Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

"no i did actually want absurd utopian futurism, you americans are just blind greedy sickos"

Dr. C otm

Yeah it's kind of obvious he's circumscribing the real narrative which is that the money in the SV dried up for him but the PRC has backed up to his office in a cash truck.

Elizabeth Holmes' chutzpah is remarkable

I find her ability to snow people astounding. I'm obviously primed and biased because of what I know now about the company and her in particular but watching her speak it's just really hard to fathom how so many folks didn't immediately grasp that they were / are dealing with a total bullshitter. Watch her at 0:54 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiNFXcI9Rb8 This person is a bad liar. She's not good. What the hell is wrong with people?

sorry https://trackchanges.postlight.com/podcast-20-rex-sorgatz-the-other-side-of-fate-2151da51f998#.ivs4e4udy

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 5 July 2016 18:05 Bookmark

are there any other podcasts like this ppl might reccommend? stumbled across it randomly a while ago (i don't work in or have a specific interest in tech) but i really like it, always funny and perceptive

(can post them here Podcasts not to derail)

there is https://gimletmedia.com/show/reply-all/ which is kind of like track changes meets bbc radio 4 home truths

oh man, had never actually watched a video of Elizabeth Holmes before. TBH hadn't even paid attention wrt Theranos until it became a scandal. This is like Madoff-level shit.

had not known the theranos board features bill frist, sam nunn, william perry, and henry kissinger

(i see in a nyer profile from 2014)

(the one that rtc posted)

Another "well yeah" thinkpiece: http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification

In 2011, a New York artist and designer named Laurel Schwulst started perusing Airbnb listings across the world in part to find design inspiration for her own apartment. "I viewed it almost as Google Street View for inside homes," she says. Schwulst began saving images that appealed to her and posting them on a Tumblr called "Modern Life Space." But she had a creeping feeling something was happening across the platform. "The Airbnb experience is supposed to be about real people and authenticity," Schwulst says. "But so many of them were similar," whether in Brooklyn, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, or Santiago.

There was the prevalence of mass-produced but tasteful furniture, for one. "It’s kind of an extension of Ikea showrooms," she says. But the similarities went beyond mass-production. The ideal Airbnb is both unfamiliar and completely recognizable: a sprinkling of specific cultural symbols of a place mixed with comprehensible devices, furniture, and decoration. "It’s funny how you want these really generic things but also want authenticity, too," Schwulst says.

Funny that...

That's how you stage a home to be sold.
You want to get that super classy hotel vibe, where the things are nice, but also don't have any individual touch or imprint that could be interpreted as personal expression.
That's why all the RE agents and the stager told us first to take all of our books and turn them backwards, with the spines facing inwards, and then later just to put them all in storage (along with the shelves). Anything that says "other people live here" is a turn-off.

The idea of finding design inspiration from Airbnb would never occur to me. That's like finding musical inspiration from the Weather Channel.

I'm several days late to this but just lolling at Peter Thiel. I got quite into reading about de Grey and the eternal longevity people a little while ago (I can never remember what they're actually called, I think I might have discovered them on some David Avocado Wolfe thread on here?).

xps Who would have thought theverge.com would quote Marc Augé's Nicht-Orte one day. Decent article on a very interesting topic.

https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon-valley-startup-574ced8acdff#.iemww3rp9

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/technology/a-silicon-valley-dream-collapses-in-allegations-of-fraud.html?ref=technology&_r=1

“I’d heard stories about late paychecks or start-ups failing, but who expects fraud in Silicon Valley?”

Who, indeed?

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-exclusive

This is great.

Holmes subsequently raised $6 million in funding, the first of almost $700 million that would follow. Money often comes with strings attached in Silicon Valley, but even by its byzantine terms, Holmes’s were unusual. She took the money on the condition that she would not divulge to investors how her technology actually worked, and that she had final say and control over every aspect of her company. This surreptitiousness scared off some investors.

this is a failure of due diligence on a massive scale. isnt that what these fucking VCs are supposed to do?

very few of the VCs i have met are able to explain how things like ad tech works, much less any thing involving experimental science

professional ted-talker holmes continues on that circuit

I know I overuse the term "cargo cult," buuuut...

replied with a variation of a line from Jobs. “This is what happens when you work to change things,” she said, her long blond hair tousled, her smile amplified by red lipstick. “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then, all of a sudden, you change the world.”

*sigh*

Yup

Jobs outed as Bob Marley plagiarist

:D

Bob-a-Jobs

Job Rastafari

This is what happens when you work to change things... you change the world.

Yeah, maybe about 0.01% of the time. A much more significant percentage of the time your idea is shitty or unworkable, or your idea is passably OK but the world stubbornly refuses to change because your idea really isn't worth going to all the trouble and expense.

@NellieBowles
Apple on headphone port: "It really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on and do something better for all of us."

Fuck apples

Pearl Gabel, Kevin Bannon and 7 others like The Economist.

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A Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Sam Altman was so cost-conscious when building his first company that for weeks he ate only ramen noodles and coffee ice cream, until he developed scurvy

A complete meal in a bag?

“ONE should eat to live, not live to eat,” wrote Molière

learnmore.economist.com

"Cost-conscious" is a charitable word to use here

you wouldn't believe it, but ramen and coffee ice cream is the most efficient diet. except for the scurvy.

"Weeks?" Doesn't scurvy take several months to develop?

they disrupted scurvy

NHS says three months.

I knew a guy in college who, being cost conscious, lived off potato chips and water long enough that he developed it.

I know at some basic level if you get calories your body is going to keep working but wouldn't you feel like garbage all the time?

maybe you can disrupt that with caffeine or something

feel like the next step for these guys is to shit into a tube.

I thought we were all already doing that

the internet is a series of tubes

for me to poop in

this is good content http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

blimey that Scott story is incredible

it's a very different case, but the guy in the admiralty who figured ordering west indian limes instead of lemons reminds me of the people at the waste isolation plant (where radioactive materials are stored) who fucked up and ordered organic cat litter

that was a great read, thank you.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-work-on-atlas/

As part of rubbing elbows online with my tribe, I’ve had contact with another tribe over the years, which is venture-backed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. To paraphrase a remark made by a Japanese businessman of my acquaintance, they’re a society organized around attempting to find the optimal level of crazy.

When you have too much crazy, you start a social network for cat photo sharing and say — in all earnestness — that it will change the world for all days to come.

When you have too little crazy, you end up taking a safe job at a megacorp and staying even though you hate it.

When you have just enough crazy, you found a payments company, heedless of the fact that founding a payments company is doomed to failure because it involves mountains of hard and boring work and the incumbents have billions of dollars.

hmm

^ too glib to be informative

tbf he's joining a payments company that has already survived long enough to gain some traction, which is not that crazy.

there are so many payment companies with different target markets and market niches that exist, and many more that have already closed up shop

i think it's a very charitable spin on the modus vivendi of these people (and clearly doesn't apply to someone taking a job a stripe)