YouSaid · the spoken record

Wendy Liu

lines on the record: 51
first: 2020-05-01
most recent: 2020-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That happens. I don't know what those are. I think those can take so many forms. Maybe some private companies are actually suitable for this. Maybe we just need a lot more co-ops or nonprofits or stronger unions. I don't really know, but I would love to see more exploration of that after this pandemic is over.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having a lot of money is not required to have a decent life, and I would like more community input on the things that they're working on so that, you know, when they're building products, they're not saying like, what what should I build that's going to make the most money? They're saying, what can I build that will actually serve the people who I want to serve? And I think that's like quite a shift from what we have now in that the systems that we have now aren't really set up for that. And so I'm not really sure what that could look like. I think are a lot of possibilities, but overall what excites me is the idea of more economic democracy, more control from workers, from users, ordinary people over the systems that affect their lives. And I think, yeah, I think there's just so many ways we could do that. I would just love to see more exploration when it comes to, you know, what is the most effective way to do that? What are the best structures for ensuring?”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Silicon Valley. I think the companies that give their workers the freedom to innovate and experiment, those are the companies that tend to have better products, at least in the sense that they iterate faster, they come up with new things. Gmail, for example, was a product that came out of just an employee at Google deciding he wanted to build an email platform. I think that's the kind of thing that we should be grateful to Silicon Valley for, which is the fact that it is pioneered this new model of giving certain employees the ability to experiment and innovate on their own time. I think that's what we want to capture. I would love to see an industry where income inequality is tiny if it exists at all, where the people who are building these products aren't doing it because they're able to buy a private jet, but they're doing it because they love it. They love what they're building and they don't have to worry about money because they're living in a society where”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways of producing things that take into account all stakeholders and not just shareholders. And so I think there should still be software engineers working on products, but I think those engineers could have more of a say over what they're working on as a collective and also that communities and users and other workers should have input. And it is a great question. I think it's one where I have a little trouble sketching out the specifics just because my work is rooted in kind of critiquing the present. And while I do have an idea of what I would like to see, it's still very, it's very blurry. It's very vague just because I don't think there is a large-scale model where this has worked that I can base my visions on. But I think the innovative parts of the tech industry are the parts where workers are given the freedom to do what they want. And I think that's the kind of thing that I would like to preserve in whatever comes after a current moment.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lovely question. So, the way I see it is I'm thinking about it in terms of democracy and people having more democratic control over the systems that affect them, but also the systems they build. And so when I'm thinking about what the industry could look like, I think that could mean more worker co-ops. That could mean more nonprofits. It could mean more.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ensure that some of us get paid a lot while others get paid very little, and that we can't change this just by going back to school or just being better or trying to climb the ladder more, that the only way we change this is by shifting the balance of power in society away from corporations and the people who own these corporations toward just ordinary people. Because, you know, we all have good days. We all have bad days. Even the best software engineer in the world can get to the point where their skills are no longer deemed useful by the companies that they would be working for. And yeah, I think the industry is in for reckoning. I hope it doesn't come at too high a price. I am currently very worried for all the software engineers and would-be software engineers who are looking around at the industry and seeing that a very small number of companies are hiring. I don't think that is good. But yeah.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sinister going on, and that the wages that they're getting, the esteemed position that they're able to hold in these companies, it's not due to themselves and their own merit. It's due to their usefulness to the company. And if the larger labor market changes or if the larger economy changes and those companies don't see them as useful anymore, they will not hesitate to lay them off. And I think the only way to really counter that is not individual action. It's collective action. I think this could be a quite revelatory moment for people in the industry who previously just believed that they would be fine with the skill set they had. I hope it makes them realize that our fates are all entwined, that there's only so much we can do individually, that there are”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineers, we're seeing layoffs, we're seeing hiring freezes, we're getting to the point where this sector and especially the upper echelons of the sector, they're being revealed to not be as immune as we thought maybe. I definitely, you know, when I graduated, I assumed that because wages in the industry were high, they would be high forever and that I would always be entitled to making six figures and just seeing my net worth