Yeah. I really wanted to dodge that whole Sam Altman thing. Both mk and thenewgreen think he's the shit. I think he's a shit. I think Y Combinator is an entitled pot of rich kids most of whom need to be euthanized. I think tech culture is tone deaf to the point of criminality and I not only long for them to be broke-ass fucks like most of my '99er friends, I want them to feel physical pain as a result. I long for those fuckers - to a man - to develop Lyme disease or colorectal cancer and have no healthcare. And I'll bet every one of those fuckers - to a man - think they're making the world a better place. A better place for me, the guy who wants them to die of leprosy. Sam Altman's argument isn't "San Francisco is intolerant" his argument is "San Francisco is intolerant OF ME. And they probably are - Seattle is similar, although I'll bet not as bad. And I'll tell you why. The fundamental goal of the tech industry is wealth concentration, and the fundamental effect of wealth concentration is inequality. More than that, the goal is wealth concentration through societal damage and that is something new on this green earth. Take Uber. It's fundamentally changing the way people get around, but it's doing so by destroying a viable lower-middle-class profession (taxi driving) and replacing it with pocket change for the masses. Uber isn't even getting rich off the idea - they're losing money hand over fist. But the business climate is such that investors trip over each other to lose money first so they can sell their shares to a greater fool. I use Lyft, which is like Uber but not quite as bad. It helps that I hate the fuck out of taxi drivers in general and the livery industry in particular. I acknowledge and understand that Lyft provides a hard-luck, zombie-like existence to the people who rely on it for their livings and I allow those venture capitalists to lose money giving me rides to and from the airport. I further understand that with the proliferation of personal technology the taxi industry was doomed eventually anyway. Uber, however, made their money by not waiting around for the laws to change. By not investing time or money in shaping legislation. Uber just up and broke the law nationwide and figured they could get away with it for long enough to change the landscape. We're all used to that landscape. We make our way within it. And Uber decided to gut a part of it ("taxi drivers") so they could roll up everyone else's pennies. Amazon is the same way - if they can make .01 cents on everyone's transactions, they make more money than the guy who makes $10 on everyone in town. And then they can take away his $10. Google is the same way - you think MovieFan90210 has no business uploading your movie to their website? Well, it's your job to police their content, not theirs. Russian trolls and white supremacists coordinating torch rallies on your website? Well, they deserve free speech, too. Never mind that everyone else has closed commenting because they feel a fundamental responsibility to keep the internet from devolving into a downward spiral of hate and racism. I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that the tech industry's current business model is to get rich off of the suffering of everyone else. Gamergate? Sam Altman made money off the company that made that possible. The_Donald? Sam Altman made money off the company that made that possible. Fucking Palmer Luckey? Worth $730m. Notch Persson? $1.4 billion. And they're fucking hateful people who use their money to spread hate. And are they innovating? No, they're making apps. Parasitic software that cannot exist without someone else's hardware. Coding choices that are either viciously opportunistic of human failings or utterly deaf to the greater ecosystem in which they operate. The tech industry feels no compunctions about venturing into the social space despite the fact that they neither have nor want any training or knowledge into social effects. FirebrandRoaring, I'm not watching a half-hour video on why someone else's Youtube channel sucks. ALL Youtube channels suck. Youtube sucks. Google sucks. Google actually thought all books should be free and figured eventually the courts would tell them just how hard they could crush authors. And in the meantime, they'd crush authors. Fundamentally? This is a giant corporation with limitless resources arguing that individuals who wish to protect their livelihood should go toe-to-toe with them and if they lose, well that's capitalism. And I don't mean "google books." I mean the tech industry, Silicon Valley, Sam Altman and everyone he knows and loves.
