don't be evil

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In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

You might be in a microkitchen eyeing someone else’s leftovers in the fridge and then see the little note saying “Don’t be evil.” And, says David Krane, “You realize, it can mean, ‘Don’t take someone’s food that looks appealing.’” But it also applied to much bigger things, like maintaining a stiff line between advertising and search results, or protecting a user’s personal information, or—much later—resisting the oppressive measures of the Chinese government. For months, “Don’t be evil” was like a secret handshake among Googlers. An idea would come up in a meeting with a whiff of anticompetitiveness to it, and someone would remark that it sounded … evil. End of idea. “Don’t be evil” was a shortcut to remind everyone that Google was better than other companies.

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“That whole thing rubbed me the wrong way,” Buchheit later recalled. “So I suggested something that would make people feel uncomfortable but also be interesting. It popped into my mind that ‘Don’t be evil’ would be a catchy and interesting statement. And people laughed. But I said, ‘No, really.’” The slogan made Stacy Sullivan uncomfortable. It was so negative. “Can’t we phrase it as ‘Do the right thing’ or something more positive?” she asked. Marissa and Salar agreed with her. But the geeks—Buchheit and Patel—wouldn’t budge. “Don’t be evil” pretty much said it all, as far as they were concerned. They fought off every attempt to drop it from the list. “They liked it the way it was,” Sullivan would later say with a sigh.

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But then Eric Schmidt revealed Google’s internal motto to a reporter from Wired. To McCaffrey, that was the moment when “Don’t be evil” got out of control and became a hammer to clobber Google’s every move. “We lost it, and I could never grasp it back,” she says. “Everybody would’ve been happy if it could’ve been this sort of silent code or little undercurrent that we secretly harbored instead of this thing that set us up for a lot of ridiculous criticism.” Elliot Schrage, who was in charge of communications and policy for Google from 2005 to 2008, concluded that “Don’t be evil” might originally have benefited the company but became “a millstone around my neck” as Google’s growth took it to controversial regions of the world.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Miguel Helft and David Barboza, “Google’s Plan to Turn Its Back on China Has Risks,” New York Times, March 23, 2010; John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” New York Times, April 19, 2010; John Markoff and Ashlee Vance, “Software Firms Fear Hackers Who Leave No Trace,” New York Times, January 20, 2010. 8. Harry Lewis, “Does Google Violate Its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto?” Intelligence Squared, National Public Radio, November 26, 2008, www.npr.org. 9. Esther Dyson, “Does Google Violate Its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto?” 10. Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), 6–7. Also see Gladys Ganley, Unglued Empire: The Soviet Experience with Communications Technologies (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996). 11.

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Perhaps our role is not to doubt, but to believe. Perhaps we should just surf along in awe of the system that gives us such beautiful sunrises—or at least easily finds us digital images of sunrises with just a few keystrokes. Like all such narratives, it underwrites a kind of faith—faith in the goodwill of an enterprise whose motto is “Don’t be evil,” whose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and whose ambition is to create the perfect search engine. On the basis of that faith—born of users’ experiences with the services that Google provides—since the search engine first appeared and spread through word of mouth for a dozen years, Google has permeated our culture.

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Do technologies spark revolutions, or do concepts like revolution raise expectations and levels of effects of technologies? The chapters that follow attempt to answer such questions. The first two chapters explore the moral universe of Google and its users. I don’t really care if Google commits good or evil. In fact, as I explain below, the slogan “Don’t be evil” distracts us from carefully examining the effects of Google’s presence and activity in our lives. The first chapter argues that we must consider the extent to which Google regulates the Web, and thus the extent to which we have relinquished that duty to one company. The company itself takes a technocratic approach to any larger ethical and social questions in its way.

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

Though some of his teammates were initially hesitant, they ultimately capitulated, and “Don’t be evil” became one of Google’s core values. The phrase took this fledgling start-up to new moral heights beyond the advertising space, inspiring Google to try to use its services for the common good. “Don’t be evil” was easy to remember, comforting in tone, and noble in purpose. When the company aimed to go public in 2004, Google’s IPO registration incorporated the phrase—serving as a central message about the kind of company Google was, where it would sit in the market, and more important, what it would do for the world. The company wrote, “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.”

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Misunderstood or conflicting narratives can undermine confidence and committment. Brand Damage. Untrue or ineffective brand narratives can destroy the credibility of our products and businesses. Don’t Be Evil Paul Buchheit, Google’s twenty-third employee, had a sense of humor. He was sitting in a meeting in early 2000 to discuss and choose the company’s values, and he recommended a simple three-word phrase: “Don’t be evil.” Buchheit applauded Google for turning away from the malevolent temptations of some advertising agencies. These companies would pay search engines, like Google, a pretty penny to stealthily sneak ads into users’ searches, but Google resisted.

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Eventually, the investigative news site The Intercept exposed Google’s dealings in another serious blow to its “Don’t be evil” narrative. To complicate matters even further, the project was also scrutinized by Congress. What could Google have done differently? First, it’s important to understand that evil is in the eye of the beholder. I, for one, would not consider a partnership with the Department of Defense evil—but that’s bringing my own biases to the table. With biases and perspectives like these in mind, Google should have defined the scope of its “Don’t be evil” narrative from the beginning—to apply to advertising, to company culture, and more broadly to contracts with third parties.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

He vowed, “We’ll never sell anyone’s health records.” And in a March 2008 speech, Eric Schmidt promised to keep the site free of all advertising. There is a shared, and perhaps blinding, belief on the Google campus that Google was altruistic, an attitude reflected in “Don’t be evil.” On a stage he shared with Page at the Global Philanthropy Forum after Google embraced the slogan, Brin declared that ‘“don’t be evil’ serves as a reminder to our employees,” but it “was a mistake. It should really say, ’Be Good.‘” One can interpret Brin’s remarks as a reflection of his idealism, or his naïveté—or both. To simply say a corporation should be good ignores the range of choices a company is compelled to make in conducting its business.

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Google is seeking to make almost every book ever published available in digitized form. Schools in impoverished nations that are without textbooks can now retrieve knowledge for free. “The Internet,” said Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, “makes information available. Google makes information accessible.” Google’s uncorporate slogan—“Don’t be evil”—appeals to Americans who embrace underdogs like Apple that stand up to giants like Microsoft. Google’s is one of the world’s most trusted corporate brands. Among traditional media companies—from newspapers and magazines to book publishers, television, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, telephone companies, and Microsoft—no company inspires more awe, or more fear.

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That Google might achieve this goal in less than a generation, in a time when copyright and privacy practices are being upended, when newspapers are declaring bankruptcy and in-depth journalism is endangered, when the profit margins of book publishers are squeezed along with their commitment to serious authors, when broadcast television networks dilute their programming with less expensive reality shows and unscripted fare, when cable news networks talk more than they listen, when the definitions of community and privacy are being redefined, and the way citizens read and process information is being altered, and when most traditional media models are being reconfigured by digital companies like Google—all this means that it’s important to put Google under the microscope. Brilliant engineers are at the core of the success of a company like Google. Drill down, as this book attempts to, and you’ll see that engineering is a potent tool to deliver worthwhile efficiencies, and disruption as well. Google takes seriously its motto, “Don’t be evil.” But because we’re dealing with humans not algorithms, intent sometimes matters less than effect. A company that questions everything and believes in acting without asking for permission has succeeded like few companies before. Unlike most technologies that disrupted existing business—the printed book that replaced scrolls, the telephone that replaced the telegraph, the automobile that replaced the horse and buggy, the airplane that supplanted cruise ships, the computer that supplanted typewriters—Google search produces not a tangible product but something abstract: knowledge.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

It was bad coding hygiene to build an itemized list if you could apply a general rule. "Aren't all of these covered by, 'Don't be evil'?" Paul asked. No one took him seriously. The meeting concluded with a list of eleven core values, which HR asked me to help wordsmith. "Don't be evil" wasn't one of them. The meeting left Amit unsatisfied, and he took it upon himself to proselytize the Word of Paul. Soon, "Don't be evil" began blemishing every markable surface like brown spots on ripening bananas. I had a rolling whiteboard in my cubicle, and one day when I came back from lunch, "Don't be evil" was neatly printed in one of its corners. I saw the phrase scrawled on conference room walls and twirling across laptop screensavers.

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This book won't delve deeply into Google's current imbroglios over censorship, regulation, and monopoly. I include only what happened between my first day in 1999 and the day I left in 2005. We weren't yet worried about network neutrality, street-view data gathering, or offshore wind farms. Our big issues barely grazed the electrified moral fence of our "Don't be evil" credo: develop the best search technology, sell lots of ads, avoid getting killed by Microsoft. While this story is told from a marketer's perspective and my title came to encompass "consumer brand management," this book is not just about marketing. I don't claim to have "built" Google's brand.

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"I feel as though we've sold out with this RealNames thing," engineer Paul Bucheit complained to a large group of Googlers including Larry and Sergey. "RealNames is a real source of junk and I think it is only going to get worse." Paul cared deeply about engineering quality and about ethics and especially about the intersection of the two. He summed up his attitude some time later with the phrase "Don't be evil." It caught on. "This is even worse than auctioning off results," Paul complained. "Just for fun, I registered the RealNames keyword 'Craig Barrett.' Now when you search for 'Craig Barrett' on Google, the top result links to my hideous little web page." I tried it and found myself staring at a glittering pink screen full of animated unicorns and rainbows.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The TV producer Kurt Sutter (Sons of Anarchy) spoke for many when he said, “Google spends millions of dollars every year fronting a campaign to crush the rights of creatives.” In later chapters I will lay out both the breadth of the resistance and some of my own ideas to solve this problem. But first we need to understand how we got here. CHAPTER ONE The Great Disruption “Don’t Be Evil” —Google motto 1. The beginnings of the technical and social revolution that Martin Luther King referenced in his 1968 sermon at the National Cathedral were under way even as he was speaking. The revolution began in the moral precepts of the counterculture: decentralize control and harmonize people.

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The combination of scale and network effects makes it very hard to dislodge the winners, especially if you are in a business like tech, which is so lightly regulated. 4. Branding becomes critical. The brand becomes a promise of value to consumers. Apple gets superior margins because of its brand promise for quality and elegant design. The brand promise also helps you defend yourself against government intrusion. Google’s original “Don’t be evil” brand promise gave them a patina of social entrepreneurship that helps protect them from accusations of monopoly power tactics. As John Seely Brown has pointed out, the end of the decentralized Web that Engelbart and the PARC visionaries had imagined occurs at this point, when “we moved from products to platforms, which let the network effect play out in a hub and spoke model.”

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As Ken Auletta pointed out in his book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Page and Brin never asked for permission to copy the entire World Wide Web onto their servers and then index it. Ayn Rand’s famous quotation “Who will stop me?” seems to be the founding principle of Google. Page’s constant assurances in his initial shareholder letter that everyone should trust his and Brin’s good intentions are critical to this Randian mind-set: “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.” This naïveté, this barely disguised will to power, this dialectic—Google will do whatever it wants without asking permission, and the results will be so awesome that no one will complain—stands at the heart of the company’s success.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966; John Bellamy Foster, ‘Monopoly-Finance Capital’, Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 7, December 2006. 5 Ryan Banerjee and Boris Hofmann, ‘The rise of zombie firms: causes and consequences’, Bank for International Settlements Quarterly Review, September 2018. 6 Michalis Nikiforos, ‘When Two Minskyan Processes Meet a Large Shock: The Economic Implications of the Pandemic’, Levy Economics Institute, Policy Note 2020/1 (March 2020). 7 Martin Arnold and Brendan Greeley, ‘Central Banks Stimulus Is Distorting Financial Markets, BIS Finds’, Financial Times, 7 October 2019. 8 Jesse Colombo, ‘The US Is Experiencing a Dangerous Corporate Debt Bubble’, Forbes, 29 August 2018; Phillip Inman, ‘Corporate Debt Could Be the Next Sub-Prime Crisis, Warns Banking Body’, Guardian, 30 June 2019. 9 Matthew Watson, ‘Re-establishing What Went Wrong Before: The Greenspan Put as Macroeconomic Modellers’ New Normal’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, no. 7 (2014): 80–101. 10 Alfie Stirling, Just about Managing Demand: Reforming the UK’s Macroeconomic Policy Framework, London: Institute for Public Policy Research [IPPR], 2018. 11 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 929. 12 Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, New York: Currency/Random House, 2019. 13 See, e.g., Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, New York: Little, Brown, 2017, in which the author makes the now well-known claim that ‘Data is … the new oil’. 14 Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil; Martin Wolf, ‘Why Rigged Capitalism Is Damaging Liberal Democracy’, Financial Times, 18 September 2019. 15 Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil. 16 Matt Phillips, ‘Investors Bet Giant Companies Will Dominate After Crisis’, New York Times, 28 April 2020. 17 Matthew Vincent, ‘Loss-Making Tech Companies Are Floating Like It’s 1999’, Financial Times, 16 June 2019. 18 Martin Wolf, ‘Corporate Savings Are Contributing to the Savings Glut’, Financial Times, 17 November 2015; Peter Chen, Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, ‘The Global Corporate Saving Glut: Long-Term Evidence’, VoxEU, CEPR Policy Portal, 5 April 2017. 19 Rana Forooha, ‘Tech Companies Are the New Investment Banks’, Financial Times, 11 February 2018. 20 Andres Diaz, ‘I’m a Small Business Owner.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Published in the United States by Currency, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. currencybooks.com CURRENCY and its colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Foroohar, Rana, author. Title: Don’t be evil / Rana Foroohar. Description: First edition. | New York : Currency, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019023898 (print) | LCCN 2019023899 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984823984 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984823991 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Internet industry—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. | Information technology—Economic aspects—United States. | Corporate power—United States. | Business and politics—United States.

