The Information Revolution’s Dark Turn

A Scottish philosopher visited Silicon Valley, and he didn’t like what he saw.

But I think there is a dark side there, so it did confirm some of my theorizing about the information age. There is massive inequality, which is unacceptable. Inequality should not be so great that it crystallizes into class distinctions—master-servant relations—and I think you have that in Silicon Valley, to some extent.

.. there’s also an abuse of information technology, and the threat of what I call “technocracy.” It’s a term we don’t often use now, and I mean by technocracy not the rule of experts, but the rule of information technology, the domination of information technology over human beings, and the subordination of people to a technological imperative. That is a real threat, and I think it is almost out of control.

.. For example, recent research showed that truckers were now leaving their trade because they are monitored so closely by controllers. And it’s traditionally part of  the dream of truckers everywhere to have a bit more liberty, a bit more autonomy, a bit of freedom. And that’s being taken away by information technology.

.. There is a very strong anti-statism in America generally, and in particular, California, and in particular-particular, Silicon Valley. And I think it’s a mistaken philosophy.

.. I have read [Robert] Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Murray Rothbard’sEthics of Liberty, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom—I’ve read it all, and it’s a flawed philosophy. The ultimate value is not liberty: It is justice. Liberty has to fit within the context of social justice. And where it violates justice, I’m afraid justice trumps liberty.

.. I’m a follower of John Rawls, the great Harvard political philosopher, and in his Theory of Justice, he makes clear that justice is the paramount virtue in political life.

.. We also need to buy into some ancient ideals of human community and what used to be called brotherhood, but you could maybe now call fellowship or connectivity

.. As one of my informants put it, a sort of “Harvard mentality” has started to take over [fro the “Stanford mentality”]. The psychology of the playground rather than the commune is prevailing. I think there’s a mercenary element that’s stronger than used to be the case.

.. And you can see that in the way that they work their staff to death. I think that is, itself, a betrayal of human ideals. They should not be expecting people to be working 24/7/365.

.. A study came out that only 2 percent of Google’s, Yahoo’s, and a couple of other top companies’ workforces were black. Twelve percent of the U.S. population is black, so that is not good, is it?

.. the libertarian, winner-takes-all model pioneered in Silicon Valley

.. The state should be involved in helping people start companies and educating people.

Why I Am Not a Maker

Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor—primarily caregiving, in its various aspects—that is mostly performed by women. As a teenager, I read Ayn Rand on how any work that needed to be done day after day was meaningless, and that only creating new things was a worthwhile endeavor. My response to this was to stop making my bed every day, to the distress of my mother.

.. Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artifacts are important, and people are not.

.. It’s not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making (although it’s not all that clear that the world needs more stuff). The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing—it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker—regardless of what one actually or mostly does—is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.

.. A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable.

How Larry Page’s Obsessions Became Google’s Business

People who have worked with Mr. Page say that he tries to guard his calendar, avoiding back-to-back meetings and leaving time to read, research and see new technologies that interest him.

.. Leslie Dewan, a nuclear engineer who founded a company that is trying to generate cheap electricity from nuclear waste, also had a brief conversation with Mr. Page at the Solve For X conference.

She said he questioned her on things like modular manufacturing and how to find the right employees.

“He doesn’t have a nuclear background, but he knew the right questions to ask,” said Dr. Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. “‘Have you thought about approaching the manufacturing in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about the vertical integration of the company in this way?’ ‘Have you thought about training the work force this way?’ They weren’t nuclear physics questions, but they were extremely thoughtful ways to think about how we could structure the business.”