go up and up. But now, I mean, there are companies that have rescinded their summer internships, summer internship offers. There are companies that are no longer hiring. And what is that going to mean for the future? I'm not really sure, but I do hope that make software engineers in particular and other people working in tech realize that no matter what the rhetoric of their companies about meritocracy or efficiency or innovation, that there is something”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The CEO, the executives all get to decide what things are being built and they get to tweak those ideas based on what they think shareholders will like or won't like. But the frontline workers who are implementing this, they don't really have a lot of control over the actual ultimate aim of the products they're building. Some of them have control over technical decisions. They have some creative autonomy, but they don't get to say, well, I don't actually want to work with the US military. That's not something they can decide on. As individuals, that's something they can only make happen if they come together as a bloc. So yeah, I do have a lot of hope in, you know, people, workers being politicized and deciding to do something different and to take a stand for what they believe in. And I wonder if, given the changes that we're seeing because of the pandemic, if maybe that's something that is going to be more likely to happen once this is over. Because in the tech industry itself among self-”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Workers, especially women who are underrepresented in tech. I do think there's a lot of room for the industry, even if it remains in private hands, to do better. And I think that comes from just changing the calculus of power relations. I think that comes from workers pushing for what they believe in, pushing for one, higher wages for those who are not making that much money, better working conditions, more benefits, but also for some degree of ethical control over the products they're building. Because right now it's, you know, the products are decided from the top.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I place my hope in the workers of these companies who so far just haven't really seized the power that they have as a collective. The most exciting things I've seen coming out of the tech industry have been worker actions. For example, at Google, when you had all these workers protesting Project Maven, which was a contract with the US Department of Defense, and they actually managed to push Google to not renew that contract. And I think that's just like a tiny glimpse of the power that workers could have if they collectively exerted and pushed for what they believe to be right. The Google Walkout was another very inspiring example of workers, especially female workers, saying, you know, we don't want our company to be paying out a sexual harasser simply, you know, simply because this is how it has always been done. They were basically trying to change the rules of the game and say we want to shift the balance of power towards”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really hope so. I'm in the US and I mean it sounds like it's been bad in the UK as well, but here just it's been really, really horrific, especially when it comes to low-wage workers. Unemployment numbers are through the roof. A lot of people aren't able to pay rent. I really do hope this is a moment of rupture for people where they realize that there are other ways to organize society than the one that we're in now. But in terms of can these companies do better as private companies, I think they definitely can. I think there's a lot of room for them. I don't think it'll necessarily come from actions at the top. I think, you know, the decisions by CEOs, executives, whatever, those can be better, but I also think that they have a lot of pressure from shareholders to do what's good for the bottom line. And a lot of the time, what's good for the bottom line will conflict with good of their workers or their customers. And so where”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The capitalist system that we have now was not built to handle a pandemic like this. And we can't really necessarily blame the system for that because, you know, who before this would have thought that we would have a pandemic of this nature. But at the same time, it does offer a useful opportunity to reflect on what we could have instead. And so we don't have to say, well, you know, capitalism is just useless and has always been useless because it couldn't handle a pandemic like this. I mean, I don't think that's necessarily true. I think capitalism has brought us to this point and we can't change the past, but what we can do is look around and say, well, how have the conditions of the world changed? How can we think about better ways to design our social media platforms and our broader societal institutions to account for the fact that we have one epidemic and also the spate of misinformation regarding the pandemic in a way that is endangering people?”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there are decentralized ways. Part of the problem, I think, is that the world has never before seen the degree of connection that we're able to experience with Facebook, with Twitter, with these apps. Having more than a billion people on a platform where you have instantaneous communication, that is something quite new. If we could go back in time, maybe the way we should think about it is we should probably do it more slowly, more thoughtfully. And instead of just connecting everyone and then just seeing what happens, it could have been done in a more managed, thoughtful, iterative way. So yeah, I think what we're seeing with coronavirus in terms of misinformation, but also just in terms of the way the virus is spreading and affecting us, I think a lot of this stems from just the broader socioeconomic context that we're in. And, you know, the”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“idea where the goal of these platforms is to keep you addicted to them. They want you to spend as much