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I hope that it will serve as a wake-up call, not just for executives and policy makers but for anyone who believes in a future in which the benefits of innovation and progress outweigh the costs to individuals and to society. It’s in everyone’s interest to believe that we can create that kind of future. Because as we’ve come to understand all too clearly over the past few years, once people stop believing that a system is good for them, the system falls apart. CHAPTER 1 A Summary of the Case “Don’t be evil” is the famous first line of Google’s original Code of Conduct, what seems today like a quaint relic of the company’s early days, when the crayon colors of the Google logo still conveyed the cheerful, idealistic spirit of the enterprise. How long ago that feels. Of course, it would be unfair to accuse Google of being actively evil.

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By the early 2000s, as the company moved toward the inevitable payday of IPO—the dream of every Silicon Valley entrepreneur or investor—there was little remaining pretense that Google was anything other than a leviathan of a company looking to monetize everything that it could in preparation for its debut on the public markets. As for the infamous “Don’t be evil” mantra? “It’s bullshit,” said Jobs.7 This ideological shift was most publicly marked by the 2001 hiring of Schmidt. Around that time, Google was still ramping up its advertising model, and it wasn’t yet clear what a gold mine it would become. The investors felt that adult supervision was needed, in the form of a hard-nosed manager who could turn the company’s brilliant ideas into soaring stock prices.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

But neither should they be dictatorships. They should be—but too rarely are—meritocracies. Your challenge is to get good ideas to surface and survive from within and without and to enable customers and employees to improve your ideas and products. Don’t be evil We can’t leave a chapter about ethics and Google without addressing its famous self-admonition: “Don’t be evil.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin interpreted the pledge this way in a letter they wrote before their 2004 initial public offering: “We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forego some short-term gains.

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Google Rules New Relationship • Give the people control and we will use it • Dell hell • Your worst customer is your best friend • Your best customer is your partner New Architecture • The link changes everything • Do what you do best and link to the rest • Join a network • Be a platform • Think distributed New Publicness • If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found • Everybody needs Googlejuice • Life is public, so is business • Your customers are your ad agency New Society • Elegant organization New Economy • Small is the new big • The post-scarcity economy • Join the open-source, gift economy • The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches • Google commodifies everything • Welcome to the Google economy New Business Reality • Atoms are a drag • Middlemen are doomed • Free is a business model • Decide what business you’re in New Attitude • There is an inverse relationship between control and trust • Trust the people • Listen New Ethic • Make mistakes well • Life is a beta • Be honest • Be transparent • Collaborate • Don’t be evil New Speed • Answers are instantaneous • Life is live • Mobs form in a flash New Imperatives • Beware the cash cow in the coal mine • Encourage, enable, and protect innovation • Simplify, simplify • Get out of the way If Google Ruled the World Media • The Google Times: Newspapers, post-paper • Googlewood: Entertainment, opened up • GoogleCollins: Killing the book to save it Advertising • And now, a word from Google’s sponsors Retail • Google Eats: A business built on openness • Google Shops: A company built on people Utilities • Google Power & Light: What Google would do • GT&T: What Google should do Manufacturing • The Googlemobile: From secrecy to sharing • Google Cola: We’re more than consumers Service • Google Air: A social marketplace of customers • Google Real Estate: Information is power Money • Google Capital: Money makes networks • The First Bank of Google: Markets minus middlemen Public Welfare • St.

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Out of that comes a better service for every user, more opportunities to build traffic and revenue, a rich relationship of trust among those users and Flickr, and even new products. All from just listening. New Ethic Make mistakes well Life is a beta Be honest Be transparent Collaborate Don’t be evil Make mistakes well We are ashamed to make mistakes—as well we should be, yes? It’s our job to get things right, right? So when we make mistakes, our instinct is to shrink into a ball and wish them away. Correcting errors, though necessary, is embarrassing. But the truth about truth is itself counterintuitive: Corrections do not diminish credibility.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

It’d be one thing if we all knew everything about each other. It’s another when centralized entities know a lot more about us than we know about each other—and sometimes, more than we know about ourselves. If knowledge is power, then asymmetries in knowledge are asymmetries in power. Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto is presumably intended to allay some of these concerns. I once explained to a Google search engineer that while I didn’t think the company was currently evil, it seemed to have at its fingertips everything it needed to do evil if it wished. He smiled broadly. “Right,” he said. “We’re not evil.

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But when users protest Facebook’s constantly shifting and eroding privacy policy, Zuckerberg often shrugs it off with the caveat emptor posture that if you don’t want to use Facebook, you don’t have to. It’s hard to imagine a major phone company getting away with saying, “We’re going to publish your phone conversations for anyone to hear—and if you don’t like it, just don’t use the phone.” Google tends to be more explicitly moral in its public aspirations; its motto is “Don’t be evil,” while Facebook’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be lame.” Nevertheless, Google’s founders also sometimes play a get-out-of-jail-free card. “Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan,” says Sergey Brin. “But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.

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Actually, building an informed and engaged citizenry—in which people have the tools to help manage not only their own lives but their own communities and societies—is one of the most fascinating and important engineering challenges. Solving it will take a great deal of technical skill mixed with humanistic understanding—a real feat. We need more programmers to go beyond Google’s famous slogan, “Don’t be evil.” We need engineers who will do good. And we need them soon: If personalization remains on its current trajectory, as the next chapter describes, the near future could be stranger and more problematic than many of us would imagine. 7 What You Want, Whether You Want It or Not There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life by David Mitchell

bank run, Boris Johnson, British Empire, cakes and ale, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, lateral thinking, Northern Rock, Ocado, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, profit motive, Russell Brand, sensible shoes, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

So, if those universities with which BPP have been negotiating feel they could make savings by outsourcing their back-office functions (which sounds like a euphemism for getting a colostomy bag) but would be unwilling to cut costs without being able to blame a private company, maybe that’s a sign that they’re the wrong savings. If not, and if failing to make such cuts jeopardises those institutions, I hope they’ll find the courage to reform themselves without holding hands with a profiteer. * There’s something fishy about Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” I’m not saying it’s controversial but it makes you think, “Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?” It’s suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they’re not – which my colleague Charlie Brooker said on 10 O’Clock Live was “rather like someone who’s just moved in next door saying, ‘Hi, I’m Geoff, your non-dogging neighbour.’”

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But we mustn’t assume that the maxim was an attempt by executives to draw a line under some diabolical brainstorm in which the internet giant pulled itself back from the brink of green-lighting a scheme to grind our bones to make its bread. It could just as easily have come out of a discussion of the possibility of doing good. “Always do good”, “Try to do some good” or “Be good” might have been previous drafts of the motto, before they concluded that goodness was as impractical as malevolence was distasteful and decided on “Don’t Be Evil” as more realistic in a modern business environment. “Settling for one notch below altruism” is all the slogan really means. Still, I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. And there’s no earthly reason why Google should do any good to anyone but itself – which is presumably why it pays so little tax.

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As aspirations go, it’s not been looking particularly realistic of late as the corporation’s tax avoidance has become more evident, but it’s still a company that tries to generate a wholesome, quirky, Californian vibe. That’s why it called an operating system Cupcake. That’s why its offices are full of free snacks for employees. There’s still a faint echo of “Don’t Be Evil” in the think spaces and mood rooms, albeit with an irritating interrogative inflection. So it’s odd that it would voluntarily couple one of its products with that of a company with a shameful history of wringing money from the poorest people on Earth. To my mind, the risks involved in that association outweigh the fact that more people have heard of a KitKat than a key lime pie.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

But after the euphoria of the acquisition wore off, it became clear that even at Google getting Android off the ground was going to be one of the hardest things Rubin had undertaken in his life. Just navigating Google itself was initially a challenge for Rubin and his team. There was no hard-and-fast org chart, as in other companies. Every employee seemed right out of college. And the Google culture, with its famous “Don’t be evil” and “That’s not Googley” sanctimony, seemed weird for someone such as Rubin, who had already been in the workplace twenty years. He couldn’t even drive his car to work because it was too fancy for the Google parking lot. Google was by then filled with millionaires who had gotten rich on the 2004 IPO.

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None of this made Jobs less angry at feeling forced to go after Google in the first place. He felt Brin and Page, people he once considered friends, had betrayed him. And he felt Schmidt, a member of his board, had dissembled. Jobs’s message to his executive team that day was strident: “These guys are lying to me, and I am not going to take it anymore. This Don’t Be Evil stuff is bullshit.” But he also felt vindicated—that Google was no longer going to be a threat. Schmidt, while still technically on the Apple board, was effectively no longer a board member. He was now leaving the room during all board discussions about the iPhone, which was increasingly what Apple board meetings were about.

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More noticeably, he began seeking out public opportunities to attack Google and Android. A month after the Nexus One was released—and days after Jobs announced the first iPad—he tore into Google at an Apple employee meeting. “Apple did not enter the search business. So why did Google enter the phone business? Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them. Their Don’t Be Evil mantra? It’s bullshit.” In October, at the end of the quarterly earnings conference call with investors and Wall Street analysts, Jobs spent five minutes laying out in detail why Android was an inferior product in every way. He said Android was hard for consumers to use because every Android phone operated differently.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

It’s what computers should do.126 Microsoft is not the first tech giant to consider an overarching moral principle ought to be applied to data science. Google’s original motto: “Don’t be evil” was a modern update to the Hippocratic Oath. Eric Schmidt, one of Google’s founders, and co-author Jonathan Rosenberg, have written that this motto:…genuinely expresses a company value and aspiration that is deeply felt by employees. But “Don’t be evil” is mainly another way to empower employees… Googlers do regularly check their moral compass when making decisions.127 Whether or not the above is true is a matter of some debate,128 but it is nonetheless significant that one of the major technology giants has consciously limited itself through the adoption of such an overarching principle.

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Schmidt and Rosenberg described it as “a cultural lodestar that shines over all management layers, product plans and office politics”.129 Such principles can come back to bite their creators: in April 2018, The New York Times reported that various Google developers were protesting against the company’s collaboration with the US Department of Defense in using AI technology to scan military drone footage, known by the codename “Project Maven”. The developers wrote to CEO Sundar Pichai,130 citing the company’s own motto against it131:The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn’t make this any less risky for Google. Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart.132 The disgruntled Google employees prevailed. In June 2018, Google announced that it had abandoned Project Maven.133 Around the same time, Google released a set of ethical principles, which included that it would not design or deploy AI in “[w]eapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people”.134 A motto, oath or principle is a useful starting point but to achieve the more complex aims of various ethical codes set out above, professional regulation will need to include mechanisms for standard setting, training and enforcement.

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See Oren Etzioni, “A Hippocratic Oath for Artificial Intelligence Practitioners”, TechCrunch, https://​techcrunch.​com/​2018/​03/​14/​a-hippocratic-oath-for-artificial-intelligence-practitioners/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 127Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (London: Hachette UK, 2014). 128Leo Mirani, “What Google Really Means by ‘Don’t Be Evil’”, Quartz, 21 October 2014, https://​qz.​com/​284548/​what-google-really-means-by-dont-be-evil/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 129Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (London: Hachette UK, 2014). 130The text of the letter is available at: https://​static01.​nyt.​com/​files/​2018/​technology/​googleletter.​pdf, accessed 1 June 2018. 131Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon”, The New York Times, 4 April 2018, https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2018/​04/​04/​technology/​google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. 132Letter from various Google employees to Sundar Pichai, https://​static01.​nyt.​com/​files/​2018/​technology/​googleletter.​pdf, accessed 1 June 2018. 133Hannah Kuchler, “How Workers Forced Google to Drop Its Controversial ‘Project Maven’”, Financial Times, 27 June 2018, https://​www.​ft.​com/​content/​bd9d57fc-78cf-11e8-bc55-50daf11b720d, accessed 2 July 2018. 134Sundar Pichai, “AI at Google: Our Principles”, Google website, 7 June 2018, https://​blog.​google/​technology/​ai/​ai-principles/​, accessed 2 July 2018. 135For a similar proposal, see Joanna J.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

Vintage ISBN: 978-0-8041-7352-0 Vintage eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7353-7 www.vintagebooks.com v3.1 Contents Cover About the Author Title Page Copyright Foreword by Alan Rusbridger Prologue: The Rendezvous 1. TheTrueHOOHA 2. Civil Disobedience 3. The Source 4. Puzzle Palace 5. The Man in the Room 6. Scoop! 7. The Planet’s Most Wanted Man 8. All of the Signals All of the Time 9. You’ve Had Your Fun 10. Don’t Be Evil 11. Flight 12. Der Shitstorm! 13. The Broom Cupboard 14. Shoot the Messenger Epilogue: Exile Acknowledgements Foreword Edward Snowden is one of the most extraordinary whistleblowers in history. Never before has anyone scooped up en masse the top-secret files of the world’s most powerful intelligence organisations, in order to make them public.

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‘It was an extremely bizarre situation,’ Johnson says. The British government had compelled a major newspaper to smash up its own computers. This extraordinary moment was half pantomime, half-Stasi. But it was not yet the high tide of British official heavy-handedness. That was still to come. 10 DON’T BE EVIL Silicon Valley, California Summer 2013 ‘Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.’ GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 It was an iconic commercial. To accompany the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs created an advert that would captivate the world. It would take the theme of George Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel and recast it – with Apple as Winston Smith.

