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
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