I'm not a SV resident, but I've visited several times, over decades, and this rings true...<p>"Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people."
I think as technologists we have a natural preference for clean technological solutions that don't involve politics or messy interpersonal relationship issues. Failing to confront that whole human sphere of life leads to negative consequences everywhere, and the talk does a great job of pointing out some of the macro social effects.<p>On a similar note but a more localized scale I'm reminded of this talk on one of the downsides of moving to microservices being that people can avoid difficult conversations <a href="https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s</a>
One thing I dislike about articles like this is that they get you to agree on some basic point, such as, "Hey did you notice that there is a lot of wealth AND poverty in San Francisco?" Yes, I agree with that. "Well, actually, it's libertarians' and techies' fault!" Oh okay, you were correct about the first part so you're correct about the second too.<p>"Also, by the way, they're just like Hitler / Stalin / thinly veiled shout-out to something really bad!"<p>> Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.<p>I do agree that San Francisco has this strange juxtaposition of impoverished hellscape versus obscene wealth. It's the main reason I plan to leave here within the next couple of years. But I'd do myself a disservice if I latched onto a thought that this is the fault of some political ideological minority in the area, or even the majority (bleeding hearts). This "poverty and misery" is the techies' fault in the same way that alcoholism is the fault of bartenders.<p>All that said, I agree with the conclusion about data. There <i>should be</i> a moral obligation to limit or stop this storage. It creeps me the hell out, and it's why I don't use Facebook or Google any more, knowing that this doesn't fully solve the problem. I'll add that the metaphor he depicts is really great:<p>> As a technologist, this state of affairs gives me the feeling of living in a forest that is filling up with dry, dead wood. The very personal, very potent information we're gathering about people never goes away, only accumulates. I don't want to see the fire come, but at the same time, I can't figure out a way to persuade other people of the great danger.<p>I just wish the writer were mature enough to make that argument without the scapegoating of ideology, or the wrong ideology. This isn't about libertarianism or "trickle down" (from HN comments) or capitalism or a dislike for politics, it's about technological progress. Ideologies that are opposed to the writer's scapegoats will also act in service of technological progress when it is convenient for them.
More article-quoting:<p>"As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.<p>The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable."<p>I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think?
> Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics.<p>... SNIP ...<p>> In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software.<p>Tighter control over targeted advertising by Facebook won't suddenly help with crappy zoning or infrastructure projects designed to maximize the extraction of wealth from taxpayers while minimizing the results.
A lot of the criticisms against SV these days echo Jonathan Swift's portrayal of the scientific communities of his day: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa</a>