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At the same time, these firms vie for government contracts, hire ex-Washington staff for the inside track and spend millions lobbying for legislation in their favour. Clearly, the allegation that they were co-operating with America’s most powerful spy agency was a corporate disaster, as well as being an affront to the Valley’s self-image, and to the view of the tech industry as innovative and iconoclastic. Google prided itself on its mission statement ‘Don’t be evil’; Apple used the Jobsian imperative ‘Think Different’; Microsoft had the motto ‘Your privacy is our priority’. These corporate slogans now seemed to rebound upon their originators with mocking laughter. Before the Guardian published the PRISM story the paper’s US business reporter, Dominic Rushe, went through his contacts book.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

ELLEN ULLMAN, Life in Code, 19983 CONTENTS Also by Margaret O’Mara Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph List of Abbreviations Introduction: The American Revolution ACT ONE: START UP Arrivals Chapter 1: Endless Frontier Chapter 2: Golden State Chapter 3: Shoot the Moon Chapter 4: Networked Chapter 5: The Money Men Arrivals Chapter 6: Boom and Bust ACT TWO: PRODUCT LAUNCH Arrivals Chapter 7: The Olympics of Capitalism Chapter 8: Power to the People Chapter 9: The Personal Machine Chapter 10: Homebrewed Chapter 11: Unforgettable Chapter 12: Risky Business ACT THREE: GO PUBLIC Arrivals Chapter 13: Storytellers Chapter 14: California Dreaming Chapter 15: Made in Japan Chapter 16: Big Brother Chapter 17: War Games Chapter 18: Built on Sand ACT FOUR: CHANGE THE WORLD Arrivals Chapter 19: Information Means Empowerment Chapter 20: Suits in the Valley Chapter 21: Magna Carta Chapter 22: Don’t Be Evil Arrivals Chapter 23: The Internet Is You Chapter 24: Software Eats the World Chapter 25: Masters of the Universe Departure: Into the Driverless Car Photographs Acknowledgments Note on Sources Notes Image Credits Index About the Author LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ACM: Association for Computing Machinery AEA: American Electronics Association AI: Artificial intelligence AMD: Advanced Micro Devices ARD: American Research and Development ARM: Advanced reduced-instruction-set microprocessor ARPA: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, renamed DARPA AWS: Amazon Web Services BBS: Bulletin Board Services CDA: Communications Decency Act of 1996 CPSR: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility CPU: Central processing unit EDS: Electronic Data Systems EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation EIT: Enterprise Integration Technologies ENIAC: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ERISA: Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 FASB: Financial Accounting Standards Board FCC: Federal Communications Commission FTC: Federal Trade Commission GUI: Graphical user interface HTML: Hypertext markup language IC: Integrated circuit IPO: Initial public offering MIS: Management information systems MITI: Ministry of International Trade and Industry (of Japan) NACA: National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, later superseded by NASA NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASD: National Association of Securities Dealers NDEA: National Defense Education Act NII: National Information Infrastructure NSF: National Science Foundation NVCA: National Venture Capital Association OS: Operating system OSRD: U.S.

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With Doerr’s help, Gore’s policy aides began holding regular “Gore-Tech” meetings in California and in Washington, where awed thirtysomething Internet moguls would be seated amid the polished mahogany and gilt trim of the Vice President’s ceremonial office at the White House. It was a long way from drab tilt-ups and Homebrew swap meets and all-nighters in the PARC beanbag chairs. With the Internet boom, the men and women of Silicon Valley had become establishment power players like never before. CHAPTER 22 Don’t Be Evil As TechNet mobilized and Gore-Tech meetings proliferated, Microsoft was conspicuously absent. Awash in revenue from its total saturation of the PC platform, Bill Gates’s company didn’t have the same regulatory worries as the Silicon Valley crowd, and it was so large that it was a political force all on its own.

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Giant computer companies roamed the earth and the Valley was saturated with Wall Street money, but Brin and Page promised a return to simpler and more idealistic times. Microsoft’s overreach and comeuppance seemed further validation that Silicon Valley had it right all along: promote the small, the entrepreneurial, the agile and collaborative. Don’t get big, don’t close yourself in, and, as Google’s widely touted corporate motto put it, “don’t be evil.” This mythos—the story that the Valley had told to itself again and again since the start of the 1960s, and then broadcast to the world ever since the days of Don Hoefler—overlooked the inconvenient reality that every start-up company in the region’s history eventually did one of two things. Most often, it went out of business.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Colleagues dubbed her “the Decider,” a play on President Bush’s nickname for himself. (They made her a T-shirt with a big Superwoman D.) Much of Google’s political identity was formed in opposition to the Machiavellian moralism of the Bush-Cheney era. Google coined a company creed in its early years—“Don’t be evil”—a corporate slogan for a company that hated slogans. It was meant to combat concerns that Google would do nefarious things with intimate details it had gathered from users’ internet searches. In practice the motto stood for Google’s steadfast belief that the internet was inherently a force for good.

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“Most news organizations would think about this as an ethical question, not a legal one,” Jillian York, a director with the EFF, told reporters. “Giving corporations the power to censor sets a dangerous precedent.” In much of Europe, though, YouTube was criticized for not censoring enough. Google’s good standing on the Continent had already been slipping. European politicians accused the “don’t be evil” company of evading taxes, ignoring privacy, and behaving like a monopolist. Jewish groups would berate YouTube for giving airtime to Holocaust deniers. In 2013 Edward Snowden’s bombshell revelations included charges that the National Security Agency (NSA) had hacked into Google’s data centers.

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Shortly after 11 a.m. that morning, Stapleton, draped in a green army jacket, led her colleagues, more than three thousand strong, out of their office to a small park near the Hudson where they gathered with megaphones. Others had marched out in London, Singapore, and Zurich. Protestors cried at Google HQ listening to a female engineer describe being drugged by a colleague at a corporate event. Googlers held signs that read: time’s up, tech and don’t be evil. In all, more than twenty thousand employees protested in fifty cities, a groundbreaking moment of white-collar activism, of Trump-era catharsis. A movement that could boil an ocean. The techie rebellion grabbed national headlines and, it seemed, made the company proud. Ruth Porat, Google’s CFO, would describe the event as “Googlers doing what Googlers do best.”

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, only one US investment banker was ever convicted for wrongdoing as a direct result of the financial crisis, and none in the UK at all.28 While in some cases freer markets did do away with some of the handicaps of excessive state intervention from the post-war era, the stunted prosperity of the Western working and middle classes since the 1980s in contrast to the skyrocketing accumulation of wealth by the corporate elite has much to do with governments abdicating on their responsibilities and allowing markets to regulate themselves. But it still begs the question of why self-regulation under capitalism can’t work. The answer lies in the nature of capitalism’s most important institution: the corporation. Don’t Be Evil, Don’t Be Stupid “Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.” — Andrew Young Just as we can reasonably expect political elites to push for their self-interest when they wriggle free of checks and balances, there is no reason to believe that firms will not do the same. The Iron Law of Oligarchy applies regardless of the nature of the institution.

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Capitalist critic Naomi Wolf described this problem in a 2012 article on financial scandals: It is very hard, looking at the elaborate edifices of fraud that are emerging across the financial system, to ignore the possibility that this kind of silence — “the willingness to not rock the boat” — is simply rewarded by promotion to ever higher positions, ever greater authority. If you learn that rate-rigging and regulatory failures are systemic, but stay quiet, well, perhaps you have shown that you are genuinely reliable and deserve membership of the club.30 Yet it is telling that Google, once the brainchild of a pair of scruffy Stanford geeks whose motto was “Don’t be evil”, is now one of the most terrifying examples of so-called “surveillance capitalism”, seemingly hell-bent on accumulating (and profiting from) all the information it can get its hands on. In 2015 the company finally ditched the original motto since the hypocrisy was just too obvious, and at least, according to one account was actually being taken seriously by some of the company’s staff.31 That these excesses can be reined in by the power of free markets to discipline its worst offenders is undoubtedly one of the most damaging myths peddled by the advocates of laissez-faire.

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., “This Global Financial Fraud and its Gatekeepers”, Guardian, 14 Jul. 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/14/global-financial-fraud-gatekeepers 31 Apparently Google’s overlords were concerned that employees were taking it literally and objecting to some of the company’s profit-making proposals: Moyer, J.W., “Alphabet, now Google’s overlord, ditches ‘Don’t be evil’ for ‘do the right thing’”, Washington Post, 5 Oct. 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/05/alphabet-now-googles-overlord-ditches-dont-be-evil-in-favor-of-do-the-right-thing/ 32 Andrews, E.L., “Greenspan concedes error on regulation”, New York Times, 23 Oct. 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/business/worldbusiness/23iht-24greenspan.17202367.html 33 “Your Company is not a Democracy”, Entrepreneur Europe, 30 Jun. 2010, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/207280 34 Wadhwa, V., “Democracy is a great thing, except in the workplace”, Washington Post, 6 Jul. 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/06/07/democracy-is-a-great-thing-except-in-the-workplace/ 35 Barro, R.J., “Democracy and Growth”, NBER Working Paper Series, 4909, Oct. 1994, https://www.nber.org/papers/w4909.pdf 36 The idea that sociopathy is rampant among CEOs and senior managers is not an urban legend although studies vary from 4-5% to as many as one fifth of high level executives. de Vries, M.F.R., “The Psychopath in the C Suite: Redefining the SOB”, INSEAD, 2012, https://sites.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

Here’s a company that’s found the balance: Google. Google’s food for employees is terrific. The chairs and tables on which they eat are pathetic. They cut the right corners. They’re mediocre in the right places. They’re not mediocre, for instance, when it comes to values (“Don’t be evil”). Who would settle for “good” and say “Don’t be evil most of the time?” At Comcate we were once preparing a response to a request for proposals. The RFP was twenty-five pages long and asked for what seemed like extraneous information. Nevertheless, we slaved away, carefully preparing each section, debating the content of the introduction and conclusion, and second-guessing our choice of graphics.

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

And of course, they google all of us, everyone who works on anything 'sensitive.'" 642 "Naturally," Greg said. He felt like he was going to throw up. He felt like never using a search engine again. "How the hell did this happen? It's such a good place. 'Don't be evil,' right?" That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of his reason for taking his fresh-minted computer science PhD from Stanford directly to Google. 643 Maya's laugh was bitter and cynical. "Don't be evil? Come on, Greg. Don't you remember what it was like when we started censoring the Chinese search results, and we all asked how that could be anything but evil? The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil -- we're giving them access to a better search tool!

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The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil -- we're giving them access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn't get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience. If we hadn't lost our don't-be-evil cherry by then, we surely did the day we took that one." 644 "Now what?" Greg pushed a dog away from him and Maya looked hurt. 645 "Now you're a person of interest, Greg. Googlestalked. Now, you live your life with someone watching over your shoulder, all the time. You know the mission statement, right? 'Organize all human knowledge.' That's everything.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Some mocked what they saw as a belated show of concern. By 2013, the Snowden revelations had shown how useful big tech’s data was to law enforcement and military interests. Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, had headed the Defense Innovation Advisory Board for years. Once famous for the motto “Don’t be evil,” Google has shed even that modest ethical standard.81 Other critics claimed that Google had not done nearly enough for the nation of its birth. There is an AI arms race, and if the United States can’t tap its top tech companies, nations with pliant plutocrats will pull ahead. Sandro Gaycken, a senior adviser to NATO, commented, “These naive hippy developers from Silicon Valley don’t understand—the CIA should force them.”82 Uncooperative firms risk America’s falling behind China and even Russia in an AI arms race.

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Noam Schreiber and Kate Conger, “The Great Google Revolt,” New York Times Magazine, February 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/google-revolt.html; Letter from Google Employees to Sundar Pichai, Google Chief Executive, 2018, https://static01.nyt.com/files/2018/technology/googleletter.pdf; Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “ ‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon,” New York Times, April 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html. 81. Kate Conger, “Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause from Its Code of Conduct,” Gizmodo, May 18, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393. 82. Tom Upchurch, “How China Could Beat the West in the Deadly Race for AI Weapons,” Wired, August 8, 2018, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-weapons-warfare-project-maven-google-china. 83.

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George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and the Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 4. 49. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 134–135. 50. For examples of such shortcomings, see Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles—And All of Us (New York: Currency, 2019); Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). 51. Byron Reese categorizes these metaphysical questions with great acuity in The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 15–54. 52.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Google’s transparency about advertising delivered high quality results and gained trust.66 Early search leaders who succumbed to the siren song of ad-disguising drove their users away with irrelevant links while Google’s audience grew. As more people signed into its system, Google learned more about them and became ever better at tailoring its search results.67 Its ad income increased as its targeting improved. This triumph of “Don’t Be Evil” is still a celebrated Silicon Valley success story. Patiently gathering data, the company entrenched its privileged position between advertisers, content providers, and audiences.68 But in 2012, as it moved from general purpose search into specialized fields like shopping, Google began to back away from strong separation of paid and editorial material.69 The Federal Trade Commission strongly encourages search engines to label sponsored content,70 and has reserved the right to fi le suit for unfair and deceptive practices against any search engine that fails to do so.

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Users lack both the ability and the incentive to detect manipulation as long as they are getting “good enough” results. So we’re stuck. And again the question arises: With whom? The exciting and radical Internet platforms that used to feel like playmates are looking more like the airlines and cable companies that we love to hate. “Don’t Be Evil” is a thing of the past; you can’t form a trusting relationship with a black box. Google argues that its vast database of information and queries reveals user intentions and thus makes its search ser vices demonstrably better than those of its whippersnapper rivals. But in doing so, it neutralizes the magic charm it has used for years to fend off regulators.

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Note that in each case, Google, like the rating agencies discussed earlier, blamed public interpretation of the result rather than taking responsibility for it. 83. “Autocomplete,” Google. Available at https://support.google.com /web search /answer/106230. (It also specifies that Autocomplete cannot be turned off.) 84. Evgeny Morozov, “Don’t Be Evil,” The New Republic, July 30, 2011, http://www.newrepublic.com /article /books /magazine /91916/google-schmidt -obama-gates-technocrats. 85. Evan McMorris-Santoro, “Search Engine Expert: Rick Santorum’s New Crusade against Google Is Total Nonsense” (Sept. 2011). Talking Points Memo. Available at http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com /2011/09/search-en gine -expert-rick-santorums -new-crusade -against-google -is -total-nonsense 254 NOTES TO PAGES 73–74 .php?

