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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

In March 2019, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sued Facebook for its ad policy, citing violations of the Fair Housing Act and discriminatory practices against users.31 Highly paid tech workers and the companies that employ them are also creating havoc in the places where these tech firms settle, such as East Palo Alto and San Francisco. In California, for each new tech worker, it is estimated that between two and five supporting jobs are created—dining hall servers, bus drivers, security guards, and cleaners. New jobs are great, but these jobs tend to be low-paid contract gigs. With the skyrocketing rents in communities near and in Silicon Valley caused by increased demand from highly paid tech workers, many ordinary folks find that they no longer can find a place to live in the region.

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Nothing demonstrates who is valued and who isn’t better than the pay disparity between full-time, permanent employees and “blue-collar,” contract tech workers—workers who don’t receive the pay or benefits enjoyed by full-time employees despite filling critical roles ranging from content moderators and customer support reps to janitors and shuttle bus drivers. In Santa Clara County blue-collar tech workers make an average of $19,900 a year whereas permanent, full-time employees of the same companies make $113,000.8 Blue-collar tech workers have had enough. Facebook cafeteria workers voted to unionize in March 2018. Facebook also agreed to pay all its contract employees $15 an hour, following a broader nationwide push by the Fight for $15 campaign.

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Many blue-collar tech workers are organizing through Silicon Valley Rising, a community-, faith-, and labor-based coalition created to fight occupational segregation and income inequality. SVR sees the struggles of tech workers as rooted in the broader dislocations and disruptions caused by tech companies’ rapid and unrestrained invasion of Santa Clara County over the past few decades. The coalition calls not only for wage gains but also affordable housing, and an inclusive tech industry; right now only one in ten permanent employees of tech companies are Black or Latino. Low-paid tech workers are fighting for bread and butter, but they aren’t the only workers in the tech industry who are fighting.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

(SlideShare presentation, Research for Media Training North West, Manchester, UK, September 2004), 13. 92Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 63. 93Weststar, O’Meara, and Legault, “Developer Satisfaction Survey 2017 Summary Report,” 12. 94Weststar, O’Meara, and Legault, “Developer Satisfaction Survey 2017 Summary Report,” 17. 95Weststar, O’Meara, and Legault, “Developer Satisfaction Survey 2017 Summary Report,” 18. 96Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, 107. 97Williams, “You Can Sleep Here All Night.” 98Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, 108. Organizing in the Videogames Industry 1“Tech Workers Coalition,” Tech Workers Coalition, 2018, https://techworkerscoalition.org. 2R. K. Upadhya, “Disrupting Disruption: On Intervening against Technological Restructuring,” Notes from Below 2 (March 30, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/disrupting-disruption. 3Jason Prado, “Prospects for Organizing in the Tech Industry,” Notes from Below 2 (March 30, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/prospects-for-organizing-the-tech-industry. 4Tech Workers Coalition, “Tech Workers, Platform Workers, and Workers’ Inquiry.” Notes from Below 2 (March 30, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/tech-workers-platform-workers-and-workers-inquiry. 5Tech Workers Coalition, “Tech Workers, Platform Workers, and Workers’ Inquiry.” 6“Why We Strike,” SAG-AFTRA, 2016, www.sagaftra.org/files/whywestrike.pdf. 7Quoted in Ian Williams, “The Ongoing Voice Actor’s Strike Is More than Just a Little Drama,” Waypoint, December 29, 2016, https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/nznyxq/the-ongoing-voice-actors-strike-is-more-than-just-a-little-drama. 8Quoted in Williams, “The Ongoing Voice Actor’s Strike.” 9Luke Plunkett, “The Video Game Voice-Actor’s Strike Is Over,” Kotaku, November 7, 2017, https://kotaku.com/the-video-game-voice-actors-strike-is-over-1820240476. 10Dante Douglas, “Game Developers Need a Union,” Paste, March 7, 2018, www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/03/game-developers-need-a-union.html. 11Quoted in Ethan Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio Have Been on Strike for a Month,” Kotaku, March 16, 2018, https://kotaku.com/developers-at-one-french-game-studio-have-been-on-strik-1823833426. 12This is a national collective bargaining agreement in France that mainly covers consulting firms. 13Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 14Quoted in Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 15Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 16Quoted in Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 17“A Black and White Tri-Fold Leaflet,” Game Workers Unite UK, 2018, http://gwu-uk.org/assets/trifold-bw-uk.pdf. 18Matt Kim, “IGDA Director Says Capital, Not Unions, Will Keep Game Development Jobs Secure,” US Gamer, January 19, 2018, www.usgamer.net/articles/igda-director-union-crunch-interview. 19Ian Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades, Gaming Is Finally Talking Unionization,” Waypoint, March 23, 2018, https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/7xdv5e/after-destroying-lives-for-decades-gaming-is-finally-talking-unionization. 20Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades.” 21Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades.” 22Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades.” 23Michelle Ehrhardt, “IGDA, Union-Busting and GDC 2018,” Unwinnable, March 22, 2018, https://unwinnable.com/2018/03/22/igda-union-busting-and-gdc-2018. 24Ehrhardt, “IGDA, Union-Busting and GDC 2018.” 25Game Workers Unite, “Game Workers Unite Zine,” Notes from Below 2 (March 30, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/game-workers-unite-zine. 26Game Workers Unite, “Game Workers Unite Zine.” 27Game Workers Unite, “Game Workers Unite Zine.” 28Quoted in Thomas Wilde, “‘It’s Very David and Goliath’: Inside the Growing Effort to Unionize Video Game Developers,” Geekwire, May 9, 2018, www.geekwire.com/2018/david-goliath-inside-growing-effort-unionize-video-game-developers. 29Quoted in Wilde, “It’s Very David and Goliath.” 30“Prospects for Organising the Videogames Industry: Interview with Game Workers Unite UK,” interview by Jamie Woodcock, Notes from Below 3 (August 16, 2018), https://notesfrombelow.org/article/prospects-for-organising-the-videogames-industry. 31“Prospects for Organising.” 32“Prospects for Organising.” 33“Prospects for Organising.” 34Jamie Woodcock, “Playing for Power,” Jacobin, January 3, 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/video-game-workers-unite-union-uk. 35See, for example, articles at https://notesfrombelow.org/.

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Upadhya, a member of TWC, explained: “Since the 2016 elections in the US, there has been an unprecedented level of visible unrest among workers at all levels in the tech industry, from food service workers to programmers and engineers.”2 For TWC, this unrest has led to tech workers organizing, but it has also spawned cross-sector campaigns at the so-called campus workplaces, with tech workers—who often enjoy better pay, terms, and conditions—supporting the struggles of other groups of service workers. As Jason Prado, a software developer, wrote in an article published in Notes from Below: “Service workers on my company’s campuses have organized and won union contracts, and workers further up the hierarchy have actively supported these efforts.”

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Notes from Below 2 (March 30, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/tech-workers-platform-workers-and-workers-inquiry. 5Tech Workers Coalition, “Tech Workers, Platform Workers, and Workers’ Inquiry.” 6“Why We Strike,” SAG-AFTRA, 2016, www.sagaftra.org/files/whywestrike.pdf. 7Quoted in Ian Williams, “The Ongoing Voice Actor’s Strike Is More than Just a Little Drama,” Waypoint, December 29, 2016, https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/nznyxq/the-ongoing-voice-actors-strike-is-more-than-just-a-little-drama. 8Quoted in Williams, “The Ongoing Voice Actor’s Strike.” 9Luke Plunkett, “The Video Game Voice-Actor’s Strike Is Over,” Kotaku, November 7, 2017, https://kotaku.com/the-video-game-voice-actors-strike-is-over-1820240476. 10Dante Douglas, “Game Developers Need a Union,” Paste, March 7, 2018, www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/03/game-developers-need-a-union.html. 11Quoted in Ethan Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio Have Been on Strike for a Month,” Kotaku, March 16, 2018, https://kotaku.com/developers-at-one-french-game-studio-have-been-on-strik-1823833426. 12This is a national collective bargaining agreement in France that mainly covers consulting firms. 13Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 14Quoted in Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 15Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 16Quoted in Gach, “Developers at One French Game Studio.” 17“A Black and White Tri-Fold Leaflet,” Game Workers Unite UK, 2018, http://gwu-uk.org/assets/trifold-bw-uk.pdf. 18Matt Kim, “IGDA Director Says Capital, Not Unions, Will Keep Game Development Jobs Secure,” US Gamer, January 19, 2018, www.usgamer.net/articles/igda-director-union-crunch-interview. 19Ian Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades, Gaming Is Finally Talking Unionization,” Waypoint, March 23, 2018, https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/7xdv5e/after-destroying-lives-for-decades-gaming-is-finally-talking-unionization. 20Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades.” 21Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades.” 22Williams, “After Destroying Lives for Decades.” 23Michelle Ehrhardt, “IGDA, Union-Busting and GDC 2018,” Unwinnable, March 22, 2018, https://unwinnable.com/2018/03/22/igda-union-busting-and-gdc-2018. 24Ehrhardt, “IGDA, Union-Busting and GDC 2018.” 25Game Workers Unite, “Game Workers Unite Zine,” Notes from Below 2 (March 30, 2018), www.notesfrombelow.org/article/game-workers-unite-zine. 26Game Workers Unite, “Game Workers Unite Zine.” 27Game Workers Unite, “Game Workers Unite Zine.” 28Quoted in Thomas Wilde, “‘It’s Very David and Goliath’: Inside the Growing Effort to Unionize Video Game Developers,” Geekwire, May 9, 2018, www.geekwire.com/2018/david-goliath-inside-growing-effort-unionize-video-game-developers. 29Quoted in Wilde, “It’s Very David and Goliath.” 30“Prospects for Organising the Videogames Industry: Interview with Game Workers Unite UK,” interview by Jamie Woodcock, Notes from Below 3 (August 16, 2018), https://notesfrombelow.org/article/prospects-for-organising-the-videogames-industry. 31“Prospects for Organising.” 32“Prospects for Organising.” 33“Prospects for Organising.” 34Jamie Woodcock, “Playing for Power,” Jacobin, January 3, 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/video-game-workers-unite-union-uk. 35See, for example, articles at https://notesfrombelow.org/.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

During intermission, we drank plastic cups of white wine and split a bag of candy. Parker was stressed about the erosion of net neutrality. He was working on a campaign to galvanize tech workers, but it wasn’t gaining traction the way he had thought it would. I knew something about net neutrality already, but I let him explain it to me anyway. Nostalgia; old times’ sake. The problem, he said, was that the most important issues facing the tech industry were also the most tedious. It was in their interest to fight, but founders and tech workers didn’t know how to organize. They didn’t have the patience to lobby. They didn’t consider their work political. “They all assume this will just last forever,” he said.

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As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I’d seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve—and guilty, all the time. * * * I moved into an apartment in the Castro, joining a man and a woman in their late twenties, roommates who had wiggled their way onto a hand-me-down lease. They were tech workers, too. The woman worked as a midlevel product manager at the social network everyone hated; the man as a data scientist at a struggling solar-energy startup. They were both endurance runners; the data scientist kept a road bike in his bedroom. They had no body fat. They had no art in the apartment, either.

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Photos of the CEO and my coworkers voluntarily participating in a fear-based endurance event near Tahoe, a massive obstacle course where they swam through dumpsters of ice water and plowed across muddy fields while being administered electric shocks by former Division II athletes. Photos of me, modeling the company T-shirt, thick-necked and grinning. My friends were hardworking and committed, but their vocations were poorly compensated, and against that rubric their life choices were wholly unimpressive. They were the sort of people some tech workers looked down on for not contributing meaningfully to the economy, though the derision cut both ways—if anyone our age had ever introduced himself as an entrepreneur, my friends would have laughed themselves into fits of smug superiority. In any case, my friends’ world was sensuous, emotional, complex.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Some, devoted entirely to sex, may be drug- and alcohol-free (to encourage safety and performance) and demand a balanced gender ratio. Others are very heavy on drugs and women and usually end in group “cuddle puddles,” a gateway to ever-so-slightly more discreet sexual encounters. The path by which women are lured into these sex parties differs. One female tech worker told me she fell into a high-flying, open-minded crowd after attending a party for the Bravo reality show about Silicon Valley. “I was invited to some villa in the city, I had just graduated from college, and it sounded cool and glamorous,” she said. That took her on a series of unexpected adventures, including a sex party where several tech founders and engineers were in attendance and food was being served off the bodies of naked women.

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Ultimately, this entrepreneur got so fed up that she moved herself and her start-up to New York and left Silicon Valley for good. The women who do say yes to these parties rarely see a big business payoff. “There is a desire to be included and invited to these kinds of things and sometimes it felt like it was productive to go and you could get ahead faster by cultivating relationships in this way,” one female tech worker told me. “Over time, I realized that it’s false advertising and it’s not something women should think is a way to get ahead. It’s very risky—once you’re in that circle, once you decide you want to play the game, you can’t back out. If you really believe that’s going to get you to a serious place in your career, that’s delusion.”

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HACKING MONOGAMY Remember Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer who blogged that her manager brought up his nonmonogamous relationship as a way to make a pass at her over the internal company chat system? It’s worth repeating what she wrote in her viral essay: “He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t.” Open and polyamorous relationships—like the one Fowler’s manager described—are on the rise among many tech workers in Silicon Valley but not working out to everyone’s satisfaction. As Fowler experienced, this new landscape of nonmonogamous dating can infect the workplace with varying results. Uber’s response seemed to suggest that the manager’s invitation to be part of his open sex life was not a big deal.

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

If an overabundance of software jobs creates an excess demand for software engineers in a particular city at a particular time, engineers from all over the country will flock to that city and even out demand and supply. Software engineers tend to be young, well educated, and foreign-born—three groups with particularly high mobility. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, there was an enormous demand for high-tech workers in Silicon Valley as hundreds of well-financed startups scrambled to hire new employees, and hundreds of thousands of high-tech workers moved there from all over the United States. During the bust that followed, demand collapsed, and hundreds of thousands moved away. But if the ratio between employers and engineers is the same in San Francisco, Lincoln, and Copenhagen, what attracted Kiel Oleson and Mikkel Svane to San Francisco?

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Attracting a new scientist, software engineer, or mathematician to a city increases the demand for local services. This in turn means more jobs for cabdrivers, housekeepers, carpenters, nannies, hairstylists, doctors, lawyers, dog walkers, and therapists. These local service workers cluster around high-tech workers, supporting their personal needs. In essence, from the point of view of a city, an innovation job is more than a job. To see how this multiplier effect works in practice, let me introduce you to a small-business owner named Tim James. James is a bookbinder in San Francisco. His clients are mostly local residents and local businesses, so he is clearly part of the non-traded sector.

