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The word "innovation" has become synonymous with absurdity with Silicon Valley. Indeed, entrepreneurs and "thinkers" of the technology industry casually throw it, like a crowbolt in a college, P.E. class; what that really means is perpetually vague and deliberately vague. It is vague enough to suit almost all situations in which a new product, service or "thing" is presented as superior to the old – it does not matter if the so-called "old" thing has distinct advantages or if the news the superiority is solely due to the fact that it makes more money than the old one, or that there are other old things that are really superior but that will not make anyone rich. (Remember to remove the headphone jack from your new Apple phones.)
This summary may seem flippant, but it is a good explanation of the trajectory of the information technology industry over the past two decades: some venture-backed entrepreneurs are interfering in a new industry, " tech, "compete and declare their new top track once the former is bankrupt.
Thus, rather than limiting themselves to operating systems and PC software as they did in the 1980s and 1990s, the technology industry realized that real money lies in being a intermediate. By this I mean serving as an intermediary point for, for example, web traffic to newspapers and magazines (like this one); or be the intermediary between taxi services, coordinating drivers and passengers via apps. In these two examples, the original product is not so different from the world of pre-technology: a taxi ride, in the latter case, a news item in the first. The difference is that a technology giant takes a share of the transaction. In addition, in many cases, the workforce – the people who make, produce and do things that the technology sector is involved in – is more precarious, less well paid and less secure than ever before. she was only in the era of pre-technologies.
Seen in this light, the technology sector does not seem really innovative. Or rather, its only innovation seems to exploit workers with more cruelty and position itself in the middle of more transactions. Certainly, some services have become more complex. convenient because of apps and smartphones – but nothing prevents that convenience must be expensive, apart from the insatiable desire of the technology industry for profit. Here are some examples of the deterioration of our livelihoods and our societies by Silicon Valley, which is expanding into new industries.
taxis
Public transit has never been so good in the United States, except for a few big cities like New York, and private taxi services have been completed. Being a taxi driver was a popular craft, so much so that a taxi medallion was perceived as a ticket for the middle class.
Then come Uber and Lyft, who flooded the private transit market and undermined the taxi industry by downgrading the industry and paying their workers much, much less. Driving a taxi is no longer a middle class job; The once precious taxi medals have become a burden for some taxi drivers. The prospects for career taxi drivers are so dark that an alarming number of taxi drivers have committed suicide.
At the same time, because of the precarious nature of the Lyft and Uber jobs, these drivers are often neither controlled nor undervalued, which poses significant safety issues for passengers. And unlike a taxi back at the time, being a carpool driver was no mean ticket for the middle class: a recent study of such employees revealed that most entrepreneurs do not use it. this type of work as their only source of income, but as extra jobs to make ends meet.
Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics at the New York School of New York, describes the market economy companies as Uber as "winning the competition" by taking shortcuts that "frequently endanger the public" . According to Wolff, taxi regulators were created in most countries because taxi companies were traditionally unsafe. "Taxi companies now need insurance, driver training, well-inspected cars and other protections to protect the public – the cost of taxi driving reflects these guarantees," said Wolff, adding :
… there is always an interest for someone to enter and operate, again, drivers inadequately insured, poorly maintained, inadequately controlled – to come with a cheaper taxi service [that is] not regulated by taxi commission. That's all Uber and Lyft [are]… they negate the old device and offer cheaper and more competitive services by taking shortcuts.
Household appliances
Light bulbs have been around for about 140 years and household refrigerators for about 100. During this time, they have not changed much, apart from becoming more energy efficient, mainly because they did not really have them. need: we must keep food cold and we need light. The devices that do these things do not really need to do much anymore.
Now, tech companies are putting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips in all sorts of things that were not previously connected to the Internet. They call this the "smart home" and, although the word is open, the common thread of smart devices is that they can usually be monitored via an app.
The smart home is sold to us as a new generation, a new advance on traditional devices. But these devices tend to waste more time and risk for both privacy and security that conventional devices do not have. You can not simply install a Wi-Fi chip in a commonplace household object, such as a light bulb or a smoke detector, without repairing the security vulnerabilities generated by the fact that another device is permanently connected to the Web. . But that's exactly what happened: A huge number of smart devices for the home have been hacked and turned into digital soldiers forming gigantic botnets that can be called by hackers to launch distributed denial of service attacks. An Atlantic reporter made an experiment that revealed that his fake smart home device had attracted hundreds of hacking attempts within hours of being hooked up.
One of the reasons businesses are so eager to sell us the smart home is that these devices can be used to create digital files on customers to sell products to them. A refrigerator without an Internet connection can not generate any data about a consumer, but a refrigerator with only one can regularly report all kinds of data on the user, data that can be monetized and sold.