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But for Warner, what was truly unforgivable was the fact that American companies ‘have bastardised themselves so much to get into the Chinese market’; in fact, he said, US businesses were guilty of nothing less than ‘prostituting themselves’.4 As it subsequently turned out, these include Facebook, which has data-sharing partnerships with at least four major Chinese electronics businesses – all of which have close ties to the government in Beijing.5 The fact that this was not disclosed during high-profile hearings in Washington tells its own story about the steps corporations are willing to take in pursuit of opportunities – as a strongly worded statement from the bipartisan House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee explained.6 That was issued before it emerged that Facebook had been sharing user data with four firms – Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL – that have been flagged as national security threats by US intelligence.7 The relentless search for profit is mirrored by Google’s decision to develop a search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, to block websites and searches on topics to do with human rights, religion and other sensitive subjects, and that would be acceptable to the Chinese authorities – giving the company access to a huge market. Perhaps not surprisingly, this has led to considerable soul-searching within Google itself, a company that used to have the motto ‘Don’t be evil’ enshrined within its code of conduct.8 The dropping of the slogan in the early summer of 2018 is not just a sign of the times; it is a sign of the realities that go with putting the priorities of shareholders above those of others.9 The demonisation of China in various forms played an important role in the presidential election campaign.

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Dance, ‘Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by US Intelligence’, New York Times, 5 June 2018. 6House of Representatives, Energy and Commerce Committee, Press Release, ‘Walden and Pallone on Facebook’s Data-Sharing Partnerships with Chinese Companies’, 6 June 2018. 7Ali Breland, ‘Facebook reveals data-sharing partnerships, ties to Chinese firms in 700-page document dump’, The Hill, 30 June 2018. 8Casey Newton, ‘Google’s ambitions for China could trigger a crisis inside the company’, The Verge, 18 August 2018. 9Kate Conger, ‘Google Removes “Don’t Be Evil” Clause from Its Code of Conduct’, Gizmodo, 18 May 2018. 10Good Morning America, Interview, ABC, 3 November 2015. 11Trump, Staten Island speech, ‘Trump: I’m So Happy China Is Upset; “They Have Waged Economic War Against Us” ’, Transcript on Real Clear Politics, 17 April 2016. 12The Economist, ‘The Economist interviews Donald Trump’, 3 September 2015. 13B.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

This punching-up campaign, like others, shamed the target for betraying its principles. In Google’s case, the values in question were clear for all to see. In the prospectus for its 2004 public stock offering, the Google founders had inserted, a bit ostentatiously, a clause in which they vowed to distinguish themselves morally from their money-grubbing competitors. Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company. This lofty promise made the company especially vulnerable to Gebru’s damning charges.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT she denounced the company for censoring her: Casey Newton, “The Withering Email That Got an Ethical AI Researcher Fired at Google,” Platformer, December 3, 2020, https://www.platformer.news/​p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Don’t be evil”: Larry W. Sonsini, David J. Segre, and William H. Hinman, Amendment No. 4 to Form S-1 Registration Statement, Google, July 26, 2004, https://www.sec.gov/​Archives/​edgar/​data/​1288776/​000119312504124025/​ds1a.htm. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “research integrity and academic freedom”: “Standing with Dr.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

My requests to Oakland were ignored and Google wasn’t talking either—trying to get answers from the company was like talking to a giant rock. My investigation stalled further when Oakland residents temporarily succeeded in getting the city to halt its plans for the DAC. Though Oakland’s police surveillance center was put on hold, the question remained: What could Google, a company obsessed with its progressive “Don’t Be Evil” image, offer a controversial police surveillance center? At the time, I was a reporter for Pando, a small but fearless San Francisco magazine that covered the politics and business of Silicon Valley. I knew that Google made most of its money through a sophisticated targeted advertising system that tracked its users and built predictive models of their behavior and interests.

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It put whole libraries at your fingertips, allowed you to translate foreign languages on the fly, let you collaborate in real time with people on the other side of the planet. And you got all of it for free. It seemed to defy the laws of economics. Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google managed to retain its geekily innocent “Don’t Be Evil” image. It convinced its users that everything it did was driven by a desire to help humanity. That’s the story you’ll find in just about every popular book on Google: a gee-whiz tale about two brilliant nerds from Stanford who turned a college project into an epoch-defining New Economy dynamo, a company that embodied every utopian promise of the networked society: empowerment, knowledge, democracy.

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Rather, Gmail understood that ‘pregnant’ in this case wasn’t a good thing because it was coupled with the word ‘affair.’ So it offered the services of a private investigator and a marriage therapist.”54 Showing ads for spy services to betrayed mothers? It wasn’t a good look for a company that still draped itself in a progressive “Don’t Be Evil” image. True to Larry Page’s paranoia about letting the privacy “toothpaste out of the tube,” Google stayed tightlipped about the inner workings of its email scanning program in the face of criticism. But a series of profiling and targeted advertising technology patents filed by the company that year offered a glimpse into how Gmail fit into Google’s multiplatform tracking and profiling system.55 They revealed that all email communication was subject to analysis and parsed for meaning; names were matched to real identities and addresses using third-party databases as well as contact information stored in a user’s Gmail address book; demographic and psychographic data, including social class, personality type, age, sex, personal income, and marital status were extracted; email attachments were scraped for information; even a person’s US residency status was established.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

In a cramped garage in 1998, Page and Brin founded a search engine to perform a task that sounded bonkers; “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It was the exact type of moonshot thinking venture capitalists encouraged. But while the Google founders were excited to change the world, they didn’t want to make decisions based on what the money men wanted. The motto “Don’t be evil”‡‡ became synonymous with Google’s founders and their approach, the message being “even though we’re growing into a mature company, we won’t be doing terrible things for money.” In 2004, when Google undertook its IPO, it used a controversial financial instrument called a “dual-class stock structure.”

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Chapter 8 notes †† Not every startup decides to take on venture capital. These companies are said to be “bootstrapped,” or entirely self-funded. Bootstrapping founders keep all the equity in the company and reap all the rewards if the startup succeeds. Their founders also go broke when they fail. ‡‡ Google removed the “Don’t be evil” mantra from the preface of its corporate code of conduct in 2018. §§ Founder worship of Zuckerberg evaporated after 2016, when news coverage of events ranging from the presidential election in the United States to reported ethnic cleansing in Myanmar suggested that Facebook lacked oversight of its platform.

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., 189 Gates, Bill, 37, 67 Gawker, 205 Geidt, Austin, 13, 60–62, 63, 82, 86, 192–93 General Electric, 314, 319 Gicinto, Nick, 257 Gingrich, Newt, 229 Giron, Joe, 156 Glade Brook Capital Partners, 300 Gladwell, Malcolm, 126 Go-Jek, 187 Gold Club, 192 Goldman Sachs, 69, 93, 100, 132 Gomez, Henry, 313 Google, 4–6, 9, 31, 36, 96–99, 99n, 147, 158, 172, 195 as advertising company, 154 “Don’t be evil” mantra of, 76–77, 76n Google Capital, 100 Google Glass, 177n Google Maps, 107, 148 Googleplex, 105, 107, 181 Google Ventures, 98–101, 99n, 105–7, 157, 202, 283, 326 Google X, 105–6, 109–10 Gulfstream V, 178 headquarters of, 105 HR and employees of, 224–26, 333 IPO of, 76–77 self-driving cars and, 105–10, 176–77, 180, 232–35, 233–36 Trump’s election and, 199–200 Gore-Coty, Pierre-Dimitry, 309 GQ magazine, 119, 120, 221 Grab, 148, 150, 187, 258, 259–60, 333 Graf, Daniel, 237, 309 Gramercy Park Hotel, 127, 130 Graves, Molly, 56 Graves, Ryan, 13, 63, 82, 124, 135, 165, 191, 309, 312–13, 321, 324, 341 allegiance to Kalanick, 97, 270–72, 287–88, 299, 301 background of, 54–55 Lyft and, 86 selected to be Uber’s first CEO, 55–59 on Uber’s board, 79–80 Great Recession, 33–34, 132 Green, Logan, 85, 86, 120, 186, 187, 188, 189 Greyball, xvii, xviii, 242–53, 254 Greylock Partners, 74 Groupon, 77 Grubhub, 65 Guadalajara, Mexico, 172–74 Guetta, David, 7 Gurgaon, India, 149–50 Gurley, John, 66 Gurley, John William “Bill,” 14, 69n, 187, 202, 255, 264n, 270, 272, 274, 276, 279, 288n after showdown, 308–10 annoyance with Kalanick, 122–26 attempts to find Kalanick’s replacement and, 314–16, 321 blogging by, 125 confers with spurned investors, 288–89 connects Kalanick and Michael, 93–94 desire for proper corporate governance, 332, 334–35 fundraising and, 92 Grand Bargain and, 326–27, 331 investment talent of, 64–71, 78–80 plan to force Kalanick’s hand, 289–91, 292–306, 292n at SXSW, 125–26 the syndicate and, 282–86, 303–4 on Uber’s board, 79–80 wishes Kalanick well, 299 Gurley, Lucia, 66 Gutmann, Amy, 214–15 H&R Block, 249 Hacker News, 156, 159 Hales, Charlie, xii, xiii Harford, Barney, 331, 331n Harvey, Kevin, 70 Hayes, Rob, 57, 63, 78, 288, 288n, 293 Hazelbaker, Jill, 225, 237, 239, 240 “Heaven,” 156, 259 Heidrick & Struggles, 312–13, 324 “Hell,” 257 Henley, Mat, 178, 259 Hewlett-Packard, 144, 312, 313, 314, 323 Highway 101, 28 Holden, Jeff, 120 Holder, Eric, 224, 225–26, 254, 260, 266, 275, 283 Holder Report, 254, 266, 269–81, 283, 296, 299, 341 Holiday Inn, 265, 266 Hollywood, 9, 24 Holt, Rachel, 237, 309, 331 Holzwarth, Gabi, 179–80, 193, 194, 230, 249–53 “the Homeshow,” 95 Hornsey, Liane, 226, 256 Hourdajian, Nairi, 126–28, 130–131 Houston, Texas, 66 Huffington, Arianna, 127, 238, 256, 287, 289, 301–5, 307, 325 continued support for Kalanick, 270–74 joins board of directors, 226–30 joins Kalanick after his mother’s death, 264–65 release of Holder Report and, 276–80 Huffington, Michael, 228–29 Huffington Post, 229 Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, 65, 70 Hyderabad, India, 149 Ibiza, Spain, 193 ICE, 206 Illinois, 113 IMEI, 154–55, 157 Immelt, Jeff, 313–14, 319, 320–22, 323, 324 InAuth, Inc., 155, 156–57 India, 148–50, 166–67, 187, 203, 257, 259 rape scandal in, 166, 261, 262, 285, 337 taxis and, 148–49 Indonesia, 259–60 The Information, 253 Instacart, 9 Instagram, 9, 74, 96–97, 200, 235 Intel, 35, 193n InterActiveCorp, 307, 320, 333 Internet Explorer, 69 iOS software, 154–55, 157, 159, 162 iPhone, 36–39, 44, 58, 59, 154–55, 157, 160, 163, 176, 218 iPod, 35 Iran, 320 iRide, 113 Isaac, Mike, 127n, 241, 279–80, 280n, 295, 296, 305–6, 339–40 iTunes, 35, 37 Ive, Jonathan, 38 Jacobin, 205, 207 the JamPad, 47–48, 49 Janklow, Mort, 230 Jay-Z, 7–8, 54, 194 Jeopardy!

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

We believe, naively, that nobody (but the Big Guy) can listen to our thoughts. But let’s be clear . . . Google too is listening. To date, Google has been masterful at keeping this fear in check and not exploiting—as far as we know—the predictive power of its algorithms. Even the company’s initial motto, “Don’t Be Evil,”attempts to reinforce the divine benevolence of this near-supreme being.19 Moreover, you can be banished: Google has cast out payday lenders, white supremacists, or any firm that charges an interest rate greater than 36 percent. They have been, to recoin a phrase, “cast into outer darkness,” the unknown.

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., Form 10-K for the Period Ending December 31, 2016 (filed January 27, 2017), p. 23, from Alphabet Inc. website. https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20161231_alphabet_10K.pdf. 17. Yahoo! Finance. Accessed in February 2016. https://finance.yahoo.com/. 18. Godman, David. “What is Alphabet . . . in 2 minutes.” CNN Money. August 11, 2015. http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/11/technology/alphabet-in-two-minutes/. 19. Basu, Tanya. “New Google Parent Company Drops ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto.” Time. October 4, 2015. http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/. 20. http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/. 21. Sullivan, Danny. “Google now handles at least 2 trillion searches per year.” Search Engine Land. May 24, 2016. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillion-searches-per-year-250247. 22.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

There have been revelations about the existence of a sprawling international surveillance infrastructure, uncompetitive business and exploitative labor practices, and shady political lobbying initiatives, all of which have made major technology firms the subjects of increasing scrutiny from academics, commentators, activists, and even government officials in the United States and abroad.3 People are beginning to recognize that Silicon Valley platitudes about “changing the world” and maxims like “don’t be evil” are not enough to ensure that some of the biggest corporations on Earth will behave well. The risk, however, is that we will respond to troubling disclosures and other disappointments with cynicism and resignation when what we need is clearheaded and rigorous inquiry into the obstacles that have stalled some of the positive changes the Internet was supposed to usher in.