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Although James’s shop is definitely low-tech, the performance of his business over the years closely tracks the ups and downs of the NASDAQ, which in turn closely tracks the performance of high-tech firms in San Francisco. James’s business soared during the late 1990s, the dot-com boom years. During that period, high-tech workers flush with cash filled local restaurants and bars, built new houses, and gathered in local gyms, thus vastly increasing the incomes of local service workers, including bookbinders. To keep pace with the rising demand for his products, James hired three new employees and raised everyone’s wages.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It also highlighted a huge philosophical gap that’s at the crux of gentrification: the kids believed that because they’d been in the community longer, because this was their routine, because they were on the field first, they had a right to play soccer there. The tech workers believed that because they’d purchased a ticket to the field, it was theirs. In the minds of the tech workers, it seemed, everything was a commodity—not just tacos and apartments, but the city itself. They had the technological access, the know-how, and the money to buy it. The kids did not. This mentality is what New York–based writer and activist Sarah Schulman has called “the gentrification of the mind.”

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in New Orleans, things seem to be leveling off: Jennifer Larino, “New Orleans–Area Construction Contracts Drop in May,” Times-Picayune, June 27, 2014. Silicon Valley lost more workers than it gained: Georgia Wells, “Silicon Valley Residents Leave for Greener Grass, Cheaper Housing,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2016. The share of tech workers living in the Bay Area: Ashley Rodriguez, “Tech Workers Are Increasingly Looking to Leave Silicon Valley,” Quartz, February 29, 2016. Index absentee homeownership, 169–170 Adams, Eric, 208 affordable housing, 29, 144. See also public housing demolition of, 52 lack of government support for, 21, 134, 169, 179 land banking and, 211 in New Orleans, 29 in New York City, 145, 169, 173, 179–180, 190, 199–200, 203–204, 212 racial segregation and, 110 in San Francisco, 131–134=135 SROs as, 135 Airbnb, 61–62, 134, 136, 211 Angotti, Tom, 210 Aristil, Tim, 129 Atlantic Yards (Brooklyn), 174, 202 Back to the City Conference, 32 Baker, Richard, 53 Baldwin, James, 168 ballot initiatives, 211 Beame, Abraham, 191–192 Berlin, 142–143, 184, 214 Berni, Ryan, 43 Bigard, Ashana, 19–23, 26–30, 64 Bing, Dave, 83 Black Lives Matter movement, 214 Blanco, Kathleen, 18, 26, 48–49, 50 de Blasio, Bill, 144, 170, 175, 187–188, 202–203 gentrification and, 201 zoning laws and, 190 Bloomberg, Michael, 41, 169–170, 179, 201–204 Bolaños, Annabelle, 131, 144, 148 Boston, MA, 107 Boyd, Alicia, 198–200, 207, 210 Brash, Julian, 215 Bratton, Bill, 175 Brinkley, Kenny, 103–104 Broder & Sachse, 74, 76 “broken windows” policing, 175 Brooklyn, NY, 8, 176–180, 197–198, 217.

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A few months before that, Jimmie was walking behind a white man near Dolores Park, a gentrification hotspot a few blocks from Joe’s parents’ house, when the man turned to look at Jimmie and, presumably fearing a robbery, ran through the park and right through an active set of sprinklers, soaking himself. Jimmie’s view of these kinds of people is surprisingly sympathetic: he said that if he had as much money as they do, he’d probably be doing the same thing, living in condos and running from black people. One activist told me he actually feels bad for the tech workers who’ve descended on the city: they pay previously unheard-of sums for small apartments, get shuttled in buses to Palo Alto at 7:00 a.m. and back home at 6:00 p.m. (and often work through the night), take an Uber to whatever restaurant they might be eating at that evening, and then repeat the process the next weekday.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

The wannabe Zuckerbergs are their own kind of gig worker, scrambling individually to make a buck, just on a grander scale. 41 Rather than leave to become startup founders, some tech employees have instead taken a page from the Tesla factory workers, or indeed, from the workers who serve them those catered lunches: they’re organizing. The Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) began with an engineer and a cafeteria worker turned organizer who challenged a few of the shibboleths of Big Tech—namely, the idea that different kinds of workers have no interests in common, and the assumption that the programmers have more in common with the Zuckerbergs of the world than they do with the working class. It built slowly for a while, and then, after Trump’s election in 2016, a burst of action drew many new recruits, both to the TWC and to Tech Solidarity, a group begun to help tech workers find ways to act on their anger.

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Every person who walked out today is an owner, and the owners say: Time’s up.” 46 That organizing was followed by demands, in the summer of 2020, that Google end its contracts with police departments. Tech workers joined in solidarity with protesters across the country, calling for defunding and abolishing policing after a Minneapolis officer killed George Floyd. A letter signed by more than 1,600 Google employees read, in part, “Why help the institutions responsible for the knee on George Floyd’s neck to be more effective organizationally?” Amazon programmers, meanwhile, had been organizing to support the company’s warehouse workers, protesting their dangerous working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, the tech workers were taking their lead from those on the front lines. 47 Suddenly the tech industry no longer seemed so impenetrable.

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Let the coder wear his “RESIST” button to the Pentagon, let the developers play games on their work machines, then they’ll be happier to do their work. These “digital artisans,” as Ross called them, were made to feel that they had a level of control over the machines. But unlike the original artisans, whose tools were theirs to control, the tech workers were still laboring for a big employer pocketing the profits. After all, the original Luddites didn’t break machines because they opposed technology, but because the technology was designed to deskill them and make them obsolete. The fun-loving tech workplace, already beginning to be stocked with foosball tables and other games to play, made the programmers feel secure that they were powerful and could never be replaced.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

However, just as the World’s Fair showed only the positive side of the automotive future, the tech industry’s visions also glossed over many problems, including the key question of whether they could ever be properly realized. As Musk received high praise, Tesla workers were suffering with high injury rates, while his green vehicles had to rely on a dirty mineral supply chain. Uber was embraced by tech workers and the journalists who gave it such good press, but in reality cities were swamped with new vehicles and Uber’s driver workforce was exploited. Meanwhile, Google’s self-driving team had internal problems, and as time passed it became clear that it placed far too much faith in the technology—a common theme not just in the present, but throughout the long history of the innovations chronicled in this book.

…

Even as Kalanick and other ride-hailing executives made bold promises for the future they claimed to be ushering in—one of shared mobility instead of car ownership that would ostensibly solve congestion and many other transport problems—the reality was almost the complete opposite. San Francisco is the urban core of Silicon Valley, and unsurprisingly one of Uber’s largest markets. The tech workers of the Bay Area are among the biggest users of the app-based solutions they create, since they exist to solve what they deem to be problems or hinderances in their own lives. So, if Uber was reducing traffic, we would naturally expect to see less congestion in San Francisco—but that is not what researchers have found.

…

Instead, they are people who could easily drive, be driven, or hop in a taxi if they did not want to walk, cycle, or take transit. But those options were not cheap or convenient enough, so they had to blow up the existing system and regulatory framework to serve themselves. Yet, like with the jitneys and the taxis of the 1930s, this is not just a story about the customer or the street. There are also drivers involved; if tech workers and their bosses have been the beneficiaries of Uber, it is the people driving them around who have suffered the consequences. Ride-hailing companies claim their workers are not equivalent to taxi drivers, and so should not be covered by the same rules and regulations even though they provide the same service.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

The Intel fight had such a huge impact: we were so loud and public about what was going on that people were finally able to hear us. It struck people: gave them a sense of what was happening behind the scenes, made them see what wasn’t so visible. It has been amazing to meet some of them, to share my story, and to see tech workers connecting with us. The other day at Facebook, we needed some show of strength and power to help move the company, because it was kind of at a standstill. So, we decided to have the tech workers come in and stand in the background, just to show the company, Hey, we support these cafeteria workers too. We stand with them. And we want to see them get better benefits. My optimistic self is hoping and praying that there is gonna be a lot more of us fighting that fight—more people who can find their voices and be able to say, “I want a union.”

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You have people who come here and work in tech, who live in a condo, maybe been here for about a year, and never meet someone who grew up here. The flip side of that is you have people who work in the local taqueria, or they work as a bus driver. They’re born and raised here, have three kids here, and they’ve never met a tech worker. I don’t want to isolate those two groups, but that tends to be the conversation nowadays. Someone says, “You know what? I make a difference. I have five employees. I pay them. I pay my taxes. I pay business taxes. And I contribute every time I go out to eat dinner, every time I use my dry cleaner.”

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Activists flooded City Hall to urge compliance with Prop M. There were protests on a weekly basis, urging commissioners not to vote a certain way, asking the board to get involved. It was exciting, because you could see the opposition was real. Fast-forward to now, and it’s totally different. Because of Wi-Fi, tech workers can work down the peninsula yet live in San Francisco. They can board a bus and work during their commute each way. So you can’t keep track of workers—for the purpose of calculating how much office space to build, how much housing is needed, how much tax revenue should be received. That’s why everyone is confounded: this isn’t happening within city jurisdictions anymore.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

There are two worlds in Silicon Valley, and they barely ever meet. There’s the exciting start-up open-plan offices, with beanbags, table football, TED Talks and flip-flops, where the region’s half a million tech workers can expect to earn on average well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. (For the biggest companies, the median salary is higher still.) Mostly under 40, they want to live in nearby bustling San Francisco, since Silicon Valley can resemble The Stepford Wives. Each morning, thousands of tech workers hop on private, Wi-Fi-enabled coaches from one of the dozens of pick-up points in San Fran’s increasingly gentrified streets, and head down Highway 101 into Menlo Park (for Facebook), Sunnyvale (for Yahoo) or Mountain View (for Google).

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Alongside it, though, is another world, inhabited by the people who are left behind in the mad rush towards progress: the ignored women in tech start-ups who complain about misogyny, the Uber drivers who can only afford to live 70 miles away and have to work on zero-hour contracts, the long-time residents who are turfed out so their landlords can rent out their homes on Airbnb. It’s a place where minorities struggle on low-wage service jobs, serving the largely white affluent tech workers. The median house value in both San Francisco and Silicon Valley is now around a million dollars, and the average rent is over three thousand per month for a two-bedroom flat: beyond the reach of almost anyone but tech workers. (The average salary in San Francisco is $46,000, and less if you don’t work for Facebook, Google, etc.) In one of the richest cities in America, 15,000 registered homeless people – one of the highest numbers per capita in the country – struggle on, often with serious mental health and drug addiction problems.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

On Henrik Stenmann, coaching, and evolution, see Mathilde Fischer Thomsen, “Virksomhed har 4-dages Arbejdsuge: ‘Vi Passer på Vores Medarbejdere,’” TV 2 Lorry, February 10, 2017, www.tv2lorry.dk/artikel/virksomhed-har-firdages-arbejdsuge-vi-passer-paa-vores-medarbejdere; “Her er Hemmeligheden Bag en 4-dages Arbejdsuge,” StepStone, February 21, 2017, www.stepstone.dk/virksomhed/videncenter/hr-og-rekruttering/her-er-hemmeligheden-bag-en-4-dages-arbejdsuge?lang=en. On tech workers’ complaints about leadership, see “Tech Workers Say Poor Leadership Is Number One Cause for Burnout,” Ladders, October 30, 2018, www.theladders.com/career-advice/tech-workers-say-poor-leadership-is-number-one-cause-for-burnout; on entrepreneurs and coping, see M. A. Uy et al., “Joint Effects of Prior Start-Up Experience and Coping Strategies on Entrepreneurs’ Psychological Well-Being,” Journal of Business Venturing 28 (2013): 583–597, www.mawder.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/2013JBV.pdf.

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For a few weeks in late 2016, after Pursuit Marketing moved to a four-day workweek, Lorraine Gray noticed a few workers were still coming into the office on Fridays for an hour or two, then disappearing. She soon found out why. “They hadn’t told their wives about the four-day week,” she says, “so they were coming in, doing a few hours, going to the pub together, then going home at five.” The story illustrates an important point: lots of us have friends at work. In a 2018 survey of US tech workers, 60 percent of female respondents and 56 percent of male respondents said that a coworker was one of their best friends. And while work helps us make friends, friends help us work better. Having close friends among your colleagues makes you happier and more engaged with your work, boosts your personal productivity, and improves your ability to cooperate with others on difficult challenges or during trying times.

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The company’s sales grew substantially after she adjusted her nail polish formula so observant Muslim women could wear it—a change she made after a conversation with a customer about how conventional nail polishes are impervious to water and oil. “I really get to think things through” on her days off, and that gave time for the idea of water- and oil-permeable polish to incubate. (That kind of clarity is good for leaders and companies, but also for the health of workers. In a 2018 survey of tech workers, “poor leadership and unclear direction” was the top cause of burnout.) Taking Wednesday afternoons off also helps Rosie Warin “be strategic and creative and calm and lead the business in a way that’s created a lot of success for us.” The habit of building free time into her day, recognizing the value of rest, and taking rest more seriously provides more time to think strategically and creatively.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” The economist William Beveridge, an architect of England’s modern welfare state, was influenced by Charlotte Brontë’s depiction of the Luddite struggle—his 1944 report, “Full Employment in a Free Society,” is subtitled “Misery generates hate.” In 1982, a tech worker going by the pseudonym Gidget Digit wrote a paean to technological sabotage in an article for Processed World, “Sabotage: The Ultimate Video Game”: “What office worker hasn’t thought of dousing the keyboard of her word processor with a cup of steaming coffee [or] hurling her modular telephone handset through the plate glass window of her supervisor’s cubicle,” Considering the enduring popularity of the scene in Mike Judge’s 1999 film Office Space, where workers take out their pent-up aggression against ignorant bosses, layoffs, and corporate drudgery on a copy machine, the answer is likely “very few.”

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“We have ten to twelve seconds to make a business decision that could take minutes or hours. We need information. They’re not showing you any information other than your location to go pick up.” And they need fair and transparent pay, of course. “Proper compensation, that’s number one.” Another driver, a tech worker and organizer, developed an automated tool of his own to help drivers apply for lost back pay in a system that treated rideshare drivers as pieceworkers. “The form assumes that you do piecework, like picking strawberries. Which makes it brain-breaking to fill in these forms.” He’d made a spreadsheet that a worker could easily use “to fill in the three-page wage time form, to get the overtime business expenses, to fill it out automatically,” even to help input rest breaks and estimate damages.

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If Uber keeps pushing them down, if the government ignores them, if every party to the growing plight fails to issue them redress—then it would be only reasonable to expect that the app-based workers will only continue to rise in number as the latest great comet gathers steam. Even a Luddite-style uprising is not out of the question. THE NEW LUDDITES “We need a Luddite revolution,” Ben Tarnoff, a tech worker and the founder of Logic magazine, declared in the Guardian in 2019. Today, amid the normalization of Uber and Lyft, the domination of Amazon, the rise of AI-as-a-service startups, and the percolating distrust in tech companies, a growing number of critics, academics, organizers, and writers are explicitly endorsing the Luddites and their tactics.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The Condo Hackers were all immigrants or the children of immigrants, and therefore accustomed to getting jerked around. They were also too busy to raise a fuss. They rarely stopped working, even when drinking. The office always followed them home. They fancied themselves budding entrepreneurs, but they were chiefly migrant laborers with MacBook Pros. Like thousands of other tech workers, the foreign-born among them had entered the country on H-1B “specialty occupation” work visas conditional upon their continued employment. Like me, they each had a startup idea. Unlike me, they had professional training, exceptional in-demand skills, and the potential to one day earn a living wage.

