> First, the TLDR version: In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get management to take our side?" This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that "builds."
> The real question is whether we will be able to rebuild a building culture. I believe it is possible; Silicon Valley has shown that building sub-cultures can persist even in the face of general malaise. I am afraid this is a long term project. It may involve wrenching cultural authority out of the hands of existing arbiters and pulling it towards places like Silicon Valley, where men and women have not forgotten how to get things done. This may require building up the sort of cultural, media, and political infrastructure that exists along the Acela Corridor, just divorced from the patronage networks that currently keep things anchored in Washington and New York. Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and cities in the state, perhaps California itself.
Hilarious that the capital of ad-tech and useless app proliferation is considered “Building things”.
You want builders, go blue collar. Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers. They know how to get * done. Not Stanford CS grads ensconced in their golden FAANG coffins.
If you demand the things to be impressive in order to count, you can not build culture of building. You will build culture of impressing. And impressing in most cases requires a lot of money thrown on pr.
This is so true. I'm more impressed by the focused and successful long-term (~20 year) plan of revitalization of the local downtown than I am by most things out of Silicon Valley. It started with a cheesy video [1] and now you can go find small businesses [2][3][4] operating in what used to be the hollowed out husks of a past era.
It started from a dying post-WW2 textile town and now it's showing up in movies and TV shows as an idyllic small town. It's not even that kind of idyllic small town. The local paper's editor wrote articles in favor of marriage equality, trans rights, and racial equality and still hasn't been run out of town.
One is Neural Machine Translation, as embodied by, for example, the new Google Translate. For many language pairs you can get automated translation that is actually mostly plausible. It's an incredible aid to global communication.
And those are just the high-tech, high-profile projects.
Even a mundane bridge near a small town saves thousands of people a day of making a detour. This might not sound 'impressive', but imagine a bridge that gets used by just a thousand people a day and that replaces a detour that takes 15 minutes longer. That's a 1000 people * 0.25 hours * 2 times a day = 500 human hours saved per day, or over 180.000 hours saved per year. With a lifespan of 50 years equals that to close to 10 million(!) hours or 4500 'working years' saved. This is an example of just a small bridge near a small town, just imagine the benefit of larger bridges (and other infrastructure projects) near the big cities.
I mean, it's been about a decade since Silicon Valley invented the iPhone. Things take a while to produce clear, unambiguous transformations of the world.
The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.
That’s going to break people’s hearts.
I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
[…]
Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
The idea that the iPhone didn't change the world is just so strange I'm not sure how to engage with it. There's a whole new category of device that billions of people own, and we're saying that didn't matter?
Ironically, San Francisco is known as the city that refuses to build, because the voluntary associations refuse to let it happen.
I'll save my belief in the Bay Area being a real change agent for when I see real change happening in their systems.
I think the author of the article is on to something. I'm not sure precisely that the author has all points right, but directionally and at least fuzzily, it feels right.
> The real question is whether we will be able to rebuild a building culture. I believe it is possible; Silicon Valley has shown that building sub-cultures can persist even in the face of general malaise. I am afraid this is a long term project. It may involve wrenching cultural authority out of the hands of existing arbiters and pulling it towards places like Silicon Valley, where men and women have not forgotten how to get things done. This may require building up the sort of cultural, media, and political infrastructure that exists along the Acela Corridor, just divorced from the patronage networks that currently keep things anchored in Washington and New York. Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and cities in the state, perhaps California itself.