January 31, 2019 (2445 words)
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A summary of the last 30 posts, and a glimpse of topics I'll be writing about next month.
Tags: recap
This post is day 31 of a personal challenge to write every day in 2019. See the other fragments, or sign up for my weekly newsletter.
At the end of each month, I’m going to recap the previous posts in that month and also try to pull out the main themes that have emerged.
This month’s posts
For each post: a short summary, plus follow-up news & links to relevant things I’ve read since the post was created.
- 1: Why I’m doing this. Why I set this ludicrous write-a-post-every-single-day challenge: a combination of being inspired by k-punk & wanting to write more but with minimal pressure.
- 2: 2018 in retrospective. A brief explanation of the ups & downs of 2018, along with a list of content I consumed and produced.
- 3: Theses on organising contractors in tech. Tech worker organising won’t be easy, but it could be hugely important, and one big frontier is around the treatment of contingent workers on large tech campuses.
- 4: But what if we used drones?. Responding to a terrible Quartz article suggesting that the US should turn to a drone security startup instead of building a wall. Plus: a previously unpublished piece (part personal, part polemic) about “illegal” immigration and why it’s a bullshit concept.
- 5: Upward mobility and the tech industry. The idea of “meritocracy” and its twin, upward mobility, together form the mythical veil used to legitimate the sharp inequality symbolised by Silicon Valley. Of course, the path to the top was only ever available to a few people. But now, as the labour market further polarises, the possibility of upward mobility is becoming increasingly illusory. When the myth falls apart, how will the system sustain itself?
- 6: Dialectical banter. Some reflections on my leftward drift over the past 2 years, along with some really bad jokes about dialectics.
- 7: Startup idea: Airbnb for towed cars. Imagine: if your car gets towed, and you can’t pay the fine, you can rent it out until you make enough money back to pay the fee. A made-up startup idea meant to illustrate the perverse outcomes incentivised by the current startup model.
- 8: Revenge of the nerds. A critique of Paul Graham’s 2003 essay of the same title, and how the underdog mindset he describes translates pretty nicely into the unethical wasteland that is Silicon Valley today (while also being self-serving and far from indicative of objective truth).
- 9: Remember who the enemy is. A summary of my favourite k-punk blog post, on the Hunger Games, and how it’s a powerful allegory for the ideological pacification required to keeps any unnatural class system intact.
- 10: Take the job, but organise. Advice for anyone contemplating taking a job at a tech company but plagued by ethical concerns about the tech industry.
- 11: The overnight test. A response to a 2012 blog post by Linds Redding titled ‘A Short Lesson in Perspective’, which resonated with me strongly when I first read it. In the original post, the author reflects on his 30 years spent in advertising and concludes that it wasn’t worth it, shortly before he passed away of cancer.
- 12: Ellen Pao, KPCB, and the elephant in the room. A piece I wrote 18 months ago but never got around to publishing. My personal reactions to the 2012 Ellen Pao trial (she sued Kleiner Perkins for gender discrimination) and the ‘elephant in the room’ of massive wealth.
- 13: When you live long enough to become the villain. Tech companies sometimes start out with good intentions, but they tend to think they’re still underdog even when they’ve long forfeited any reasonable claim to that title. When you’ve been valued at a billion dollars, you tend to become just another huge corporation, and your motives change. You may become even worse of a villain than the one you set out to “disrupt”.
- 14: So you want to do a masters degree on inequality. I do not recommend the degree I did at LSE, but I have other recommendations. Plus: suggested reading on inequality & why it’s both a problem, and a poor framing of the problem (“exploitation” might be a better one).
- 15: There is no such thing as pre-tax income. Pre-tax income is an asymptotic mathematical construct that doesn’t actually make sense in reality, and yet it persists, with highly politicised outcomes that alter people’s attitudes towards taxation. Further reading on this topic: this Jacobin article, which says: “The socialist view of redistribution within a capitalist society must reject an important premise at play in nearly all tax policy debates: that pre-tax income is something earned solely by individual effort and possessed privately before the state intervenes to take a part of it. Once we break from this libertarian fantasy, it’s easy to see that individual and corporate income is made possible only through tax-financed state action.”.
