Facebook and California fire: Toxic smoke bleak backdrop for Silicon Valley

The toxic smoke is an apt metaphor for where Silicon Valley finds itself.

Business Standard : When I flew into San Francisco last Sunday, the haze shrouding the city was not the usual charming fog, and there was an acrid smell, like a barbecue on steroids. California was on fire.

In the past week, towns have been burned out of existence, people have fled the raging flames, and ashes have been falling from a tangerine sky.

The conflagration is airborne via the smoke, creating a “weather of catastrophe,” which is the phrase Joan Didion once used to describe the hot Santa Anas blowing into Los Angeles. “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are,” she wrote.

As 2018 comes to a close, that edge — a sense that the end times are near — has never been more obvious to those in California’s tech business. And while that feeling is nowhere near comparable to the suffering of those fleeing and battling the fires that are burning away the Western landscape, the toxic smoke is a bleak backdrop and an apt metaphor for where Silicon Valley now finds itself.

Much of the mess, of course, has been emanating from one company: Facebook. The realization of how much the social media giant has screwed up has dropped slowly, but now we know.

This week, a New York Times investigation into who knew what about the Russian manipulation of Facebook’s platform painted a devastating picture of a company if not out of control, then driving directly and with great alacrity into what were clearly avoidable walls.

In addition to showing how Facebook’s leaders failed to deal forthrightly with the situation, the piece has numerous examples of what I can only call dirty tricks to hurt rival companies and deflect public attention. And that is on Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief executive and chief operating officer, as well as a panoply of top executives.

One is Facebook’s man in Washington, Joel Kaplan, who could not seem to make any decision that was not a perplexing misjudgment. This was a practice he continued by sitting behind Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings as his chief cheerleader. Conflict of interest much? Very much.

But the frightening news from Silicon Valley goes beyond one company. Tech leaders made screens so addictive that they won’t let their own children use them; they operate in a monoculture that reflects only itself and turns a blind eye to sexual harassment and diversity; and they accept dirty money from unsavory investors like the Saudis.

The overall sense of this year is that the brilliant digital minds who told us they were changing the world for the better might have miscalculated.

Dan Lyons, a longtime tech observer and author of the new book “Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us,” recently tweeted: “Nobody in Silicon Valley can solve homelessness or figure out how to hire with diversity, but 11 electric scooter companies have raised VC funding. Oh, and a company that uses robots to make pizza. You wonder why there’s a tech backlash.”... Read More