From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/visions/bay-area-has-values-problem-non-techies-are-dismissed-unimportant-nations-future
We are in trouble if the techsters and banksters set the moral compass.
By Jay Youngdahl
December 4, 2013
This piece originally appeared in the East Bay Express, and is reprinted here with their permission.
The health and vitality of a society can be measured by its cultural values, including what it honors and celebrates. For years, the Bay Area could be quite proud of its values. The region has a glorious history of diversity and has championed important political and economic causes. Here at the Express, we are proud to be located in Oakland’s Jack London district. London’s legacy of concern for working folks and social justice, as well as his personal quirkiness, form one of the defining touchstones of the East Bay. But the times they are a-changin’.
The ugly sustained attacks on middle-class BART workers in the mainstream press over the last year, combined with a blind eye toward Silicon Valley arrogance and large-scale financial criminality, have exposed a growing and worrisome trend in the Bay Area. The heroes of the current age are not the hardest working or most caring or most helpful members of our society. Instead, they are the most arrogant, and in some ways, the most compromised.
Take the tech industry. For all of its coolness and shiny products, values espoused by the leaders of this industry are contributing to a hollowing out of Bay Area progressivism and humanism. This month, Farhad Manjoo, author of the “High Definition” column for The Wall Street Journal , wrote a piece titled “Silicon Valley Has an Arrogance Problem.” In it, he argued that many tech entrepreneurs believe that due to “their cultural and economic power,” only they have the ability to “shape the future.” Non-techies are dismissed as “unimportant to the nation’s future.”
Manjoo wrote about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and lecturer at Stanford University, Balaji Srinivasan, who gave a talk at a start-up conference in San Francisco in October. In the talk, entitled “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,” Srinivasan proposed that techies should leave and build an “opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology.” Why would techsters want to leave the United States? Srinivasan, according to Manjoo, “pointed to a few headlines in the national press warning that robots might be taking over people’s jobs. These, he said, were evidence of the rising resentment that technology will foster as it alters conditions across the country and why Silicon Valley needs to keep an escape hatch open.”
Think about that for a minute. Silicon Valley knows it is building and promoting technologies that will cause major job losses. Yet instead of being concerned with the well-being of those who will be unable to find work, the techsters are worried about whether they will be able to escape with their skin—and of course with their money.
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/visions/bay-area-has-values-problem-non-techies-are-dismissed-unimportant-nations-future