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However bad the boom was for thousands of long-term San Franciscans forced out by high rents, it at least inspired the city’s spraycan artistes. Otherwise sterile yuppie outposts became canvases for elaborate Chicano-style murals depicting the city’s working-class purge. The murals were a neighborhood fixture, but frequently updated, and so they, too, began to depict the Man’s new manifestations, with tech-worker shuttle buses and condo towers surrounded by the righteous masses. Every cloying marketing slogan was subject to petulant revision by the black marker brigades. A few sarcastic strokes improved the sign outside an ostensibly charitable “economic development corporation” in the Mission District, which was buying up apartments around the neighborhood to renovate as offices: The Mission longtimers had no sympathy for robot butlers.

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and you had a deeply unfashionable job like, say, writer, it behooved you to say “I deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja.” In my former life I’d have sooner gouged my own eyeballs out than describe myself in such a way, but in postrecession, postboom, postwork, postshame San Francisco, we all did what we had to do to survive. III Gigs Make Us Free I envied the tech workers even as I pitied them. The paychecks weren’t bad at all, and the benefits were downright Dionysian. Their industry was the alien invader that consumed everything it touched. Its radioactive presence may have sterilized the outside world, stifling organic life in all forms, but inside the warm embrace of the mother ship, the worker drones had comfort, stimulation, and plenty.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The Obama administration’s Justice Department came into office promising stern action against corporate cartels that fixed prices, which is precisely what the Silicon Valley Techtopus seems to have been doing with tech workers; an official from the Antitrust Division had even announced in a 2009 speech that “the Division has long advocated that the most effective deterrent for hard core cartel activity, such as price fixing, bid rigging, and allocation agreements, is stiff prison sentences.”23 Not this time. When the Justice Department learned about the conspiracy to suppress tech workers’ wages in 2010, it did just about the same thing it had done with the “Too Big to Jail” banks: it filed a civil suit and boldly extracted from the tech companies in question … a promise not to do it again, for five years.

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It is a matter of legal record that, for years, the CEOs of Apple, Intel, Google, Pixar, and other Silicon Valley firms operated something very much like a cartel against their own employees. In a scandal that journalists now call “the Techtopus,” these worthies agreed to avoid recruiting one another’s tech workers and thus keep those workers’ wages down across the industry. In 2007, in one of the most famous chapters of the Techtopus story, the famous innovator Steve Jobs emailed Eric Schmidt, demanding that this CEO and friend of top Democrats do something about a Google recruiter who was trying to lure an employee away from Apple.

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When the Justice Department learned about the conspiracy to suppress tech workers’ wages in 2010, it did just about the same thing it had done with the “Too Big to Jail” banks: it filed a civil suit and boldly extracted from the tech companies in question … a promise not to do it again, for five years. (The affected tech workers had more success on their own, filing a class-action lawsuit against four of the big Silicon Valley companies; it was settled for $415 million in 2015.)24 Let’s look again at Uber, the machine for inequality, which has had a damaging effect on many people who drive taxis for a living. It also happens to be a clever innovation. This has made it a basic political test for Democrats: Should they support the company with its ingenious software, or the working people whose livelihoods it threatens?

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

He wanted a cool job, perhaps at one of the startups whose apps populated his iPhone home screen. One of those was Foursquare, a buzzy, location-based mobile check-in startup that had cache among the Valley elite. He tried applying through the front door, but was quickly turned down; Foursquare was inundated with offers from eager would-be tech workers. Instead of giving up, Graves had a better idea. On nights and weekends, he started calling around bars and restaurants in Chicago, pitching owners and managers to sign their businesses up for the Foursquare app. By pretending that he actually worked for the company, Graves managed to sign up thirty new customers in the Chicago area.

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Reports that Uber employees were hailing Lyfts and then trying to recruit the driver were met with disgust—something that confused Kalanick and Uber employees. Business, they thought, was supposed to be a competition. Logan Green, Lyft’s CEO, was a good tactician. But Kalanick outmaneuvered his rivals every single time. And he felt fine trouncing his competition. One prime example: Kalanick’s network of spies in the Valley—mostly made up of other tech workers and venture capitalists—picked up early rumors of Lyft’s new carpooling service. To get the jump on Lyft, Kalanick tasked his chief product officer, Jeff Holden, to drop everything and copy the carpooling feature immediately. Uber announced the impending launch of “Uberpool,” a carpooling feature, mere hours before Lyft announced the product it had invented.

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But while the election cast a pall over tech in general, the night also served as the turning point for Uber in particular. The company’s troubles did not stem from the election, of course, nor did they cause the result, but they were soon caught up in the chaos that followed. The maelstrom marked the beginning of one of the worst twelve-month periods in American corporate history. When the tech workers awoke on the morning after the election, their mental image of themselves—as bastions of youth and democratic idealism, helping to create a more efficient, healthier, more connected country—had been shattered. Donald John Trump was the president of the United States. The thrice-married real estate mogul who spent the last decade taking birther-conspiracy potshots at Barack Obama on Twitter was now the commander in chief.

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

advanced artificial intelligence: Steven Levy, “Inside Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s Bid to Build a Border Wall,” Wired, June 11, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-anduril-border-wall/. 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.

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In August 2000, The Guardian wrote that Flooz had a chance of realizing “Hayek’s dream of companies challenging governments for the right to issue money,” referring to Friedrich Hayek, the great libertarian economist. Those two companies wouldn’t run into serious trouble until the end of the year. Few noticed the crash, in fact, until the fall, when the first dot-coms started running out of money. Pets.com announced, suddenly, that it was insolvent, the launch parties grew scarcer, and tech workers began nervously checking a new parody news site, FuckedCompany.com. But Thiel had noticed. In fact, almost as soon as he’d raised the $100 million and just before the bubble began to burst, he disappeared. He stopped coming to the office and cut off regular contact with his staff and the board.

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The company had also secretly helped create a second database, the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, which creates individual risk scores that the Customs and Border Protection agency uses to evaluate travelers and immigrants. These disclosures—combined with Thiel’s support of Trump—generated intense outcry, first within Silicon Valley and then beyond it. In January, the Tech Workers Coalition, an activist group, had staged a march in front of Palantir headquarters to protest the company’s work with Trump. Two months later, after the FALCON story broke, a group of protestors showed up at Thiel’s home in San Francisco carrying signs that read: palantir: wake up! you are complicit, don’t build software for mordor and peter thiel is a vampire.

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

Robert Marquand, “Fast, Cheap, and in English, India Clerks for the World,” Christian Science Monitor, April 30, 1999. 131. Economic Policy Institute, “EPI Analysis Finds No Shortage of STEM Workers in the United States,” press release, April 24, 2013, http://www.epi.org/press/epi-analysis-finds-shortage-stem-workers; Joshua Wright, “Supply of Tech Workers Greater Than Estimated Demand,” New Geography, September 1, 2011, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002411-supply-tech-workers-greater-than-estimated-demand. 132. Sarah McBride, “Special Report: Silicon Valley’s Dirty Secret—Age Bias,” Reuters, November 27, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-idUSBRE8AQ0JK20121127. 133. Andrew S.

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For this group, the rest of society, he suggested, exists only “as images and stereotypes.”5 Progressive theorists, such as Ruy Teixeira, have suggested that, in the evolving class structure, the traditional middle and working classes are of little importance compared to the rise of a mass “upper-middle class” consisting largely of professionals, tech workers, academics, and high-end government bureaucrats.6 The Economic Decline of the Yeomanry All this suggests what could be seen as the proletarianization of the Yeoman class. In the four decades since 1971, the percentage of those earning between two-thirds and twice the national median income has shrunk, according to Pew, from over sixty to barely fifty percent of the population.

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The 1099 Economy: The Rise of a New Yeomanry? There are promising signs that many in the Yeomanry are seeking to establish something of a digital version of the rural homestead. Encompassing people writing apps, doing technical consulting, and working in the information sector, the numbers of self-employed tech workers have surged between 2005 and 2010. The percentage of such employees in information sectors grew 15 percent during this period.85 Tech is not the only area where the 1099 economy is expanding. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 21.4 million self-employed Americans in 2008, and recent data from EMSI suggests that the figures might be even higher.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

“Appalachian Transition in Action.” Social Enterprise Alliance, January 17, 2017. https://socialenterprise.us/2017/01/17/appalachia-maced. Epilogue: Can Zebras Fix What Unicorns Have Broken? Coren, Michael J. “Silicon Valley Tech Workers Are Talking About Starting Their First Union in 2017 to Resist Trump.” Quartz, March 24, 2017. https://qz.com/916534/silicon-valley-tech-workers-are-talking-about-starting-their-first-union-in-2017-to-resist-trump. “FAQs Purpose Economy.” Purpose. http://purpose-economy.org/en/faqs/. Le, Phuong. “Seattle Divided as Leaders Halt Tax on Companies Like Amazon.” Associated Press, June 13, 2018. https://apnews.com/606ff14719bb4cf4a397cf2d79008992.

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No one in their right mind believes this is a healthy way to run a company. Job Insecurity and Your Brain Anim Aweh sees the victims of these Silicon Valley sweatshops in her practice as a therapist in the Bay Area. “Some people here are making a ton of money, but their work is demanding,” says Aweh, a twenty-seven-year-old social worker who counsels young tech workers. She works a lot with people of color, who face unique challenges in notoriously undiverse Silicon Valley. “They’re told to work long hours. They’re competing against one another. It’s a rat race. One woman I work with said, ‘The expectation is that you should just work hard, not work smart. Just do, do, do, do—until you can’t do anymore.’”

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I don’t think you have what it takes! People in Silicon Valley are not worried about workaholism. In fact, they celebrate it. Some think young techies aren’t working hard enough. Michael Moritz, a famous venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, recently wrote a piece in the Financial Times urging American tech workers to keep up with their counterparts in China, who work fourteen-hour days, six days a week, while taking hardly any vacation time and seeing their kids only a few minutes a day. In the Valley, hustle has become a hot new buzzword. People wear hustle T-shirts, and attend hustle boot camps. Once a year, several thousand people pay $300 each to attend Hustle Con, a conference where expert hustlers teach wannabe hustlers how to hustle—which is in itself a hustle.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

The biggest challenge was getting people to the polls. It helped, O’Rourke said, that Texans hate phonies, so he didn’t hide that he opposed Trump’s planned border wall, thought Trump should be impeached, and supported abortion rights, the legalization of marijuana, and gun control, as did most Bay Area tech workers. He was already fighting in the House to overrule Trump’s Federal Communications Commission and restore net neutrality, which kept internet access providers from favoring some content over others. O’Rourke didn’t have to contrast his frankness with Cruz’s flexibility. Everyone there knew the incumbent had declined to endorse candidate Trump after he attacked Cruz’s wife’s looks and suggested Cruz’s father had been involved in John F.

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Laird moved to the city in 2009 and spent three years there helping the community without pay. He worked on security in the Dalai Lama’s office and helped build up local expertise. Then he spent two more years in Bangalore at an internet policy nonprofit. Hacktivismo inspired hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups. Many had stories like Nathan Freitas’s. A New York tech worker at the turn of the millennium, Freitas first heard about Tibetan repression from concerts headlined by the Beastie Boys. Through a work acquaintance, in the late 1990s he stumbled across a tiny Tibetan group in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood that had only one modem and needed assistance setting up an office network.

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Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, formed the Center for Humane Technology and warned that Facebook and YouTube had let some of the world’s most powerful instances of artificial intelligence figure out how to keep people watching, and that the answer had been to show outrage and extremism. Rank-and-file tech workers forced Google to drop a contract to provide artificial intelligence for analysis of Pentagon drone footage that could be used in automated targeting, and protests spread through Silicon Valley over tech employers’ contracts with border authorities who separated children from immigrant parents.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

High-Technology Multipliers, Employment and Wages in Britain’, Research Policy, 48(9), November 2019, 103803 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.05.012>. 87 ‘Trade Union’, OECD.Stat <https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TUD>. 88 Ben Tarnoff, ‘The Making of the Tech Worker Movement’, Logic Magazine, 4 May 2020 <https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 89 Irina Ivanova, ‘Amazon Picks Twitter Fight with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren amid Union Campaign’, CBS News, 26 March 2021 <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-union-vote/> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 90 Bethan Staton, ‘The Upstart Unions Taking on the Gig Economy and Outsourcing’, Financial Times, 18 January 2020 <https://www.ft.com/content/576c68ea-3784-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 91 ‘Table 5.

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.’, Business Insider, 10 October 2020 <https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-ban-hearings-politicians-senators-know-nothing-about-tech-2020-10> [accessed 12 April 2021] Stoltenberg, Jens, ‘Nato Will Defend Itself’, Prospect Magazine, 27 August 2019 <https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/nato-will-defend-itself-summit-jens-stoltenberg-cyber-security> [accessed 12 March 2020] Tarnoff, Ben, ‘The Making of the Tech Worker Movement’, Logic Magazine, 4 May 2020 <https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/> [accessed 3 April 2021] Thelen, Kathleen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004) <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511790997> Thiel, Peter, ‘Competition Is for Losers’, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 <https://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536> [accessed 9 October 2020] Thurner, Stefan, Peter Klimek and Rudolf Hanel, Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) <https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198821939.001.0001/oso-9780198821939> [accessed 19 July 2020] Tisné, Martin, ‘It’s Time for a Bill of Data Rights’, MIT Technology Review, 14 December 2018 <https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/14/138615/its-time-for-a-bill-of-data-rights/> [accessed 8 October 2020] Tufekci, Zeynep, ‘YouTube, the Great Radicalizer’, New York Times, 10 March 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html> [accessed 18 October 2020] Turck, Matt ‘The Power of Data Network Effects’, Matt Turck [blog], 2016 <https://mattturck.com/the-power-of-data-network-effects/> [accessed 3 August 2020] UBS, The Food Revolution, July 2019 <https://www.ubs.com/global/en/ubs-society/our-stories/2019/future-of-food/_jcr_content/mainpar/toplevelgrid_1749059381/col1/linklist/link.1695495471.file/bGluay9wYXRoPS9jb250ZW50L2RhbS91YnMvZ2xvYmFsL3Vicy1zb2NpZXR5LzIwMTkvZm9vZC1yZXZvbHV0aW9uLWp1bHkucGRm/food-revolution-july.pdf> Van Reenen, John, and Christina Patterson, ‘Research: The Rise of Superstar Firms Has Been Better for Investors than for Employees’, Harvard Business Review, 11 May 2017 <https://hbr.org/2017/05/research-the-rise-of-superstar-firms-has-been-better-for-investors-than-for-employees> [accessed 2 September 2020] Van Reenen, John, Christina Patterson, Lawrence Katz, David Dorn and David Autor, ‘The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms’, CEP Discussion Paper No. 1482, October 2019 <http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1482.pdf> van Zanden, J.

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Complex technologies – from biotech to artificial intelligence to chip design – need not just one but many specialists working together.29 And only cities can bring them together. Most of the high-tech urban areas in the Exponential Age are living proof of the way talented people from across sectors flock to cities – a process known as ‘agglomeration’. Every year, thousands of tech workers migrate from around the world to San Francisco. As a result, technology companies are willing to shell out for the eye-watering cost of doing business in San Francisco (or London, or Paris) because they are getting the benefit of an incredibly skilled labour pool. Otherwise, they would move to smaller towns or the countryside and enjoy a lower cost of living.