time on them as possible. Facebook likes this term time well spent, but what does that really mean? They just mean time. There's no way to measure that for them. They just define it according to what they think is good. These platforms want us to stay on them, even if that means we are receiving the wrong information, even if it means we're just angry and arguing all the time. I think there are other ways to design these platforms to combat misinformation. That's not my”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. I think, yeah, I mean, I think if we expand the scope of the question to beyond just the social media platforms, I think especially in the US, you know, we don't have universal health care. We have a society that is geared around the idea of work. And so people who don't have jobs that are valued by society are just treated horribly, they're treated disposably. I think a lot of those problems could be ameliorated if we had a more humane and more egalitarian society where, you know, we don't have a few people who are working minimum wage jobs on the front line while some billionaires get credit for donating ventilators or whatever. But when it comes to the social media companies, I think if those had been built along the lines of like a more decentralized platform as opposed to this very centralized attention.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If anyone's listening to this and is using the money as kind of proof of their own superiority, whether implicitly or not, I think that's a thing to be wary of because the The norms, the institutions that determine how much money something is allocated, those are not unbiased. Those are not these neutral arbiters of merit. Those function according to specific rules for specific purposes. And I think it would be a mistake to assume that because someone's able to raise $100 million for some call center startup, that their ideas necessarily something that society should place their faith in, something that is going to be good for the world.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making people callous to the reality around them. Like, it definitely did for me. And I think for any young person who's in the industry and sees the money around them, I think it's easy to take the money as proof of merit, as proof of things being okay. But at the same time, I mean, if you look at what happened in Wall Street 2008, 2009, I think it's probably a similar feeling, and maybe Silicon Valley should pay more attention to what was going on then because at the time, the people in that industry probably took the money that was flowing around as proof that their industry was fine, that there was nothing wrong with all the money they're making. But then, of course, over the next couple of years, everything started to unravel and the industry became more reviled. So I think this is, you know, the fact that there's so much money flowing around tech, while it can have this kind of validating effect, I think we should be really wary of that. And hopefully if”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kind of money that I'd grown used to, the kind of world that I was familiar with, that that was the exception, not the rule, that the vast majority of people on this planet do not have access to that kind of money. And the fact that I did, I mean, for a while, I took that as proof of my own merit, that I was somehow special and was uniquely placed to do something amazing with that money. But then as I started to meet more people outside my bubble, I realized that, you know, a lot of people could use more money and they also have ideas for how to do something with it and that maybe my own personal perspective is not necessarily somehow superior to theirs. It's just that there's the system that we're in prioritizes a certain way of seeing the world in a certain kind of technical background. So yeah, I think the money in the industry, it is confusing, and I worry that it has the effect of”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We raised $10 million. We're amazing. We're so cool. Our product is so great. People love us. And that was very strange for me because I just didn't really know how to make sense of it. I did have a sense that there was something sinister in that, but again, like I didn't have a framework. I didn't have a vocabulary. And that was something that only really hit home for me when my startup sold. And then I moved to London and I started meeting all these people who had never had access to that kind of money and would never expect to. You know, I met people who were delivering food for Deliveroo, who it just, the fact that, you know, someone like me could just try and raise like several hundred thousand dollars without even much of anything, that wasn't conceivable from their perspective. And I started to realize that.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is it that a Twitter poll product can be sold at Palantier for X millions? It didn't occur to us that that could be in some way indicative of a broader problem, that, you know, for one, that this might be being used for nefarious purposes, or that the amount of money in the industry was disconnected from merit or actual usefulness. Instead, I think we took the valuations at face value. We saw that there were advertising technology companies that were valued at tens or hundreds of millions and we thought we could be up there. We could do that. And it was very strange. Again, it was this bubble where we were in this industry where money was not really a means to procure your survival the way it is for most people. Instead, for us, it was this like badge of honor. The point of raising 10 million is not to be able to survive for another few years. The point is to say,”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have a quite reasonable expectation that we'll be able to make at least a million, like hopefully more. And then we're just like, you know, flying, we're like going through the clouds and I'm just thinking there's something about this that seems really absurd. Like where the stuff that we're doing, it doesn't make any