Hello 🙋‍♂️ future of coding. I came across this some time ago but I still think it’s worthwhile sharing, It showed for me how one the one hand the ethical decline of google went from “don’t be evil- to… what ever it is today that’s their guiding principle. But also more importantly how a change in company culture also reflected on technical innovation. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

Can you elaborate on why?

Sure! It showed for me how one the one hand the ethical decline of google went from “don’t be evil- to… what ever it is today that’s their guiding principle. But also more importantly how a change in company culture also reflected on technical innovation.

It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company...

I think it would require decoupling Google from capitalism. Not likely to happen any time soon (but in the long term... who known?)

I agree it’s not very likely. Silicon Valley is a strange place. I doubt they will challenge capitalism .. but who knows

Sure! It showed for me how one the one hand the ethical decline of google went from “don’t be evil- to… what ever it is today that’s their guiding principle. But also more importantly how a change in company culture also reflected on technical innovation.

Are you an LLM? This sounds exactly like ChatGPT when it's trying to sound helpful ... but just repeats itself! 🤣 (I see you edited the OP, so presumably that's what happened here!)

Silicon Valley couldn’t be more in the grip of capitalism; challenging that needs to come from somewhere else. Look at the Thiel’s and Andreessen’s who are pulling the strings for most of the promising startups that might start from idealistic ideas with a kernel of change, but quickly get converted into scaling machines for accelerationist agendas.

To be fair, it's incredible if Google managed to avoid Dead Management Layers Syndrome for so long. Being "just like all the other corporations" isn't so bad (from their PoV) when you own so much of the world now.

You’re not wrong, but I’d like to keep some nuance here: The SV or American flavor of VC that people like Andreessen represent has evolved into something even more dangerous. They’re shooting straight for political power. We’ll see how it goes, as the US plays all the way through capitalism. Meanwhile, European VCs have sort of the opposite problem and can’t scale anything to competitive size as the EU now firmly believes that innovation happens through regulation.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

http://paulgraham.com/cities.html I had no idea what he meant at the time, since I live in Silicon Valley and never felt this. But it seems increasingly telling with the passing of the years, not of a place but a subculture.

Effects of monopoly to be precise https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/...

It's not just Google. For every giant platform, the threats of competition, regulation and self-help have been in steady decline for years, as acquisitions, underenforcement of privacy/labor/consumer law, and an increase in IP protection for incumbents have all mounted ... When internal factions at tech companies argue about whether to make their services worse, there's a heavy weight tilting the scales towards enshittification. The lack of competition, an increase in switching costs for users and business-customers, and broad powers to prevent users from modifying the service for themselves all mean that even when a product gets worse, profits can still go up.

This is the culprit: monopoly, and its handmaiden, regulatory capture. That's why today's antimonopoly movement – and the cases against all the tech giants – are so important. The old, good internet was built by flawed tech companies whose internal ranks included the same amoral enshittifiers who are gobbling up the platforms' seed corn today. The thing that stood in their way before wasn't merely the moral character of colleagues who shrank away from these cynical maneuvers: it was the economic penalties that befell those who enshittified too rashly.

Incentives matter. Money talks and bullshit walks. Enshittification isn't due to the moral failings of individuals in tech companies. It's possible to have a good internet run by flawed people. But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.

Replace "tech giants" with "pharmaceutical giants" (or many others) in the above - especially around "regulatory capture"!

Ah so it comes down to re define what money is , what property is … and avoid negative effects of monopolies. Beyond obvious attempts to solve this technically which for me manifest in blockchain/web3 what changes are needed to undergo the cultural shifts / changes ?

I see the main challenge in coming up with social organizations that intrinsically limit inequality. No person nor any collective (corporation, state, ...) should be allowed to dominate in any aspect of life for an indefinite amount of time.