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

For decades, computing companies have tried to convince all white-collar workers that they were management, or aligned with management, and so did not need to argue with those at the top, or need unions to help press for change. As recent events in the tech industry have shown, nothing could be further from the truth. From Google to Kickstarter, tech workers have begun to see that, if they don’t have a real voice in deciding the direction of the company, they don’t have any control over the harms created by the products they make. As individuals, their voices can be easily ignored, as the Boeing example shows. As a group, however, tech workers—and citizens—have power. As the cases of Project Dragonfly and Project Maven at Google show, worker pushback can shut down projects and save lives. As the Google Walkout showed, until more people speak up it is still more acceptable to pay a sexual harasser millions of dollars to leave than it is to pay women an equal wage or give them equal opportunities to stay.

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This history is of crucial importance today because it is not that unusual: the British reliance on sexist hiring and firing practices, and on the association of technical work with low-status workers but powerful managerial work with high-status workers, has been a common pattern in the postindustrial West. The manner in which government leaders and industry officials worked together to standardize and codify a gendered underclass of tech workers, and then to later upskill that work once the managerial power of computers became clear, was not evolutionary or accidental. It was an intentional set of systems design parameters intended to ensure that those who held the most power in predigital society, government, and industry continued to hold that power after the “computer revolution.”

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Contract negotiations in Germany are typically held at the state level between the regional union representatives and the regional representatives of the employer association. 29. “Das Haus und das Werk,” IBM Deutschland (December 1954): 2. 30. “Wir sprechen miteinander,” 1–2; and “Herr Hörrmann über Arbeits-, Lohn-, Produktionsprobleme,” IBM Deutschland (September 1954): 3–4. 31. Jeff J. Roberts, “Tech Workers Will Get Average of $5,770 under Final Anti-Poaching Settlement,” Fortune (September 3, 2015), http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/. 32. For further reading, see Sareeta Amrute, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 8 Siri Disciplines Halcyon M.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

After a few months stuck indoors with screens as our only social conduits, many of us felt a strong pull back to the physical world. Some students stuck taking virtual classes started complaining that they weren’t learning anything or having any fun. White-collar workers confined to their homes began itching to return to the office, where they could more easily collaborate with their teams and advance their careers. (One tech worker I know grumbled that “nobody is getting promoted over Zoom.”) People who had been satisfied with virtual interactions during the pandemic’s early months began flouting social distancing rules in order to eat at restaurants, drink at bars, and attend concerts and church services with their friends.

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American tech companies like Google and Facebook swooped in to hire some of the company’s workers, and local start-ups and big Canadian companies caught most of the rest. Today, the Waterloo economy is thriving, with a higher median household income and a lower unemployment rate than it had during RIM’s heyday. Part of Waterloo’s quick recovery is related to the fact that many of the laid-off RIM workers were tech workers with in-demand skills. But tech skills don’t explain the entire phenomenon, because RIM’s nontechnical employees also got back on their feet quickly. I spent a week in Waterloo, talking to local government officials, former BlackBerry workers, and community leaders about how the city recovered from BlackBerry’s collapse.

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We can step into the conversation, learn the details of the power structures that are shaping technological adoption, and bend those structures toward a better, fairer future. Personally, I’m on Team Bagley. I think we have a moral duty to fight for people, rather than simply fighting against machines, and I believe that for those of us who aren’t tech workers, that duty extends to supporting ethical technologists who are working to make AI and automation a liberating force rather than just a vehicle for wealth creation. I call this strategy “arming the rebels,” not because I think resisting technological exploitation should involve violence of any kind, but because I think it’s important to support the people fighting for ethics and transparency inside our most powerful tech institutions by giving them ammunition in the form of tools, data, and emotional support.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

But even though the vast majority of creatives are not truly wealthy (Byrne, Smith, and Moby excepted), they are relatively advantaged by the standards of most urbanites and most Americans. This becomes abundantly clear when we take into account the amount of money that artists and cultural creatives have left over after paying for housing. In New York, artists and other cultural creatives have, on average, $52,750 left over after paying for housing, less than tech workers ($65,900) and business and financial professionals ($88,770), but nearly three times more than service workers ($17,860). In LA, artists and other cultural creatives have a similar amount left over ($53,760), less than techies ($64,350) and business professionals ($75,870), but three and a half times more than members of the service class ($15,350).

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But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage.”20 He was right—and that’s exactly what’s happening today. Still, as technology companies and the techies who work for them head back to the cities, they are increasingly being blamed for the deepening problems of housing affordability and urban inequality. In spring 2014, protests broke out in Oakland against the private buses that shuttled tech workers from their homes in the city’s gentrifying urban core to their jobs in the corporate campuses of Silicon Valley. “You are not innocent victims,” a flyer that was handed out to the bus passengers read. “You live your comfortable lives surrounded by poverty, homelessness and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.”

…

Two-thirds of San Francisco residents who participated in an April 2014 survey said that techies were “squeezing out others” and making the city less diverse and more exclusive. But nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of them said they believed that tech companies were good for the city, and more than half (56 percent) said the city should continue to nurture and attract them.26 Of course, the migration of high-tech startups and tech workers into urban neighborhoods does put pressure on real estate, and this is especially the case in San Francisco. But tech companies are also huge drivers of innovation, economic progress, jobs, and the much-needed tax revenues that cities can use to address and mitigate the problems that come with them.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

That part did not happen, and it’s easy to understand why: You can’t improve the well-being of the working class with the money you get from sabotaging the well-being of the working class. Unfortunately, tech workers used their own products. Crabby platforms grew by tearing up the social foundation, the way hydrolickers carved away at that Placer County mining town until the whole thing was ready to slide down the hill. Airbnb undermined the hospitality industry, and the ride-share companies had the same effect on transportation. Instead of eating big-tip lunches at white-cloth restaurants, tech workers ordered fast-casual from an app, perhaps using one to order, another to pay, and a third to deliver.

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Servant apps like TaskRabbit and Postmates allowed users to summon contractors for miscellaneous jobs—IKEA bought the former in 2017, and the cannibal crab Uber nabbed the latter in 2020. Other than food and labor, Amazon could deliver the rest, and Bezos was working on those, too. Instead of other people’s pay, tech workers sunk their money into real estate. Silicon Valley home prices doubled.29 The tech workers also reinvested in their own sector via stock options and venture bets, tying capital back up in start-up gambling, where it could subsidize appified low-wage pseudo-luxury services.x The tech-industry concept consultant Venkatesh Rao labeled this rent-a-servant lifestyle “premium mediocre,” and it describes the users of the services courted by the Twitter tax break well: “Premium mediocrity is a pattern of consumption that publicly signals upward mobile aspirations, with consciously insincere pretensions to refined taste, while navigating the realities of inexorable downward mobility with sincere anxiety,” Rao writes.

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They ended up with two different corporate strategies, and occasionally became business opponents, but they personified the same historical forces. They weren’t serving the public, and they didn’t need approval from clean-shaven authoritative professor-administrators like Fred Terman or military bureaucrats like Bob Taylor, which left them and the cohort of tech workers they hired free to smell bad. (Historian Charles Petersen describes the transition as one from “bureaucratic” to “nerd” masculinity.)41 These repellent young men were the tools that got capital from the crisis of the 1960s to the “greed is good”’80s, and an unwillingness to wash and feed oneself began to seem indicative of programming skill and economic value.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

As we drove back to the Rainbow Mansion, I told Jeremy that there was a particular species of tech worker I was especially interested in tracking down. Just as the culture in which we’re suspended forms a generalized ‘perfect self’ for us to compare ourselves to, so every cell of that culture also generates its own specialized iteration of it. In 1943 Jean-Paul Sartre noticed that there was a cultural concept of the perfect waiter just as there are models of the perfect teacher, the perfect pop star, the perfect politician, the perfect parent and the perfect boss. In Silicon Valley there’s a model of ideal self that many younger tech workers aspire to be that’s become significantly influential throughout the West.

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Workshops based on Esalen programmes were highly popular at the university, having been attended by eight hundred members of the community. These programmes became so successful that funding was received to teach Esalen techniques across the Bay Area at elementary and secondary schools, with more than fifty thousand participants. Esalen would remain popular with tech workers for many years, with one 1985 Esquire story reporting ‘scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley’ being regular guests. Such was its lasting influence, Tim O’Reilly, the man who in 2005 christened the internet’s social media phase ‘Web 2.0’, would eventually comment, ‘The internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at Esalen in the 70s.’

…

There was a Sunday evening atmosphere; recycling bins, concrete Buddhas and men in shorts with prominent veins riding expensive bicycles. Finally, the train stopped at Sunnyvale, where you alight for Cupertino, home of Apple. I took a taxi up a winding hill to the Rainbow Mansion, a large cream house with a terracotta roof that was now an ‘intentional community’ made up of bright young tech workers. My search for the self had taken me, once again, to the Western world’s edge. Now that I’d landed in the present day, I had the opportunity to meet selves that should be, if the ideas I’d been pursuing were correct, made up of so many of the lives of their ancestors. Being born and raised in the 1980s and 1990s, these were thoroughbred neoliberals, the kinds of people that many of the cultural leaders of our past, from Aristotle to Stewart Brand, via Ayn Rand and her Collective, should in theory recognize and think of as good.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Not only is this poor worker performing a task that could be better done by a machine, but she is gaining no ability to work in any better capacity by doing it. In dramatic contrast, look at the set of policies Finland has used to deal with the dislocation of laid-off tech workers after the failure of Nokia. As the New York Times reports, when Nokia started laying off employees in droves, “politicians started providing government grants, entrepreneurship programs and other training to help the thousands of laid-off tech workers start their own companies.” Beyond that, Finland has encouraged other global companies to open offices there to take advantage of this newly available talent pool, and compelled Nokia to do more than it would have otherwise to support its former employees.

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John Seely Brown, “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner for the 21st Century,” keynote presentation at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco, March 1, 2012. 11. Mark Scott, “After Nokia Layoffs, Tech Workers in Finland Regroup and Refocus,” New York Times, August 9, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/technology/after-nokia-layoffs-tech-workers-in-finland-regroup-and-refocus.html. 12. National Trust for Historic Preservation, “HOPE Crew—Hands-On Preservation Experience: Engaging a New Generation of Preservationists,” https://savingplaces.org/hope-crew/#.VjLRoLerTIU. 13.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

“Google: Global Annual Revenue 2014 | Statistic,” Statista, accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/. 33. Mike Swift, “Google Will Hire at Least 6,000 Workers ‘across the Board’ in 2011,” accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_17194423?nclick_check=1. 34. Patrick Mcgeehan, “Half of New York’s Tech Workers Lack College Degrees, Report Says,” The New York Times, April 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/nyregion/half-of-new-yorks-tech-workers-lack-college-degrees-report-says.html. 35. “Where the Jobs Are | Inside Higher Ed,” accessed April 24, 2014, http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/04/23/where-jobs-are#sthash.J4L8nNW5.dpbs. 36. Arlene Dohm and Lynn Shniper, “Occupational Employment Projections to 2016,” Monthly Labor Review, November 1, 2007, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2007/11/art5full.pdf. 37.

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Neil Rae, an executive at the tech company Transcom, tells a New York Times reporter that their quest to “fill technical-support positions” has shifted away from college graduates to “kids living in their parents’ basement.” Companies are more and more willing to hire from less prestigious universities and the ranks of the dropouts and disaffected gamers. In New York City, a study estimated that more than half of the city’s 300,000 or so tech workers don’t have a college degree.34 There’s a lot at stake, since shortages seem endemic. A 2014 analysis of available jobs by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce finds that “the most in-demand jobs are for applications software developers and computer systems analysts.”35 The US Department of Labor predicted that the number one sought-after employee in 2016 will be the Network Systems and Data Communications Analyst.

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He writes of going on a hunt for someone to answer the question “why, during the decades of the personal computer and the Internet, the American economy has grown so slowly, average wages have stagnated, the middle class has been hollowed out, and inequality has surged?” He poses the question to a wide range of tech workers in the Bay Area and reports that “few of them had given the topic much consideration.” But when pressed for an answer, most brushed it off, wondering “if it was really true” or saying that this was just a temporary blip. Sam Lessin, who at the time was leading Facebook’s “identity product group,” tells Packer that, essentially, people are going to, or perhaps already, need less money because “as communication technology gets less expensive,” we’ll be able to “entertain each other and interact with each other and do things for each other much more efficiently.”

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

If they weren’t hiring women, it must be because women just didn’t have enough in-born logic or grit. And on top of that were actual bursts of flat-out harassment. One coworker called her a “cunt” to one of her friends; and although Google took some action in response to her complaint, in the end, she didn’t feel they took it seriously enough. Then there was a tech worker for another firm who started feeling her up on a flight to a conference—“He was treating me like a part of the in-flight entertainment,” Huston says. And there was the coder from another Google office who would stalk young female interns so persistently that a female Googler sent a memo to the women in her office warning others about him when he was traveling to visit: “Please stay away from him.”

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(Across Slack’s worldwide offices, women were 34.3 percent of those in technical jobs; in their US offices, 12.8 percent were from “underrepresented racial and/or ethnic backgrounds”; and 8.3 percent identified as LGBTQ. Later, she moved on to be a senior engineering manager for Patreon.) Levels of harassment are high, too, for LBGTQ employees in tech. When the Kapor Center for Social Impact surveyed tech workers to find out why they’d voluntarily left a tech job, 24 percent of LBGTQ workers said they’d experienced “public humiliation or embarrassment” at work. They were also the group in the survey that reported the highest rates of being bullied, at 20 percent. (Fully 64 percent said bullying “contributed to their decision to leave.”)

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Other coders at Google posted in support of him on their internal forums. Nearly every female coder I spoke to had stories of coworkers citing the same research Damore did, dilating on how nature has decreed rigid male and female roles. When Kelly Ellis, that former Google coder, tweeted about sexual harassment she’d experienced, a tech worker emailed her to explain it was all evolution at work—“We have hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history to deal with. Men are wired to approach you as an egg donor first.” There are pretty clearly self-serving reasons why some programmers prefer to believe that biology explains why men are employed in coding far more than women.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

It’s a dry 90 degrees Fahrenheit inside, but the T-shirted young men who minister to these warm, purring boxes seem oblivious to the mineshaft-like temperature. I’m told that it’s time to take my photo for this book, so I try to be with it, saying, “Let’s do it here by these 7710 SR-c12 routers,” to which a tech worker rolls his eyes and says, “That’s not a 7710 SR-c12 router; it’s a 7710 SR-c4.” Whoops. I’m soon off to see Amélie Lamothe, a young systems quality assurance engineer from Ottawa who’s been with the company for five years and has a vinyl WALL-E figurine in her cubicle. She is also a taekwon-do black belt, but she tells me she considers herself to be an introvert.