sense. It's like we're building sand castles in the air and it just felt really unsettling. And I think that does capture just the fact that there's so much money in the tech industry that in many ways it's not really connected to anything on the ground. I remember before we started our startup, we'd heard about this company that got acquired by Palantir, I believe. And what they did, they made this product that was something like Twitter polls. So like polls for Twitter. And it was very strange. I remember they got acquired for quite a large sum of money. And the founder was quite young and we thought, well, you know, if they can do it, we can do it. We didn't think, Stop and ask, you know,”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally, and I was trying to write that scene in a way that depicted just how absurd that was without being too heavy handed. And so there's a scene where, and you know, this is a real scene where we were on this plane and we were talking about these numbers. And I do remember just thinking like these numbers are absurd. Like we're talking about millions of dollars for something that we built, which isn't even that useful.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to break with established norms versus making sure that that's done for the right reasons. I think there are so many people in the industry because Because it's where the dynamism is, right? And because it's how you can make a lot of money these days. And they're not in it thinking, I will make sure that everything I do is about making people's lives better. They're thinking, well, you know, I'm going to get rich and I'm sure it'll be fine for people in the long run. But what matters is that I build something cool and my name is in TechCrunch and I become wealthy from this. And I think that is a problem because I don't see the broader structures of the industry or society at large as being robust enough to ensure that that kind of energy is channeled toward the greater good. And so there's this kind of disconnect where the culture within the tech industry is very good at innovating. It's very good at producing new things. I don't think it's being directed towards the right purpose.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of thing that ordinary people would want if they could decide democratically. I think there is a lot of money in just making people's lives a little bit more miserable. And yeah, and I think, so for me, that is kind of the central problem. But I do think you're saying, there's this culture of asking for forgiveness, not permission in the tech industry. And while on the one hand, that can actually be quite powerful because it allows determined founders to, you know, challenge the norms, to come up with something innovative and creative and interesting, there's also a downside in that if those people are not equipped with the ethical tools to figure out what kind of things they should be asking for permission for, then they're going to end up building things that are unethical or that are harmful for many people. And I think right now the industry, it does not have the proper balance of”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their innovation is channeled toward the public good. I think that's what people who, even if they don't admit it specifically, that's probably what they tell themselves, because everyone has to justify what they do to themselves. They have to believe that what they're doing is somehow better than the alternative. And I think that is probably an implicit belief that many people in the industry have that, you know, even if they aren't specifically thinking about the greater good when they're working on their product they probably assume that the market mechanism will ensure that they're working on something that is useful for society. And I don't think that's true. I think if we're looking at the evidence, there are a lot of things that can get funded or can generate revenue without actually being”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that does get to the heart of what I see as a problem. It's partly this kind of tech hubris, this idea that as people in the tech industry who either have CS degrees or have some kind of technical way of thinking about things, that they just know better. And so they don't need to ask for permission because, you know, the users, they're stupid. They couldn't possibly be expected to understand what what they need. I think that's pretty common in the software world. And at the same time, there's this, I think there's a faith that the systems work and that I think the assumption is that it's okay for people in the industry to not have to think about the mission, to only think about doing whatever they want to, you know, being ruthless, growing, expanding, creating something cool because the broader structures of society ensure that”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Cambridge Analytica revelations and maybe taking some time to reflect on it that I definitely started thinking, well, this is wrong, we should not have been doing this. I don't know how we managed to convince ourselves to do this. But yeah, so we were living again in this kind of bubble where because we were surrounded by people who were doing similar things, we didn't think what we were doing was that much of a problem. But now when I talk about it, it's just, it feels very obviously, you know, just unethical.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit creepy about this. We were doing things like figuring out who was friends with who so we could find you on Twitter and Instagram. So even if you never connected your accounts and you only told a couple of your friends that you were the same person on Twitter and Instagram, we could still figure that out from looking at your friends. And it was definitely a violation of people's privacy. But at the same time, because the platforms gave us the ability to get this data, we thought, well, it can't be that wrong. You know, this has got to be fine. And we also knew of several other companies in our space that were doing essentially the same thing as us. And so I think all of that contributed to this idea that even though what we were doing felt a little bit creepy, it had to have been okay. The people we were working with, our customers, our investors, they knew what we were doing. They didn't really seem to think it was a problem for them. It was just, okay, this is how the industry works. And it was only after.