KB, I'd say you don't know the half of it, but you consume enough media that I imagine you probably do. You'll have to forgive, this has been stewing for a couple of days and was exacerbated last night when my group of friends were harassed in a restaurant by a group of guys, two of whom were making MAGA hats. In Canada. Unironically (not that that is the sort of thing one should do ironically). I will point out that anyone whom I have ever personally heard utter the phrases "open debate", or "marketplace of ideas" has consciously or subconsciously believed that they have nothing to lose in that situation. It makes for an easy position to hold, when you believe that the "none too dangerous" things you debate can't hurt you. It's a lot harder of a sell when people are debating your existence, or debating whether you should be allowed to exist, or debating whether or not you're a person, or debating what bathroom you should be "allowed" to use. Honestly, the LGBT community figured out that reasoned debate was going to get them exactly nowhere sometime around the beginning of the postwar period, at the very least by the time the Compton's Cafeteria Riots took place. Any time "reasoned debate" has gotten the community anywhere, it has been a public face that was veneered overtop of rioting, civil disobedience, or die-ins. I am not a person of colour, but I imagine black people who lived through the civil rights era would tell you much the same. Indeed, I have heard them say it, but it is not my story to tell. This is not the first time that people more interested in debating ideas than bearing responsibility for their actions have tried to go up against bad people in "free and Honest" debate. Putting a mirror up between the "debate" around LGBT people in the Weimar Republic and the current political situation should give people reason to pause. These people that they want to debate? They're not interested in "free" or "honest". fuck, the vast majority of people in positions of power aren't really interested in "free" or "honest" if it means they lose out. At this point, I'm just trying to figure out if these people are actively malicious or passively malicious, or i guess if it really matters.I think tech culture is tone deaf to the point of criminality
Going from here to a whole bunch of problems we know jack shit about,are totally unqualified to solve, and which can only be explained to us in language that makes no sense to us are now, somehow, our problems and, worse, often they're our fault to where did all these nazis come from we thought global communication would give us enlightened cosmopolitans not nazis has been a rough ride for everyone. You're not looking at malice, you're looking at something somewhere between denial and confusion.
Global communication isn't the problem. Allowing the people on that global communication platform to place nazi doctrines on an even footing with more peaceful doctrines and expecting them to play nice is the problem. It is a global scale version of what happened in Europe during the interwar period, and the only people who didn't see it were the people who didn't know their history, and the people who thought it would somehow be different this time. Unfortunately, in this case, those who don't know their history are currently in the process of repeating it, and people like me are in the crossfire. Fuck, I'm lucky. At least I'm not a trans woman of colour - talk about an ugly death rate. I know Hanlon's Razor - Never attribute to malice what could equally be attributed to stupidity. In this case, it's both a willful stupidity and a latent malice, and honestly the only reasonable response to "We didn't know" is "Only because you ignored us trying to tell you."where did all these nazis come from we thought global communication would give us enlightened cosmopolitans not nazis
As a white kid hated by the Hispanic majority in New Mexico I thought I understood prejudice. Then I befriended black people in Los Angeles. I think it's fair to say that I'm aware of some minor percentage of it but I sure don't know it. I mean, just this morning I was explaining that Trump's tax cuts were basically written for me. Yeah there have been times I couldn't get a coffee 'cuz I was too gringo but there have also been times the cops have said "sorry for pulling you over, sir, we thought you were hispanic." Actively malicious or passively malicious is the wrong focus. Your mention of the Weimar Republic and LGBTs is right, I think. If I'm looking for an "honest debate" about whether a group of people should be treated as fellow humans, what I'm really looking for is a forum in which I can assert they aren't human. And if I can assert it convincingly enough, they aren't. "Teach the controversy" is shorthand for "we're wrong but also loud and aggressive."
If you think all the trees in the park suck because the park does, you're factually incorrect. There are some badass channels on YouTube. Every Frame a Painting. Veritasium (and Veritasium2). CGP Grey. Even SovietWomble — all off my own list. You don't have to watch the video. I was just looking for your opinion as an experienced film industry guy. You also don't have to empty a bucketload on others just because it rained on you. For one thing, Google literally connects the world, in ways nothing else does. But, sure, you can suddenly reduce your argument to one side and stick with the rightousness; as if someone can command you otherwise. Just... shit, man: aim.ALL Youtube channels suck.