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By this I mean that they don’t have the latest Android or iPhone; they’ve got a 2002 Motorola coal-burning flip phone in the bottom drawer, which is kept solely to communicate with spouses or for emergencies. When I mention this relative absence of smart phones, the universal response is that like many tech workers, they totally compartmentalize their lives and don’t want work contaminating real life, and vice versa. The last thing they want when they’re dealing with information all day is more information. I also note from photos in cubicles that, unlike the somewhat geriatric Bell Labs staffers, most of Alcatel-Lucent’s Kanata employees seem to be in the life stage when they’re having children.

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

With outdoor heaters and a kitchen serving restaurant-worthy grub, it’s the ideal spot for a long summer night, or a date if you don’t mind the lively atmosphere. g Rooftop Bars g Contents Google Map B RESTAURANT & BAR Map 3; 720 Howard Street, Yerba Buena; ///accent.coherent.tennis; www.bsanfrancisco.com Nestled atop the Moscone Convention Center, B is a wonderland of views, dollar oysters, and seasonal cocktails. Patrons – a melting pot of tech workers, groups of animated girlfriends, and suited-up businessmen – sit out on the modern terrazzo after a hard day’s work and watch the sun set over Yerba Buena Gardens, drinks in hand. Suffice to say that B makes for a perfect upscale, yet casual backdrop for a date night. » Don’t leave without trying the Paloma – a citrus-heavy drink with a hint of elderflower.

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g Alfresco Fitness g Contents Google Map Kadampa Meditation Center SF Map 4; 3324 17th Street, Mission Dolores; ///ocean.cracks.years; www.meditationinsanfrancisco.org Suffice to say we could all use a little (or a lot) more calm these days, so a meditation class at Kadampa Meditation Center SF should sit high on anyone’s list. All of the center’s drop-in meditation classes are perfectly suited for busy urban people, whether they’re an exhausted tech worker or continent-crossing traveler. As you might expect from a blissed-out meditation center, it’s inclusive and welcoming. g OUTDOORS g Contents Wonderful Walks San Franciscans are an outdoorsy bunch. When you live where mountains and forests meet the sea, it’s hard to resist getting stuck into nature.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Perhaps most tellingly, some tech CEOs are now calling openly for federal regulation on questions concerning data privacy, facial recognition, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the development of AI. These are early indications that a new relationship between government and the tech sector is a real possibility. Grassroots efforts by researchers and tech workers are increasingly focused on achieving socially beneficial outcomes from technology. The AI researcher Joy Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League to call attention to the often-malign effects of algorithms on marginalized populations. Tech workers are organizing within their own companies to bring social protections to gig workers. In the wake of the livestreamed Christchurch massacre, nongovernmental organizations around the world banded together with governments to create the Christchurch Principles, an effort to promote social media governance that better supports democracy and human rights.

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The results were predictable: “Imagine a meal made of the milk left in the bottom of a bowl of cut-rate cereal, the liquid thickened with sweepings from the floor of a health food store, and you have some sense of what it is like to consume the protein-packed shakes that have replaced Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Red Bull in the diets of some tech workers in Silicon Valley.” Summoning up a small bit of charity, he concluded, “These instant meals are meant for work warriors for whom good and delicious food is secondary to perfect and unassailable engineering.” It’s not hard to spot some problems with Soylent. It may be a hyper-efficient means of meeting one’s daily nutritional needs while drastically cutting down on the time required to prepare and eat regular food.

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It brings gustatory pleasure. It provides social connection. It sustains and transmits cultural identity. A world in which Soylent spells the end of food also spells the loss of these values. Maybe you don’t care about Soylent; it’s just another product in the marketplace that no one is required to buy. If tech workers want to economize on time spent grocery shopping or a busy person faces the choice between grabbing an unhealthy meal at a fast-food joint or bringing along some Soylent, why should anyone complain? In fact, it’s a welcome alternative for some people. That’s fine. Engineering has obviously brought humanity lots of good.

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

WHAT’S UNDER SILICON VALLEY’S HOODIES From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way. Unlike people on the East Coast, who all wear the same skinny jeans or pinstripe suits depending on their industry, young people in Mountain View and Palo Alto go to work wearing T-shirts. It’s a cliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if you look closely at those T-shirts, you’ll see the logos of the wearers’ companies—and tech workers care about those very much. What makes a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

And then there’s what the San Francisco–based writer Rebecca Solnit dubs, collectively, “the Google Bus.”30 These are sleeker and more powerful buses, menacingly anonymous in their absence of any identifying marks, with the same kind of opaque, tinted windows that masked the Battery from the prying eyes of the outside world. Unlike the Muni’s legacy buses, the Google Bus isn’t for everyone. It is a private bus designed to transport tech workers from their expensive San Francisco homes down to the offices of Google, Facebook, and Apple. Google alone runs more than one hundred of these daily buses, which make 380 trips to its Googleplex office in Mountain View.31 These luxurious, Wi-Fi-enabled private buses—which, in total, make around four thousand daily scheduled pickups at public Bay Area bus stops—have been superimposed on top of San Francisco’s public transit grid by tech companies that have even begun to employ private security guards to protect their worker-passengers from irate local residents.32 The Google Bus has sparked such animosity from locals that, in December 2013, protesters in West Oakland attacked one of them, smashing a rear window and so outraging Tom Perkins that he compared the glass breaking to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.33 And, as if to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, 2014 is the year that these demonstrations have become more politically organized and coherent.

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Google alone runs more than one hundred of these daily buses, which make 380 trips to its Googleplex office in Mountain View.31 These luxurious, Wi-Fi-enabled private buses—which, in total, make around four thousand daily scheduled pickups at public Bay Area bus stops—have been superimposed on top of San Francisco’s public transit grid by tech companies that have even begun to employ private security guards to protect their worker-passengers from irate local residents.32 The Google Bus has sparked such animosity from locals that, in December 2013, protesters in West Oakland attacked one of them, smashing a rear window and so outraging Tom Perkins that he compared the glass breaking to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.33 And, as if to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, 2014 is the year that these demonstrations have become more politically organized and coherent. They are even spreading outside the Bay Area, with antigentrification protests taking place in February 2014 in Seattle against private Microsoft buses.34 Kristallnacht it certainly isn’t. Rather than racial genocide, the Bay Area’s problem is the ever-widening economic inequality between tech workers and everyone else. In many ways, failure is as endemic here as it is in Rochester. “After decades in which the country has become less and less equal,” mourns the Palo Alto–born-and-bred George Packer, “Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places on earth.”35 Figures from the Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin suggest that the Valley has actually hemorrhaged jobs since the dot-com crash of 2000, losing some forty thousand jobs over the last twelve years.36 A 2013 report by Joint Venture Silicon Valley confirms Kotkin’s findings, adding that homelessness in Silicon Valley has increased by 20% between 2011 and 2013 and reliance on food stamps has reached a ten-year high.37 In Santa Clara County, the geographical heart of Silicon Valley, the poverty rate shot up from 8% in 2001 to 14% in 2013, with the food stamp population jumping from 25,000 in 2001 to 125,000 in 2013.

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Eviction, Ex-Tenant Says,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 2014. 52 Ibid. 53 Casy Miner, “In a Divided San Francisco, Private Tech Buses Drive Tension,” NPR.org, December 17, 2013. 54 Andrew Gumbel, “San Francisco’s Guerrilla Protest at Google Buses Wells into Revolt,” Observer, January 25, 2014. 55 Carmel DeAmicis, “BREAKING: Protesters Attack Google Bus in West Oakland,” Pando Daily, December 20, 2013. 56 Robin Wilkey, “Peter Shih ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ Post Draws San Francisco’s Ire, Confirms Startup Stereotypes,” Huffington Post, August 16, 2013. 57 Jose Fitzgerald, “Real Tech Worker Says SF Homeless ‘Grotesque,’ ‘Degenerate,’ ‘Trash,’” San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 11, 2013. 58 Yasha Levine, “Occupy Wall Street Leader Now Works for Google, Wants to Crowdfund a Private Militia,” Pando Daily, February 7, 2014. 59 J. R. Hennessy, “The Tech Utopia Nobody Wants: Why the World Nerds Are Creating Will Be Awful,” Guardian, July 21, 2014. 60 Krissy Clark, “What Did the Tech CEO Say to the Worker He Wanted to Automate?

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

I stared at this koan, hoping the young woman wearing the shirt while restocking WeWork’s coffee was living it out somewhere else, and I thought about how many parents I knew, both younger and middle-aged ones, had bought into this maxim, to a mixed end. How are we all supposed to survive doing what we love? What will become of the rest of the world? The exhortation can even feel coercive, when applied to the lot of journalists, for instance, or start-up tech workers and other employees in floundering but “creative” businesses. They labor long hours for low salaries doing jobs whose glamour or promise of renown is meant to be their own reward. Americans may well be marinating in an atmosphere of “cruel optimism,” as the scholar Lauren Berlant wrote in her book of the same name, an atmosphere that “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”

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After all, due to the scarcity of rentable or buyable housing in many cities, it is now common for teachers and other professionals living in places like San Francisco to seek second jobs, like the Uber drivers we met previously. As Princeton sociologist and demographer Douglas Massey has written, many families living in costly American cities or surrounding suburbs and towns are feeling the effects of the rise of the digital economy on the cost of real estate. With the rise of that sector, well-paid tech workers moved into urban centers, altering the composition of these areas. The companies themselves sometimes moved in as well, forming mini-metropolises within already au courant places, as Amazon has done with its headquarters in Seattle. The working poor and the struggling middle class then increasingly move to the outskirts—the outer parts of boroughs or the inner suburbs or the uncool far-flung commuter towns like Vallejo, which is thirty-two miles (via a backbreaking commute) from San Francisco.

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Robot’s Alderson is given to deadpan enraged voice-overs about the horrors of the contemporary human condition. “Since when did ads infect our family albums?” Alderson said. “Since when did one become greater than ninety-nine?” This is also true for HBO’s Silicon Valley, which examines the huge gap between ramen-eating, couch-surfing, low-end tech workers and their 1 percent tech-guru overlords—the show’s main source of drama and humor. The absurd tech-titan excesses in Silicon Valley—the venture capital toga parties, the private Kid Rock concerts—are starkly contrasted with life on the lower rungs, where a desperate aspirant pitches his app to customers at the liquor store where he works.

Ready to Run: Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally by Kelly Starrett

Google bus, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, tech worker

recommended mobility exercises for a supple thoracic spine Start wailing on your T-spine and shoulders with these gems: T-Spine Global Smash (see here) T-Spine Double-Ball Strip (see here) Anterior Shoulder (see here) BRIEFING Every weekday morning in San Francisco, herds of high-tech workers line up at street corners, waiting for the charter bus to swing by and load them up for their daily trip to Silicon Valley. They take their seats on the bus and jack into the Wi-Fi with their laptops, but you see them getting their start while waiting for the bus, many of them hunched up, shoulder rolled, heads hanging out over the cliff, at one with their iPhones, either reading or texting.

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Of these two images, which sounds like it’s doing more damage to the body? A day laborer in India transporting bricks to a construction site in a basket perched on top of her head. A computer programmer hunched over his laptop with a 7-ounce baseball cap on his head. For the sake of connection, let’s say he’s one of the tech workers waiting for the Google bus on the corner of 18th and Dolores in San Francisco’s Mission District. He starts his day with his head hanging over his phone, and then he climbs into a window seat on the bus and spends the rest of the day caving his head and shoulders over a computer. Let me put it this way: In this comparison, the woman in her sari carrying bricks is showing off the power of midline stabilization.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Uphadya, are discussing overcoming the vertical isolation of software engineers by organizing ‘technoscientific’ points of production.28 This organization could be structured industrially (organizing all workers in one industry, rather than all workers in one job role), and so recompose different layers of the working class into one united front against the black box and the bosses.29 Together, couriers and tech workers would have much more leverage than either group on their own. The disconnect of these two workforces is a key point that allows Deliveroo to systematically exploit workers on the ground and systematically control workers in its HQ. But industrial-scale organization at Deliveroo could go even further than that: workers in the Deliveroo customer service call centres, cleaning the Deliveroo offices, and guarding the Deliveroo sites all have the same interests as us.

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But they have much more in common with worse-off white-collar workers. Purely in terms of the relation to the means of production themselves, there exists an underlying possibility for solidarity between the two in the same way that there exists the possibility for alliance between Deliveroo workers and tech workers. As the Greek socialist theorist Nicos Poulantzas put it back in the 1970s, ‘organising such strata, incorporating them in trade unions, engaging them in collective practices and demands and breaking the ideology that they are “middle class” or “professionals” is indeed one of the most important stakes of class struggles today’.12 This professional segment, balancing dangerously on a cliff edge just above the rest of the working class, is no less important today.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

“There are no laws or required standards”: Ibid. Their letter was signed by twenty-five artificial intelligence researchers: Ibid. CHAPTER 16: WEAPONIZATION inside the Clarifai offices in lower Manhattan: Kate Conger and Cade Metz, “Tech Workers Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?” New York Times, October 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/technology/tech-workers-ask-censorship-surveillance.html. On Friday, August 11, 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis: Jonathan Hoffman tweet, August 11, 2017, https://twitter.com/ChiefPentSpox/status/896135891432783872/photo/4. Launched by the Defense Department four months earlier, Project Maven was an effort: “Establishment of an Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,” Memorandum, Deputy Secretary of Defense, April 26, 2017, https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/Project%2520Maven%2520DSD%2520Memo%252020170425.pdf [inactive].

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a group of independent academics addressed an open letter: “Workers Researchers in Support of Google Employees: Google Should Withdraw from Project Maven and Commit to Not Weaponizing Its Technology,” International Committee for Robot Arms Control, https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-employees-and-tech-workers/. “As scholars, academics, and researchers who study, teach about, and develop information technology”: Ibid. a front-page story about the controversy: Scott Shane, Cade Metz, and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google,” New York Times, May 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Kalanick and his colleagues briefly hole up in a private room to complete their call as a crowd of one thousand overwhelmingly youthful employees of Chinese Internet companies waits in a strobe-lit hall with loudspeakers blaring. Despite Uber’s underdog status in China, Kalanick is a rock star to the young, Internet-savvy Chinese audience. Obsessed with all things digital and entrepreneurial, the tech workers know well the story of Uber’s global success and its efforts in China. Even though Didi outshines it at home, Uber has carved out a sizable piece of the market, and Kalanick is a boldface name for the audience. The packed ballroom is skeptical but intrigued by Kalanick’s maverick reputation and record of persistence.

