It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet. It still thinks it's those counter-culture rebels hacking away in a garage, building products for the masses.

Just look at them!

They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take.

They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)?

They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring.

They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones.

They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference?

It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast!

“It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet“

1000x yes. This is exactly what happened.

An entire generation of impressionable youngsters, essentially brainwashed into believing to the depths of their soul that Silicon Valley is a utopian meritocracy, composed solely of founders out there saving the world by exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in the individual/social/collective/national psyche.

Like a burning-man-gone wrong style acid trip, where everything starts out peachy and Friendly and then somehow, imperceptibly, so slowly that you never even saw it coming until it was far too late, the place for your friends turns into the circus, like LinkedIn but even more shameless self promotion and rampant fakery, and one day you wake and realize to your horror that real people’s lives are being destroyed due to this tone-deaf technology juggernaut. Shifts in global politics. Bullying. Teen suicides. Cognitive bias amplified by the collective intelligence of some of the greatest and most misguided minds of our generation, all united behind their leader’s vision of a world of programmable social interactions, backed by an absolutely ruthless win at all costs mentality.

The war on reality has begun, people. It’s actually been going on for the last 14 years, but the masses are finally starting to pick up on it.

Facebook employees: it’s time to pick a side and engage in some public collective action like your frenemies at Google. The #techlash is upon us. Ethics is coming back into fashion. Take a stand. Not only will it help save the world, for real this time, it will look good on a resume.

I read in a book somewhere (I think it was about Facebook) that when the recession hit in 2008 a lot of people moved from wall street to silicon valley, because that's where money was still made. Could it be they took a bad culture with them?

I’ve definitely noticed the culture changing for the worse as the tech gold rush attracted many whose primary motivator was money and power more than building something great. That said, the quest for power at all costs including deliberate misinformation has been part of facebook’s DNA from day one (e.g. Zuck “dumb fucks” etc)

Well said!

How about simplifying it further?

When individuals get into positions of unaccountable power and have access to infinite resources they don't do as great a job as we think they can.

In politics, military...even science, the arts and entertainment again and again we are seeing we overestimate what people at the top of the food chain can do.

With speed and scale technology produces larger and larger interconnected networks that can be exploited.

Our traditional power hierarchies that get propped up to make this exploitation efficient are highly efficient only during the growth phase.

> They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference?

You really hit me right there, I've genuinely considered things like microdosing and nootropics in technology, but derided the old fashioned version of the same thing happening in business spaces as if taking drugs to get more work done is somehow better if the drugs are more trendy.

I need to rethink.

> They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones.

Assembling a set of false dichotomies (capitalism vs taxes), stereotypes, over-generalizations, and outright fabrications (company-issued container homes) into an extended non-sequitir and caricature proves nothing, other than your non-constructive intent.

But this much I'll give you: it's easy to take all your rage and craft it into a diatribe targeted at a scapegoat.

> they don't have to see as many homeless

Would you want to have people suffering through homelessness in the place you live? There are only a few options for dealing with it humanely, and they do involve spending money. Otherwise, you are suggesting leaving the problem as it is, or doing inhumane things to deal with it.

Imagine Larry Ellison running Facebook. The mind recoils at the thought.

FB is already close to there in my opinion. My main concern is someone like Ellison running Google. For all of Google’s faults, they could be a lot more evil.

Sounds better than Zuck and whatshername. Maybe they'd ship features users want once in a while.

it is weird to me that you imply facebook and google have morals in your comparison to the amoral wall street. what is stranger to me is that i agree, but only because i believe facebook and google to have distorted or warped moralities. i think they truly believe they are making the world a better place, but i hold the opinion they both have contributed a net negative on society at large.

to me, amorality is preferable over warped morality. it is clear what wall street wants: money. it isn’t clear to me what facebook and google actually want. i fear they strive for control.

I can't buy into the idea that these companies have contributed a net negative to society. Their existence has vastly improved communication over the internet for billions of people. Weighed against their cons, I still think it's a net positive.

Although it's kind of silly trying to make these judgements, I'd say Google has been a net-positive, Facebook is a little murkier.

Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either.

Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things.

It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?

WILL take over?