I love how the entire tech worldview is so impoverished at this point that people engaging with things on some first-order level is automatically proof that there is no crisis or that people even enjoy it.
I guess by that logic the American midwest is really in love with opioids, and there's no crisis there. Throw in some reference to Girard and scapegoats probably because the author has watched some Peter Thiel video on youtube and you have yourself a new blog post.
I'm not convinced there is a problem specifically with FB either. Personally its great to keep up to date with friends and family globally. I only spend 20 minutes a week though. I spent a lot more time on Twitter and Reddit and those platforms seem much more toxic.
He doesn't say so precisely but like many invocations of this phrase it probably means something closer to "people not part of the intelligentsia / chattering classes." Of which it appears he would not be one of these normal persons.
Normal people really love getting their TV and internet from big cable companies. We can see that in the subscriber numbers for Comcast, Time Warner, etc...
Media want to control the narrative , even if their advice is wrong (as was in this pandemic). So does facebook, even though it isn't willing to do any work (i.e. pay a penny) to create it. The media is also (rightfully) mad because FB stole their ad revenue. Regardless it's fascinating to watch the transformation of mass media and the discovery of individual voices over prepackaged narratives.
"Even among American citizens, some tech workers are in the business simply to make money, gain power, and solve problems—even if they create just as many new ones in the process."
Even among, I don't know, bartenders and schoolteachers, some are in the business simply to make money.
Back in the day, one heard of students who went to law school to right wrongs, and came out to bill hours.
> These “equity engineers,” as I’ll call them by one of their goals, cashing out, might have studied computer science in order to solve problems, or to live a good life. It would be a caricature to say that these archetypes don’t care at all for politics, but their radicalism tends to be an inward-facing one, lured by technolibertarian fetishes such as blockchain. For this group, technology is politics, and seeing the two at odds becomes incoherent.
It says that it's explicitly avoiding a caricature, but these people who just want to be paid to do work are still radicalized, technolibertarian fetishists for whom technology is politics.
I hate this view of silicon valley and tech workers as characters you'd expect to see in a cyberpunk story, rather than, like, normal people who happen to live in the bay area and work with computers, or even alongside people who work with computers. Instead everyone has to be radicalized in some direction or another. If they don't appear to be radicalized, then "their radicalism [must] be an inward-facing one." That's not a caricature?
I think because from an outside perspective, many seem to make caricatures of themselves as these massive intellectuals making more money than anyone else in the US while while engaging in some sort of futuristic fever dream of silicon, hallucinogens, and money.
Not saying I particularly agree, but coming from a more traditional work background, seeing the ball pits/slides/wave pool college campus like billion dollar companies, hearing (probably exaggerated stories) of bizarre costume parties etc seems to be very much an isolated (radical) group.
There is also the worship of billionaires and a dark dystopian vision of the future with the promotion of things like the gig economy, offshoring, and an internal class system in the companies of the "red badges" and the "brilliant engineers"
I don't think it is a stretch to see this as a breeding ground for radical technolibertarianism. I mean, they made it, why can't everyone else?
Those folk do exist here, but they most definitely aren't the ones who are just here for a paycheck "to live a good life." Most people I know here are just like everyone I know elsewhere, except that their rent is higher, their houses smaller, and their paycheck larger. I've been working here in tech for over a decade now, ranging from the wildest tiny startups to big billion+ dollar public companies, and I've never worked anywhere with a ball pit, slides, or wave pools. They exist. They just aren't what most of us actually experience. Silent majority, I guess. Almost everyone I know here thinks the people and company practices you're describing are as crazy/dumb/awful as you do.
Sorry, I just get really frustrated when the media labels the kookiest loudest of us as what Silicon Valley is. Especially when they're trying to describe the boring ones without caricatures.
I don't know if you could say school teachers are doing it to make money.
Facebook and Google are advertising companies primarily. They will be taking money from advertisers for nearly anything that isn't in their TOS. I'm sure most employees would object to something in that list not lining up with their personal beliefs.
The concept that your employer should conform to your ideas around politics or the environment seems to only happen in SV.
Schoolteachers (in the USA, anyway) get paid next to nothing, and frequently have to buy classroom supplies out of pocket because their school system doesn't have the budget to buy them.
As the amount of administration support staff and special needs paraprofessionals skyrocketed, the resources allocated to regular students and teachers have dwindled. People feel good about having students with special needs included in regular classes but it has caused an enormous reallocation of resources, shifting massive cash and attention to the lowest performing students.
There was a book about this once, Harrison Bergeron.
Is it entirely due to re-allocation to special needs education?
Seems like with population growth, we are trying to educate more and more kids, and unlike in the past, we dont just discard that parts that would be expensive or difficult.
In the past, we ignored the problem so it wasnt factored into budgets, head counts. There needs to be more money overall for education. It returns more than $1 for every $1 invested over the long term.
It varies by district but my wife is a teacher (now) and she has worked in several schools where the special education budget met or exceeded the non-special, while serving only 3-5% of the school's enrolled children.
My wife also teaches these sorts of children and the vast majority of them seldom improve beyond a 5th or 6th grade level, and many of the "smarter" ones with milder disabilities end up in jail at some point after being graduated (most typically for sexual, theft, violence, and drug offenses) out of the system since they can no longer be failed, yet they basically can't truly be taught how to properly function in society since they can't even properly comprehend laws or how they work, as they only have basic reading capability and comprehension of even simple children's books.
Closing institutions insteading of reforming and modernizing them for these sorts of people was indeed a mistake.
I find this article insufficiently neutral to be read as objective news. Seeing the articles suggested at the bottom, my opinion is more than redoubled.
Even if I happen to agree with a message, I still think non-emotional and nuanced takes are necessary.
> Some workers don’t want to rock the boat for fear they might get blacklisted, McCarthy said.
Has anyone here ever heard of someone getting blacklisted? I could imagine someone who does something really shitty in an interview at SomeCorp being put on a do-not-hire list at SomeCorp, and the same for being fired there, but blacklist to me implies preventing employment across multiple companies.
I don’t think an explicit blacklist exists, but I figure employers will google you, so they will know if you did anything that got you on the news or if you wrote an article attacking your employer’s politics. If this search isn’t done by someone in the company, it’s probably done by a background check company they hire.
Also, there is the concept of a back-channel reference, where someone from the hiring company will reach out to contacts at the candidate’s current and/or former employer and ask for opinions.
It's also worth noting how many people get most of their local news (for better or worse) from Facebook these days, like social accounts of the decimated small town papers and some superficial TV news stations, and community groups. If you live in a tech-savvy larger market, it's easy to take for granted how smaller communities use the platform.
