optimusclimb: I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable.

-

michaelochurch: If we're guilty of something, it's that we enjoy our work (perhaps not our paid jobs, but the ongoing process of learning and building cool technology, even as a hobby) so much that we tend to disengage from political fights: both ours (open vs. closed allocation) and the bigger ones of the world (Ellis Act). The bad guys have become quite adept at exploiting this property of us. When we realize that something's wrong, we focus on minutiae. We focus on the douchebag 27-year-old middle manager who told us everything has to be in Java, and it becomes a complaint about Java, the language, instead of the bigger issue (the investor-level corruption that put the idiot in charge).

That head-in-the-sand behavior of possibly the smartest working class that's ever existed really hurts San Francisco, but it also hurts us.

-

Peter Ludlow on "The Banality of Systemic Evil":

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality...):

The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:

"(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut."

Jackall went through case after case in which managers violated this code and were drummed out of a business (for example, for reporting wrongdoing in the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant).

-

In my view, the perfect example of Silicon Valley's systemically banal evil is how nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising and a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. So much so that my mere suggestion of this as evil rains downvotes (as I expect for this comment).

When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811). The idea that advertising gives us free web content and services is utter bullshit.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” -- Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera

It's important to realize that Hammerbacher isn't just talking about engineers working directly on ad systems, but anyone working on any product that relies on ad revenue and thus invariably makes design and functionality choices that prioritizes ad views and advertiser value (e.g. collecting data about you) over end-user interests.

The get rich quick ethos of Silicon Valley tech firms using whatever means necessary, such as showing ads, collecting user data for advertisers, coming up with viral schemes (When did the virus become our role model?), and then using those riches to take over the space (pricing everyone out) as well as the culture (money, materialism, socially vapid products, getting rich quick is destroying the counter culture, much of what makes the Bay Area special).

-

And now, as if to prove my point, Hacker News has killed this article.