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Swordsmyth
10-06-2018, 08:48 PM
After overcoming the temptation to publish under a pseudonym, former Google PR executive Jessica Powell has finally dropped her long-awaited satirical novel/memoir "The Big Disruption" last week. In the highly anticipated book - and in an accompanying personal essay published on Medium (https://medium.com/s/the-big-disruption/why-i-left-my-big-fancy-tech-job-and-wrote-a-book-b64c40484774) - Powell offers what may be one of the most scathing critiques of Silicon Valley from a former executive at one of its biggest and most influential companies.
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/2018.10.06powell.JPG
Some of her claims are nothing short of shocking - like when she admitted in her essay that she quit Google last August (she was the company's top PR executive, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai) not to go back to school to study creative writing, as was reported at the time, but because she "got tired" defending the company's unscupulous actions. In particular, she cited YouTube's argument to UK lawmakers that it couldn't censor all of the far-right and jihadist recruitment content posted on its platform because of the sheer volume of content - a claim that Powell said was an outright lie, per the Daily Mail. (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6245847/Former-Google-boss-urges-tech-giants-end-delusion-making-world-better-place.html)
Memorably, there were some instances where Google even paid some of the accounts that posted terrorist content.

Google has been widely criticised for allowing jihadists, far-Right extremists and other hate preachers to post content on its YouTube video platform. In some cases, it funnelled cash from advertisers to the extremists posting videos.
But the firm has repeatedly told MPs it cannot stop problem content because of the sheer volume of videos that are uploaded to YouTube.
Miss Powell was in charge of the company’s response to the criticism, reporting directly to Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai.
Her decision to quit the lucrative role in August last year surprised many in the industry. At the time, Miss Powell claimed she was leaving to go back to university to study creative writing.
However, in her essay, published for free on the Medium website, she admitted she needed to ‘take a break from the issues that I got tired of defending at parties’.
She said: ‘On the surface, things seemed really important and exciting. We were doing big things! Bringing the internet to the developing world! But also, on some level, it all felt a bit off, like when you go on vacation and find yourself wondering when it’s going to feel like the Instagram pics other people have posted.’
While Silicon Valley insiders probably think they're among the most noble people on the planet as they fight to expand Internet access in the developing world and support other similarly "noble" causes, Powell argues that there's a certain cognitive dissonance that arises from tech industry excuses about its failures to combat election hacking and its unwillingness to be transparent about how user data is monetized.

"This is an industry that takes itself far too seriously, and its own responsibility not seriously enough."
[...]
"You can’t tell your advertisers that you can target users down to the tiniest pixel but then throw your hands up before the politicians and say your machines can’t figure out if bad actors are using your platform."
"You can’t buy up a big bookstore and then a big diaper store and a big pet supply store and, finally, a big grocery store, national newspaper, and rocket ship and then act surprised when people start wondering if maybe you’re a bit too powerful."
Powell urged Silicon Valley to "end the self-delusion" and "fess up to reality" or work toward holding itself to a higher ethical standard.

"I want Silicon Valley to end the self-delusion and either fess up to the reality we are creating, or live up to the vision we market to the world each day. Because if you’re going to tell people you’re their saviour, you better be ready to be held to a higher standard."
Of course, no Silicon Valley tell-all would be complete without details of the sexual harassment that's reportedly rampant in the valley. And Powell's essay is no exception.

Should I start with the early stage companies? Like the time I was at a startup and the founder I was working for — a guy who owned a hundred shirts in the same color and quoted Steve Jobs on a daily basis — asked me whether we should hand out dildos as company swag or consider converting our social media platform into an anonymous sex club. (We even whiteboarded it.)
Or maybe I could start with the money — all the absurd valuations with seemingly little basis in reality. Or the time a partner at a VC “jokingly” offered up my female friend, his employee, as an enticement for a founder to work with his firm.
To be sure, Powell isn't saying anything new. All of these criticisms of Silicon Valley have been lodged in the past - but mostly by outsiders. The fact that she was a senior executive working her tech - and that she walked away from the money because she became disillusioned - is almost as relevant as the details of her story.



https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-06/fess-reality-former-google-exec-exposes-silicon-valley-hypocrisy-scathing-essay

timosman
10-06-2018, 09:58 PM
absurd valuations with seemingly little basis in reality.


:tears:

timosman
10-07-2018, 01:07 PM
The Big Disruption: A Totally Fictional But Essentially True Silicon Valley Story

https://medium.com/s/the-big-disruption/the-big-disruption-36fbed0268cf




The only animal left standing was a one-eyed sea lion named Fred.

The northwest wall of the Palo Alto Sea Park shark tank broke at four a.m. on a hot August night, releasing into the park 780,000 gallons of water and fourteen angry sharks. They rode the wave in one sharp-toothed tsunami, penetrating the dolphin tank with open mouths, chasing the dolphins into new parts of the park.

Down came the manatee tank, the penguin’s pen, and the piglet squid viewing room. The flamingo hut and the snake house withstood the pressure but flooded with water, the animals’ terrestrial enclosures suddenly transformed into muddy aquariums. Noah’s ark was now subject to a Darwinian reorganization in which for a few breathless seconds, snakes became exotic fish, tails dropping vertically like flutes bobbing in the water until they finally sank to the floor. Nearby, the flamingos honked in terror, their pink necks popping up above the waves like unfastened hooks, tangling in each other until they dropped below the surface.

As the water from the tanks expanded to the edges of the park, the depths once housing the sea’s greatest creatures were now reduced to mere puddles. Fish were left flapping against the asphalt; the beluga whale flattened seahorses and starfish as it barreled its way through the park in search of arctic water. No longer traveling forward with carnivorous glee, the sharks came to a stop near the snack bar and began rolling about on their dolphin-stuffed bellies, emitting wimpy cries that would have delighted fish lower on the totem pole were they too not gasping in their newly parched environment. Within minutes, self-pity transformed to anger, and in their final moments, the sharks turned on each other in a cannibalistic bloodbath.

It all happened so quickly that by the time the rescue crews arrived, there was little left to salvage. The crew moved swiftly from one section of the park to the next, their faces increasingly grim. The manta rays spread flat like leathery carpets, the snakes roping above them in a bloated tangle. Colorful fish lay on their sides, mouths gaping, scales shifting like crystals in the slowly rising sun.

Word quickly spread of the catastrophe, and television news helicopters soon circled above. Everyone was looking for Belbo, Palo Alto’s beloved walrus and official mascot. The rescue crew finally discovered the aquarium’s prized pinniped underneath one of the felled walls, her death exacted by a slab of heavy concrete.

As the leader of the rescue crew turned to declare the end of their efforts, a loud croak bellowed from the northwest corner of the park. The crew ran toward the sound, which now repeated, like a foghorn, over and over. It was coming from the marine-themed jungle gym, one of the few structures that had survived the flood, thanks to its distance from the shark and dolphin tanks. As the crew approached, they saw a gray mass swaying atop the slide, partially blocking the sun. The rescuers shielded their eyes for a better view, and soon its form grew clearer. It was a one-eyed sea lion with a patch on its left eye.

At the sight of the rescue team, the sea lion barked again and clapped its hands. It balanced a ball on its nose, then put its weight on its front flippers and lifted its tail up behind its head. Without thinking, the rescue crew laughed and clapped.

Then the sea lion jumped onto its belly and sailed down the slide, landing on its stomach, flappers out to its side and a smile on its face. The crew rushed to hug the sea lion, to applaud its survival skills, to hail the new mascot of Palo Alto. The animal clapped its hands again and croaked three times, and across Silicon Valley, the sea lion’s bark dried the tears of the children watching the live news broadcasts. The sea lion showed them hope amid this sea of destruction.

One of the newscasters named it Fred.

A few months later, when the ground had finally dried and the bitter memories of the lost aquarium had faded for all but lawyers and insurance companies, the lot was purchased by a young internet company called Anahata. The founder of the company demanded that Fred be included as part of the property deal.

Fred was given his own wading pool next to the founder’s office but spent most of his time waddling about the company’s halls, pooping in the cubicles and barking at employees he didn’t like, forcing Anahata’s engineers to purchase sound-reduction headphones so they could work undisturbed. Fred did as he pleased and, in doing so, impressed everyone with his stubborn refusal to change his ways.

When Fred died of old age a few years later, all the employees gathered to pay their respects. During the dedication of a commemorative aquarium in the company’s main building, the founder of Anahata, a man named Bobby Bonilo, told his employees that it was Fred who had taught him how to run his company. Fred, he said, had proven that it was fine to have one eye and waddle if you were better than anyone else at doing those things.

No one understood the metaphor, but all the employees committed it to memory as important career advice.

The commemorative aquarium was soon filled with brightly colored fish and crustaceans, as well as a giant squid the founder flew back from a remote island in the Pacific. The squid wowed the crowd with its undulating arms, which extended almost the full length of the tank, and its chomping mouth, which tore apart most of the fish the moment they were dropped in the water.

Nearly a decade on, the squid is nearly the size of a school bus and the aquarium’s only remaining inhabitant. It floats in the central building of Anahata, today the world’s largest and most powerful technology company.


....