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(My $12 car wash and $9.99 case of bottled water meant I was still in the hole.) I was also out of position, as I now would have to head back toward a busier section of town for my next ride, which I found twenty-five unproductive minutes later near San Francisco’s City Hall. This time my passengers were two twentysomething tech workers who discussed a meeting they had just completed and were heading to one or the other’s apartment to continue working. I don’t know anything more about them because they ignored me completely, something I’ve done countless times with my Uber and taxi drivers. That one-mile ride lasted a mere six minutes, and the passenger who exited from the right side of my vehicle neglected to close the door all the way but was long gone before I could get his attention.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

an international letter against the use of AI for autonomous warfare: “Lethal Autonomous Weapons Pledge.” Future of Life Institute. https://futureoflife.org/lethal-autonomous-weapons-pledge/. “Hey, I left the Defense Department”: Tarnoff, Ben. “Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon.” Jacobin. Jacobin, June 6, 2018. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military-tech-workers. about a dozen Googlers resigned: Conger, Kate. “Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract.” Gizmodo. Gizmodo, May 14, 2018. https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-resign-in-protest-against-pentagon-con-1825729300.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

If such a policy increased the number of foreign students too steeply, reducing slots at US universities for native-born students, limits could be set accordingly, or the US education system could expand. Of course, there are other ways to increase skilled immigration, such as simply increasing the number of H1-B visas. Many highly qualified workers are forced to leave the country because they are not successful in the H1-B visa lotteries. One in eight tech workers in the United States is here because of an H1-B visa, and there is a shortage of native workers with the skills required in math, science, and technical positions.45 Still, there are serious arguments that the H1-B program would benefit from reforms in the allocation process.46 A Balanced Immigration Policy While the above policy would bring more highly-skilled immigrants into the United States, a balanced immigration policy would serve our economy’s many needs for immigrants.

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Those who planned to return home cited family as an important motivator. See Xueying Han and Richard P. Appelbaum, “Will They Stay or Will They Go?: International STEM Students Are Up for Grabs,” Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2016. 45. For a discussion of recent aspects of this problem, see Deanne Fitzmaurice and Katie Benner, “Meet the Foreign Tech Workers Left in Limbo by Trump,” New York Times, April 19, 2017. 46. Moni Basu, “Why the Highly Coveted Visa That Changed My Life Is Now Reviled in America,” CNN.com. June 4, 2017. 47. William A. Kandel, “US Family-Based Immigration Policy,” R43145, Congressional Research Service, February 9, 2018. 48.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

We’ve seen the same results in the financial world, where online research on any topic makes you more confident in your overall knowledge and more likely to bet on what you think you know by investing based more on self-assurance than on actual data. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence in the debate over technology is the large number of tech workers who restrict their kids from using smartphones and tablets. Athena Chavarria of Facebook told the New York Times, “I am convinced the Devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.” Steve Jobs famously did not allow his own kids to use iPads, saying that he and his wife limited the technology their kids used at home.

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One of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams, gave his kids actual books instead of tablets, and Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, has said he severely limits screen time in his home because he is painfully aware of the damage tech can do. “I’ve seen it in myself,” he said. “I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” Tech workers and software developers are partly responsible for the addictive nature of our devices, so it’s no wonder they’re concerned about the impact that tech has on their families. This should give us all pause when we consider how much we use smartphones and tablets. Would you eat a meal that the chef wouldn’t serve to his own family?

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Democratic nations have many advantages over authoritarian regimes in a long-term contest to shape how AI is used. Collectively, democratic nations have greater talent, military power, and control over critical technologies. Yet this power is fragmented among different countries and actors, including governments, corporations, academics, and tech workers. Democratic societies will need to manage their internal divisions to harness their strength. Democratic governments will need to work with tech firms to govern surveillance technology to ensure that authoritarian regimes or corporations don’t undermine individual liberties. National security experts who want to stem the flow of AI technology to competitor nations will need to work with academics who favor openness.

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Just outside the tree-lined campus of Tsinghua University, China’s answer to MIT, lies Zhongguancun, one of China’s tech hubs that vie for the title of “China’s Silicon Valley.” The massive tech park is populated with gleaming office buildings, green spaces, ponds, and throngs of young engineers in English language T-shirts, heads down in their phones. At one Chinese start-up I visited, the cafeteria was packed at dinnertime with tech workers who seemingly never went home. China’s tech culture is notoriously hardworking, with employees expected to work “996”: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Yet the open office spaces I saw were still full at 9 p.m., crumpled food wrappers next to workers’ computers as they toiled into the night.

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In education, they were building AI applications to automatically grade papers, personalize education resources, and customize study plans. They cheerily explained their AI would increase teaching efficiency. In medicine, iFLYTEK fielded in 2018 an AI-based diagnostic system to aid doctors in treating 900-plus diseases. Most Chinese tech workers, like those in other countries, just want to get rich. The vast majority of conversations I had with AI researchers in China were about the beneficial uses of AI in society, in improving efficiency, productivity, health, safety, and quality of life. The challenges that Chinese AI innovators are grappling with are largely the same as their counterparts elsewhere.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Doherty and Leinberger, “The Next Real Estate Boom.” 27. Ibid. 28. Leinberger, “Federal Restructuring.” 29. Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, Carjacked, 207. 30. Leinberger, Option, 77–78, and “Here Comes the Neighborhood”; Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution, 143. 31. Jon Swartz, “San Francisco’s Charm Lures High-Tech Workers.” 32. David Brooks, Lecture, Aspen Institute; and David Brooks, “The Splendor of Cities.” 33. Mapes, 268. 34. Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” 3. 35. Ibid., 4. 36. Hope Yen, “Suburbs Lose Young Whites to Cities”; Leinberger, Option, 170. 37. Ibid. WHY JOHNNY CAN’T WALK 1. Jim Colleran, “The Worst Streets in America.” 2.

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“Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.” Institute for Empirical Work in Economics, University of Zurich, Switzerland, ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html. Summers, Nick. “Where the Neon Lights Are Bright—and Drivers Are No Longer Welcome.” Newsweek, February 27, 2009. Swartz, Jon. “San Francisco’s Charm Lures High-Tech Workers.” USA Today, December 6, 2010. The Segmentation Company, “Attracting College-Educated, Young Adults to Cities.” Prepared for CEOs for Cities, May 8, 2006. Transportation for America. Dangerous by Design 2011. Undated. Troianovski, Anton. “Downtowns Get a Fresh Lease.” The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2010.

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

Some of the writers who sprang to Sandberg’s defense early on have casually disavowed her book; others quietly distanced themselves from it. Goldberg even echoed Grant’s original points in a review of Ivanka Trump’s 2017 book Women Who Work. Lean In was a publicity machine, but real results were coming out of existing feminist activism in technology. Communities of women tech workers, several steps ahead of Sandberg, were inclusive, adapting to the needs of queer and trans people, disabled people, and people of color, and aware of how aspects of identity exacerbate sexism. Among these groups were the feminist hackerspace Double Union, an unconference called AdaCamp, and a blog and wiki called Geek Feminism, which included an exhaustive number of articles with information like how to write a code of conduct to use at a conference, or the best practices of explaining nonbinary inclusion in “women’s spaces.”

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Google’s “Year in Search 2017” is available on YouTube, in addition to its other annual roundups. Eric Schmidt called multiple results a “bug” in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2005, which is further considered in a Washington Post piece by Gregory Ferenstein (“Google, Competition and the Perfect Result,” January 4, 2013). Nitasha Tiku has reported on activism at Google (“Why Tech Worker Dissent Is Going Viral,” Wired, June 29, 2018). An interview with Guillaume Chaslot, one of the engineers who worked on the recommendation system, in The Guardian (“‘Fiction is outperforming reality’: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth,” February 2, 2018) provides more information on how hateful content and misinformation spreads on the platform.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Our jobs, for example, are now “flexible,” because we are the ones contorting ourselves to work at all hours, or we were professionally “nimble” because we were trying to survive on freelance gigs. The lingo around living paycheck to paycheck routinely tried to make the dreary carousel of contemporary life sound more fun. “These words have gained a strange kind of prestige from downwardly mobile, college-educated tech workers,” said John Patrick Leary, the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. It was part of what Reddit’s founder, Alexis Ohanian, has called “hustle porn,” cheerleading multiple jobs and their backbreaking exertions, giving a cheerful spin to the full 30 percent of Americans who do something else for pay in addition to their full-time jobs, according to an NPR/Marist survey.

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Chapter 10: The Con of the Side Hustle $39 billion by March 2021: Erin Griffith, “Instacart Raises $265 Million, More Than Doubling Its Valuation to $39 Billion,” New York Times, March 2, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/technology/instacart-raises-265-million.html. “These words have gained a strange kind of prestige from downwardly mobile, college-educated tech workers”: John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019). 30 percent of Americans who do something else for pay in addition to their full-time jobs, according to an NPR/Marist survey: “A Close-Up Look at Contract Workers,” NPR, January 22, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/579629353/a-close-up-look-at-contract-workers.

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Asperger Syndrome, Drosophila, finite state, G4S, game design, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, neurotypical, pez dispenser, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, sugar pill, tech worker, wage slave, Y2K

People confuse children with angels: make it work for you. You asked for it. Part Three Part Three Breakfast Is for Losers Five Months Later Kwantlen College Learning Annex Course 3072-A Assignment: Write about What You Know . . . and the People You Know "All Rise and Pray to the Hug Machine" Meeting Today's New Tech Worker by Kaitlin Anna Boyd Joyce After having worked at my current tech firm for the larger part of a year, I have come to the conclusion that my co-workers aren't so much idiots as they are fellow citi2ens in the thrall of various modes of persistent low-grade autism. The clinical definition is that they are suffering from mild versions of "pervasive development disorders" or "sensory integration dysfunctions."

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Perhaps the broadest way of understanding the world of the high-functioning autistic is to treat all stimuli that impact on the human body not as sensory input but as information bombardment. Most people are able to sift out the day's excess information without ever thinking about it, but to the tech worker exhibiting autistic—okay, let's just say the word: geek—to most geeks, a hug is not a hug, it's the physical equivalent of holding a novelty marine foghorn up to the ear and blasting it directly into the central nervous system. When you hug a geek, you're overloading them in a manner they find intolerable.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

According to the organizers, more than 60 percent of all Google offices, amounting to thousands of employees, participated in the walkouts.52 The same day, they published an article in The Cut articulating five key demands: an end to forced arbitration; a commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity; a publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report; a clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct; and changes in organizational governance, including shifting the Chief Diversity Officer to report directly to the CEO and appointing an employee representative to the Board.53 In February 2019, Google announced that it would meet one of the walkout’s key demands by ending forced arbitration for employee disputes.54 Yet no announcement was made on Project Dragonfly until July 16, 2019, when Google executive Karan Bhatia announced before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that the project had been canceled.55 The story of the Google employees is only one example of the many petitions and protests that tech workers have since been organizing to pressure their companies to act more ethically, not only at Google, but also at Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Apple.56 Many have also proposed innovations and tried to orchestrate their adoption, because they realize that the tools they build are political.

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Cicilline, Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets: Majority Staff Report and Recommendations, United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee of the Judiciary, 2020. 39 Fernando Belinchón and Moynihan Qayyah, “25 Giant Companies That Are Bigger than Entire Countries,” Business Insider, July 25, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/25-giant-companies-that-earn-more-than-entire-countries-2018-7. 40 Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (New York: Melville House, 2021). 41 Dell Cameron and Kate Conger, “Google Is Helping the Pentagon Build AI for Drones,” Gizmodo, June 1, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/google-is-helping-the-pentagon-build-ai-for-drones-1823464533. 42 Meredith Whittaker, in discussion with the authors, September 2020. 43 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. 44 Reuters, “Google to Halt Controversial Project Aiding Pentagon Drones,” NBC News, June 2, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/google-halt-controversial-project-aiding-pentagon-drones-n879471. 45 Lulu Chang, “As Google Continues Its Work on a Military Project, a Dozen Employees Resign,” Digital Trends, June 2, 2018, https://www.digitaltrends.com/business/google-employees-letter-to-ceo-war/. 46 Davey Alba, “Google Backs Away from Controversial Military Drone Project,” BuzzFeed, June 1, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/google-says-it-will-not-follow-through-on-pentagon-drone-ai. 47 Sundar Pichai, “AI at Google: Our Principles,” Google, June 7, 2018, https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-principles/. 48 Ryan Gallagher, “Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal,” The Intercept, August 1, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/google-china-search-engine-censorship/. 49 Find a copy of the open letter in the New York Times archive here: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/166-dragonfly-letter/ae6267f0128f4facd183/optimized/full.pdf#page=1. 50 “Open Letter: Google Must Not Capitulate on Human Rights to Gain Access to China,” Amnesty International, August 28, 2018, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/08/open-letter-to-google-on-reported-plans-to-launch-a-censored-search-engine-in-china/. 51 Taylor Telford and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Google Employees Worldwide Walk Out over Allegations of Sexual Harassment, Inequality within Company,” Washington Post, November 1, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/01/google-employees-worldwide-begin-walkout-over-allegations-sexual-harassment-inequality-within-company; Ryan Mac, “Disgraced Google Exec Andy Rubin Quietly Left His Venture Firm Earlier This Year,” BuzzFeed, October 13, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/andy-rubin-playground-global-google-quiet-departure. 52 Sam Byford, “Google Employees Worldwide are Walking Out Today to Protest Handling of Sexual Misconduct,” The Verge, November 1, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/1/18051026/google-walkout-sexual-harassment-protest. 53 Telford and Dwoskin, “Google Employees Worldwide Walk Out.” 54 Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Ends Forced Arbitration for All Employee Disputes,” New York Times, February 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/technology/google-forced-arbitration.html. 55 “Google’s Project Dragonfly ‘Terminated’ in China,” BBC News, July 17, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49015516. 56 Johana Bhuiyan, “How the Google Walkout Transformed Tech Workers into Activists,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-11-06/google-employee-walkout-tech-industry-activism. On the importance of paying attention to such employee rebellions, see David Courpasson and Jean-Claude Thoenig, When Managers Rebel, 1st ed.

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph

Airbnb, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, digital rights, high net worth, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, Mason jar, pets.com, recommendation engine, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, Travis Kalanick

People in Santa Cruz are typically against development. They’ve opposed widening the roads. They don’t want it to grow. Growth is God, over the Santa Cruz mountains. But in Santa Cruz, it’s vulgar. I wanted some of Santa Cruz’s laid-back ethos for my company. I didn’t want to attract just the same group of ambitious young tech workers from over the hill. I wanted freethinkers, people who were slightly outside the box. I wanted things to be different. I wanted life balance—for me and for my co-workers. I wanted Santa Cruz’s access to trails and waves and a more relaxed way of life, and I didn’t want to have to spend two hours every day commuting to Palo Alto.

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By spring of ’98 he’d gotten tired of his classmates at Stanford and had been focusing most of his energy running a different venture: Technology Network. TechNet was a lobbying group that combined Reed’s two overriding passions: the tech world and educational reform. It pushed for better protections for tech companies against lawsuits from shareholders, easier visa requirements for foreign tech workers, and improvements to math and science education. Reed was a big believer in charter schools and was using the group to advocate for them, donating money to a growing number of politicians. Frankly, he had enough to worry about. But I was still relieved when he dunked his head underwater and swam to the other end of the pool.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Google maintains corporate offices in dozens: Giovanni Legorano, “Google Reaches $333 Million Tax Settlement in Italy,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-agrees-306-million-tax-settlement-in-italy-1493901007. The surrounding neighborhood: Art Patnaude, “Tech Workers Flock to Dublin’s Silicon Docks,” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-workers-flock-to-dublins-silicon-docks-1432822827; Fiona Reddan, “Top 1000: Apple Overtakes CRH to Become Ireland’s Largest Firm,” Irish Times, May 10, 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/business/top-1000-apple-overtakes-crh-to-become-ireland-s-largest-firm-1.3488309.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

He spent more than a decade fantasizing that Kinja, the tech platform, would be his real business—not just a bunch of blogs. Maybe that explains why Nick decided to launch Valleywag. It’s hard to explain it otherwise. The site never got much traffic, peaking around two million visitors a month. It didn’t sell many ads. It didn’t even generate the kinds of anonymous comments you’d see on Jezebel or Gawker—too many tech workers understood how IP addresses worked, how traceable they could be. It was, Nick always knew, “never commercial.” The advertisers in lucrative Silicon Valley publications were venture capital and law firms—not the consumer brands Batty sold to. But Valleywag was, in some ways, the most personally significant of the Gawker sites to Nick Denton.

