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Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

(www.wsj.com)
370 points sillypuddy | 4 comments | 18 Feb 18 16:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.444s | source
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titzer ◴[18 Feb 18 22:14 UTC] No.16409099[source]▶
I'm 37 and, God, people treat me like I'm a dinosaur. I've been programming C for 25 years and it's hard to relate to young people who don't know what a machine register is. We can argue about it, I can get downvoted, whatever.

I moved out of the Bay Area after 5 years, and to be honest, the divide between where I am and where the ideological center of Silicon Valley has drifted just continues to get wider.

It has little to do with politics, and it has more to do with the role of technology in human life and the future.

Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.

I used to be into that, believing that software was this wonderful force that is going to turn man from the ape he is into some kind of artificially-intelligent hyper-being. It's a fail, it's a fantasy. It's just not going to happen, and it's time to wake up from the dream. We're not going to be living on Mars or visit Jupiter or become immortal, not in the next 10 years or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. With high probability you're going to live out your life and die somewhere between 70 and 100. Just like the billions of humans before you. Get used to it! It's OK, even.

I moved away to get out of the shouting match, to get away from so many young bright software developers like me straight out of college, who just want to disrupt everything for no reason, and to get out of that echo chamber. Everyone's a unicorn. Everyone's gonna change the world. FFS your stupid chat apps are not going to change the world.

Moving out of the Bay Area is not about being disillusioned, it's about focusing on things that actually matter, instead of the silly bubble.

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1. YeGoblynQueenne ◴[18 Feb 18 23:36 UTC] No.16409578[source]▶
>> Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.

That's what it sounds like to me too. I find it particularly hard to reconcile claims of liberalism, or even libertarianism, with an industry led by Google, Amazon and Facebook, companies that basically make money by running roughshod over their users' privacy.

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2. filesystem ◴[19 Feb 18 00:29 UTC] No.16409846[source]▶
Agreed. This is probably my biggest gripe with SV tech companies. They seem to genuinely believe that there is no natural intersection between tech / software innovation and ethics. I would love to see a law similar to GDPR come to the US for this very reason...
3. telchar ◴[19 Feb 18 01:05 UTC] No.16410015[source]▶
As a geographical outsider, it seems to me that this is more indicative that Silicon Valley runs on a deep amoral cynicism that uses hypocritical marketing messages to appeal to a segment of left-leaning youthful technological tastemakers.

I feel this is more of an indictment of the cynicism and hypocrisy of the gargantuan power players in SV than of the alleged political beliefs (techno-utopianism, liberalism) being discussed. The line of discussion that this thread represents, which seems common on HN these days, seems to disparage liberalism as if it is to blame for being used as cover by powerful corporations that seem to me to be more anarcho-capitalist than anything else.

Are there really very many techno-utopians in SV, or are they mostly people and companies who use the language of making the world a better place as a cover for consuming it economically?

4. abusoufiyan ◴[20 Feb 18 06:46 UTC] No.16418299[source]▶
> libertarianism, with an industry led by Google, Amazon and Facebook, companies that basically make money by running roughshod over their users' privacy.

That is the libertarian utopia right? Ultimate privatization, very few regulations on what businesses can do.