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their gender is, what their age was. We tried to figure out everything we possibly could about them. And then where possible, we connected that data to an email address. And that means that if you're a brand and you have a list of 100,000 emails and you don't know anything about these people because let's say you go to a traditional marketing data agency and they say, we don't have any data on these emails, then you would go to us and you and then we would tell you, well, here are the Twitter and Instagram handles of all these people. And here's what they care about. Here's how you can target them better. And so we would say these people all really like yoga. These people like running. These people are fans of Taylor Swift. And we would just give that information to whoever we are working with and they would figure out what to do about it. And for me, it was one of those things where the technical challenge was just so fascinating that I didn't really think about the ethical implications of it. Even though I kind of knew, well, there's something that's a little”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were less good at it, basically, and we were less ruthless about it. So, what Cambridge Analytica did just, you know, for those who just need to touch up on that, they would take data from Facebook, I think primarily Facebook, and then use that to build a psychographic profile of people and then use that data to try to figure out how to manipulate them, most notably for the purposes of getting them to vote a certain way or just follow a certain candidate for political purposes. And what we were trying to do, it was kind of similar, maybe one step below that, where we just got the data and we took data from people's Twitter and Instagram. And then we used machine learning to figure out what we could about them. So for example, if someone was a fan of Justin Bieber, if they liked urban outfitters, if they lived in a certain place, if they follow certain candidates, presidential candidates, for example,”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's really funny talking about it now because at the time when we talked about it, it seemed kind of innocuous, maybe a little boring, but now if I describe it in more accurate terms, then it sounds really sinister. So in a phrase, I would say, So, I would say it's kind of like what Cambridge Analytica was trying to do, except we were much less.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Toward open source software that definitely just did not sit well with me because I was used to contributing to open source. I loved the idea of open source. And Google had this policy where if you wanted to work on open source software Because it might theoretically conflict with something Google was working on, you would have to get sign off from your manager. I didn't like that. And that was part of what made me think I should look for something else. And so I ended up starting a startup with some friends from university.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was definitely left with this unsettled feeling about Google, but I didn't really know what to do about it. I guess I thought, I believe this idea that I had worked really hard to get there. And it was something I had earned and therefore deserved that, you know, the fact that Google is going to pay me six-figure salary start just starting as a new graduate, I thought, well, okay, that's what I've earned. That's my reward for working hard throughout my whole life. And so even though there's a part of me that thought, well, you know, the average income in the US is way lower than that. There are people who are really struggling to get by. It doesn't seem fair that I'm getting paid that much money. At the same time, I really wanted to believe that it was fair and that so I didn't have to care because it seemed very frustrating to have to care about that sort of thing. So I just, I kind of shut off that part of my brain. But at the same time, you know, there are other things about Google that I didn't like. They had this policy to”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't really have a vocabulary. I was surrounded by other people working in tech who also expected to be able to make a lot of money in the field and who didn't necessarily have a strong sense of social responsibility. And I certainly didn't. I didn't think that I had much responsibility to the people around me. And so I think it was a kind of ideological bubble where even though we knew that there was something wrong with the world we were living in, we also didn't really know how to look outside it. It was a strange place. And yeah, and I think when I came, when I went back to university after my internship was over,”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was a part of San Francisco that just had quite a few homeless people living within it. And I remember passing by some just walking around and thinking, well, this city is obviously very wealthy. This company is incredibly wealthy. Why does it seem like the number of homeless people is just increasing every week? What is going on in this city? Why does it seem like everyone's just kind of okay with it? And I didn't know how to reconcile that. I felt like there was part of me that said I was being naive, that there was something I just didn't understand. But there was another part of me that just thought there's something wrong, that this doesn't seem normal. It doesn't seem okay that, you know, my employer is producing all these billionaires who are, you know, then spending their money on lavish houses or planes or whatever, while at the same time there are all these people who live right next to them who are obviously struggling. And I thought the priorities just seemed wrong. But then at the same time, I didn't really know who to talk to about that.