Silicon Valley Bank, Tech and Politics
Hello, I hope that you’re doing great! I was in Arizona this weekend for a Forward Party event, which was phenomenal. I also was on Bill Maher on Friday in a wide-ranging conversation – check it out if you can.
On the podcast this week I discuss Silicon Valley Bank and its aftermath with CNBC Contributor and Big Technology writer Alex Kantrowitz. “All anyone could talk about in tech last week was Silicon Valley Bank.”
It wasn’t that long ago that people nearly universally felt like technology was a positive force in the world. Last week told a different story. “It was a gutcheck moment that folks in tech realized that there were a lot of people really rooting for them to fail,” Alex commented. “There’s a sense that if the bank had just been called something like Santa Clara Regional Bank it would have been much less political.”
He’s right. Today in America just about everything gets politicized. In 2011, I started a non-profit, Venture for America, to train aspiring entrepreneurs in Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, New Orleans and other cities. At the time, entrepreneurs were regarded as builders, innovators, and job creators.
Now, 12 years later, some of the most prominent entrepreneurs in the country are objects of controversy, and there’s a palpable sense that developments in technology have been cause for concern more than celebration.
Our kids and teenagers are anxious and depressed, in part because of social media. Our public discourse has been splintered into a thousand different realities giving each of us more of what we want to hear.
AI Is developing at a rate that is almost unfathomable. It may subvert human agency, as well as disrupt millions of jobs. We could barely comprehend ChatGPT-3 and now its successor GPT-4 is here in quick succession.
Tech giants and intermediaries sell and resell our data for hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and we don’t see a dime of it.
As Tristan Harris puts it, “We have primordial brains, medieval institutions, and godlike technologies.” Tech is getting smarter, and we are not.
In this environment, it’s little wonder that, when the tech ecosystem was on the line with Silicon Valley Bank, there was some hostility.
“I want technology to be part of the solution,” Alex says. “Maybe the recognition of the skepticism will lead to something positive.” We can only hope. And maybe we can help make it happen.
For my conversation with Alex click here. To try to speed up our institutions to address the challenges of this era, check out Forward.
