Name: Abolish Silicon Valley
ISBN: 9781912248704

Abolish Silicon Valley

Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon warehouse workers or Uber. We're starting to see the cracks in the edifice, as we realise that the wealth that the tech industry is so good at creating is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality and unsubstantiated lies of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that led to Silicon Valley in its current form, and links them to the economy at large. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not merely to enrich a select few.

What Hacker News says

beckman466Jul 2022

> its chief architect always came off like a schizophrenic

do you realize it's our economic system and the perversion of technology to literally criminalize cooperation and the sharing of information (intellectual property regime (read the book Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu for more) for one of two groups of people (workers and owners)?

> Maybe it's just me

normalization of an anti-human economy starts from day -9 months (i.e. health/ill-health of the human organism starts and depends on the health of the mother). what has the 'modern world' got to offer those who don't have clean drinking water due to imperialist systems?

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nonrandomstringFeb 2022

FWIW Mandie, here's my list of modern pop tech critique, all topics that DV touches at least tangentially. Far more than 40 days and nights worth of reading

Shoshana Zuboff Big Other (surveillance capitalism)

Virginia Eubanks Automating Inequality

Sophie Brickman Baby Unplugged

Cory Doctorow Radicalized

Mike Monteiro Ruined by Design

Nick Srnicek Platform Capitalism

Paul Kingsnorth Life versus the machine

Heather Burns Understanding Privacy

Roger McNamee Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Siva Vaidhyanathan Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us

Catherine Price How to Break Up With Your Phone

Thomas Kersting Disconnected: Protect Your Kids Against Device Dependency

Nicholas Kardaras Glow Kids

Zeynep Tufekci Twitter and Tear Gas

Lelia Green Technoculture

Douglas Rushkoff Team Human

Jaron Lanier Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media

Carissa Véliz Privacy is Power: Why You Should Take Back Control

Xiaowei Wang Blockchain Chicken Farm

Jenny Oddell How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Wendy Liu Abolish SIlicon Valley

Jonathan Taplin Move Fast and Break Things

Andrew L. Shapiro The Control Revolution

Lawrence Lessig Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

David Shenk Data Smog

Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia

Paulina Borsook Cyberselfish.

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beckman466Apr 2021

I absolutely agree with the author that the fear of technology is really the fear of capitalist technology.

My favorite article about this is from Wendy Liu: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

“Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles.”

Back to this article. In the article the author writes:

> How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, […] if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries?

Yet the Nordics are not run on any ‘principles’. Denmark, Sweden and the other Nordic countries are 100% pure capitalist countries.

Social democracies reap the spoils of imperialism and neocolonialism just as much as any other capitalist nation. They source the same coffee, timber, minerals and energy resources from the global south to extract as much value as possible. The only difference is that they also have safety nets for their own citizens; healthcare, strong labor unions, welfare programs and a ‘healthy’ political milieu. The exploitation of the global south comes at the expense of satiating their own citizens needs and desires at the cost of cheap products.

I live in a scandinavian country, and our economy is based on exactly the same features of capitalist mode of production that you can find in the UK and the US. Its not like Apple or Nescafe source the materials in their products differently than elsewhere.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/ky5p1x/how_do...

The Nordic countries have the same bourgeois private property systems which enable the capitalist class to commoditize the means of production and exploit workers by paying them a wage. It’s also important to remember that the goal of communism is a stateless society: nation states are a tool of capitalism. Also this common debate of ‘Government vs. Corporation/Capitalist firm’ is a false dichotomy. Both are part of the capitalist system as a whole. The firm is birthed by the capitalist state. An analysis of our current capitalist system that only looks within the borders of one state, when it is in fact part of a global production system (and therefore ‘forgets’ that capital can travel without limits, unlike the working class), is always an incomplete critique.

To sum up: the Nordics still use the exact same capitalist made products as every other capitalist country and participate in the same globalized capitalist mode of production.

Also important to critique when talking about technology is the current capitalist education system.

Curiosity and stimulating intellectual work is only rewarded (and thus reserved) for those in the working class who either pass the grueling ‘hunger games’-game that is school, or for those in the capitalist class who come from a wealthy family or received access to a big capital inheritance. When these intellectual laborers graduate they have become grandiose, paranoid, ‘punished by rewards’ -social darwinists with a false consciousness (Marxist term). The capitalists now try to keep these intellectual laborers unaware of the effects of the systems they are tasked to build/expand. Systems which are now automating the exploitation of the rest of the working classes. They do this through offering job perks, Google buses, etc.. It's all bribes. Meanwhile the members of the working class, who didn't pass the hunger games, is kept intellectually wounded, so as to be easier to exploit and control by capitalists. If Silicon Valley capitalists really wanted to be as disruptive as they say they are, they would organize to immediately abolish ‘Intellectual Property’ laws. Instead they hide behind American exceptionalism (and behind the American military which enforces the tyrannical global IP regime). SV leaders are complicit in the most deadly ‘copying is illegal’ propaganda campaign, and system, ever invented. We live under a capitalist system that criminalizes sharing and helping others. Knowledge is not zero sum game. The incentives are all wrong and we need to recalibrate society.