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Only one writer had really figured out how to drive attention to it, and that was a goofily optimistic New Yorker named Nicholas Carlson. The answer lay not in the sex lives of unattractive technologists and financiers but in slideshows, and in particular slideshows of the awesome new offices that tech workers occupied—big open-plan spaces, with Ping-Pong tables and colorful couches. Valleywag readers couldn’t get enough of that. Nick Denton viewed that kind of coverage as “supine,” an opinion that has now become conventional. His own coverage of some of the country’s most powerful men was, if anything, ahead of its time.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

When then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher enticed Nissan to open the first Japanese car plant in Europe in Sunderland in 1986, Nissan insisted on bringing in Japanese managers; the factory also employed 8,000 locals in 2019.6 The presence of talented foreigners can also help attract international capital. As tech workers move to Toronto, the Canadian city is attracting more venture capital flows too. Through their business networks, skilled migrants also tend to boost exports to their country of origin, as well as foreign investment there.7 Their knowledge of foreign markets is particularly helpful for small exporting businesses, notably in Sweden.8 Moreover, migrants increasingly lead global businesses.

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When she realised that her daughter Disha, a university student who had lived in the US since she was six, might be sent back to India when she turned twenty-one and was no longer covered by her mother’s temporary work visa, she had had enough. Canada gave the family permanent residence in eight months. ‘It’s so nice to be in a country where you feel you belong,’ said Disha.48 As the US turns away talented tech workers, Toronto’s appeal is growing. In 2017 it added more tech talent than the San Francisco Bay Area (which includes Silicon Valley), Seattle and Washington DC combined.49 Meanwhile, venture capital investment in Toronto-based start-ups more than quadrupled between 2013 and 2018.50 Among those flocking there are Canadians who had previously moved to Silicon Valley to work.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

The media image of hackers as apolitical, juvenile pranksters belittles the issues at stake: “While only a small number of computer users would categorize themselves as ‘hackers,’ there are defensible reasons for extending the restricted definition of hacking down and across the case hierarchy of systems analysts, designers, programmers, and operators to include all high-tech workers—no matter how inexpert—who can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured communications that dictates their position in the social networks of exchange and determines the pace of their work schedules.”74 Employees crashing the computer systems of their employers gives a clear indication of that hacking can be an act of labour resistance.

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In announcing the rise of a different class, Negri, Hardt, and others, are contributing to a two-hundred-year-old tradition with roots both in the liberal and the socialist camps. Liberals have invariably heralded the new social stratum as the bearer of an end to class conflicts, while radicals of course have made the very opposite judgement.28 Revolutionary hopes were attached to the high-tech worker already in the 1960s when Serge Mallet wrote about the New Working Class. The subjectivity of the young workers in the automated factory, Mallet attested, was particularly disposed to seeing through the contradictions of the capitalist system.29 Thirty years down the road, Maurizio Lazzarato makes a similar argument about workers in the cutting-edge sector of our day.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Making contractual terms unenforceable is a powerful weapon indeed, and it’s a measure that in the US can take place at the state (not federal) level, where lawmakers are typically more responsive to voters. Take California, where noncompete agreements are unenforceable “as against public policy.” This means that tech workers can abandon companies whose founders turn out to be toxic and found competing companies without worrying about lawsuits from their former employers. That one legal quirk is the reason California has a tech industry: the first Silicon Valley company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, was founded by the Nobel laureate William Shockley, who invented the method for making semiconductors out of silicon (without Shockley’s work, we’d still be using gallium arsenide in our electronics, and “Gallium Arsenide Valley” doesn’t have quite the same ring).

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In the US, one is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).2 This Reagan-era cybersecurity law has been distorted through high-priced cases brought by the likes of Facebook, which has argued that violating its terms and conditions should be viewed as a criminal act of hacking. Then there’s noncompete agreements, which lock up tech workers who might defect from a controlling company to a liberating one; trade secrecy, which lets companies sue rivals that rely on “secrets” to make compatible products; and binding arbitration, which deprives customers and suppliers of a day in court to object to these practices. New dirty tricks are also always on the horizon: Oracle v.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Jason Sockin, Aaron Sojourner, and Evan Starr, “Non-Disclosure Agreements and Externalities from Silence,” working paper, August 30, 2021, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3900285. 8. Queenie Wong, “Meet the CEO Behind Blind, an Anonymous Chat App That Has Tech Workers Talking,” SiliconValley.com, January 25, 2018, https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/01/25/meet-the-ceo-behind-blind-an-anonymous-chat-app-that-has-tech-workers-talking. 9. Svenja Dube and Chenqi Zu, “The Disciplinary Effect of Social Media: Evidence from Firms’ Responses to Glassdoor Reviews,” Journal of Accounting Research 59, no. 5 (December 2021): 1783. 10. Victoria Turk, “This Bot for Workplace Harassment Takes the Bias out of Reporting,” Wired (UK), October 9, 2018, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/julia-shaw-spot-ai-workplace-harassment-reporting-startup. 11.

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

It had to be stopped before it did any further damage.11 For all the competitive spin when it came to talking about who had the best product, however, Netscape and its allies didn’t want to draw much public attention to their campaign to get the government to help. At first, they lobbied very quietly. Even though the TechNet crowd was persuading Congress to side with them on nearly every issue those days—from more tech-worker visas to R&D tax credits to e-commerce sales taxes—they initially didn’t get much headway when it came to their case against Microsoft. The White House had little relish for going up against a booming tech giant whose founder was one of the richest and most admired men in America. The thirteen-year slog of the IBM suit further dampened government interest in high-tech antitrust, as did the case of the existing Microsoft consent decree, which already was outdated by the time it went into place.

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Already facing criticism for the pressure their growth had placed on the housing market, Facebook and Google announced that they would build apartments and town houses to house their employees nearby, company towns in the mold of Pullman and Ford, updated for the twenty-first century. As if in call-and-response to the new welfare capitalism, campaigns to organize tech workers gained momentum, pushing to expand white-collar tech’s perks and pay to its massive, contingent workforce, the shuttle-bus drivers and gig workers and coders for hire. Drive beyond the sandstone-and-tile shimmer of Stanford, the obelisk of the Hoover Tower (still pointing straight up!), and the Stanford Shopping Center, developed on university land back in the 1950s and now home to every designer brand imaginable.

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Vice President Al Gore and President Bill Clinton at the first Net Day in Concord, Calif., 1996. The Internet era created new opportunities for Indian IT workers and companies. Infosys training session, Bangalore, 2000. Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos poses before the Seattle skyline at company headquarters, 2001. Young tech workers flocked to “pink slip parties” in the wake of the dot-com crash. A red dot on your name tag meant you were looking for a job. San Francisco, 2001. Google cofounders Sergey Brin (left) and Larry Page (right) with CEO Eric Schmidt (center), shortly before the company’s 2004 IPO. Presidential candidate Barack Obama talks to a young journalist after a town hall meeting at Google, 2007.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

The relatively high taxation necessary to support a strong social safety net falls most heavily on those with productive assets, including human capital, making countries like France a good place to be a child born into a poor family and a bad place to be an Internet entrepreneur (which in turn makes it a bad place to be a high-tech worker). Overall, policies that guarantee some pie for everybody will slow the growth of the pie itself. Per capita income in the United States is higher than per capita income in France; the United States also has a higher proportion of children living in poverty. Having said all that, reasonable people can disagree over the appropriate level of social spending.

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Boeing sells aircraft to India, Microsoft sells software to Europe, McKinsey & Company sells consulting services to Latin America. Again, this is more good news for people who know how to design a fuel-efficient jet engine or explain total quality management in Spanish. On the other hand, it puts our low-tech workers in competition with low-priced laborers in Vietnam. Nike can pay workers $1 a day to make shoes in a Vietnamese sweatshop. You can’t make Boeing airplanes that way. Globalization creates more opportunities for skilled workers (Naked Economics is published in eleven languages!) and more competition for unskilled workers.

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Both institutions have benefited from each other’s success and a strong partnership between them, demonstrating in a dramatic way the symbiotic relationship that often exists between the tech sector and leading universities. See Taylor Soper, “Univ. of Washington Opens New Computer Science Building, Doubling Capacity to Train Future Tech Workers,” Geekwire, February 28, 2019, https://www.geekwire.com/2019/photos-univ-washington-opens-new-computer-science-building-doubling-capacity-train-future-tech-workers/. Back to note reference 11. “AP Program Participation and Performance Data 2018,” College Board, https://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/participation/ap-2018. Back to note reference 12.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

You’ll need an income source.”18 Rising overdose deaths, the vacuum of leadership and vision, and the sheer disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic made some people wonder if the crisis had created a real opportunity for change on the West Coast. When I asked her what she thought was possible, given how many reform-minded tech workers had left San Francisco, Riva said, “It does feel like the end of an era, and makes me sad.” At the same time, she said, “There’s a lot of people trying to think like, how do we fix this?”19 In normal times, we pay our taxes and expect that, in return, police will prevent and investigate crimes, sidewalks and streets will be as clean and clear as possible, and our children can expect from their schools a decent education.

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“No Safe Place: The Criminalization of Homelessness in US Cities,” National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, July 16, 2014, www.homelessnesslaw.org. 13. Justin Keller, “Open letter to SF Mayor Ed Lee and Greg Suhr (police chief),” Justin Keller (blog), February 15, 2016, www.justink.svbtle.com. 14. Julie Carrie Wong, “San Francisco Tech Worker: ‘I Don’t Want to See Homeless Riff-Raff,’” Guardian, February 17, 2016, www.theguardian.com. 15. Richard Rothstein, Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017). 16. Bruce Mitchell and Juan Franco, “HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps: The Persistent Structure of Segregation and Economic Inequality,” National Community Reinvestment Coalition, March 20, 2018, www.ncrc.org/holc. 17.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

., 85. 74 Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2013), 249. 75 Lee, AI Superpowers, e-book, 348. 76 Smith, Tools and Weapons, 11. 77 Adam Satariano, “The World’s First Ambassador to the Tech Industry,” New York Times, September 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/technology/denmark-tech-ambassador.html. 78 Esmy Jimenez, “ ‘We Won’t Build It’: Northwest Tech Workers Struggle With Company Ties to Immigration Enforcement,” Northwest Public Broadcasting, January 14, 2020, https://www.nwpb.org/2020/01/14/we-wont-build-it-northwest-tech-workers-struggle-with-company-ties-to-immigration-enforcement/. 79 Michael Steinberger, “Does Palantir See too Much?,” New York Times, October 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/21/magazine/palantir-alex-karp.html. 80 Alex Karp, “Opinion: I’m a tech CEO, and I don’t think tech CEOs should be making policy,” Washington Post, September 5, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/policy-decisions-should-be-made-by-elected-representatives-not-silicon-valley/2019/09/05/e02a38dc-cf61-11e9-87fa-8501a456c003_story.html. 81 Trae Stephens, “The Ethics of Defense Technology Development: An Investor’s Perspective,” Medium, December 4, 2019, https://medium.com/@traestephens/the-ethics-of-defense-technology-development-an-investors-perspective-45c71bf6e6af. 82 Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh, “China’s Technology Transfer Strategy: How Chinese Investments in Emerging Technology Enable a Strategic Competitor to Access the Crown Jewels of U.S.

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

Consequently, hiring involved some skills matching between job requirements and applicant qualifications, but also included (and frequently prioritized) cultural and emotional matching between evaluators and candidates. There is burgeoning evidence to suggest that these types of processes are not unique to the EPS world; instead, they are more general features of American labor markets. Whether they are hiring restaurant servers, fashion models, or high-tech workers, US employers emphasize their personal feelings of fit, chemistry, and like-mindedness, often over applicants’ prior work experience and job-specific skills.8 Together, these findings call attention to the fundamentally interpersonal nature of hiring. Mainstream sociological models present employers’ decisions as resulting from applicants’ characteristics.

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., extracurricular activities, paid child care, private schools, and personal tutors)—kept them watching their balance statements and made them feel constrained. A New York Times article several years ago described similar trends on the West Coast among the “working-class millionaires” of Silicon Valley; high-tech workers who made seven figures per year, but saw themselves as underprivileged because they were surrounded by people who made eight or nine figures.10 Thus, a crucial obstacle in using people’s perceptions of their own social position to study social class is that, in many Americans’ eyes, being upper class or elite means the freedom from thinking about monetary constraints and/or having no one richer to which to compare oneself.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Asians’ superior academic standing in college admissions has generated major lawsuits against prestigious universities such as Harvard, with aggrieved whites claiming that Asians benefit from affirmative action policies that whites now seem to need to guarantee sufficient representation in universities and Asians demanding that admissions criteria be more meritocratic rather than artificially limiting their enrollment through racial quotas.12 It is safe to say that Silicon Valley would not be what it is today without Asians. With their level of educational attainment, Indian immigrants (72 percent of whom arrive in the United States with a bachelor’s degree or higher) now account for 70 percent or more of the United States’ annual quota of H-1B visas. The influx of hundreds of thousands of tech workers from southern India has made Telugu the fastest-growing language in America. According to the researcher Vivek Wadhwa, from 1995 to 2004, 53 percent of tech start-ups in the Valley were founded by at least one foreigner, overwhelmingly Asians.13 The campuses of Google and Facebook are tech equivalents of UN headquarters, with canteens offering cuisines from Arabic to Japanese.14 Indians in particular are not only powerfully represented in the tech workforce but also highly networked through organizations such as The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).

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Across Europe, hotels and facilities are so understaffed that they cut back on services (yet resist automating them). Many of Germany’s industrious provinces require thousands of workers that could come only from southern Europe or Asia. Nationwide, Germany is seeking 200,000 nurses by 2020 and is actively recruiting Filipinos to care for its elderly. At the same time, Indian tech workers have become highly sought after to staff European companies. Even after establishing an institute in the United Kingdom to train more British engineers, Dyson still needs at least three thousand engineers for the company’s flagship manufacturing center in England. In the war for talent, Asians are being snapped up.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The more prosperity concentrated in certain cities, the more it concentrated within certain segments of those cities, exacerbating long-standing imbalances or driving those of lesser means out altogether. Dystopian elements in cities such as San Francisco—the homeless defecating on sidewalks in a place with $24 lunch salads and one-bedroom apartments renting for $3,600 on average; high-paid tech workers boarding shuttles to suburban corporate campuses while lower-paid workers settled for 200-square-foot “micro-apartments” or dorm-style arrangements with shared bathrooms or predawn commutes from distant cities such as Stockton—were a feature of both local and national inequality. The growing imbalance of wealth was making life harder in both sorts of places.