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Though they pay lip service to privacy, new-media companies are resistant to any supervision or legal limits on how data are gathered or used, for the simple reason that their profit margins depend on accessing that information. The erosion of privacy online is not an inevitability but rather the result of bad public policy and business incentives that have turned the rush to gather more personal data into a veritable arms race.24 Despite its famous maxim “Don’t Be Evil”—a motto made in reference to specific advertising methods—Google has violated its own principles on more than one occasion. The search giant that once resisted advertising now owns AdMob, AdSense, Analytics, and DoubleClick. Similarly, techniques it once found suspect, such as tracking, have been reconsidered.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

Kenneth Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ tells us there is no system for choosing between three political candidates under which all voters’ preferences are fairly represented.13 Peyton Young’s book Equity, which uses mathematical game theory to treat the subject matter, is by the author’s own admission ‘a stock of examples that illustrate why equity cannot be reduced to simple, all-embracing solutions’.14 And Cynthia Dwork and her colleagues’ 2012 work ‘Fairness through Awareness’, resorts to looking at how we can best balance affirmative action for groups with fairness to the individual.15 Like in Jon Kleinberg and his colleagues’ work on bias, when these authors did the maths they found paradoxes instead of rational certainty. I thought back to the motto, once so proudly stated by Googlers: ‘Don’t be evil.’ It isn’t used as frequently at the company now. Had Google abandoned its axiom after one of its mathematicians discovered that there was no equation that could allow them to avoid evil with certainty? We can try our best, but we can never be truly sure whether or not we are doing the right thing.

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Candid here, here Fair Housing Act (US) here fairness here fake news here, here, here feedback loops here MacronLeaks here post-truth world here, here, here false negatives here, here false positives here, here, here, here Fark here Feedly here Feller, Avi here Fergus, Rob here Ferrara, Emilio here filter bubbles here, here, here FiveThirtyEight here, here, here, here Flipboard here Flynn, Michael here football here, here robot players here, here Fortunato, Santo here, here Fowler, James here Franks, Nigel here Frostbite here Future of Life Institute here, here Gates, Bill here Gelade, Garry here gender bias here, here, here GloVe (global vectors for word representation) here Genter, Katie here Gentzkow, Matthew here, here Geoengineering Watch here, here Glance, Natalie here GloVe (global vectors for word representation) here Go here, here, here, here Goel, Sharad here Google here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here artificial intelligence (AI) here, here, here black hats here, here, here DeepMind here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘Don’t be evil’ here Google autocomplete here, here Google News here Google Scholar here, here, here, here Google Search here Google+ here personalised adverts here, here, here, here SharedCount here Gore, Al here Grammatas, Angela here, here Guardian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Guardian US here, here h-index here, here Häggström, Olle here, here, here Here Be Dragons here Hassabis, Demis here, here, here Hawking, Stephen here, here, here He, Kaiming here Her here Higginson, Andrew here Hinton, Geoffrey here HotUKDeal here Huckfeldt, Bob here, here, here, here Huffington Post here, here, here Independent here Instagram here Internet here, here, here, here Internet service providers (ISPs) here Intrade here Ishiguro, Kazuo Never Let Me Go here iTunes here, here James Webb Sapce Telescope here Jie, Ke here job matching here Johansson, Joakim here, here Journal of Spatial Science here Kaminski, Juliane here Kasparov, Garry here, here Keith, David here Kerry, John here Keuschnigg, Marc here Kleinberg, Jon here Kluemper, Donald here Kogan, Alex here, here, here Kosinski, Michal here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kramer, Adam here, here Krizhevsky, Alex here Kulsrestha, Juhi here Kurzweil, Ray here Labour Party here, here Momentum here Lake, Brenden here language here Laue, Tim here Le Comber, Steve here Le Cun, Yan here Le Pen, Marine here Le, Quoc here Lerman, Kristina here, here, here Levin, Simon here Libratus here LinkedIn here, here, here, here literature here logic gates here Luntz, Frank here Machine Bias here Macron, Emmanuel here Major League Soccer (MLS) here, here Mandela effect here, here Mandela, Nelson here Martin, Erik here matchmaking here mathematics here, here assessing bias here mathematical models here, here, here power laws here Matrix, The here May, Lord Robert here McDonald, Glenn here, here Mechanical Turk here, here, here, here, here Medium here Mercer, Robert here Microsoft here, here, here, here, here, here Mikolov, Tomas here, here Minecraft here Mosseri, Adam here, here, here Mrsic-Flogel, Thomas here Ms Pac-Man here, here, here Munafò, Marcus here Musk, Elon here, here, here myPersonality project here National Health Service (NHS) here, here National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) here, here Nature here, here, here Natusch, Waffles Pi here Netflix here neural networks here, here convolutional neural networks here limitations here recurrent neural networks here New York Times here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here The Upshot here, here news aggregators here Nix, Alexander here, here, here, here Noiszy here Northpointe here, here, here, here O’Neil, Cathy here Weapons of Math Destruction here Obama, Barack here, here Observer here online data collection here, here gender bias here preventing here principal component analysis (PCA) here online help services here OpenWorm here Overwatch here, here Pasquale, Frank The Black Box Society here, here Paul, Jake here, here, here, here Pennington, Jeffrey here personality analysis here Big Five here, here, here, here PewDiePie here Pierson, Emma here Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here political blogs here political discussions here, here, here PolitiFact here polls here, here, here, here Popular Mechanics here post-truth world here, here, here power laws here Pratt, Stephen here, here PredictIt here, here, here, here, here, here Prince here principal component analysis (PCA) here categorising personalities here COMPAS algorithm here probability distributions here ProPublica here, here, here, here, here, here Pundit here Q*bert 214, here Qualtrics here racial bias here, here, here, here, here GloVe (global vectors for word representation) here randomness here Reddit here, here, here, here, here regression models here, here Republican Party here, here, here, here, here RiceGum here, here Richardson, Kathleen here Road Runner here Robotank here, here robots here, here, here, here, here, here Russian interference here, here, here Salganik, Matthew here, here Sanders, Bernie here Scholz, Monika here Science here SCL here, here search histories here Silver, David here Silver, Nate here, here, here The Signal and the Noise here Silverman, Craig here Simonyan, Karen here singularity hypothesis here Skeem, Jen here Sky Sports here slime moulds (Physarum polycephulum) here, here, here Snapchat here Snopes here social feedback here Space Invaders here, here, here, here Spotify here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stack Exchange here StarCraft here statistics here, here, here, here, here regression models here, here Stillwell, David here, here Sullivan, Andrew here, here Sumpter, David Soccermatics here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sun, The here superforecasters here, here superintelligence here, here Szorkovszky, Alex here, here, here, here, here, here Taleb, Nassim here, here, here Tegmark, Max here, here, here, here Telegraph here, here, here, here Tesla here, here, here, here Tetlock, Philip here, here Texas, Virgil here, here, here The Gateway here TIDAL here Times, The here, here Tinder here, here, here Tolstoy, Leo here, here, here Anna Karenina here trolls here true positives here, here Trump, Donald here, here, here, here, here, here election campaign here, here, here, here, here, here election outcome here, here, here Twitter here, here TUI here, here Turing, Alan here Twitter here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here MacronLeaks here Tyson, Gareth here van Seijen, Harm here, here Vinyals, Oriol here vloggers here voter analysis here, here, here Wall Street Journal here Ward, Ashley here Washington Post here, here, here, here Watts, Duncan here, here Which?

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Only rare glimpses, like the reflection of a car in a mirrored skyscraper, remind the user that you are observing another person’s experience. * * * A user of Google products might be put off by its chipperness, sympathize with the colored-badge underclass, and believe that its old byword, “Don’t Be Evil,” was always bunk; but the company’s steady dominance over internet infrastructure leaves skeptics with few alternatives. In this bind, Google releases its boggling new ventures. Users, at its launch, complained about ads in Gmail—it’s creepy and feels like a robot is reading my email!—and Google Street View appeared, at first, as an obvious invasion of privacy, not to mention an act of hubris with an undercurrent of colonization.

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It connected everyone and democratized the world, people met their spouses and had kids because of it, they kept up with friends halfway across the world with it, they found community there. There were “meaningful communities” for Facebook users, like private support groups for people with rare diseases (never mind that one of its many privacy dustups involved a loophole for marketers to harvest names of users in private patient communities). “Don’t be evil” was always bunk, but at least Google’s old watchword boasted about its tolerance for dissent. Facebook’s company culture was an ouroboros, posing that its virtue rested simply in being. Evil, to Facebook, festered in the absence of Facebook. All this time Zuckerberg was practicing rhetorical usury of his users, for with every rare-disease support group coming together in empathetic harmony, there were white supremacists and actual genocide enablers, uniting and forging their own “communities.”

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Google, especially after the advent of street view and Gmail, provoked major concerns about the centralization of so many citizens’ information in the hands of a private corporation, as well as concerns about how it was casually undoing expectations that many people had about the privacy of their personal information. Google’s efforts to index and make visible the entirety of the web were presented as neutral and helpful, but at the same time the company’s goal was to monetize all of that information, and our searches through it, for ad sales. Google’s now-discarded original motto “Don’t be evil” perhaps seems, in retrospect, to hint at a deeper understanding on the part of its founders that what the company was doing could go badly off the rails without proper oversight. Lastly, Facebook’s roots in sexism and ongoing privacy violations are at this point well known. We understand now that it had a business model that seemingly had harm built into it at the ground level, even if a now-older Zuckerberg has tried to rewrite history and sanitize the story of Facebook’s origins and his corporate strategy.6 In some ways the stories above are unsurprising, and fit a pattern: the entire history of electronic computing is, as is the case with many technologies, intertwined with efforts at domination.

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It is hard enough to dislodge and correct such broken systems when we do have a say—a legally protected vote—in how they should function. It is exponentially harder when the very basis on which the system operates means we do not. After getting pushback from their own employees on the company’s ethical failures, post-“don’t be evil” Google management appointed a problematic “AI ethics board” without giving employees a voice. Employee pushback got the board disbanded, but the company now has no AI ethics board, nor is it required to have one.15 Labor unrest and consumer complaints can only pressure corporations into better behavior when governments enforce laws and regulations meant to protect our lives instead of the companies’ bottom lines.

…

., 77–78, 83 Google, 5, 7, 84, 87, 160, 201, 254, 263, 318, 321, 329, 333 advertising, 136–137 Alphabet, 31, 54 AlphaGo, 7 business concerns, 17 Docs, 224 Drive, 224 employees, 23, 207, 262 ethics board, 22 hiring, 257 Home, 179, 180, 184, 189, 190t image recognition, 4, 120 original motto, (“don’t be evil”), 17, 22 Photos, 265 search, 66, 203, 328 voice recognition, 188 Graham, Paul, 256 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 245 GRC (Gender Resource Center), 298 Great book tourism, 366–367, 374 GreenNet (UK), 324–325 Grubhub, 210 Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network, 327–328 GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) network, 327–328 G-Tech Foundation, 298, 301 Guest, Arthur, 217 Hacking, 15, 81, 87, 256, 266, 287, 291 hacker, 263–264, 266, 287, 291 tourist, 100–102 Haddad, Selim, 216–218, 220 Hangul, 7, 341–344, 351 Hanscom Air Force Base Electronic Systems Division, 274 Harvard University, 14, 257, 349 Hashing, 57, 66, 124–126, 129 #DREAMerHack, 266 #YesWeCode, 253, 264–266 Hayes, Patrick, 52 Haymarket riots, 168 Health insurance, 53 Hebrew, 217, 222, 224–225, 341, 343–344, 354 Henderson, Amy, 265 Heretic, 237 Heterarchy, 86t, 87 Heteronormative, 139, 154 Hewlett-Packard, 318 High tech, 12–13, 21, 35, 37, 46, 147–148 sexism in, 136–138, 152–153 High-level languages (HLL), 275, 277–278, 284, 290 Hindi, 190, 215, 342, 355f Hiring.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

And so it is with the tech companies today: Silicon Valley has used many of the same gambits. You only have to spend a few minutes listening to tech pioneers such as the founders of Facebook or Airbnb to hear how their Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere ‘disruptive’ companies are going to create a more inclusive and happier world. ‘Don’t be evil’, Google used to say; that has now been changed to ‘Do the right thing’. Silicon Valley built its very reputation on harnessing technology to make us happier, more fulfilled and more satisfied human beings. Technology, they argue, is the catalyst for a better life – and incidentally, don’t get in our way as we are creating that better life, or put any constraints on our growth.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The absence of certain stated values is notable, too, because out of the spotlight, they become hard to see and are easily forgotten. Originally, Google operated under a simple, core value: “Don’t be evil.”1 In their 2004 IPO letter, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote: “Eric [Schmidt], Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company.… We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects.… We will live up to our ‘don’t be evil’ principle by keeping user trust.”2 Amazon’s “leadership principles” are entrenched within management structure, and the core of those values center around trust, metrics, speed, frugality, and results.

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

There would be no deep reasoning involved – if there was any reasoning at all, it would probably be no more sophisticated than if you are faced with multiple obstacles then avoid the larger of these – but, frankly, even this level of reasoning seems implausible. The likeliest outcome would be that the car would just slam on the brakes. And perhaps, in practice, that is probably all that we would manage to do, in the same situation. The Rise of Ethical AI ‘Don’t be evil.’ –– Google company motto, 2000–2015 (approximately) Of course, there are much wider issues around AI and ethics, which are perhaps of more immediate importance and relevance than the arguably rather artificial Trolley Problem, and at the time of writing, these issues are being keenly debated.

…

It is, of course, wonderful that big businesses are declaring their commitment to ethical AI. The difficulty, though, is their truly understanding precisely what they have committed to. High-level aspirations, such as sharing the benefits of AI, are welcome, but translating that into specific actions is not easy. The company motto used by Google for more than a decade was ‘Don’t be evil’. That sounds great – and I daresay was genuinely well intentioned – but what, precisely, does that mean for Google’s employees? They will need much more specific guidance if they are to prevent Google from crossing over to the Dark Side. Within the various frameworks that have been proposed, certain themes recur, and there is increasing consensus around these.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

He was the creator and lead developer of Gmail, Google’s web-based email system, which anticipated most aspects of what is now called Web 2.0. As part of his work on Gmail, Buchheit developed the first prototype of AdSense, Google’s program for running ads on other websites. He also suggested the company’s now-famous motto, “Don’t be evil,” at a 2000 meeting on company values. Although not a founder, Buchheit probably contributed more to Google than many founders do their startups. Gmail was in effect a startup within Google—a dramatically novel project on the margins of the company, initiated by a small group and brought to fruition against a good deal of resistance.

