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0 pointskelnos6y ago0 comments

> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.

I disagree with this characterization. I live in SV and literally everyone I've talked to about privacy/anonymity on the internet sees the value in being able to partition one's life into different buckets for different audiences, and many of them actively maintain such partitions.

This has nothing to do with culture; this is about technology limitations and laziness. Companies like FB want to make it easier to track people online and tie everything you do to a single identity. They can certainly do a lot to link supposedly-unrelated personas through various forms of fingerprinting, but it's never perfect, and they'd love for things to be simpler.

There's also the issue of anon/pseudonymity: companies like FB don't like that because they want an indentifiable real-world person to be accountable for the things they do online.

(Really, think about it: the idea that the people who live in Silicon Valley have some magical weirdo culture where social and professional partitioning doesn't exist... well, that's absurd and doesn't even pass the smell test.)

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dredmorbius6y ago

What individual SV tech workers want, and what SV CEOs and VC pursue, are two wildly different things.

Using SV as a synecdoche for "movers and shakers in the information technology / adtech worlds", the statement stands.

georgek6y ago

As a Greek person I love it when people use our ordinary words as fancy words!

kelnosOP6y ago

Not sure if the point you're trying to make. The parent called it a "cultural thing unique Silicon Valley", which to me implied that it's pervasive in people's thinking. But it's not. The fact that some few CEOs seem to think that way does not make it a "cultural thing" by any stretch of the imagination. It's a scheme to make money and gain market share, not commentary on social values.

dredmorbius6y ago

That the interest in a single unified online identity is not merely exceptional in its association with Silicon Valley, but a specific subset of the Valley: power-brokers and corporate heads.

There are of course exceptions -- rank-and-file tech workers who have drunk the cool aid, and some outside tech who think this is a Good Thing (often for Others but not Themselves).

Ascribing the fixation to SV is, again, generally accurate.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointskelnos6y ago0 comments

There's also the issue of anon/pseudonymity: companies like FB don't like that because they want an indentifiable real-world person to be accountable for the things they do online.

0 comments

dredmorbius6y ago

What individual SV tech workers want, and what SV CEOs and VC pursue, are two wildly different things.

Using SV as a synecdoche for "movers and shakers in the information technology / adtech worlds", the statement stands.

georgek6y ago

As a Greek person I love it when people use our ordinary words as fancy words!

kelnosOP6y ago

dredmorbius6y ago

That the interest in a single unified online identity is not merely exceptional in its association with Silicon Valley, but a specific subset of the Valley: power-brokers and corporate heads.

There are of course exceptions -- rank-and-file tech workers who have drunk the cool aid, and some outside tech who think this is a Good Thing (often for Others but not Themselves).

Ascribing the fixation to SV is, again, generally accurate.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse