Why the World Hates SILICON VALLEY

[appalachiablue]

- Aerial View of San Jose, California -

WHY THE WORLD HATES SILICON VALLEY, Newsweek, June 10, 2016.

Silicon Valley is the new Rome. As in the time of Caesar, the world is grappling with an advanced city-state dominating much of the planet, injecting its technology and ethos everywhere it lands and funneling enormous wealth back home.
Peter Thiel—tech investor, avowed monopolist, proponent of skipping college—has many of us wringing our hands about Silicon Valley’s swelling wealth and influence. Thiel spent about $10 million to secretly fund an ex-wrestler’s lawsuit against a salacious news-gossip website, allegedly as revenge, and the revelation of that set off panic about the ability of Silicon Valley and its billionaires to impose their will. Thiel is just one of many stories with a similar theme.
Facebook got accused of muting conservative news on the site, stirring still more worries about media control and censorship. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made Thiel look like a cheapskate when he paid $30 million to buy and tear down four homes around his residence, just so nobody will be able to see into his windows. Look around the U.S. and you find that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wielded the power to reverse an Indiana law that might have discriminated against the LGBT community, by threatening to abandon the state. The Donald Trump phenomenon has been largely fueled by voters angry that their jobs are getting reamed by technology.

Similar angst about California’s peninsula of geeks and Ghirardelli has resulted in backlash around the globe. The European Commission is freaking out about Google and Netflix, China has been pushing back against Apple, and India recently stopped a Facebook plan to offer free internet because the government felt India might lose control over its wireless infrastructure. “There are certain rules necessary to operate so India doesn’t become a digital colony,” Sharad Sharma of Bangalore think tank iSpirt told journalists.
And yet the Silicon Valley Empire is just getting started. A new generation of technologies such as artificial intelligence, 3-D printing and blockchain—all likely to be developed primarily by Silicon Valley companies—are about to cross the chasm from prototype to mainstream and challenge everything you know about manufacturing, money, services, national sovereignty and much else in your life. If you think there’s been head-spinning change since 2007, when smartphones, social networks and cloud computing combined to usher in the current tech era, the next 10 years could short-circuit your cortex.

Is all this good or bad? The answer is as complex as asking the same question about the Roman Empire two millennia ago. Nice for some; really sucks for others. With hope, beneficial to humanity in the long run, but we might have to give it a couple of hundred years to really know.
Get Used to That Sucking Sound: Silicon Valley loves to “disrupt” stuff. Well, now it is disrupting the world. Famed tech analyst Mary Meeker this month released her annual data dump about the industry. If you pick it apart, you can clearly see Silicon Valley’s ascendency in the global economy. For instance, Meeker listed the 20 most valuable tech companies in 2015. Twelve were American, seven were in China, and one was in Japan. None came out of Europe or India or anywhere else. The U.S. companies represented 76 percent of the total market cap and 87 percent of the revenue. Of the dozen companies based in the U.S., just one is not in Silicon Valley (Priceline, based in Connecticut).

Here’s a different way to see the tilt toward California: The number of Internet users is growing faster in India than anywhere else in the world. Almost all of that growth is from people using mobile phones. The top three phone apps in India are owned by Facebook (Facebook, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger), so no wonder India was worried about even more encroachment by the company. Also, almost all of India’s mobile phones run on either Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS operating system. That means a significant proportion of India’s most dynamic industry is sending money to Silicon Valley. That kind of thing is happening in every country except, like, North Korea.

Read more, http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/why-the-world-hates-silicon-valley/ar-AAgPsWr?ocid=spartandhp

[bemildred]

1. Yeah. it's like it's out of control. So unexpected. nt

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. The endemically-sybaritic billionaires are riding high, but there are many auguries

that suggest God may have other plans for their personal power and life-style in the not too distant future.

[seabeckind]

3. Upstarts.

The powers in the world have built a wonderful shining city on the hill and now are faced with the reality that there are people who are managing to get ahead without paying homage to them.

The very idea!

[mrmpa]

4. Why I hate Silicon Valley.............

because its workforce is not representative of the population of the US. If you look at google or any of these companies what you see are white males, Asians and an occasional female and an occasional African American. They also only recruit from specific schools.

I remember reading not long ago, that I think it was the University of Alabama (I might be mistaken) graduates 40% of African American Computer Science majors. But you will never see Silicon Valley recruiting there.

Today, I read this article by Dr. Phil Spriggs, an Economics Professor at Howard University and a former Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Obama administration. According to the Professor African American Computer Science grads outnumber Asian Computer Science grads. Just think about that, for a minute.

http://blackbluedog.com/2013/05/news/did-you-know-that-african-americans-earn-more-ba-degrees-in-computer-science-than-asians/

[appalachiablue]

6. Tech titians have been justly called out for their deplorable lack of diversity in hiring,

most notably blacks and women. Unless however you have the right race, school pedigree, resume and "Lean In" with all you've got to acquire a $1 Billion salary and 9,000+ sq. ft. house like FB COO Sheryl Sandberg, the exception.

[freebrew]

5. Windows 10...

just kidding.

[progressoid]

7. Dang. I thought this was about the TV show.