Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Moral Compass (with Anil Dash)

Anil Dash is a pioneering technologist, advocate for ethical tech, and former CEO of Glitch, who currently serves on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Looking back on his career, he says Silicon Valley has lost its moral compass because it no longer responds to shame.

"You stopped being able to say, don't do this thing, it makes you look bad," Anil says. "Facebook never cared about that. And most of the product managers at OpenAI used to work at Facebook.”

“If [they] were a person that joined Meta after they enabled the Rohingya genocide and then [they] went to work at OpenAI,” he adds, “And you're like, 'Hey, why does your product tell teenagers to self-harm?' They're going to be like, 'What's the problem?'"

Today on Revolution.Social, Anil and Rabble talk about the evolution of the independent web, the challenges of maintaining progressive values within the startup ecosystem, and how to use digital tools to foster a more democratic society. They also explore the backlash against AI, which Anil believes to be a manifestation of all the disruption the tech industry has caused in people's lives, and why that doesn't mean we have to give up on AI entirely.

Chapters: 0:00 Introduction

5:12 The History of Decentralization

12:07 AI Ethics and Intellectual Property

16:57 The Silicon Valley Playbook: Economic Disruption

24:50 What We Can Learn from Prince and Taylor Swift

31:18 The Culture of Curation: From Reblogging to Vine

41:16 The Decline of Corporate Shame and Accountability

46:15 AI as a Tech Industry Fashion Trend

54:15 Why Coding in AI Feels Better than Making Art

1:03:01 We Need a Rubric for Ethical, Human-Centric AI

1:08:46 Grassroots Resistance to Big Tech

Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874

This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.

To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/