Rebecca Solnit on the Silicon Valley Attitude:
Enough minions of Silicon Valley's mighty corporations could arrive to create a monoculture. In some parts of town, it already is the dominant culture. A guy who made a fortune in the dot-com boom and moved to the Mission District (the partly Latino, formerly blue-collar eye of the housing hurricane) got locals' attention recently with a blog post titled "Douchebags Like You are Ruining San Francisco." In it, he described the churlish and sometimes predatory behavior of the very young and very wealthy toward the elderly, the poor, and the nonwhite.
He wrote, "You're on MUNI [the city bus system] and watch a 20-something guy reluctantly give up his seat to an elderly woman and then say loudly to his friends, ‘I don't know why old people ride MUNI. If I were old I'd just take Uber.'" Yeah, I had to look it up, too: Uber.com, a limousine taxi service you access via a smartphone app. A friend of mine overheard a young techie in line to buy coffee say to someone on his phone that he was working on an app that would be "like Food Not Bombs, to distribute food, only for profit." Saying you're going to be like a group dedicated to free food, only for profit, is about as deranged as saying you're going to be like Gandhi, only with guns.
Taken from Google: From "Don't Be Evil" to Evil Empire.
By an insightful enumeration of anecdotes, Solnit makes a strong point that, after the NSA scandal, people are finally willing to listen to and come to terms with. The relentless optimism of the Digital Age, the utopia of the Global Village, might slowly come apart at the seams. Her statistics on philanthropy also debunk the myth that Silicon Valley is still filled with hippie do-gooders. These are business people we have to treat with the same (if not more) suspicion as the business man of olde.
Her summary of Google's powerplay position is scary and unfortunately bang on the money:
Imagine that it's 1913 and the post office, the phone company, the public library, printing houses, the US Geological Survey mapping operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive corporation unaccountable to the public. Jump a century and see that in the online world that's more or less where we are. A New York venture capitalist wrote that Google is trying to take over "the entire fucking Internet" and asked the question of the day: "Who will stop Google?"
See also Piero Scaruffi's Google Glass and the business of monetizing other people's lives.
As Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said: "There is what I call the creepy line: the Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it" (his words, not mine).