- 16: Uber, but for waiting in line at the DMV. Introducing a real app called YoGov, which lets you pay homeless people to wait in line for you and feel better about yourself. A perfect example of the Silicon Valley tendency to aim for local maxima, through technical solutions to political problems.
- 17: There’s a storm coming. On the massively underestimated systemic risk that helped trigger the 2008 financial crisis, and why that concept might be relevant to Silicon Valley today (citing the n+1 book, Diary of a Very Bad Year). Gig economy companies, in particular, assume a static political balance of forces - because workers were atomised and willing to work for low wages post-2008, it’s assumed that they’ll always be pliable, and so the company will always be in control.
- 18: On scooters. In which I despair at the brazenness of the scooter startups that have blanketed Austin, Texas, and suggest that they should instead be a public service, free at the point of use. Of course, making something a public service while retaining its utility isn’t exactly easy, because the current government is lacking in many ways; consequently, any worthwhile socialist project must also grapple with how to transform the state we have into the state we want.
- 19: The world’s richest couple. Why Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos should split their wealth equally in the divorce, and why that wealth should be zilch. Plus: thoughts on stock market valuations and how they’ve become increasingly detached from reality, making them hard to reason about. (After I wrote this post, I came across a Marx quote which described stock as a claim on future surplus value. Pretty nice way to think about it.)
- 20: Financialisation and the downsides of liquidity. More thoughts on financialisation and the relationship between liquidity and precarity, especially when it comes to housing. Cites Max Haiven’s book Cultures of Financialization.
- 21: The ‘click’. On my personal joy upon discovering Marxism and theory in general, and how it echoed similar ‘click’s I’d encountered when learning abstract mathematical concepts.
- 22: A materialist analysis of RuneScape. RuneScape is capitalist realism in game form, and the experience of grinding for skills/levels/money teaches us to be excellent willing subjects of capital IRL. I will not be taking any questions at this time.
- 23: Can a heist be revolutionary? On Ocean’s Eight. I watched Ocean’s Eight and spent most of the movie angry at the fact that everyone just took for granted that this diamond necklace was worth $150 million. On the symbolic and, increasingly, fictitious nature of capital, especially in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
- 24: Capital knows who the enemy is. Google’s lawyers had asked the NLRB to limit protections for workers who tried to organise over corporate email, even though it had publicly supported the walkout last November. A reminder that there is a fundamental antagonism between capital and labour, and that corporations will always put their own (profit-driven) interests first at the expense of the workers (even the ones who really believe in the company).
- 25: Sometimes it’s not a technical problem. Some social problems, like homelessness or rising house prices, cannot be solved with purely technical solutions. Plus: details of my failed attempt at resurrecting my RuneScape account.
- 26: Reflections on Fyre Festival. I saw the Netflix documentary and, my god, was it chilling. Billy McFarland is like the perfect Silicon Valley entrepreneurial figure; the only thing special about him is that he got caught. As Young Legionnaire wrote on Twitter, “Mr. McFarland’s crime is not the tech grift, but revealing how flimsy and close to grift so much tech entrepreneurialism is by default”. Or, to quote a different tweet: “America is just one long Fyre Festival”.
- 27: Making kings out of startup founders. If the entrepreneurs who make it big in Silicon Valley can be thought of as boy kings, then the venture capitalists who fund them are the kingmakers. Both groups are part of an illegitimate system for highly unequal distribution of resources, where some Stanford dropouts are rewarded with millions of dollars to do a frivolous startup while others go homeless. Their claim to wealth on the basis of merit & “wealth creation” is every bit as hollow and self-serving as the divine right of kings. Further recommended reading on this topic: Andrew Kortina, co-founder of Venmo, wrote a very moving personal essay about startups myths, Marx, and technological determinism: The Emperor Has No Clothes, There is No Santa Claus, and Nothing is Rocket Science.
- 28: Tech workers and journalists, unite?. Thinking about the recent layoffs in digital media, and the role played by Facebook and Google as intermediaries that have hastened media’s demise by sucking up ad revenues. The root problem, of course, is the for-profit media system: in the long run, journalism has to be publicly funded, treated as infrastructure (necessary for any democracy) rather than a commodity. The question is how to get there when media outlets everywhere are slowly dying, or resorting to paywalls. Newsrooms have been unionising at a rapid pace, but if they want to have the most leverage - and the greatest capacity for actual change - they should unite with the workers at the companies whose algorithms decide their future.
- 29: The Lucas Plan & Silicon Valley. On worker control of a company and what that could mean in the context of Silicon Valley.
- 30: The platform wars: Silicon Valley’s Great Houses. Shots fired between the tech giants: Facebook was reported to have violated Apple’s ToS via some truly sketchy data-harvesting methods, so Apple responded by shutting off Facebook’s corporate iOS apps, which caused a massive workplace disruption for many Facebook employees. Since I published the piece, Apple has since re-enabled Facebook’s enterprise certificate, and has instead revoked Google’s. I like the Game of Thrones analogy here, though Sarah Jeong’s depiction of this as a “Cold War” is apt as well: “Apple banning the Facebook and Google certs is extremely funny but should also give us pause to think about how much of our daily lives depends on a handful of corporations that have been engaged in a cold war of compatibility for years”. Incidentally, I saw this truly wild tweet which congratulated Apple for “standing up for what’s right” in revoking the certs - for not being afraid of big companies, because corporations are not above rules. I mean, sir? Did you know Apple is the biggest company in the world by market capitalisation? And the rules were made by … Apple? Like, I’m not exactly a cheerleader for Google and Facebook, but I don’t see how Apple comes off as the good guy here. They’re just protecting their own reputation, ultimately.
Major themes
- Don’t blame the individuals (even the ones who are easy to dunk on, like startup founders) for acting in line with what’s incentivised by the system; they’re just behaving rationally, based on what they know. Instead, the existence of people who do really unethical things but get rewarded tons of money for it shoud be seen as canaries in the coal mine, indicating just how broken the system is. The goal, then, should be transforming the system over trying to fund a few ethical founders. (Not to say that the latter is never worth doing, but it’s only ever a stopgap solution.)
- Every hierarchy or system of exploitation needs an ideological layer to maintain the system and quell dissent. The one we live under today is quite elegant, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley, which means it’s hard to dislodge.
- The myriad links between Silicon Valley and financialisation.
- Feedback mechanisms (cybernetics?) are important. What happens when the people making decisions are not the ones affected by the outcomes (e.g., the gig economy)? Then the system diverges and becomes unstable. Maybe good from an accelerationist perspective, but not something any intelligent founder would want to optimise for.
What’s coming
I’m starting to realise that writing a 1-2k word blog post every day is really difficult. Even though there are still lots of things I want to write about, I’ve exhausted lots of the low-hanging fruit (stuff I already had tons of notes on, and felt was ready for consumption). I’m also starting to fall prey to conceptual laziness, where I’ll go through my list of potential topics and pass on them because I don’t want to have to fill in the theoretical gaps or do extra research. That’s not good.
Future posts will be less ambitious, I think. Shorter, more focused, more pop culture stuff (book/film/TV reviews). The reviews will include stuff I love (the show Man in the High Castle, Nick Dyer-Witheford’s book Cyber-Proletariat) as well as stuff I used to love but now see more critically (Neal Stephenson’s books).
Topic-wise: I want to write more on startups and the effects they can have on the real world, through the lens of particular startups as well as through the persepective of venture capitalists (blog posts, reports, talks, etc). I want to write more on advertising, on the cultural aspects as well as the political/economic implications, with a focus on Silicon Valley companies. I’d also like to think more about automation/operationalisation, and who gets to control it - could tech workers act in the service of the working class as a whole, rather than serving capital? On days when I’m feeling especially lazy/uninspired, I might just post a photo I’ve taken while walking around SF, along with some witty caption about the neoliberal hellscape that is Silicon Valley.
As always, if you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me! If you have suggestions for things I should write about, let me know.