#paris marx

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Hyperloop was always a scam

It's time to be honest about Musk's vacuum tube to nowhere

Musk never had any intention of building the Hyperloop. He only needed it to help kill or substantially delay the high-speed rail project and the alternate vision of sustainable collective transportation it offered. It threatened his interests as an automaker and his elite vision of “individualized” mobility that simply worked better for him.

[...]

In the time since California started talking about high-speed rail and Elon Musk interjected with his fantasy to help sidetrack it, China moved ahead and built a network consisting of 42,000 kilometres (26,000 miles) of track. Europe is continuing to expand its own network, and Japan is building a maglev line that will run at speeds of over 500 km/h (310 mph). The first segment from Tokyo to Nagoya could open by 2027. Not to be outdone, China is working on a maglev of its own to beat its Japanese rivals. While the Hyperloop deception spread far and wide, nowhere was it stronger than in the United States. As countries around the world moved forward with real transport improvements, North Americans were distracted by the fantasies of clueless, but self-confident tech moguls. They left people trapped in their cars and denied better options to get around that people in many other parts of the world — even those that are quite a bit poorer — take for granted. Now all they can do is shovel money at automakers to try to power cars with batteries instead of internal combustion engines. They have no vision for a better, less car dependent alternative.

[thoughtportal]

Getting off US tech is no easy task

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the effort

Last month I wrote a post about my intention to get off US tech platforms and services. I’d been considering it for a while, and even taking small steps in that direction, but the alliance between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump, paired with the growing threats from the United States, finally made me take the plunge.

I’m planning to publish a longer list of alternatives for others who want to start shifting away from US tech companies in the near future. But before that, I wanted to provide an update on how things are going. The truth is that getting off the tech services most of us have come to rely on is (probably unsurprisingly) a challenging task because there’s only so much an individual can do to push back on structural forces and a purposeful limitation on the choices available to us.

[luntfontanne]

[On the Silicon Valley mindset and what that means for tech-based utopian dreams of the future of transportation]

I think there are many different ways to look at it. … Fred Turner did great work on this, Richard Barbrook and The Californian Ideology I think is really important to understanding this approach. I think I would say two different things. When we look at Silicon Valley's general approach to problems, it's very much focused on how can technology solve this problem. Technology deployed within the free market.

And so you're not really looking at the political angles of this, what caused this problem in the first place from a political and social perspective. It's, "how does this problem exist today, and how can we imagine a technology that would potentially rectify this problem," without dealing without the broader connections and social issues that surround the problem, that created the problem in the first place. The idea is we just need some better technology, and this can be solved. And I think time and time again, we see that the technology does not actually solve the problems in the way that, in some ways the people who develop these technologies who are idealistic maybe, maybe sometimes naive as well, originally imagine. And we can see that with transportation as well.

But I think that there's another piece of this too, which is something that Jarett Walker talks about, which is elite projection—this idea that the people coming up with these ideas are in these really privileged places in society. Many of them come from wealth, many of them are white men who have a particular experience of the world. And so the ideas that they come up with, the solutions to problems that they come up with, are shaped by their experience of the world, and how they have lived. And so, when we think about transportation then, and we can apply this to many different areas, naturally that is going to affect the way they think about how we solve our transportation problems, how we fix the system that we've created.

And so for someone like Elon Musk, who looks at the transportation system, it's not, "oh wow, the car sucks. Maybe we shouldn't have this because it's killing a lot of people, it's causing a lot of environmental issues, people are stuck in traffic all the time, it's destroyed our communities by creating a suburban mess." Rather, it's much more narrow because he likes the car; he doesn't want to be around strangers, as he says, who could possibly be serial killers on transit. He wants to be in his car, away from everyone else, but he doesn't want to waste his time being stuck in traffic, right?

