The Scottish Philosopher in Silicon Valley

June 6, 2016

When Alistair Duff, professor of information society and policy at Scotland’s Edinburgh Napier University, checked out Silicon Valley, he identified several disturbing aspects of the prevailing tech scene. The Atlantic’s Kevah Waddell interviews the professor in, “The Information Revolution’s Dark Turn.”

The article reminds us that, just after World War II, the idealistic “information revolution” produced many valuable tools and improved much about our lives. Now, however, the Silicon-Valley-centered tech scene has turned corporate, data-hungry, and self-serving. Or, as Duff puts it, we are now seeing “the domination of information technology over human beings, and the subordination of people to a technological imperative.”

Waddell and Duff discuss the professor’s Normative Theory of the Information Society; the potential for information technology to improve society; privacy tradeoffs; treatment of workers; workplace diversity; and his preference that tech companies (like Apple) more readily defer to government agencies (like the FBI). Regarding that last point, it is worth noting Duff’s stance against the “anti-statism” he believes permeates Silicon Valley, and his estimation that “justice” outranks “freedom” as a social consideration.

Waddell asks Duff what a tech hub should look like, if Silicon Valley is such a poor example. The professor responds:

“It would look more like Scandinavia than Silicon Valley. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t develop the tech industry—we can learn a massive amount from Silicon Valley….

“But what we shouldn’t do is incorporate the abuse of the boundary between work and home, we should treat people with respect, we should have integrated workforces. A study came out that only 2 percent of Google’s, Yahoo’s, and a couple of other top companies’ workforces were black. Twelve percent of the U.S. population is black, so that is not good, is it? I’m not saying they discriminate overtly against black people—I very much doubt that—but they’re not doing enough to change things.

“We need the best of Silicon Valley and the best of European social democracy, combined into a new type of tech cluster.

“There’s a book by Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen called The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model, which argues that you can have a different type of information society from the libertarian, winner-takes-all model pioneered in Silicon Valley. You can have a more human, a more proportioned, a tamer information society like we’ve seen in Finland.”

Duff goes on to say that the state should absolutely be involved in building the information society, a concept that goes over much better in Europe than in the U.S. He points to Japan as a country which has built a successful information society with guidance from the state. See the interview for more of Professor Duff’s observations.

 

Cynthia Murrell, June 6, 2016

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

Comments

2 Responses to “The Scottish Philosopher in Silicon Valley”

  1. Parker Ermogemous on June 7th, 2016 12:08 am

    Just creating a personal profile and start searching for Asian girls online in your area.

  2. Jonattan Blun on June 8th, 2016 3:00 am

    Scottish Philosopher thought was true, i will had have the same opinion with him in this case.anti-statism is one thing i’d love to argue with you in this article

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