Even in the absence of hacking or privacy, smart home devices are not necessarily an innovation, as their function seems to be to create more work for us and to transform us (essentially) as managers. There is a certain managerial mindset that goes from the creators of the device (who are, in a way, managers themselves) to the consumers – as if I wanted to spend days and nights studying graphs and diagrams of my refrigerator's power consumption, or data analysis on my Roomba's path. It seems horrible.
In addition, the difficulty of installing many of these devices in the first place can be disconcerting for those who lack technical knowledge; In particular, dramatically increasing the number of Wi-Fi enabled devices at home often means that you need to invest in new Internet equipment, be it routers or faster Internet service, or both. Not everyone is an engineer, nor does it want to be, but smart home appliances often force us to become so – and this increasingly complex field of home appliances is supposed to be superior to simplicity. to press a light switch on the wall.
And speaking of turning us into managers …
Aptitude
The greatest genius of Steve Jobs was not engineering, but marketing. He understood that late capitalism no longer meets the needs, but create their; inevitably, Apple has become the leading exporter of desire products, marketers who force us to desire clean products and to obsess them once we own them.
To this end, there has never been anything wrong with fitness; it was not an industry that needed to be "disrupted" to use Silicon Valley's favorite dystopian verb. But if you put monitoring devices on your shoes, your watch, your armband and your water bottle, you suddenly have a huge supply of data points on your body and activity that you can analyze later. Apple and many other applications even help you monitor your ovulation cycle. Some analyze and monetize this intimate customer data. This can create fun situations when these devices are no longer updated or are corrupted. Nike was widely ridiculed when a pair of "smart" sneakers was ruined by a faulty update. The idea of being able to hack someone's shoes and ruin it is not exactly the direction I thought I would take for the future.
I guess if you dreamed of being a statistician and you constantly collect data on your body, it might sound interesting, but if it is not, it's a new source of affluence in your life. Again, the creation of devices to quantify as much fitness data as possible was not an example of capitalism responding to the wish of the consumer – no one, with the exception of a few scientists, would never said, "I want to turn my leisure activities and exercise plan into spreadsheets" – but the technology sector has been very effective in making us want that.
This obsession with quantifying our existence is known in academic circles as "computationalism". Previously, I interviewed Professor David Golumbia, who has written extensively on this subject and describes computationalism as "the philosophical idea that the brain is a computer" as well as "a broader world view that people or society are considered computers, or that we may live inside a simulation. "
"There is a small group of people who become obsessed with quantification," Golumbia said. "Not just about the exercise, but rather the intimate details of their lives – how much time with their children, how many orgasms you have – most people are not like that; they have been counting for a while [and] so they get tired of counting. The count seems oppressive. "
Convenience
In many of the cases above, Silicon Valley is torn apart in an industry, has taken good jobs and has turned them into bad jobs. In the case of the convenience store, the goal of Silicon Valley seems to be to completely eliminate the human component.
There are different ways to do this. The most famous is Bodega (now known as Stockwell), on which we reported in 2017:
Two former Google employees hope to take control of street corners, dormitories, gyms or any other convenient place in urban residential neighborhoods by reinventing the vending machine.
Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan have launched a new startup called "Bodega", whose goal is to make convenience stores convenient. "Bodega sets up five-foot-wide pantry boxes containing non-perishable items that you can pick up at a convenience store", Fast Company reported. "An app will unlock the box and cameras with computer vision technology will record what you've picked up and automatically recharge your credit card."
Employees? They would also become things of the past, because nobody will work with the bodegas and all the transactions will be electronic.
Unsurprisingly, since the friendly neighborhood neighborhood market is something that has existed for centuries in most cultures, an extraordinary group of technicians striving to destroy what has touched a collective nerve. As a result of indignation on the Internet, both of them apologized and then changed their name.
Stockwell / Bodega is far from the only example of Silicon Valley's crusade against human interactions. There is a company trying to make robots that make, serve and sell smoothies, which we reported sadly last year. There are several companies, including CafeX, which makes baristas of robots. Amazon creates Amazon Go stores that lack cashiers and trust cameras to track what people are charging for and billing them accordingly.
The fact is that baristas and cashiers are not things that we die from wanting to get rid of; This is not a situation comparable to that of horses and carriages, where cars seemed to be a serious improvement on the use of pack animals for transit. Silicon Valley is only trying to put baristas and cashiers out of business because human labor costs money; the difference between a 4 dollar robot coffee and a 4 dollar man's coffee, is that there is no cost of hand-d & # 39; # 39; work in the previous purchase, so that Silicon Valley has wide-eyed with dollar signs. The future vision of the technology industry is one of a world with less human interaction, less conversation, less humanity. and more monitoring and more monetization of our buying habits. Nobody wants that, but it's imposed on us.
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Excerpted courtesy of "A Silicon Valley People's Story: How the Technology Sector Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Makes Democracy," by Keith A. Spencer, available now from leading bookstores. © 2018 Eyewear Publishing.
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