It's sad that so many of The Onion's attempts at over-the-top parody have turned out to be prescient.
A VC arm that's part of the government seems like a monstrous hybrid of private and public. What is the profit for? For the same reason that it gives one pause regarding what the CIA is doing investing in social media. If it's totally OK, why not have the government invest in private prison companies?
Let alone how SV was in large part funded and formed by Military Contracts
This is only half the story. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that these same databases are being used by NSA and GCHQ, enabling authoritarian governments to suppress and attack these same people.
The problem is that advertising is inherently unethical, so that reasoning doesn't hold up.
> What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need?
That only holds up if those other $40 were to spontaneously appear from thin air - but it doesn't, and that difference is coming from somewhere. It means that somewhere, some group of people had to collectively pay $40 more for something, to pay for your salary.
> Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive.
No, it's really not. "Going out and creating something" is not automatically something desirable, if the "something" being created is unethical.
I don't dispute that advertising can be unethical, or that many of these big tech companies have faced some difficult decisions and debatably have made the wrongs ones. But you can do unethical things in any industry, and advertising is not fundamentally unethical.
People who were doing silly work making video games pushed the boundaries of parallel processing, created the GPU industry, and now that is relied on for serious scientific research. People making social networks so college freshman could date made tools to help those fighting authoritarian governments connect and created infrastructure technology to work on big data problems the governments might face on social issues.
Who did more to help the Asian Tigers raise from poverty to economic superpowers? Peace Corps people distorting local economies with their help, or people investing in local infrastructure because it was good value for them to make money??
What's better for the world, besides your conscious, working for a soup kitchen for work that can be done for $10/hr, or freelancing for $50/hr and donating that to the soup kitchen to give someone with less skills a job and the soup kitchen $40 remaining to buy supplies they need?
Finally, a lot of really smart people end up going in to law or finance because that's where the money is. Even if making consumer ad-tech doesn't sound quiet as noble as researching novel energy, if it encourages people to start entering fields where they are building things rather than creating more regulation for things, it's probably a net-positive. I really doubt that this idea that engineers should be this monastic underclass is so great for society. I constantly hear programmer say their salary is "inflated", to which I respond "if you feel overpaid, give your money to a good charity, don't roll over for the uber rich tech-exec/VC in charge."
If you want to make a positive impact on the world, respecting market efficiency is underrated.