…

Livingston: Did you get any compensation for doing this project that was such a big success within the company? Buchheit: It’s hard for me to know even, because, even after the initial stock grants, throughout the history of the company they’ve given follow-on grants. So I don’t know what mine would have been if I wasn’t working on Gmail. Livingston: I heard you came up with the famous “Don’t be evil” principle. Can you give me the background? Buchheit: I believe that it was sometime in early 2000, and there was a meeting to decide on the company’s values. They invited a collection of people who had 170 Founders at Work been there for a while. I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate values seemed a little bit funny to me.

…

I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate values seemed a little bit funny to me. I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different and not one of these usual “strive for excellence” type of statements. I also wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out. It just sort of occurred to me that “Don’t be evil” is kind of funny. It’s also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent. They were tricking them selling search results—which we considered a questionable thing to do because people didn’t realize that they were ads.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

But some malign entity had altered the code to show users the stories of the entity’s choosing.66 That malign entity turned out to be Google, which specialized in projects that appeared to be for the public’s benefit, in keeping with its unofficial corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.” In Bubble City, Swartz opined on this hollow-hearted promise. “Don’t Be Evil was some hacker’s PR ploy that got out of hand,” Swartz wrote. “Paul Buchheit, the guy who made Gmail, suggested it in an early meeting and Amit Patel, another early Googler starting [sic] writing it on whiteboards everywhere. A journalist saw it and the rest was history—but don’t be mistaken, it was never official corporate policy.”67 How could it be?

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

That’s the key difference between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism: if corporations never gained unearned moral authority to begin with, they couldn’t be weaponized so easily by authoritarian stakeholders. THE CCP IS the spider at the center of the global web of stakeholder capitalism. This theoretical observation is borne out by the actions of American companies abroad. For instance, when Google first drafted its code of conduct for employees in 2000, it famously included the line “don’t be evil.”31 Google seems to have quickly forgotten that rule when it went abroad to do business in China. Its initial Chinese search engine enabled censorship by state authorities from 2006 to 2010, but after being the victim of Chinese hacking efforts, Google eventually announced that it would no longer comply with mainland Chinese censorship and relocated to Hong Kong.32 Upon leaving mainland China, Google tried to make a virtue of necessity, with Sergei Brin speaking out against the “forces of totalitarianism.”33 That lip service to freedom of speech earned Google applause in the West, but the truth is that the company quickly sought to return to China by any means necessary.

…

Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Director Yang and State Councilor Wang at the Top of Their Meeting.” U.S. Department of State, 23 Mar. 2021, www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-chinese-director-of-the-office-of-the-central-commission-for-foreign-affairs-yang-jiechi-and-chinese-state-councilor-wang-yi-at-th/. 31. Conger, Kate. “Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause from Its Code of Conduct.” Gizmodo, 18 May 2018, gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393. 32. Helft, Miguel, and David Barboza. “Google Shuts China Site in Dispute over Censorship.” The New York Times, 22 Mar. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html. 33.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different and not one of these usual “strive for excellence” sort of statements. I also wanted something that, once you get it in there, would be hard to take out. Brad Templeton: “Don’t be evil” was the phrase. Paul Buchheit: It just sort occurred to me. Sergey Brin: We have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good—always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, “Don’t be evil” seems the easiest way to summarize it. Paul Buchheit: It’s also a bit of a jab at the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time were, in our opinion, kind of exploiting the users to some extent.

…

Po Bronson wrote a novel about the financial markets and then another about start-ups before he turned to nonfiction. It was the perfect windup for his subject: the great internet gold rush of the late nineties. The Nudist on the Late Shift is still, in this writer’s informed opinion, the best book ever written about that era. Paul Buchheit was a very early Google employee. He coined the phrase “Don’t Be Evil,” which became Google’s corporate motto. He built the AdSense prototype—the software that, even to this day, generates much of Google’s corporate wealth. For an encore he hacked together a little experiment that he called Gmail. Nolan Bushnell founded Atari, the company that started the computer game industry and put Silicon Valley on its modern path.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

But he also began to take the assault personally. Brin’s identity—and, one could argue, Google’s corporate identity too—was inextricably linked with his family’s escape from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. He saw the attack as a direct assault on the founding principles of Google itself, summed up by its three-word motto: “Don’t be evil.” With each visit to the war room, Brin was further convinced that this was not the work of some basement dweller; this was a well-resourced attack. Baked inside that three-word clickbait, “Go Kill Yourself,” was a link to a website hosted in Taiwan that executed a script containing a zero-day exploit in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

…

Google’s presence in China didn’t play well in Washington either. Brin and Page were likened to Nazi collaborators. Members of the House International Relations Committee compared Google to a “functionary of the Chinese government” and called its actions “abhorrent.” “Google has seriously compromised its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ policy,” one Republican congressman said. “Indeed, it has become evil’s accomplice.” Some executives began to feel that way. But they knew that anything less than full compliance with Chinese authorities was dangerous. They’d all heard the stories. Chinese agents frequently raided corporate offices to threaten local executives with jail time if they didn’t move quickly to block “problematic” content.

…

Now Brin was among the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, and richest men. He was not about to roll over to another authoritarian regime now. Neither was every sleepless soul in Google’s war room that January 2010. They’d come to work at Google for the free perks, free food, free classes, free gyms, and “Don’t be evil” ethos. Its more recent recruits had come to join the fight. Nobody standing there that January was going to stay on if they thought their work was somehow abetting Chinese surveillance, jailings, and torture. “Our entire attitude changed,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO told me. “We weren’t going to let it happen again.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

With Microsoft suitably admonished, and now living under a new regime of oversight, the scene was set for Microsoft’s next challenges: in search, digital music and mobile phones. First was a little start-up that was already becoming the talk of internet users, one that was to form its corporate thinking around a motto that tried to express a desire not to be Microsoft: ‘Don’t be evil.’ Chapter Three Search: Google versus Microsoft The weather in Brisbane for the 7th World Wide Web conference in May 1998 was dismal: ‘It rained every day,’ recalls Mike Bracken, one of the attendees. Among the many papers on the schedule for the conference, though largely unnoticed, was one by two Stanford undergraduates, entitled ‘The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine’.

…

Schmidt, while less adamant, said that it was unreasonable to miss out on the opportunity; without Google, the search business in China would still grow, and local rivals would get the chance to dominate and leave Google trying to catch up. Page, in effect holding the casting vote, sided with Schmidt. Google began offering a search engine sited inside China in January 2006 at google.cn. Already known for the ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan, Google came under intense scrutiny over its decision. ‘We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles, but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese… and perhaps make more of a difference,’ Brin suggested in a press conference afterwards. But Irene Khan, then Amnesty International’s secretary-general, was unimpressed: ‘Whether succumbing to demands from Chinese officials or anticipating government concerns, companies that impose restrictions that infringe on human rights are being extremely short-sighted,’ she said, adding: ‘Internet companies justify their actions on the basis of Chinese regulations.

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

“While the internet has opened up commercial opportunities and provided access to vast amounts of information for people the world over, [it] has also become a malicious tool, a cyber-sledgehammer of repression of the government of the People’s Republic of China,” said Chris Smith, a large, square-jawed Republican congressman with intense blue eyes and thin-rimmed reading glasses, as he leaned forward in his seat.1 “As soon as the promise of the internet began to be fulfilled, when brave Chinese [users] began to email each other around the world about human rights issues and corruption by government leaders, the Party cracked down.” Of the four companies arrayed before Smith, Google had faced the most criticism from the US media, thanks to both its fame and the company’s well-known, and often mocked, ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan. Of the four, however, Google’s time operating in China was the shortest, and its conscience was the cleanest. Google was accused of collaborating with the creators of the Great Firewall, but Cisco had helped build it. In 2004, Yahoo provided user records that helped lead to the arrest of journalist Shi Tao, who was later sentenced to ten years in prison.2 The following year, Microsoft had deleted the blog of dissident author Michael Anti after the authorities complained, censoring him not only in China but around the world.3 This sparked instant outrage and criticism, but a Microsoft spokesperson defended the move on the grounds that it was the cost of doing business in China: “While this is a complex and difficult issue, we remain convinced it is better for Microsoft and other multinational companies to be in these markets with our services and communications tools, as opposed to not being there.”

…

Facebook has censored LGBTQ people, Black Lives Matter activists, and breastfeeding mothers.16 YouTube has long been accused of overzealously enforcing copyright, taking down legitimate parodies or videos that fall under ‘fair use’ protections.17 There are already worrying signs that the fallout from the great fake news panic of 2016 will be the increased censorship and marginalisation of minority voices, particularly those on the political fringes, as platforms such as Facebook and Google attempt to litigate which sites constitute a legitimate news source.18 As this book went to print, news emerged that Google had been developing a secret app for the Chinese market, codenamed Dragonfly.19 According to journalist Ryan Gallagher, who broke the story, the Android search tool would automatically identify and filter websites blocked by the Great Firewall, and it had been demonstrated to officials within the Chinese government. Dragonfly’s existence was a closely guarded secret, even within Google itself, and Gallagher’s reporting sparked outrage among employees, some of whom saw it as the final betrayal of Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ ethos. In an open letter to their bosses, hundreds of Googlers complained of a lack of transparency within the company and warned that Dragonfly and a return to China “raise urgent moral and ethical issues” that were not being addressed.20 Those who had lived through the original China experiment were less than impressed.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Even the ruthless “robber barons” of the early 20th century who made huge fortunes from railroads, commodities and power used their money to establish major benevolent institutions. Andrew Carnegie pursued wealth aggressively in his early years and spent the last third of his life giving it all away, establishing a pattern followed and advocated by Bill Gates today. But the Google founders’ excitement about the future is something new. Their famous motto “Don’t be evil” is just the start of it. They want to accelerate the progress of technological innovation to transform what it means to be human. Some people are cynical about this, believing that they are simply covering up their corporate greed in philanthropic clothing. I have no privileged information, but I disagree: my sense is that their enthusiasm for the future is genuine.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Michelin maintained his rating, but Loiseau killed himself anyway in 2003 when a competing French dining guide downgraded his restaurant.) The competitive ecosystem pushes people toward ruthlessness or death. A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn’t have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products, and its impact on the wider world. Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

., and again in February at the Mobile World Congress convention in Barcelona,” Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone reported. “Pichai says they held ‘frank conversations’ about the companies’ intertwined fates.” “I view Tizen as a choice which people can have,” Pichai told Stone. “We need to make sure Android is the better choice.” Google was known for the idealistic spirit embodied in its slogan “Don’t be evil.” But this was a new kind of fight. Pichai told Shin that Google was willing to “walk away” from its Samsung partnership. It was a bold statement; nearly three years earlier, Google had acquired Motorola for $12.5 billion, putting it into direct competition with Samsung and its smartphone hardware.

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Then there was the return to the Google search app, which one contract stipulated was required to be “set as the default search provider for all Web search access points on the Device.” And Google’s search widget now had to be placed on the default home screen, along with an icon for the Google Play app store. Behind the scenes, some Samsung executives thought the company that had once heralded the age of “Don’t be evil” was becoming a bully. One app maker felt Google’s move to bundle its software was “reminiscent of the monopolistic heyday of Microsoft,” Recode reported. Samsung was being forced to rethink their software efforts, which were now in conflict with their previously indispensable partner. D.J.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

They want to survive, just like individuals. Ego-preserving interest. Organizations have an analogue of self-image, and do things to preserve that image. For example, some organizations have a mission statement and go to great lengths to make sure their actions are consistent with their words. (Google's “don't be evil” motto is a good example.) Some organizations have particular reputations they want to preserve, for being honorable, ruthless, quick, and so on. Other organizations take pride in their geographic origins or in how long they've been in business. Still others have charitable foundations. Other psychological motivations.

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Even though organizations have interests, the societal pressures we've already talked about work differently on organizations than they do on people. Moral pressure. Organizations are not people; they don't have brains, and they don't have morals. They can have group interests that are analogous to morals, though. Charities can have lofty mission statements, and a corporate mission statement like “don't be evil” is effectively a moral. Reputational pressure. For groups, reputation works differently than for individuals. Organizations care about their reputation just as individuals do: possibly more, due to size. They also have more control over it. Organizations can spend money to repair their reputations by undertaking advertising and public relations campaigns, making over their images, and so on—options that are simply unavailable to most individuals.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Let’s be clear about this third level of influence, then. It was a remarkable tactic, and demonstrates that the big companies in the digital environment are beginning to recognize that they have to push back against the big companies from the traditional entertainment environment. But that’s a pretty meek revolution. Google is still a corporation, “Don’t Be Evil” motto notwithstanding (Vaidhyanathan 2011). If the digital companies start expending more resources pressuring Congress, that will provide a more pluralistic balance in the MPAA’s policy playground, but it doesn’t necessarily put power in the hands of the “Internet public.” The fight over Internet censorship is far from over.

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It’s possible that major tech firms will get a seat at the table in the next round of negotiations. It is possible to craft an Internet piracy bill that serves the interests of Google and the interests of Hollywood without serving the interests of smaller content creation sites. We would do well to recall the Net Neutrality compromise that Google made in the summer of 2010. Sometimes “Don’t Be Evil” is just a motto. The problem here is that, without Google, the third level of influence is much reduced. Google occupies a unique space in the geography of the Internet. 3. Most hopefully, it is possible that the SOPA blackout will allow a new public—what David Parry calls “the Internet Public” (Parry 2011) to take root.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

* * * — the campaign intensified after he’d left the Trump White House in 2017 and it began the way many of Thiel’s companies and political projects had begun since his college days: with a culture war. Google was, not unlike Stanford, full of lefty idealists devoted to the company’s lofty mission—“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—and its vaguely progressive-sounding politics that promised “don’t be evil.” But Google also had a conservative contingent—young college graduates who’d been attracted to the growing company because it paid well, offered great job security, and had the reputation for hiring elite engineers. Many of them were well versed in the blend of prosperity gospel and libertarian politics of Peter Thiel.