And this was the original promise of the automobile, all the way back in the 1910s and 20s, that by buying this thing, you can escape from- you can go as fast as you want, you can go where you want, you don't need to be stuck with all these people. But as the automobile becomes this mass consumer product, you can't escape the traffic, because just the geometry of it doesn't make sense, and the rich driver is right next to the poor driver, you just can't escape, right? And so when these rich people look at transportation, with Elon Musk it's, "how do I get out of traffic?" The Boring Company is one solution to that—tunnels under the ground, a really naive solution. And of course the precursor to that was an extra level on top of highways that gets forgotten by many people today—Alissa Walker has done some great work on this over at Curbed.

But also the autonomous vehicles, which are supposed to be a way to rationalize traffic so that automobiles work better together and you won't be stuck in traffic anymore. Or Travis Kalanick, the inciting moment behind Uber, the creation of that company, is that oh it sucks to get a black car or a taxi in San Francisco, so we need a solution to that very narrow problem, and then sell it as something that is going to help so many more people.

And so those are really the key points, right? Technology can solve these problems without dealing with the politics and the social aspects of it. But also, the solution to these problems come from a particular position in society that sees the problems in a very narrow way and doesn't recognize the full extent of them, but will still sell those very narrow solutions as solving the problem for everybody.

Paris Marx on their podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, discussing the topic of their new book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation.

Read an excerpt of the book published in Wired: “Transport Apps Promised to Eliminate Friction. But at What Cost?”

[probablyasocialecologist]

The high cost of Uber’s small profit

Workers and customers get squeezed so investors can make off like bandits

After nearly 15 years, Uber claims it’s finally turned an annual profit. Between 2014 and 2023, the company set over $31 billion on fire in its quest to drive taxi companies out of business and build a global monopoly. It failed on both fronts, but in the meantime it built an organization that can wield significant power over transportation — and that’s exactly how it got to last week’s milestone. Uber turned a net profit of nearly $1.9 billion in 2023, but what few of the headlines will tell you is that over $1.6 billion of it came from unrealized gains from its holdings in companies like Aurora and Didi. Basically, the value of those shares are up, so on paper it looks like Uber’s core business made a lot more money than it actually did. Whether the companies are really worth that much is another question entirely — but that doesn’t matter to Uber. At least it’s not using the much more deceptive “adjusted EBITDA” metric it spent years getting the media to treat as an accurate picture of its finances. Don’t be fooled into thinking the supposed innovation Uber was meant to deliver is finally bearing fruit. The profit it’s reporting is purely due to exploitative business practices where the worker and consumer are squeezed to serve investors — and technology is the tool to do it. This is the moment CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been working toward for years, and the plan he’s trying to implement to cement the company’s position should have us all concerned about the future of how we get around and how we work.

[...]

Uber didn’t become a global player in transportation because it wielded technology to more efficiently deliver services to the public. The tens of billions of dollars it lost over the past decade went into undercutting taxis on price and drawing drivers to its service — including some taxi drivers — by promising good wages, only to cut them once the competition posed by taxis had been eroded and consumers had gotten used to turning to the Uber app instead of calling or hailing a cab. As transport analyst Hubert Horan outlined, for-hire rides are not a service that can take advantage of economies of scale like a software or logistics company, meaning just because you deliver more rides doesn’t mean the per-ride cost gets significantly cheaper. Uber actually created a less cost-efficient model because it forces drivers to use their own vehicles and buy their own insurance instead of having a fleet of similar vehicles covered by fleet insurance. Plus, it has a ton of costs your average taxi company doesn’t: a high-paid tech workforce, expensive headquarters scattered around the world, and outrageously compensated executive management like Khosrowshahi, just to name a few. How did Uber cut costs then? By systematically going after the workers that deliver its service. More recently, it took advantage of the cost-of-living crisis to keep them on board in the same way it exploited workers left behind by the financial crisis in the years after its initial launch. Its only real innovation is finding new ways to exploit labor.

[probablyasocialecologist]

What comes after the AI crash?

