The Internet Is Not the Answer (41 page)

35 Ibid.

36 Daniel Bates, “I Am Ashamed,”
MailOnline
, December 22, 2013.

37 Gadd, “Five Things I’ve Learned.”

38 Simon Sebag Montefiore,
Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner
(New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 299.

39 John Dinwiddy,
Bentham
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

40 Ibid., p. 109.

41 Parmy Olson, “The Quantified Other: Nest and Fitbit Chase a Lucrative Side Business,”
Forbes
, April 17, 2014.

42 Meglena Kuneva, Keynote Speech, “Roundtable on Online Data Collection, Targeting and Profiling,” Brussels, March 31, 2009.

43 Dan Gillmor, “Is the Internet Now Just One Big Human Experiment?,”
Guardian,
July 29, 2014.

44 Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook and Engineering the Public.”

45 Christopher Caldwell, “OkCupid’s Venal Experiment Was a Poisoned Arrow,”
Financial Times,
August 1, 2014.

46 Vanessa Thorpe, “Google Defends Listing Extremist Websites in Its Search Results,”
Guardian
, May 25, 2014.

47 Ana Marie Cox, “Who Should We Fear More with Our Data: The Government or Companies?,”
Guardian
, January 20, 2014.

48 Charlie Savage, Edward Wyatt, Peter Baker, and Michael D. Shear, “Surveillance Leaks Likely to Restart Debate on Privacy,”
New York Times
, June 7, 2013.

49 John Naughton, “Edward Snowden’s Not the Story. The Fate of the Internet Is,”
Observer
, July 27, 2013.

50 Ibid.

51 James Risen and Nick Wingfield, “Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders,”
New York Times
, June 19, 2013.

52 Michael Hirsh, “Silicon Valley Doesn’t Just Help the Surveillance State—It Built It,”
Atlantic
, June 10, 2013.

53 Claire Cain Miller, “Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program,”
New York Times
, June 7, 2014.

54 David Firestone, “Twitter’s Surveillance Resistance,”
New York Times
, June 10, 2013.

55 Sue Halpern, “Partial Disclosure,”
New York Review of Books
, July 10, 2014.

56 Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac, “How a ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, a CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,”
Forbes,
August 14, 2013.

57 Ibid.

58 Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone, “Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, November 22, 2011.

59 Robert Cookson, “Internet Launches Fightback Against State Snoopers,”
Financial Times
, August 23, 2013.

60 This letter was sent by AOL, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo. See
reformgovernmentsurveillance.com
.

61 “Silicon Valley’s Hypocrisy on Spying,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, December 11, 2013.

62 Bruce Schneier, “The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, July 31, 2013.

63 Daniel Etherington, “Google Patents Tiny Cameras Embedded in Contact Lenses,”
TechCrunch
, April 13, 2014.

64 James Robinson, “
Time
Magazine Shows Just How Creepy Smart Homes Really Are,”
Pando Daily
, July 7, 2014.

65 Quentin Hardy, “How Urban Anonymity Disappears When All Data Is Tracked,”
New York Times
, April 22, 2014.

66 Ibid.

Chapter Eight

1 This remains the FailCon credo. See
thefailcon.com/about.html
.

2 Jessi Hempel, “Hey, Taxi Company, You Talkin’ to Me?,”
CNN Money
, September 23, 2013,
money.cnn.com/2013/09/19/magazines/fortune/uber
-kalanick.pr.fortune.

3 On Kalanick’s Ayn Rand fetish, see Paul Carr, “Travis Shrugged: The Creepy, Dangerous Ideology Behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption,”
Pando Daily
, October 24, 2012,
pandodaily.com/2012/10/24/travis
-shrugged.

4 Julie Zauzmer and Lori Aratani, “Man Visiting D.C. Says Uber Driver Took Him on Wild Ride,”
Washington Post
, July 9, 2014.

5 Olivia Nuzzi, “Uber’s Biggest Problem Isn’t Surge Pricing. What If It’s Sexual Harassment by Drivers?,”
Daily Beast
, March 28, 2014.

6 See, for example, Ryan Lawler, “Uber Prepares for Another Fight with DC Regulators,”
TechCrunch
, May 17, 2013,
techcrunch.com/2013/05/17/uber-prepares-for-another-fight-with-dc-regulators
. See also Jeff John Roberts, “Cabbies Sue to Drive Car Service Uber out of San Francisco,” GigaOm, November 14, 2012,
gigaom.com/2012/11/14/cabbies
-sue-to-drive-car-service-uber-out-of-san-francisco.

7 Salvador Rodriguez, “Uber Claims Its Cars Attacked by Cab Drivers in France,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 13, 2014.

8 Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy, “German Court Bans Uber Service Nationwide,”
New York Times,
September 2, 2014.

9 David Streitfeld, “Rough Patch for Uber’s Challenge to Taxis,”
New York Times
, January 26, 2014.

10 Paul Sloan, “Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and Beyond),” CNET, December 19, 2011,
news.cnet.com
/8301-1023_3-57345138-93/marc-andreessen-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond.

11 Jordan Novet, “Confirmed: Uber Driver Killed San Francisco Girl in Accident,”
VentureBeat
, January 2, 2014.

12 Michael Hiltzik, “Uber Upholds Capitalism, (Possibly) Learns Downside of Price Gouging,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 16, 2013.

13 “Uber’s Snow Storm Surge Pricing Gouged New Yorkers Big Time,”
Gothamist
, December 16, 2013.

14 Aly Weisman, “Jerry Seinfeld’s Wife Spent $415 During Uber’s Surge Pricing to Make Sure Her Kid Got to a Sleepover,”
Business Insider
, December 16, 2013.

15 Airbnb’s investigation by US tax authorities is well documented. See, for example, April Dembosky, “US Taxman Peers into Holiday Rental Sites,”
Financial Times
, May 29, 2011; Brian R. Fitzgerald and Erica Orden, “Airbnb Gets Subpoena for User Data in New York,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 7, 2013; and Elizabeth A. Harris, “The Airbnb Economy in New York: Lucrative but Often Unlawful,”
New York Times
, November 4, 2013.

16 Alexia Tsotsis, “TaskRabbit Gets $13M from Founders Fund and Others to ‘Revolutionize the World’s Labor Force,’”
TechCrunch
, July 23, 2012.

17 Brad Stone, “My Life as a TaskRabbit,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, September 13, 2012.

18 Sarah Jaffe, “Silicon Valley’s Gig Economy Is Not the Future of Work—It’s Driving Down Wages,”
Guardian
, July 23, 2014.

19 Guy Standing,
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Clas
s (Bloomsbury Academic, 2001).

20 Natasha Singer, “In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty,”
New York Times,
August 16, 2014.

21 George Packer, “Change the World,”
New Yorker
, May 27, 2013,
newyorker.com/reporting
/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer. For my TechCrunchTV interview with Packer about his
New Yorker
piece, see “Keen On . . . How We Need to Scale Down Our Self-Regard and Grow Up,”
TechCrunch
, June 19, 2013,
techcrunch.com/2013/06/19/keen
-on-silicon-valley-how-we-need-to-scale-down-our-self-regard-and-grow-up.

22 For a video of Kalanick’s FailCon speech, see
youtube.com/watch
?v=2QrX5jsiico.

23 See invitation to FailChat:
culturesfirststeps.eventbrite.com
.

24 Stephen E. Siwek, “The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy,” Institute of Policy Research, August 21, 2007. See executive summary: ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound-recording-piracy-to-the-us-economy.

25 IFPI Digital Music Report, 2011, “Music at the Touch of a Button,”
ifpi.org/content/library/dmr2011.pdf
, p. 15.

26 Ibid.

27 See, for example, Ellen Huet, “Rideshare Drivers’ Unexpected Perk: Networking,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, December 29, 2013.

28 Gideon Lewis-Kraus,
No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush
(
Kindle Single,
2014).

29 Jessica Guynn, “San Francisco Split by Silicon Valley’s Wealth,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 14, 2013.

30 Rebecca Solnit, “Google Invades,”
London Review of Books,
February 7, 2013.

31 Michael Winter and Alistair Barr, “Protesters Vandalize Google Bus, Block Apple Shuttle,”
USA Today
, December 20, 2013.

32 Alexei Oreskovic and Sarah McBride, “Latest Perk on Google Buses: Security Guards,” Reuters, January 16, 2014.

33 Tom Perkins, “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?,” Letters to the Editor,
Wall Street Journal
, January 24, 2014.

34 Nick Wingfield, “Seattle Gets Its Own Tech Bus Protest,”
New York Times
, February 10, 2014.