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posted the same message: Kari Paul, “Tech Workers Protest Data Mining Firm Palantir for Role in Immigrant Arrests,” The Guardian, May 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/13/tech-workers-palantir-immigration-protest-github. cut ties with it: Tom McKay, “Dozens Arrested at #JewsAgainstICE Protest at Amazon Store in NYC,” Gizmodo, August 11, 2019, https://gizmodo.com/dozens-arrested-at-jewsagainstice-protest-at-amazon-st-1837156701. The effort, Project Dragonfly: Mark Bergen, “Google in China: When ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Met the Great Firewall,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 8, 2011, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-08/google-never-stopped-trying-to-go-to-china?sref=4ZgkJ7cZ. went on CNBC: “Joe Lonsdale: Google Is Not a Patriotic Company,” Squawk Alley, CNBC, July 15, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

“They entered the phone business. Make no mistake. They want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” A few minutes later, after the meeting moved on to another topic, Jobs returned to his tirade to attack Google’s famous values slogan. “I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing. This ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, it’s bullshit.” Jobs felt personally betrayed. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had been on the Apple board during the development of the iPhone and iPad, and Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had treated him as a mentor. He felt ripped off. Android’s touchscreen interface was adopting more and more of the features—multi-touch, swiping, a grid of app icons—that Apple had created.

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But he also threatened that if Google continued to develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of the iPhone’s look and feel. That was the context for Jobs’s pronouncement that Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan was “bullshit.” So Apple filed suit against HTC (and, by extension, Android), alleging infringement of twenty of its patents. Among them were patents covering various multi-touch gestures, swipe to open, double-tap to zoom, pinch and expand, and the sensors that determined how a device was being held.

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Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish,” New Yorker, Apr. 26, 2010; Ryan Tate, “The Price of Crossing Steve Jobs,” Gawker, Sept. 30, 2010. CHAPTER 39: NEW BATTLES Google: Open versus Closed: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Tim Cook, Bill Gates. John Abell, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra Is ‘Bullshit,’” Wired, Jan. 30, 2010; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “A Battle for the Future Is Getting Personal,” New York Times, March 14, 2010. Flash, the App Store, and Control: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Tom Friedman, Art Levinson, Al Gore. Leander Kahney, “What Made Apple Freeze Out Adobe?”

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

They built it out of old bits and pieces made by Simulmatics: content analysis, the simulation of human behavior, targeted messages, social networks, IF/THEN statements. Unlike the scientists of Simulmatics, many of the people who built the new machine did not begin with the best of intentions. They boasted that, at best, they had no bad intentions. “Don’t be evil,” the motto of Google, marked the limit of a swaggering, devil-may-care ethical ambition; doing good did not come into it.7 Incubated decades before, beneath a honeycombed, geodesic dome in Wading River, this work found a place, too, in universities. In the 2010s, a flood of money into universities attempted to make the study of data a science, with data science initiatives, data science programs, data science degrees, data science centers.8 Much academic research that fell under the label “data science” produced excellent and invaluable work, across many fields of inquiry, findings that would not have been possible with computational discovery.9 And no field should be judged by its worst practitioners.

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., Aline Holzwarth, “The Three Laws of Human Behavior,” behavioraleconomics.com, May 7, 2019, https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/the-three-laws-of-human-behavior/. Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 14, 2011. Although, notably, Google abandoned “Don’t be evil” in 2015, and Alphabet Inc. adopted a code of conduct that urged employees to “do the right thing,” http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/02/as-google-becomes-alphabet-dont-be-evil-vanishes/. Mathematicians-turned-businessmen Jeff Hammerbacher and D. J. Patil claim to have coined the term “data scientist” in 2008, and not long after, data science was also embraced both within and outside the academy as a new scientific method, a “fourth paradigm,” following the earlier paradigms of empirical, theoretical, and computational analysis.

Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Ideals are expressed as architecture principles. A good format is the TOGAF formula of Name, Statement, Rationale, and Implications:Name – Should be easy to remember and represent the essence of the rule. Statement – Should clearly and precisely state the rule. It should also be nontrivial (“don’t be evil” does not pass the test). Rationale – Provides a reason for the rule and highlights the benefits of it. Implications – Spells out the real-world consequences of this principle. The first thing to do then is to flesh out these ideals and create a process through which you can create buy-in to them.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Jonathan’s email said the same thing: ‘Something about this story resonated with them, so much so that they felt compelled to google her name. That means they’re engaged. If interest in Justine were sufficient to encourage users to stay online for more time than they would otherwise, this would have directly resulted in Google making more advertising revenue. Google has the informal corporate motto of “don’t be evil”, but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.’ In the absence of any better data from Google, he wrote, he could only ever offer a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation. But he thought it would be appropriately conservative - maybe a little too conservative - to estimate Justine’s worth, being a ‘low-value query’, at a quarter of the average.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

Page prided himself on hiring engineers for business-minded jobs that would traditionally go to someone trained in, say, finance. Even as Google came to employ tens of thousands of workers, Larry Page personally reviewed a file on each potential hire to make sure that the company didn’t veer too far from its engineering roots. The best expression of the company’s idealism was its oft-mocked motto, “Don’t be evil.” That slogan becomes easier to understand, and a more potent expression of values, when you learn that Google never intended the phrase for public consumption. The company meant to focus employees on the beneficent, ambitious mission of the company—a Post-it note to the corporate self, reminding Google not to behave as selfishly and narrow-mindedly as Microsoft, the king of tech it intended to dethrone.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

That puts people in a place where they can do their very best work.”8 Not exactly the kind of crew Jobs would have commanded. Google’s Crusaders “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—it’s hard to imagine a more ambitious initial company mission than that (except perhaps Google’s other one: “Don’t be evil”). But that’s the crusade Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, embarked on in 1998. Since then, Google has redefined how we use the web, redesigned concepts of the workplace, and refined its business model—separating its wildly successful advertising business from its “moon shot” initiatives like self-driving cars.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Internet culture also believes that the Internet itself is a key to building a better world. The invention of the Internet marks a break with the past, and an opportunity to open many old political and social debates. Companies see themselves as enlightened participants in these debates, with a social mandate as well as a business mandate; Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra encapsulates their belief that the company has a moral mission as well as a technological one. Internet culture is also supremely ambitious and self-confident. It’s a confidence captured in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s saying that “software is eating the world.” In its outer reaches it is an ambition manifested in ideas of Seasteading (a movement to build self-governing floating cities, started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel) and the Singularity (a belief in “the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity,” originating with the ideas of inventor and now Google employee Ray Kurzweil).

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Over the past few years, the GNU/Linux open source expanded and became a robust—if still technologically daunting—alternative to the copyrighted, proprietary software of behemoths like Microsoft and Oracle, while the model of collaborative, cooperative development yielded results that could go toe-to-toe with established, for-profit business models. 173 GENERATIONS The Searchers: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Others Don’t Be Evil. —Google corporate motto Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke Half a century into the computerization of culture, whatever linear narratives of origin we have been able to map out here definitively break down. The bursting of the dot-com bubble was reminiscent of the disastrous fate of railroad companies in the United States in the late nineteenth century.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

For example, when China demanded that foreign PCs come preinstalled with software that would allow censors to block selected sites, the public outcry shamed the government to scale back its request, instead asking only to make the software optional. What if China tried to force ICANN to deregister certain domain names it had trouble blocking, and ICANN instead threatened to delist official Chinese servers? Eventually, the Chinese authorities may respect and even follow Google’s unofficial motto: “Don’t Be Evil.” Human-Rights.org If global justice has a voice, its name is, appropriately, Avaaz, the word in many Asian languages for “voice.” Avaaz is one of the largest online communities with more than three million members. Spearheaded by a lean team of social networkers, it has no use for national chapters, dividing its operations not by geography but by language—currently thirteen of them (to the United Nations’ six).

Shipping Greatness by Chris Vander Mey

business logic, corporate raider, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fudge factor, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, performance metric, recommendation engine, Skype, slashdot, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, two-pizza team, web application

Have your team review the log data, or at least understand the systems that are generating the reports, whether those are Webtrends or Google Analytics. Defensive Acquisitions I have not led a defensive deal. In my opinion, they’re not very nice and smell of fear-based decision making. If you have the pockets to do a defensive deal, please don’t be evil when you do one. If you’re even considering doing a defensive deal, you probably need to think about what monopolistic practices are. “I’m not a lawyer” is the first thing you should get used to saying because at least your comments will be in context. I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t tell you what not to do.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

A new order would surely emerge. Even when business came to the internet world, it was going to be different. The reach and scale of the internet would enable a ‘long tail’ of small and independent producers to flourish. Online companies were launched talking in earnest terms of changing the world, with ‘don’t be evil’ mantras alongside – and generous share options making even their office decorators rich. For a long time, you could convince yourself it was all the real deal. At the start of the last decade, WikiLeaks used its unique online platform to challenge the world’s biggest superpower with an unprecedented series of leaks.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

For example, company leaders could publicly commend an employee or team for exemplary behavior, signaling to the broader workforce the sorts of values they want employees to emulate. Corporations regularly try to rally employees around a common narrative and appeal to reason. It is not uncommon for companies to adapt easily memorable slogans to drive home the cultural imperative to its employees. Some better-known examples include Google’s “Don’t be evil,” Apple’s “Think different,” and BP’s rebranding as Beyond Petroleum. By and large, even in cases where management has taken the lead on the culture message, boards will likely have a hand in overseeing the direction of a company’s culture. Companies can also discipline employees for deviations from stated cultural standards or for breaking legal and regulatory rules.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

They told stories about moon shots, abundance, and living on Mars, and in the midst of the Great Pessimism we were enraptured. NYU marketing professor, Scott Galloway, says of the iPhone: it “was a bright light in the darkness that signaled hope and optimism.”11 It had suddenly become acceptable to think big again. Larry Page, whose company’s unofficial slogan is “Don’t be evil,” talks about using knowledge to fix things and help people. “In every story I read about Google, it’s about us versus some other company or some stupid thing,” he laments. “I don’t find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative is not how we make progress.”12 Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky speaks of the company’s “pure” mission to “solve a problem and to help people.”13 Yelp gives its employees teddy bears for being nice.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Many, if not most, of the companies mentioned in this book have been involved in activities that cast shadows over their more altruistic efforts. JPMorgan was home to the London Whale scandal, where a single trader accumulated outsized positions in credit default swaps that led to a $6 billion loss and called into question the bank’s risk management systems. Google, despite its initial “Don’t Be Evil” motto, has been dogged by accusations that its business has been built on its misappropriation of other people’s work, and that its search engine favors its own services over outside competitors. Apple, like many of its tech brethren, manipulates global rules to pay an unconscionably low rate of tax on its activities.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Facebook, for example, shares your data with a company called Datalogix to establish what percentage of those who view an ad actually go on to buy a product from that advertiser.142 In a bracing book called You Are Not a Gadget, the virtual reality pioneer turned cybersceptic Jaron Lanier describes Google and Facebook as ‘spying/advertising empires’.143 These information businesses claim the data and results are all anonymised, but somewhere some machine and therefore potentially some person knows it is you. Hence the disconcerting experience that, minutes after searching for, buying online or simply emailing about, say, sandals, advertisements for sandals start popping up on our screens. (I choose a deliberately innocuous example.) Google’s most famous slogan is ‘Don’t be evil’. Yet as one Google engineer confided to another author, with a smile: ‘We’re not evil. We try really hard not to be evil. But if we wanted to, man, could we ever!’144 Beside personalised advertising and the gargantuan collection of personal data that underpins it, there is customised search.

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See also Dahrendorf, Ralf; Domscheit-Berg, Daniel; East Germany; German language; Gutenberg, Johann; Koselleck, Reinhart; Küng, Hans; Mann, Heinrich; Morgenstern, Christian; Nolte, Ernst; Tucholsky, Kurt; Ulbricht, Walter; Zypries, Brigitte Germany Abolishes Itself (Sarrazin), 213 gestures, 8, 123–24, 149, 176 Ghonim, Wael, 315 Gibson, William, 22 Gladstone, Brooke, 196 ‘glass person,’ 324 global city, 18–19, 207 global north and south, journal citations, 176–77 Global Voices, 200 God, 244, 267–68 Godwin, Mike, 23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 210 Goffman, Erving, 316 Gogol, Nikolai, 234 Goldacre, Ben, 153 Golden Rule, 109 Golden Shield (Great Firewall of China), 40, 362 Gomorrah (Saviano), 141–42 Gonzales, Alberto, 319–20 González, Mario Costeja, 307–8 Google, 169–70; algorithmic choice in Google car, 365; ‘autocomplete’ in Search, 303; banning cigarette/liquor ads, 52; becoming more ‘European,’ 308; Bettina Wulff suit against, 303; Bruce Leiter on, 93; Buzz social network, 289; China and, 26, 40, 47, 54; collecting information from Gmail, 169; and Communications Decency Act (US), 23; contradictory legal postures, 302; customised search results, 51; delisting requests, 308; ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan, 50–51; European or American norms on, 308; free access in poor countries, 358; and free speech, 168–69, 239, 285; goal of to make money, 50; González suit against, 307–8; googling as research starting point, 162; and Holocaust denial, 55; mission statement of, 167; near monopoly by, 169–70; Olympics editorial, 237; and paedophilia, 92, 168; personalisation of search results by, 134, 169–70; and privacy, 285, 289, 295, 303, 309; as private superpower, virtual country, 1, 21, 23–24, 31, 47–48; profits from ads, 169; and reputation management, 302; Search, 168, 237, 303; Search Quality Rating Guidelines, 187; self-made rules of, 84; selling freedom, 50; tailored search results, 51; Translate, 95, 176; value to versus value for, 284.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

It was just about to launch its AdWords search advertising product, which would become one of the most successful products in history. “I really believed that was the future of the business,” she says. She was fine being a tractor in that effort, building an organization, changing the nature of ad sales from schmoozing to analytics. Sandberg was never one of the people you would hear talking about “Don’t Be Evil” or any of that stuff. She once remarked that, in her observation, a company’s beliefs were the opposite of its mantras. “My attitude has always been that you’d better keep your head down and do your work,” she once told me. “I delivered my numbers and focused on my metrics.” But by the end of 2007, it was time to leave Google.

…

We want to move fast, ship the thing that will get the impact that we want, and then keep going.” Indeed, the slogans, particularly “Move Fast and Break Things,” were prone to misinterpretation. “It meant to iterate and try things and not be afraid of failure—but not to be sloppy,” says Graham. “It didn’t mean to duct tape the server and run away.” But just as Google’s motto—“Don’t Be Evil”—would be used against it, the “break things” part of Facebook’s motto would be used by critics as a cudgel, when people were accusing Facebook of actually breaking things—breaking social order, breaking democracy, breaking civilization itself—like some digital version of a bull in a Restoration Hardware store.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

The Huffington Post has constructed a long list of the firm’s privacy violations.55 Google, too, is renowned for mining personal information. The company’s bid to use Google Plus as a platform for its other offerings represents just another attempt to create a “database for affinity” that might prove irresistible to prying advertisers.56 As one wag tweeted in 2013: “Google motto 2004: Don’t be evil. Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define. Google motto 2013: We make military robots.” It may be time, as blogger Joshua Rivera put it, to call Google “an evil empire.”57 But Google is hardly alone in pushing these violations of privacy. Apple has been hauled in front of the courts for its violations, while Consumer Reports has documented Facebook’s pervasive, and often deepening, privacy breaches, including such details as health conditions (which an insurer could use against someone), travel plans (convenient for burglars), and information about a person’s sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and ethnicity.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

I am somewhat worried that market concentration ratios in many parts of the American economy are rising, but most of those markets seem pretty contestable and offer consumers lots of choice. The upshot is that the analysts who raise this issue usually are exaggerating the problem, harm to consumers is hard to find, and American competition remains alive and well. 6. ARE THE BIG TECH COMPANIES EVIL? Google’s original motto, which endeared it to many geeks, was “Don’t be evil.” And indeed, for a long time it seemed the company realized this aspiration. People under thirty may not know how hit-or-miss it was to search the web prior to Google. It has greatly enhanced our ability to find the right restaurant reviews, look up medical information, research dating or business partners, and track down old friends, not to mention that it provides the means for good, link-based blogging, among many other advances.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Every company that takes on traditional investment is (often unwittingly) promising to grow forever in exchange for capital now. While it can be hard to imagine in the early days, the very nature of growth beyond scale is exploitative. Take Google, the paragon of iconoclastic virtue when it rose to prominence with its “Don’t be evil” slogan. You can’t “organize the world’s information” without inadvertently (or intentionally) controlling the flow of that information. Or take Facebook, the social network whose noble mission is to “bring the world closer together.” As an ad-supported business, its growth depends on capturing more and more of our attention, which means it must—at a very fundamental cognitive level—manipulate and addict us.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

We’re generally more focused on practical machine learning technologies like machine vision, speech recognition, and machine translation, which essentially is about building statistical models to match patterns—nothing close to the “thinking machine” vision of AGI. But I think Page’s quotation sheds more light on Google’s attitudes than Freidenfelds’s. And it helps explain Google’s evolution from the visionary, insurrectionist company of the 1990s, with the much touted slogan DON’T BE EVIL, to today’s opaque, Orwellian, personal-data-aggregating behemoth. The company’s privacy policy shares your personal information among Google services, including Gmail, Google+, YouTube, and others. Who you know, where you go, what you buy, who you meet, how you browse—Google collates it all.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

This way of describing our predicament runs the risk, innate to Christian demonology, of paranoia. It is less ‘they’re all out to get me’ than ‘evil is something that happens to me, rather than something I am involved in’. As with conspiracy theory, it externalizes evil. After all, the platforms are not only not demons; they are ostentatious about it. ‘Don’t be Evil’, as the Google slogan has it. They don’t, by themselves, generate the acedia, the generalized depression and weariness that they monetize. No more than the pharmaceutical industry does. They offer us a solution, an addiction which magnifies and potentiates acedia. But, as with all addictions, we succumb to it with our choices and our rationalizations.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

But how much self-imposed morality can we really expect from multi–hundred-billion-dollar companies that are currently accused of a raft of unethical behavior around the world, including monopolistic market practices, exploitation of their users’ data, and failure to pay their local taxes—not to mention the myriad other ethical scandals perpetually engulfing Big Tech? Although these companies are by no means intrinsically bad, they remain profit-driven businesses, answerable only to their shareholders or investors. Whatever seductive promises their don’t be evil–style slogans make, there is no such thing as a moral for-profit company, inside or outside Silicon Valley. For better or worse, the aim of these private superpowers is to dominate markets, not share them. Their goal is their bottom line, not ethics. And yes, it’s also encouraging that powerful Silicon Valley investors like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel have contributed significant capital to an open-source AI platform that, we are promised, won’t be owned or operated by a single data silo.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

In fact, they celebrated it. Facebook’s mission statement for its first decade was “to make the world more open and connected.”19 Twitter said that its goal was “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”20 Google’s working motto was simple: “Don’t be evil.” For a while, it worked. The social media giants were essentially open platforms, with a light hand in terms of censorship. Then the 2016 election happened. The shock that greeted Trump’s victory in 2016 fundamentally altered the orientation of the social media platforms. That’s because, up until that moment, the personal political preferences of executives and staffers—overwhelmingly liberal—had meshed with their preferred political outcomes.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

What happens to changing the world? What happens to “the United Nations at the kitchen table”? Can you have a social mission and be a big behemoth on Wall Street? Plenty of tech-industry giants, of course, claim they have missions. Facebook’s is “Make the world more open and connected.” Google had “Don’t be evil” until its new parent, Alphabet, changed it to “Do the right thing.” But balancing mission and Wall Street expectations is a tricky thing. “I really like these guys—they are genuine,” says Jessi Hempel, head of editorial for the online technology publication Backchannel, about the Airbnb founders.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

It would build its processes based upon the customer outside-in view of the interactions and user experience people desire, and it would target to overcome the things that piss off most people, such as lock-in fees, hidden charges, balloon payments on overdrafts and so on and so forth. It would make it clear what ‘fair’ means, by defining this and making sure it is practiced in everything we preach. A bit like Google’s “don’t be evil”, even though they sometimes appear to be, my new bank’s motto would be “don’t screw the customer”, and we’d make it clear how we would avoid doing that. We would support customers joining our “screw loose lounge” where they could rant and rave and discuss and debate, and we would have a “live and unscrewed” section for staff and management to air their hang ups and thumbs ups.

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Considering that the NSA is the single biggest collector of zero day vulnerabilities, that information would help make Google more secure than others that don’t get access to such prized secrets. The agreement also lets the agency analyze intrusions that have already occurred, so it can help trace them back to their source. Google took a risk forming an alliance with the NSA. The company’s corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,” would seem at odds with the work of a covert surveillance and cyber warfare agency. But Google got useful information in return for its cooperation. Shortly after the China revelation, the government gave Sergey Brin, Google’s cofounder, a temporary security clearance that allowed him to attend a classified briefing about the campaign against his company.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

The governments of South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand each found Google in violation of privacy laws; in March 2011 France punished Google with a fine of 100,000 euros. In March 2013 Google paid a total of $7 million to thirty-eight US states and the District of Columbia to settle their lawsuits over the Street View matter. For a company whose unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil,” the whole event was a bitter public humiliation. No surprise that in May 2010, Google said its Street View cars would no longer capture Wi-Fi mapping data. By then Google had recruited a global army of Wi-Fi mapmakers—the millions who carried cell phones that ran the company’s Android operating system.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

A final possible way to end civilization is arguably to just carry on the way things are at the moment. This is often seen as the way that climate change will overwhelm us, but many argue that the same laissez-faire attitude puts humanity in danger of subservience to corporations who may make token claims to have the good of humanity at heart (think of Google’s former corporate motto “Don’t be evil”), but in reality are driven by hard cash and shareholder returns, trampling individuals under foot. We started this chapter with the chill of the cold war threat of atomic annihilation. And during the 1960s and 1970s the world became familiar with antinuclear demonstrations. But the protests weren’t limited to calls for nuclear disarmament.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Google and Facebook come to mind. Their founders were able to retain majority control, giving them leeway to manage far more than simple shareholder value. CEOs who choose to deliver on a triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) are great … except that they eventually have to leave. Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” is only as good as Larry Page’s interpretation of it. And even benevolent dictators are still dictators. A few companies—including Zipcar, in my opinion, but also BlaBlaCar and Etsy—will always deliver significant social and environmental benefits no matter how they are financed or who runs them, because they necessarily deliver positive externalities.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The ways that we interact with datacentric systems imply a contractual trust with platforms to protect our data privacy. And indeed, Netflix was roundly criticized for its privacy violations.58 The particular examples that Uber provides us with might have simply joined a long list of “oops” moments in which technology hit a nerve. But Uber is different. It is the legacy of a technology culture that cautioned “Don’t Be Evil,” the slogan that came from Google’s code of conduct around 2000. Similarly, Facebook, founded in 2004, announced that its mission was “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” and, in 2017, adjusted it to: “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”59 Technology companies get the benefit of the doubt in American society, enjoying a high level of status and respect as powerful, entrepreneurial innovators that deliver a better future.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

I was writing during the last gasps of the internet as a potential force for democracy, before Silicon Valley companies surrendered to the filthy lucre obtained by spying on citizens and data mining personal profiles for the benefit of hostile states. It was a time when people would learn that Google’s slogan was “Don’t Be Evil” and not burst into ironic laughter. American exceptionalism was always an illusion, and Americans had long been prone to paranoid conspiracies, but even I was surprised by the quickness with which US political culture came to mirror that of surveillance states. I had not anticipated how quickly the cyber-utopianism embraced by internet corporations would turn into nihilist abdication of the public good.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

While some thirty thousand ecstatic nerds, some of them half-naked, dance and ululate below, techno-priests ignite a forty-foot genderless wooden statue together with a temple in the sand full of vatic testimonies. Like Google, Burning Man might be termed a commons cult: a communitarian religious movement that celebrates giving—free offerings with no expectation of return—as the moral center of an ideal economy of missionaries rather than mercenaries. It conveys the superiority of “don’t be evil” Google, in contrast to what Silicon Valley regards as the sinister history of Microsoft in the North. Burning Man’s website, like Google’s, presents a decalogue of communal principles. Authored by the founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the “10 Principles of Burning Man” would seem on the surface incompatible with the ethos of a giant corporation raking in money and headed by two of the world’s richest men: Radical Inclusion: no prerequisites for participation.

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

GOOGLE—NOT A CONVENTIONAL COMPANY, NOT A CONVENTIONAL TAM Google’s S1 filing (its 2004 IPO document) began with a letter from its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The first two sentences read: “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” Google largely lived up to this promise. It included the goals “don’t be evil” and “make the world a better place” in its founders’ letter. It promoted and maintained at its headquarters a college campus–like atmosphere of creativity and challenge, replete with gourmet cafes open day and night. Its first Analyst Day featured a presentation not by its CFO, George Reyes, but by its executive chef, Charlie Ayers.

Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker

8-hour work day, active transport: walking or cycling, barriers to entry, book value, buy and hold, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Easter island, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, game design, index fund, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, junk bonds, lateral thinking, lifestyle creep, loose coupling, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, passive income, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, psychological pricing, retail therapy, risk free rate, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, wage slave, working poor

Decrease the volume and size but increase the sophistication of your activities and possessions. Measure prosperity by less activity, not more. Do fewer useless things. Work for the purpose of earning money for no more than five years of your life or five hours a week. Avoid generating waste and find ways to use the waste of others. Learn to use the system to your advantage, but don't be evil! Serve yourself rather than having others serve you. Instead, help them. Keep running costs down but pay for value. Maintain health to avoid the personal and monetary cost of sickness. Build up the capital to live as a capitalist or the skills to always find a new job. Focus on productive assets rather than stuff.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Google’s recently established Brussels office—charged with managing public relations for the search 296 CONCLUSION giant’s contentious relationship with the European Union over ­privacy issues—seemed eager to prove its cultural bona fides and ­establish itself as a good corporate citizen. Indeed, Google has since initiated a series of other cultural sponsorships across Europe, trying to project an image in keeping with its corporate motto: “Don’t Be Evil,” a mantra that seems a distant echo of Otlet’s dictum that the Mundaneum must “always be good.” While Google’s troubled relationship with the European Union may have provided some impetus for the sponsorship, there were human factors at work as well. Google’s local marketing manager, Julien Blanchez, happened to hail from Mons, home of the Mundaneum museum, as did Prime Minister di Rupo, who for a time served as the city’s mayor.

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

If everything you do is geotagged, then everyone always knows where you are—which is awesome if you’re hoping to meet some friends after work for a drink but maybe not so awesome if potential burglars are casing your neighborhood to find out who’s not home, or if you’re dealing with an abusive ex or a child predator or even some stranger who got mad about something you posted online. We’re an Orwellian dystopia in the making, says Dobson, except that no shadowy government will be providing the surveillance. Instead, we’re opting to do it to ourselves. With Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto in mind, I ask Paul Rademacher if he worries about the new digital map technology—call it Maps 2.0—turning evil. He tells me that Michael Jones, Google Earth’s chief technologist, often points out that all new technologies seem scary, but months later you find yourself wondering what you ever did without them.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler