It’s mid-August and thoughts of back-to-school and returning to work are in high gear. Or at least amping up.

Especially since tech companies are tightening their rules on remote work.

“Zoom, once the poster child for remote work during the pandemic, is now forcing a significant number of its employees back to the office, joining the growing chorus of tech companies pivoting away from remote work. Despite its explosive growth and popularity as a virtual communication tool, Zoom seems to have caught the in-office fever. The company’s hybrid approach demands that employees within 50 miles of an office show up in person at least two days a week, supposedly to foster team interaction,” the New York Times reported.

The question is, given the exodus we witnessed from some of the ‘premier’ tech hubs, most notably Silicon Valley and New York, as a result of Draconian lockdown policies where one needed what amounted to a letter of transit to enter a grocery store to purchase toilet paper, will those expats return? Will Silicon Valley once again be the jewel in the proverbial tech crown? Or will the continued establishment of the new tech hubs being a case of unintended consequences?

According to noted venture capitalist Bill Gurley, location is important, and that maybe Miami and Austin might not be able to replicate the intensity of Silicon Valley because of the social nature of the cultures.

Spoken like a true Silicon Valley acolyte.

Let’s consider what the Silicon Valley ‘intensity’ qua work ethic hath wrought, starting with the Age of Social, with the stated purpose of bringing the world closer together – and resulting global online surveillance.

But consider: Silicon Valley is an industry town, with the worker bees singularly focused on releasing product and bugger all to the consequences or collateral damage. Are these people who leave work at a decent hour and kick back to spend time socializing in venues where they might encounter people who are not in the industry?

Welcome to life in a vacuum.

Miami and Austin, for example, have nightlife and host industries other than technology, which might breed tech workers who have a healthier perspective on the world,  the people who live in it and their wants and needs might be. And might factor that into the tech that they’re building.

Zoom and How to Get Nowhere Fast

Speaking of Zoom and life in a vacuum, LLMs are now the order of the day, so Zoom Quietly Changes Terms So it Can Use Customer Face, Voice Data to Train its AI — Forever, MSN reported.

“Users that agree to the new conditions “grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights,” over customer content, according to the new service agreement. “All other rights” include the right to redistribute, publish, share, display, copy, and create derivative works from customer content…

“The company said the service agreement clarifies that customers create and own their video, audio and chat content, while Zoom simply has permission to use that content. However, service-generated data, which includes production usage data and diagnostic data, is owned entirely by Zoom.”

Will Zoom maintain its edge in the market, considering the number of confidential business meetings that are conducted over the platform?
And what about therapy sessions and doctor/patient confidentiality?

And artists/musicians who choose to work remotely over zoom?

“Users across social media have criticized Zoom for the policy change. One user, jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia, complained on the website formerly named Twitter telling people “Don’t try to negotiate with our new overlords,” the MSN piece noted.

New? How long have we been referring to the tech cabal as just that?

And we’ve been involved in tech too long to buy into the concept of unintended consequences.

Speaking of we will own everything/you will own nothing, Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Crypto Project Worldcoin Is Having An Identity Crisis, said Forbes. “Is it a crypto company? A biometric authentication platform? A “human economic system”?

Or worse?

“Late last year, Worldcoin discovered an exploit that operators used to fool the device into creating multiple signups for the same person, three people told Forbes. One person told Forbes the practice was frequently used in Kenya for a time. Another claimed a colleague had created around 100 sign-ups for themselves using it.”

Not that security has ever been top of mind for the tech cabal and would you seriously trust your biometrics to Sam Altman, whose ‘world-changing’ OpenAI is already experiencing problems performing simple math (Over just a few months, ChatGPT went from correctly answering a simple math problem 98% of the time to just 2%, study finds).

“As Altman told employees… one of his personal operating principles is “scale it up and see what happens”…And the faster the better. Scaling up “earlier than it makes sense to …is super, super valuable.”

Depending on your endgame, of course, considering that we’ve yet to see what other ‘glitches’/hacks are in the Worldcoin orb, whose stated purpose is to – excuse me??? – provide absolute trust by verifying your identity? As Forbes noted, and heads up: Worldcoin no longer says that they’re a crypt company.

‘Trust’ is not a word that’s top of mind when we think about Silicon Valley companies, and this is nothing less than a biometric landgrab.

Location is important and in Silicon Valley, there seems to be not only a return to the office, but return to business as usual, where All your base are belong to us.

No one stays on top forever. There was a time when Boston was the jewel in the tech crown, but was deaf to the internet. Time will tell if the same fate befalls the Valley, given at the preferences of end user seems to fall on deaf ears.

The new tech hubs have only had some two+ years to develop and may not offer the intensity of Silicon Valley, but they do offer a quality of life that the Valley doesn’t, which at the end of the day may make all the difference. The original promise of tech was to provide a free and open information/communications portal which was subverted by the big tech companies out west. From what we’re witnessing now, Silicon Valley clearly hasn’t changed its way. With the new tech hubs and those Ausländers in the flyover states being far from the Silicon Valley vortex, let’s hope that the sector will at long last at least begin to find its true north. Onward and forward.