Diffident

There has been a growing trend in this country to reign in Big Tech. There are many reasons why this should happen (though I fear those of political expediency are far from reliable and miss the true issues with the culture behind Silicon Valley and it’s far reaching influences. To start with the political, mostly that of social media in particular, the matter of De-platforming the act of removing someone for incendiary statements. These are private companies with private servers that we rent access when we sign up for a service. And, just like the contract we sign with a landlord when we rent a home or storefront, we sign an agreement with these companies (in the form of terms of service) that we will treat our tenure on that service with agreed upon behavior, or face eviction.

The other political debate over misinformation has more teeth to it. Or more importantly, shows an important issue with silicon Valley culture. In particular the culture of secrecy and con.

An article from the BBC recently showed the upcoming trial of Elizabeth Homes, CEO of Theranos, and how its fraud didn’t give tech a moment’s reflection (when it should have.). Homes was caught using a common practice in Silicone Valley, something that they call “Fake it, till you make it.” Basically sell a product that doesn’t work (or doesn’t exist for that matter) until you get it working. This attitude has been around for a long time. There are stories of Thomas Edison doing just that regarding the work that came out of Menlo Park over a hundred years ago, but we still allowed this practice to continue.

There is more to the deceit in Silicon Valley. If you listen to an old episode of Recode Decode from a few years ago, you have a tech insider say that the whole financial base of tech is corrupt. In this episode, Kara Swisher interviewed an early investor in silicone valley, a man named Chamath Palihapitiya. He described Silicon Valley start up culture as a giant Ponzi Scheme, in which each round of investment is used to pay off the previous round. What money isn’t going to the investors, is mostly going into advertising to get investors for the next round, with little going to building products. So the system is designed to grow capital, not products.

This brings me to the secrecy of tech. With all these black box products, with claims of making business easier and better and other fabulous claims, the software has not been peer reviewed for accuracy or legitimacy, we do not know if their statements are true. These Algorithms are having real world effects on people, and in many instances not in a good way. The alarm for this was first raised a few years back by computer scientist Cathy O’Neil in her book Weapons of Math Destruction. In this book she shows how software is used to gauge performance and other none math situations with very little oversight or critical thinking. Like the software that graded teacher performance over the year, but constantly had the highest ranking teachers falling to the worst (and vice versa), a statistically impossible feat.

Yet, even though it has been several years, tech has not listened to her warnings. In fact, in some cases weaponizing these algorithms, like Facebook, YouTube and such designing their systems to keep people watching and as a result, turning intelligence people into conspiracy thinking fools that believe the earth is flat, and worse. But it is most evident in the recent reports that the algorithms used in the H/R hiring services like Indeed, LinkedIn, and such are making it difficult for both employers and job hunters to get seen. They are basically looking at job entries so narrowly, many good candidates are not getting through, and after listening to an episode of Recode Daily talking about the situation, if you try and tailor yourself to meet the rigid requirements, the software “Blacklists you.” The report then went on to describe how to game the system to be seen, a thought that infuriated me , because it meant that only the most tech savvy, not the best qualified are getting seen. To add to my anger when asked what can be done to avert this the reporter just said build better algorithms, a thought that only a techie would think.

We are basically having calculators doing the work of people. Like making hiring decisions and grading English Papers, things they were not meant to do, (and badly I might add).