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This week: Andrew Yang and his loyal “knights” of the valley
While much of the US was tuned in to the public impeachment hearings on Capitol Hill this Wednesday, a few dozen techies in San Francisco convened at the home of tech entrepreneur Sam Altman to focus on another political story.
Andrew Yang, the Democratic party presidential hopeful, was in town for a fundraiser. BI’s Melia Russell managed to get into the event so that she could see firsthand why so many techies are head-over-heels for Yang.
Andrew Yang AP Photo/Nati Harnik
As she reports, Yang is someone who speaks the techie language.
Sure, it might help that he doesn’t want to break up Big Tech as some of the other candidates do. But Yang isn’t promising a libertarian, laissez-faire society. During the event he talked up how he shares Elon Musk’s belief that AI needs to be reined in.
When it comes to artificial intelligence technology, he told Melia, “going as fast as possible could have some real drawbacks or negative effects. And so, you need a different set of incentives than ‘just go as fast as possible.'”
His newly-unveiled tech policy blueprint, including a tax on digital ads and the creation of a “Deparment of the Attention Economy,” would also put new burdens and constraints on tech companies.
Yang is preaching a tech-savvy and industry-active brand of regulation — “you can’t take a sledgehammer to these problems,” he says — that plays well with the Valley’s we-know-best mentality. He even suggested “knighting” the techies at the event, so that they could make the government operate more efficiently.
That’s earned him trust, and money, from a lot of the tech industry elite. The problem is, the tech industry has lost everyone else’s trust.
Amazon insiders don’t appear overly worried about the company getting split up by the government, in any case.
In an interview with Julie Bort, Werner Vogels, the head of Amazon’s AWS cloud business, insists that the topic never comes up internally.
“We have no intention of doing anything like that,” he says.
Reuters/Richard Brian
Vogels defends the benefits of being a giant, multi-business corporation, telling Bort that “the synergies are just too good” to ever consider breaking up.
Those “synergies” are exactly what critics like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders contend are giving Big Tech companies unfair advantages. To judge by Vogels’ response, Amazon is either playing ignorant to these concerns, or simply choosing to defy them.
Google was first to implement the idea years ago, but a growing list of tech companies, including Yelp and Walmart’s Jet.com, are now adopting the practice.
It’s the latest, and perhaps most intrusive, example of Silicon Valley’s never ending quest to maximize worker productivity.
If this Silicon Valley innovation is as successful as smartphones and instant messaging, it may soon become standard throughout the country. But I can’t help wondering why the world’s most cutting edge companies are using old-fashioned paper, and not a digital format, to reach their toilet-bound toilers.
![Andrew Yang]({"https://image.businessinsider.com/5dc44fa53afd370c377fb026":{"contentType":"image/jpeg","aspectRatioW":2000,"aspectRatioH":1333}})
![Werner Vogels]({"https://image.businessinsider.com/5780133a88e4a74e018b6e23":{"contentType":"image/jpeg","aspectRatioW":500,"aspectRatioH":329}})
![silicon valley bathroom memos 4x3]({"https://image.businessinsider.com/5dc5cebf7eece564432ca456":{"contentType":"image/png","aspectRatioW":1201,"aspectRatioH":901}})
