employee who didn’t seem to have done much wrong”
lots of access to data but not the data needed to do the job - “we wouldn’t want vendors to know our projected server needs, as they might collude to jack up prices”
“Why was this company so afraid of public criticism? Developing technology in a bubble seemed like a recipe for disaster when people around the world were depending on Google’s products”
“especially when Google’s technical workforce was wildly unrepresentative of the wider population” see “Google finally discloses its diversity record” Murrey Jacobson for PBS, 2014
""Don’t Be Evil” motto served primarily as a reminder that Google did have the power to do evil”
“none of the software engineers I knew were in a union”
“Our work wasn’t the same kind of work [to blue collar workers], and I assumed that meant we didn’t have the same kind of grievances”
internal activism in employee backlash over product changes
examples here are the shutdown of Google Reader and the Real Names policy
“But not everyone at Google had the right kind of badge. Every office had a large contingent of red-badged contractors: hospitality workers […], security staff […], bus drivers”
“At the time, the Bay Area was buzzing with debate over the potentially negative consequences of the growth of the tech sector: gentrification, rising costs of living, long-term residents getting priced out of the city.”
“looking at the mostly black or Hispanic red-badged employees, I couldn’t escape the possibility that there might be structural reasons for this divide, independent of individual work ethic”
“These structural inequalities might not be Google’s fault, but Google clearly wasn’t reluctant to make use of them for the purposes of lowering labour costs”
“If Google did make enough from each hire to offset the high costs, where did this surplus money go? Who got to decide that allocation? And why was this system fair?”
no overtime pay, disputes settled out of court
pg 38
whatever women-in-tech solidarity I might have had was overshadowed by our $300m difference in net worth
didn’t feel right from the perspective of overall economic efficiency
the problems predated the industry’s recent boom, and they were larger than any individual
“But I couldn’t help thinking that they could do something”
what was the point of allowing individuals to amsds such wealth if the didnt use it to help others
all work would be driven by Google’s needs, and would become Google’s intellectual property. Even if Google did choose to release any of my work under an open license, it would be on Google’s terms, not mine
I knew that it would be bad for corporations if their employees were able to start competitors. I just wasn’t totally convinced that what was bad for corporations was necessarily bad for society
“In the course of my four-year computer science degree, I never had to take a single class on anything remotely resembling ethics.”
“That was all politics, which was all irrelevant to technology”
“the autonomy they thought they had as founders was only illusory, a shroud to conceal the truth of a system primarily benefitting those who already had money”