“One lethal weapon in the arsenal of the West’s trade war against the Rest is intellectual property. The common heritage of humanity—including medical knowledge and the seeds for food—is turned into property under capitalism, to be bought and sold as ‘IP.’ […] It has been a well-recognized fact throughout written history that knowledge shared is knowledge multiplied. A physical commodity that is consumed becomes extinct. I consume an apple and it is no more. But knowledge is metaphysical. It is enriched when it is ‘consumed’ by an ever-expanding circle of consumers.”

[…]

“The notion that without IP protection, innovation would be stifled is an ideological position created and propagated by those that benefit from the privatization of knowledge. I came to a diametrically opposite conclusion over two decades of work with farming communities in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and much of eastern and southern Africa. Ordinary peasants and workers are amazingly innovative and productive, until their resources and knowledge are appropriated and corporatized, and the people enslaved to earn profits for corporations.”

— Professor Yash Tandon, Trade Is War: The West's War Against the World

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louwrentiusJun 2023

It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu.

I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. Or in plain language: making other people more rich at the cost of others.

I’m just happy the guy got out when the company didn’t align with his values anymore and he has the means to afford himself a conscience.

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beckman466Oct 2021

> whenever I open the app it's just fun photos and updates from the people I want to keep in touch with. I have zero problems with that because I enjoy seeing the people around me happy, having fun, and succeeding.

Zuck, is that you? (i'm joking. surely Zuck has better things to do than hang out on online forums...)

it's interesting how you engage with only a small portion of my comment. it seems you didn't bother clicking through to the deeper critiques of the tech industry that i referenced (Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley Tribune article/essay). you casually dismiss serious in-depth critiques of today's system with anecdotal information ("I can access whatever I want, discuss whatever I want"); also by suggesting that i yearn to feel a sense of elitism or be a part of some sort of 'in-group'; that i don't have a facebook account, and that i live inside of an echo-chamber, all without actually engaging with the material and any of the arguments.

would you consider that maybe it is you who is living inside the Silicon Valley echo-chamber? your blanket statements and straw man arguments are suspiciously echo-chamber -like [1]

anyway, hope you're having fun up there on Elysium

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...

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beckman466Sep 2021

> But billions of people will get access to all the worlds information.

The web is mostly only useful to a tiny percentage of the working class who have been somewhat able to get a successful formal education, and who go on to take up a spot as a privileged knowledge worker/labor aristocrat. For capitalist owners there is no toll-booth they cannot get past (through acquisitions/informational duopolies).

Today's education system is itself a traumatizing Hunger Games-esque competition (it was to me), and ends up debilitating and wounding most of the working class, convincing them that they are dumb and incapable [1], and most of all competitors to conquer. The public facing web you talk about ("all the worlds information") is actively hostile to beginners/learners, and is mainly designed to control the feedback from what today's dominant institutions/organizations are spouting out at us (it is far from the two way 'global village' McLuhan talked about).

I keep seeing access to Google, Wikipedia and YouTube touted as some sort of standard or benchmark for online knowledge equality, yet this narrative just serves as a self-justifying tool to remedy the survivorship guilt most labor aristocrats feel. As I wrote recently:

> It isn't access to Google search and Wikipedia that made the best scientists and engineers, it was access to commoditized knowledge which is enclosed, re-enclosed and then rented out in small amounts to the highest bidders (i.e. the so called 'prestigious' universities in the global north). In other words, it's held hostage behind corporate firewalls.

What we need is a distributed knowledge commons, as well as fully open-access scientific production systems. This means abolishing the IP regime and abolishing Silicon Valley. [2]

I see two of the highest leverage points for this being 1.) the Valueflo.ws vocabulary and system, which can help us rapidly replace today's corporatized siloed Enterprise Resource Planning software/systems, in favor of a fractal inter-organizational networks (similar to project Cybersyn in Chile under Allende [3]), and 2.) the holochain/ceptr (metacurrency project) framework, which has the potential to completely rewire/rearchitect the web using it's BitTorrent + Git + cryptography qualities [4] (keyword: agent-centric).

[1] Why I started my own Sudbury Valley school, https://www.reimaginedonline.org/2013/06/why-i-started-my-ow...

[2] Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[3] Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile (Full Documentary), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0

[4] Reinventing Applications by Nicolas Luck https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

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