I hate the shit out of Every Frame a Painting. Google connects the world. Before Google, it was Alta Vista, Yahoo, Metacrawler, AOL. Google's contribution was a better algorithm which they then slammed advertising on top of and now they "connect the world" because their search results are better than Bing. The world is actually connected by a bunch of shit put together by Global Crossing, Liberty and L3 but sure, fight me.
You're not a bowl of candy today. I never intend to fight you. I only want to point out that, no matter how much you might hate something — and boy, do you — taking cheap shots at it is not helping the conversation along, or your state of mind.
A glass of pinot noir has leavened my mood somewhat. What can I say, hectoring someone in full dudgeon rarely goes well. I want to draw attention, however, to your conviction that "Google literally connects the world." It says a lot about what we accept and what we've forgotten. They don't. They really don't. At best, they reduce friction by a marginal amount. Let's be honest - Bing isn't radically worse than Google, DuckDuckGo isn't radically worse than Bing. Everything Google does, someone else does it almost as well; Google just happens to be the least-expensive, most-polished slightly-more-ubiquitous solution in every space they thrive in and any space they don't thrive, they abandon (along with everyone that signed onto their technology). More than that, they make it up on volume. Vimeo is a demonstrably better platform than Youtube. It's also a lot stickier. They made a whopping $81m revenue last year (after giving 90% of incoming sales to creators) but that's more than Youtube, an outfit that still loses money. But then, Youtube can afford to lose money because Google makes $28b in ad revenue and eventually nobody will even remember Vimeo. All they'll remember is click-overlay, loud-shout-out, 2-second-cut useless-facts-you-already-know cheap-graphics think-you-learned-something-but-you-didn't Youtube. Here's some economics from Hank Green(whom I hate). Hey, Hank - where's the real money at? so really I’m only down $53,000,000. Actual television advertising is vastly more variable than that. I'll say this: I've got a show that airs on Sundays. In 2010 we sold a block of 6 (off-season, network prime-time) 30-second spots for $250k. There were six of those blocks, the program is 42 minutes long. We averaged 6m viewers that season; $1.5m/6m viewers x 1000 is a CPM of $250. Fundamentally: Youtube has created a world where people are falling all over each other for 2 grand per million viewers. This world will never be visited by the people making six figures per million viewers. When your revenue stream is a factor of a thousand less than you're used to, you pack it in and go home, you don't economize. Multiply by everything Google does. Importantly - Google is happy to lose money doing this. They're making more money than the Youtubers are and it still isn't enough to sustain itself. As someone whose livelihood lo these 10 years has been directly dependent on massive, heartless studios I've got tales that would curl your toes... but as someone who has also worked with half the fucktards headlining Vidcon any given year, allow me to say with no quaver in my voice that a Youtube future is a dark one.Sometime in the last year, my YouTube videos received their billionth view. At the average YouTube ad rate of $2 per thousand views (a $2 CPM), that’s around $2 million in revenue from advertising over the last eight years. Not bad! Though, during those eight years, we have spent more than $4 million on the creation of YouTube videos. So also, not good!
A 22 minute TV program is accompanied by sixteen 30-second ads, at an average cost of $25 per thousand impressions. That leaves us with a per-minute CPM of around $19. A 5.5 minute YouTube video monetized the same way would make about $100 per thousand impressions. After a billion views, that’s $100,000,000. To be fair, YouTube would have taken 45% of that money,
You seem to have taken my argument to be "Google is a force of good". That is not my argument, nor has it ever been. That said, I don't want to remain involved in this conversation: nothing I could say would change it. It's disengaged: everything is shit and everyone is stupid for not changing their ways "for the better".
You're too generous. It's more like a two second cut of a fact that's sort of true in a certain context but is provided as irrefutable and the context is dropped. You're right about everything. I've used Bing, and it's fine. But I use Google because that's what I do. When I want a video, I go straight to YouTube. I think Google has become the Kleenex of facial tissues. Others are just as good, but I remember the name brand.2-second-cut useless-facts-you-already-know
I'll give it a try. One person changing 10% of their searches won't break Google's stranglehold, but that's no reason to not explore options.