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A comment on San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself. Parent comment

Re:San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and H... by pm90 on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:22AM (#21855591)
> Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.

Most of Silicon Valley isn't working on ad-tech (although a large chunk of it is). To dismiss everyone working in SV as working in optimizing ads doesn't make much sense.

There are other sectors of the economy completely wrecking the Environment (Energy, Global Warming), Global Economy (Finance, 2008 crisis) etc. While those sectors get their fair amount of attention, it seems like its cool to pick on those in tech now.

/shrug

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and H... by remarkEon on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:51AM (#21855684)
There have been multiple Hollywood movies depicting how big business and agribusiness are screwing up the environment. The Big Short was a great film about how Wall Street is totally corrupt and straight up caused the housing crisis.

Should we have a movie made about ad tech and social media and their deleterious effects on society? Just to make it even.

Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich.

Edit: I’d actually like to know what percentage of SV is working on ad tech, which I consider useless for American society at best and dangerous at worst.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and H... by perl4ever on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @03:20AM (#21870696)
"Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich."

If you are being left behind, if you're smart enough to know that, certainly it's not going to make you feel any better to know more about what people are doing that you can't do.

I wonder if anyone has written about the strangeness of the world being taken over by social media, specifically juxtaposed with the general belief that the people who develop tech lack social skills. That seems like a deeper challenge to what people believe than just nerds getting rich.

[ Parent | on HN ]