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The Transit Riders Union built a coalition and soon had its first big win—the city council unanimously passed an income tax on the city’s wealthiest households, part of a wave of progressive legislation that also included laws mandating a $15 minimum wage and paid leave. The tax would face a challenge but it was a start, the first income tax passed in the state in over eighty years. Next, the coalition took on homelessness. In September 2017, it held a rally under the banner of Housing for All, with new coalition members—even a group of concerned tech workers calling themselves Tech 4 Housing—and a call for new revenue to tackle the problem. A few weeks later, the council’s more liberal members responded with a proposal for an “employee hours tax”—a tax on businesses with gross revenue above $5 million, which would bring in $25 million for affordable housing, shelter, and homelessness services.

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

With this influx of talent, Israel effectively imported a class of highly skilled innovators. The antipathy towards individual enterprise that typified the sclerotic Soviet Union, along with deep-rooted antisemitism, fuelled a population shift of unparalleled importance. It was estimated in 2009 that immigrants from the former Soviet Union represented half of the high-tech workers in Israel.19 It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the sort of people inclined to travel thousands of miles to a small, isolated, desert country – without even knowledge of the language – might possess exactly the sort of boldness that scientific discovery relies upon. Binyamin Netanyahu declared that this influx of talent ‘rescued’ Israel, and should be treated as ‘one of the greatest miracles that ever happened to the state’.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

The person who grew up in poverty thinks about risk and reward in ways the child of a wealthy banker cannot fathom if he tried. The person who grew up when inflation was high experienced something the person who grew up with stable prices never had to. The stock broker who lost everything during the Great Depression experienced something the tech worker basking in the glory of the late 1990s can’t imagine. The Australian who hasn’t seen a recession in 30 years has experienced something no American ever has. On and on. The list of experiences is endless. You know stuff about money that I don’t, and vice versa. You go through life with different beliefs, goals, and forecasts, than I do.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Despite repeated calls from reformers to modernize the system, it has not been changed significantly since 1949, leaving little to attract smart, ambitious people starting their careers because, as one GAO report put it, the system emphasizes “time in position, rather than performance.” Generally, starting tech workers can expect to make 30 percent to 50 percent less in the government than they will in the private sector, assuming they can be induced to consider what most would regard as an uncool civil service job. Agencies lucky enough to find cyber security specialists who want to answer the government’s call for help have to work around a classification and pay system that obviously did not contemplate when it was set up seventy years ago that a star with one or two years of experience at a Silicon Valley firm should be a high-priority hire.

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national workforce was thirty-four: Juliet Eilperin, “Trump Freezes Hiring of Many Federal Workers,” Washington Post, January 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/​powerpost/​trump-freezes-hiring-of-federal-workers/​2017/​01/​23/​f14d8180-e190-11e6-ba11-63c4b4fb5a63_story.html?utm_term=.116fddfeae6a. fifteen pay categories: The General Schedule Classification and Pay is available on the Office of Personnel Management website: https://www.opm.gov/​policy-data-oversight/​pay-leave/​pay-systems/​general-schedule/. starting tech workers: Interview with Max Stier. often impractical preference: See the Veterans Services page on the Office of Personnel Management: https://www.opm.gov/​policy-data-oversight/​veterans-services/​vet-guide-for-hr-professionals/. an average of ninety days: Joe Davidson, “Federal Hiring Remains a Work in Progress After Many Fixes,” Washington Post, October 4, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​powerpost/​wp/​2016/​10/​04/​federal-hiring-remains-a-work-in-progress-after-many-fixes/​?

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

Weiyang’s entire approach is crudely transparent—food, like engineers, can be a pipeline and sourcing issue, solved through increased vertical integration. NetEase has set up numerous massive online open courses (MOOCs) to create a population of skilled workers for recruiting directly into their company, addressing the existing shortage of skilled high-tech workers. Similarly, Weiyang skips the step of working with sources, instead creating its own source of high-quality pork, further eliminating any point of failure. 3. On my way to visit the Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, I stop in the chaotic inland city of Guiyang, a tech boomtown that is building at a frenetic rate.

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

v=f_P1uoV8R6Q 49 Ibid. 50 https://www.reuters.com/article/nigeria-unemployment-idUSL5N10T29Q20150902 51 https://www.techcityng.com/tolu-komolafe-andela-superwoman/ 52 https://africacheck.org/reports/nigerias-unemployment-rate-18-8-widely-tweeted/ 53 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/business/andela-start-up-coding-africa.html 54 https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/11/01/exp-gps-1030-andela-interview.cnn 55 https://medium.com/the-andela-way/hello-world-class-completing-the-andela-fellowship-ace88447d27e 56 https://borgenproject.org/tag/tolulope-komolafe/ 57 https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/11/andela-will-use-ai-to-pair-african-developers-with-high-growth-startups/ 58 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/al-gore-s-firm-leads-100-million-round-in-african-startup-andela 59 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/new-guys 60 https://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/if-she-has-her-way-the-next-bill-gates-will-come-from-lagos/71949 61 https://techcrunch.com/video/andelas-christina-sass-on-growing-tech-talent-in-africa/ 62 Ibid. 63 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestreptalks/2018/01/12/andela-aims-to-solve-the-developer-shortage-with-tech-workers-from-africa/#45b9af91764e 64 https://techcrunch.com/video/andelas-christina-sass-on-growing-tech-talent-in-africa/ 65 https://techmoran.com/2015/06/25/spark-capital-makes-first-african-investmentleads-series-a-funding-for-andela/ 66 https://techcrunch.com/video/andelas-christina-sass-on-growing-tech-talent-in-africa/ 67 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/andela-raises-40m-to-connect-africas-engineering-talent-with-global-technology-companies-300533747.html 68 https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/11/09/technology-may-help-compensate-for-africas-lack-of-manufacturing 69 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/al-gore-s-firm-leads-100-million-round-in-african-startup-andela 70 https://lifestyle.thecable.ng/tolu-komolafe-andela-programming/ 71 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2017/03/09/reading-writing-and-hunger-more-than-13-million-kids-in-this-country-go-to-school-hungry/ 72 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/us/24sfpolitics.html?

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-the-grid, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, standardized shipping container, tech worker, technological singularity, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

A few seconds later the door was opened by a young man, dressed in an old T-shirt and shorts. He appeared bleary eyed, and in the background Sean could hear what sounded like World of Warcraft. Looking past the man, Sean could see a game controller on the couch and what appeared to be a Costco sized bag of Doritos. All the signs of a newly laid off tech worker, Sean thought to himself. “Hello, how can I...” The young man trailed off, and blinked a couple of times. He looked back into the house, as though he couldn’t believe the visitor could be there for him. He turned back to Sean. “I’m Sean Leonov,” Sean said, introducing himself. “You must be Pete Wong.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

This is the way Xerox’s original invention of the graphical user interface was laughed out of the boardroom. Or how about Knight Ridder’s iPad-like device—nearly two decades ahead of its time16—which was so disliked by the newspaper company’s executives that they quickly dissolved the internal, forward-thinking group that created the product. Tech workers aren’t fired for being safe; but while remaining safe, tech companies die. Look at our user base. Blackberry will always be the world’s most popular smartphone. Let’s not change anything. So while we sometimes recall and retell technological history through effortless tales, the reality is that many meaningful technology accomplishments at the most influential companies are the result of successful internal political wins, a slow climb of convincing the right people in the right place at the right time that a good idea is actually good.

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

If 100% of your corporate objective is to pump the stock price (with 0% in creating a skilled and loyal workforce) you will OF COURSE find a penny or two here and there if you need it to make your quarter. Sometime in the next five years, IBM will have a earnings miss, and that will be followed by certain inquiries into accounting practices, followed by restatement of earnings for prior periods. Put it in the bank. Khadijah / May 6, 2012 / 5:48 am Competent tech workers must be a priority I used to work on a lot of outsourcing jobs for IBM, particularly in server and storage management. Although the “billable hours” mindset and foreign labor issues are important, the more immediate issue is having a competent staff in the first place. Although IBM has a lot of warm bodies, the simple fact of the matter is that IBM does not have enough competent staff to deliver on all its outsourcing contracts.

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

We don’t want a short order chef, we want a Lord of the Flies, carried by wolves into civilization and raised in a French kitchen full of copper-bottomed pots and fresh-picked herbs.35 “A Lord of the Flies in a French kitchen” neatly catches the geek machismo and extraordinary privilege that are essential ingredients in the cultural paradox that is Silicon Valley. Wages are so high here, Rebecca Solnit reports, that “you hear tech workers complaining about not having time to spend their money.”36 Depending on which San Francisco neighborhood you live in, your rent rose by anywhere from 10 percent to 135 percent over 2012, driven up by young techies outbidding each other.37 In the booming restaurants and cafés, there’s a general disdain for government, which is often described as fatally broken, in desperate need of “disruption,” that condition beloved of programmers and venture capitalists.

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

The company has since launched vehicles to help employees transition to jobs in government and the nonprofit sector. Meanwhile, onetime math teacher and former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing has created the EnCorps Teaching program in California, enabling companies to help former engineering and high-tech workers move into new chapters teaching math and science in public schools. As the Encore Fellowship initiative underscores, Hewlett-Packard has likewise been a pioneer in corporate innovation for the new stage, backing the first fellowship pilot in Silicon Valley. Now Intel, Agilent, and other major corporations have joined in the effort, helping former employees take important steps toward a new stage—simultaneously extending their impact in the community.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

I think Nicholas Carr could have easily been right—thanks to rampant commodification, the tech industry could have been relegated to a steady if underwhelming sector of the global economy. Until 1996 most of the jobs in the tech industry were in manufacturing—you went to work at a fabrication plant, not a hip start-up office. Today nearly 80 percent of tech workers are in services. When an industry embraces this shift, it finds growth. CHAPTER 7 IOT AND THE FALL AND RISE OF MANUFACTURING During the early days of Zuora, we would often sit around a dinner table with a bottle of wine and try to stump ourselves—what can’t you subscribe to? Media and software moving to subscriptions was a no-brainer, but that was all just ones and zeros.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

And those incremental residents will have all the usual benefits we’ve rehearsed over and over again—a stronger local tax base, more demand for local services, property values high enough to build wealth and support a local construction industry, as well as higher productivity for native workers. Beyond the obvious case of tech workers, National Renewal Visas could be used to recruit medical professionals, teachers, accountants, and other skilled professionals giving businesses based in cities that opt in to the program a leg up. And over time, some visa recipients would launch their own businesses. Most likely these would mostly be modest undertakings, but at least a few of them could turn into high-growth start-ups that would naturally be attractors for both native-born workers and immigrants.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, they don’t advertise where they went to school but the prices are just as exorbitant. Very normal-looking houses go for $2 million plus in Palo Alto and Atherton. The corporate headquarters of Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Apple are insider tourist attractions. For the average tech worker, you wake up and drive from a leafy suburb to a grounded spaceship and stay there to eat the subsidized gourmet dinner. Or maybe you bike to your downtown office or take the dark-windowed company bus from San Francisco and tap out emails with headphones on. You think about money and housing a lot but don’t talk about it.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

Following the New York Times report in 2014, Democrats in Congress promptly drew up bills to rein in scheduling software. But facing a Republican majority fiercely opposed to government regulations, the chances that their bill would become law were nil. The legislation died. In 2008, just as the great recession was approaching, a San Francisco company called Cataphora marketed a software system that rated tech workers on a number of metrics, including their generation of ideas. This was no easy task. Software programs, after all, are hard-pressed to distinguish between an idea and a simple string of words. If you think about it, the difference is often just a matter of context. Yesterday’s ideas—that the earth is round, or even that people might like to share photos in social networks—are today’s facts.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

That touches on an issue that's very important to all the productivity analyses: do we have good measures of hours worked? The BLS, for example, assumes that white-collar workers in high-tech put in a normal forty-hour w^eek. But according to a survey by Info World (emailed to subscribers on February 14, 2003), just 11% of tech workers work "regular" hours; 43% "occasionally" put in extra hours, 18% do so "frequently, and 27% are on call twenty-four hours a day. That's one of the beauties of technology—thanks to laptops, PDAs, and ceU phones, you can never leave the office, because it foUows you everywhere. Trying to quantify the contributions of computers and other high-tech stuff to economic growth is probably a symptom of statistical fetishism at its most advanced.

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way by Tanja Hester

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy and hold, crowdsourcing, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, full employment, General Magic , gig economy, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, independent contractor, index fund, labor-force participation, lifestyle creep, longitudinal study, low interest rates, medical bankruptcy, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, multilevel marketing, obamacare, passive income, post-work, remote working, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, stocks for the long run, tech worker, Vanguard fund, work culture

There was a time when I wouldn’t have believed it, but I have since seen it with my own eyes. Every few months, a news story comes out about some family earning six figures who feels like they’re just scraping by. You’ve probably seen the headlines. The family in Manhattan earning $500,000 a year who lives paycheck to paycheck. The tech worker in San Francisco making $200,000 who feels broke because the cheapest apartment she can find costs $6,000 a month. These stories always elicit plenty of well-deserved eyerolls from the vast majority of people who manage to get by just fine on a whole lot less than those folks. But I’ll confess: I understand how this happens, because we experienced a taste of it before we got serious about saving.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

“It seems undeniable,” suggests Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, “that the increase in the skill premium in the advanced world is primarily the result of skillbiased technological change.”35 Other luminaries like Lawrence Summers reaffirmed this view, claiming that “most of the observed increases in income inequality in the American economy are due to new technology rather than increased trade,” although he does recognize the threat of the global auction.36 The idea that new technologies usually demand higher levels of skill has led economists to present education and technology as a race in which the supply of educated workers needs to keep up with technology-led demand; otherwise, a shortage of skilled workers will lead to a polarization of incomes.37 A major study by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz documents how the supply of educated workers kept pace with demand for much of the twentieth century, which they called the century of human capital. But around 1980, they chart a slowdown in the supply of educated workers while the introduction of new information technologies increased demand for hi-tech workers. This mismatch between supply and demand is used to explain the polarization of incomes between higher- and lower-skill workers, as employers were forced to raise the salaries of qualified employees. As Katz suggests, information technologies are “complementary to workers at the top, a substitute for workers in the middle,” and of little relevance to those at the bottom of the income ladder.38 In line with human capital theory, their remedy is more high-quality education for American 126 The Global Auction workers to close the gap between the supply and demand for skilled labor not simply because it would increase the wages of a large proportion of the workforce but also reduce the cost of skilled labor already in the job market.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

“San Francisco, your future is a vast ethnic ghetto! The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are working on immigration reform. They don’t give a fuck about Latinos but they love using Latinos as a disguise for their agenda! Their goal is to replace their existing workforce with workers from Asian countries. Because tech workers from Asia will work for one-third the salary! All the low level cogs in the tech industry are so fucked up their own asses that while they were hosting public mournings for net neutrality, they failed to get anything like a political education! They have no idea what’s happening to them! They can’t conceive of the natural path of business!

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration