This is a common pro-capitalist canard we’ve internalized, but it doesn’t really hold water. Amazon and Wal-Mart are “centrally planned economies” far larger and more complex than the old Soviet Union. There are doubtless reasons one seems to work and the other did not, but the alleged impossibility of central planning at scale is not that reason, especially when sad devotion to that ancient religion results in politicians actively sabotaging well-functioning public systems in order to prove that they “need” to be privatized.
More on topic, as someone working in tech well past my sell-by date for the industry as a whole, and who has been getting progressively disgruntled at the whole thing for years (but it’s been my entire career, I don’t know how to do anything else, and I’m not yet old or wealthy enough to retire successfully), I snapped up this book and read about a third of it with my morning coffee. A hell of a lot of it rings true, especially the vaguely nauseated feeling that goes with pretending to be a starry-eyed devotee to “the mission.” I wasn’t good at that when it was called “religion” and I’m sure not good at it when the gods’ feet of clay are so transparently on display.
I look forward to seeing where Liu’s journey lands her, as she is clearly a more ambitious sort than I am, which gives her story the feel of a sort of signal-amplified version of my own. Where she actually followed through on pursuing Google (up to a point), I clearly remember the day I saw their billboard on the Bayshore with some prime-number problem, encouraging people to solve it and thus discover an email address to apply. Besides, the company, at the time, was getting a reputation for hiring people with postgraduate degrees to empty trash cans just for the prestige value. I was driving by myself at the time, so the wanking motions that encouraged were purely imaginary, but the sheer pretentiousness of it put me off the idea of ever considering Google. Nothing I’ve seen or heard since has made me question that conclusion.
But I’ve gotten so very exhausted at the prospect of telling a recruiter I want to do something that means something, rather than being required to pretend I’m changing the world while building an online catalog for somebody’s sweatshop clothing storefront or invasive advertising platform, and having the recruiter look at me as if I’ve just stepped off a flying saucer. Liu states early on that she doesn’t have solutions for a lot of the problems she describes, but I wouldn’t expect her to, and damned if she isn’t doing a great job of zeroing in on what the problems are.
Watching as our would-be feudal lords fail us again and again by adhering to capitalist dogma, especially during the current crisis (for which their philosophy has left them entirely flatfooted), makes this a great time for a book like this, just another reminder that when a measure is used as a target, it becomes a bad measure, even when that measure and target are “maximizing profit.”