The end of the boom won’t end generative AI’s harms

Once the AI bubble bursts, that doesn’t mean chatbots and image generators will be relegated to the trash bin of history. Rather, there will be a reassessment of where it makes sense to implement them, and if attention moves on too fast, they may be able to do that with minimal pushback. The challenge visual artists and video game workers are already finding with employers making use of generative AI to worsen the labor conditions in their industries may become entrenched, especially if artists fail in their lawsuits against AI companies for training on their work without permission. But it could be far worse than that. Microsoft is already partnering with Palantir to feed generative AI into militaries and intelligence agencies, while governments around the world are looking at how they can implement generative AI to reduce the cost of service delivery, often without effective consideration of the potential harms that can come of relying on tools that are well known to output false information. This is a problem Resisting AI author Dan McQuillan has pointed to as a key reason why we must push back against these technologies. There are already countless examples of algorithmic systems have been used to harm welfare recipients, childcare benefit applicants, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups. We risk a repetition, if not an intensification, of those harmful outcomes. When the AI bubble bursts, investors will lose money, companies will close, and workers will lose jobs. Those developments will be splashed across the front pages of major media organizations and will receive countless hours of public discussion. But it’s those lasting harms that will be harder to immediately recognize, and that could fade as the focus moves on to whatever Silicon Valley places starts pushing as the foundation of its next investment cycle. All the benefits Altman and his fellow AI boosters promised will fade, just as did the promises of the gig economy, the metaverse, the crypto industry, and countless others. But the harmful uses of the technology will stick around, unless concerted action is taken to stop those use cases from lingering long after the bubble bursts.

16 August 2024

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Should be a Radicalizing Moment

It’s time to take down the venture capitalists who fuel the tech that makes our lives worse

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank adds to the growing list of evidence we have that the model at the core of the tech industry is deeply flawed, while showing how wrong we ever were to place any faith in the depraved billionaires who lord over it. They spent the past fifteen years eroding the position of workers, extending surveillance practices, funding monopolistic endeavors to destroy traditional industries, and ultimately creating bubbles they knew would burst, but which they hoped to profit off. They pushed a form of rugged individualism where everyone was expected be constantly in competition with one another, and the government would be scaled back as much as possible to get out of the way of their unethical profiteering — at least until they needed the government to step in and save them from themselves.

Already, we’re seeing this whole debacle being used to feed into the more pernicious narratives tech’s most powerful people are pushing to maintain their positions. We know that Peter Thiel is funding far-right political campaigns and Elon Musk is outwardly aligning himself with right-wing culture warriors, but those perspectives are much more entrenched in the Valley than has long been admitted, particularly among the venture capitalists and executive class. For years, the narrative of the tech industry was that it was run by conscientious liberals, but no one can reasonably argue that any longer — if it was ever truly anything more than a marketing pitch for a particular moment in US politics.

[...]

After years of being treated as our saviors, they haven’t responded well to the increased criticism leveled at their industry and the role they’ve played in all the ways tech has made the world a far worse place. People are getting fed up with rampaging Goliaths who want to be treated as heroic Davids until the end of their days. As a result, they’re more openly turning to the extreme right, forging new political alliances, and making open declarations about how they want to continue shaping the world to suit their desires.

[thoughtportal]

No, We Don't Live in a F---ing Simulation! — our opinions are correct

It's a fun thought experiment: what if the universe is a simulation, and nothing around us is real? But lately, some of the most powerful pe

It's a fun thought experiment: what if the universe is a simulation, and nothing around us is real? But lately, some of the most powerful people in tech (and politics) have been saying they believe this is true. Why would they think that? To understand, we talk to Damien P. Williams at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Paris Marx, host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast. Spoiler alert: anyone who'd trap us in a simulation would have to be a total sociopath.

[thoughtportal]

Digital Tech Didn’t Democratize the Film Industry w/ Will Tavlin - Tech Won’t Save Us

Paris Marx is joined by Will Tavlin to discuss the history of the film industry, how the digital revolution was promised to democratize film, and how it actually helped cement the power of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. 

Will Tavlin is a writer and fact checker based in New York City. Follow Will on Twitter at @wtavlin.