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Base wasn't as big as it was now. And so for me, it was very easy to just say okay, that must be like a tiny thing. I can ignore it. But living in San Francisco, so I worked in the San Francisco office and I lived about a couple blocks away from the office.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These contract workers who they had a different color badge. I think it's a red badge. I'm not sure if that's changed, but they had a different colored badge. And they were people who had, they were working for Google but not in a full-time role. And the company would explain the division in emails. They would say, you know, we're having this party and contractors can't come or something and they would explain if you're a contractor. Here's what to look out for. Like if you're a full-time employee, you can't let a contractor come after you in certain situations. And so that made me on the lookout for that sort of thing. And I looked around at the contractors and most of them were they were definitely ethnically and gender-wise more diverse than the full-time employees. And that got me thinking a little bit about why is it that these people are contractors? Why don't they have the benefits or why don't they have the wages that Google employees usually do? But the contract”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He just talked to a reporter when maybe he shouldn't have. But the fact that every one of the company was just kind of joking about how this guy got fired, that definitely made me a little uneasy because I was thinking, well, you know, this doesn't seem that bad. Why does everyone seem to accept that it's okay to fire someone simply because they talk to a reporter? That does not seem like a healthy environment. So that was one thing. Another thing was just.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I loved it for a while, and it was only, I guess, over the course of the three, three, four months that I was there that I started noticing little things, partly to do with the company itself. So there were things like the company was very was and still is very big on leaking in the sense that if you're an employee and you leak something to the press, then you can get fired. At least you'll be disciplined. It's usually seen as something that you should not be doing. It's, you know, betraying the family. How dare you? And there was an employee who was publicly announced to have been fired for having leaked to the press. And the founders, Larry and Sergei, they got up on stage one day and were talking about this guy who got fired and they named him. And I remember thinking, well, the thing that he got fired for, I've read the article. It doesn't sound that bad.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was definitely when the mask started to slip. But in very small and confusing ways. So when I first got the internship, at first I was just enthralled. I was amazed that I had even gotten this internship. I wasn't sure that I was qualified because I'd heard so much in the media and the press about how Google was this amazing place filled with brilliant people. And I thought, well, I don't actually know that much yet. But that quickly shifted for me because I think something Google is really good at is instilling this idea within the minds of people who are at Google or about to join Google that they themselves are really that special. And so you feel like you're part of this club. You feel like you're part of the chosen few. And that definitely helped get rid of my doubt. And I thought, well, if Google chose me, then I actually must be special because otherwise they wouldn't have chosen me. And so I put a lot of faith in the company's selection process. And when I actually got there, at first it was great. I think”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have to internalize these ideas. But I think it is pretty common. I think, you know, Especially in the early days when it was really, really easy to be in that world and not read anything negative about it. I think these days, it's more commonly understood that this kind of culture is problematic. And I feel like the discourse around it is a little more thoughtful. And so I feel like young women who are just coming of age and just getting into programming, they tend to have a better understanding of the problems of this kind of culture. So I think it's something that like as it's growing up, as people are growing up with it, it's getting a little better.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely many of the ones I've spoken to have had kind of similar experiences where I mean, in a sense, it's like if this is just the environment we all have to grow up in, right? For those of us who've started coding at like a young age or at an age where we didn't really have a good understanding of the social dynamics, then it's really hard to have a nuanced understanding of what's going on. And I think it is pretty common for women to think, oh, yeah, you know, all these guys, they're pretty dismissive of women. They tell like rape jokes or they make fun of women all the time. But I'm here. And so there must be something different about me. And so it must just be that they're talking about other women, not me. And then I think that that can lead to, you know, thinking, well, I'm just better than other women. That was definitely something that I had to struggle with as I started my computer science degree and I found, oh yeah, there are actually other women here who have gone through the same thing and maybe.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World around me, and I didn't know what to do about it. I just figured, oh, well, if this is how this world is, then that just must be fine. That must be normal. There must be something wrong, you know, with women. That's why there's so few women on the internet. And I didn't really know how to reconcile that with the fact that I myself was female. But yeah, and so I think that led to some pretty reactionary, like nasty instincts within myself, which I'm still trying to work out. But yeah, I think there's something beautiful, but there's also, you know, in a space that's so kind of like outside the norm, in a space where kind of anything goes, I think that can also give rise to some. Undesirous impulses and ways of organizing that kind of culture.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree. And I do love many things about hacker culture. I think there is something beautiful in this idea of being so engrossed in a technical problem that it just takes over you and that you maybe don't even think about the norms. Maybe you're doing something that's not necessarily legal in all sense of the term. But I think there is something beautiful in the idea of wanting to tinker with a machine, wanting to understand it, wanting to have power over it. But the same time, as I talk about in the book, there are some negatives associated with the way this culture usually manifests. And for one, there's a very strong gendered component to hacker culture. And I think that's something where if you're like me, just this naive teenager who doesn't really understand anything about gender politics entering this kind of world, then it's, it can be a little dangerous because I personally just, I saw a lot of misogyny.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as I was paying attention to the world around me, and I noticed that all of these tech companies were suddenly worth billions of dollars and software engineers were making a lot of money, that made me feel like having the ability to manipulate computers could be extremely valuable. And it was. And I think what we're seeing right now is we're kind of all of us are living with the wake of that and the fact that self-engineers are given so much power to control the destiny of the future. And I think, yeah, now we're living in kind of like the downside of that. But for me, there definitely was a time when I couldn't see any downside. It was more just, it's so beautiful to be able to make things that, you know, connect people or that automate work or that just create cool things on a computer. I only saw the positives basically when I was growing up.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the book starts out with me being about 12 years old and building a website for the first time. And even though the websites that I was building then, they were just HTML. They were very static. They were very basic. Getting a sense of what I could possibly do with these websites was really just really invigorating. made me think that I could build anything. Know as a kid, I was extremely naive. I thought I could build the next IMDb or something just by myself. But I think having access to the ability to write computer code at a time when the world was becoming more and more digitized, that gave me this sense of power, the sense of freedom that I didn't have anywhere else. And I still think that's very powerful. And over the years, as I learned more about coding and I studied computer science at university,”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just need to replace Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk with women or people of color slightly nicer people. I think diversity and ethics are important things, but I also think we need larger structural, broader solutions where we need to get to the point where we don't have these billionaires in the first place. You know, we don't have people who... Have so much control just within themselves, I think we need a much more democratic way of developing technology. And that is what I mean by abolition. It's one of those things where I say abolish Silicon Valley and I think half the people who hear it immediately understand what I mean, the other half are just furious because they're like how dare you? And I recognize it's provocative and controversial, but I think it is useful to try to steer the discussion in a certain way.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think we're getting to the point where the industry as it exists, even though it's produced some amazing things, I don't think that the structure works anymore. I think we need new norms, new institutions, new visions for directing how technological development could go. And for me, the problem is the fact that a lot of these companies are driven by the desire to expand they're driven by the profit motive. And I think in the current environment where we have staggering inequality, where we have socioeconomic system that is not working for a lot of people, I think it's almost inevitable that tech companies would get to the point where they disappoint some of the people who previously would have believed in them. And I think in a sense, we can't necessarily blame the people in charge. And so when I talk about abolishing Silicon Valley, even though it's mostly a joke, the point is to posit a structural solution. I'm not saying”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the years, just started becoming a little more uncomfortable, a little more doubtful about what I was seeing around me. And I think the last few years, we've seen a lot more tech criticism coming from both outside the valley and within it. It actually, you know, we have all these stories about workers within Silicon Valley who are just not being treated the way that we would want them to be treated. We have all these billionaires who are existing amidst staggering poverty. We have all these, you know, big tech companies that are behaving in ways that are anti-consumer. And I think all these things are connected. I think what we're seeing with Silicon Valley is we're seeing the concentration of wealth and power amidst a very small number of unrepresentative people who do not have or who are just not prepared to take on the responsibility that power implies. And I don't think they want to. I think it's necessarily even fair to saddle with them with this responsibility.”
2020-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · Abolish Silicon Valley, with Wendy Liu and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source