Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

never mind, it was short. the responses from people in SF who have no idea where interesting things are might be the best part

that's kind of every city, in that people who live in cities tend to fall into routines and go to museums, large parks, less often than visitors do unless they live right next to them (or they _actually like art and parks_)

but holy shit some people are clueless

reminds me I need to head back to see SF MOMA, though. I was there a couple months before it closed!

haven't been to the new MOMA yet but def excited to check it out

there's a million things to do in this City, having kids to expose things to has def expanded my range of stuff/places we go to (granted the number of restaurants/clubs I go out to has correspondingly decreased)

basically what mh and silby said

sv investors throw a lot of money at dumb mobile app devs because they're under the impression that apps are solving valuable problems

there's still money to be made in developing them, so devs churn out these useless apps and exaggerate the seriousness of the "problem" they're solving

the rest of us see that they solve low priority problems and we equate tech with these app devs and start feeling like they're entitled pos's

there are lots of things devs could be working on that fix how businesses interact with each other or building better erp's, data software, green tech, or even research, but all this is boring to them and not "sexy"

i feel like this is the world we live in though. if it's not cool, hip, or where all the money is, people will run away from it

v succinct and accurate description ime

except it's not like there isn't money to be made on ERP implementation, and heck if you do it right you might even make a few thousand people's lives a little less unpleasant. Nobody's going to blog about it though.

I love a bunch of modernist designs and find them aspirational in the sense I'd like to own some, and like to live in the streamlined way others imply, but there's the sense that the built objects are still a model of what could be but could never quite fit

― dr. mercurio arboria (mh 😏), Tuesday, September 20, 2016 11:15 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's a balance between functional and artistic for me

i'm a strong believer of form follows function but there needs to be a bit of not-completely-coherent art to it because it's nice to look at nice things or live around things that look cool

i think there's space for both and if "not fitting" is taken as a more "artistic endeavour," it is an important element because it enhances our lives, it prevents us from being in such a dull and coldly designed space

xxp i'd be fine with that situation if it weren't for the fact that investors think traditional companies with long-term business plans and research need to show year-over-year growth continually when products take years to develop and some markets are cyclical

that and academic/nonprofit research getting shafted, jesus

oh yeah well that's kind of an electoral issue, NIH's budget has like not grown in real dollars for a decade or something miserable like that; I spent November through August under the impression that I could end up getting laid off at any time if a grant didn't fund

there's supposed to be some badass stanley kubrick exhibit at the jewish contemporary museum. free passes at most libraries.

Sfmoma is amazing

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/29/technology/chris-messina-non-monogamy/

luv 2 disrupt fuckin

every single paragraph contains a punchable sentiment

"But as a child of divorce and an aspiring designer-entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, I was suspicious of marriage, or any other limit on my access to other people's attention"

didn't we already clown this in 2015, maybe on another thread?

it's really hard to top the cutoff culture dude but polygamy guy tried

I grew up spoon fed monogamist fairy tales that pushed "happily ever after" endings

vs

as a child of divorce

http://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=5357198&boardid=77&threadid=97044

guys I was the one who posted it, sorry

damn it, 77 link, abort abort

the bicycle for our hearts is peak ted talk

looking for the fleshlight for my heart

double-fuck him for also apparently inventing the hashtag

lol at that claim

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/the-algorithms-that-tell-bosses-how-employees-feel/502064/

techno-dystopianism

on trendwatch: the phrase "nerdesse oblige" to refer to neoliberal "code for good" stuff

e.g. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/780875752967380994

lol holy fuck at their summary of agriculture

can't wait 2 disrupt plants&animals

all the actual work on vat-grown meat is happening in academia of course

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny

it is once again time to mock the silicon valley hero who got scurvy

At Graham’s table, he and others discussed how to stop Donald Trump, then decided to reach out to an affiliated expert: Chris Lehane, a former White House lawyer now at the YC company Airbnb. Altman declared, “The best idea seems to be just to support Hillary.”

someone hand that guy a billion dollars

you know that attitude some people get around precocious youth? not to just be a good mentor or resource, but they treat them like some houseplant to be watered and put in the sun. and then not expect them to develop personally, just to keep coming up with more of the same precocious youth stuff.

"hmm yes, look at my youth. truly a great example"

"dude he's 30 now and just got scurvy for the third time because he's a large child"

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13180666/theranos-close-labs-fire-employees

Anybody catch the sniper theories regarding musk's last rocket bust?

Sorry I said sniper I meant UFO

either way, lol

I feel like my "hey, sup" messages to Liz Holmes in the hopes she will buy me sushi and chat are increasingly futile now

Liz, get back at me, not too late

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuGvQEkWcAA9bcG.jpg:large

note: no longer a billionaire by any reasonable meaning of that word

^ I let these kinds of people run after the kind of success they seek, without their attracting either my interest or involvement.

I might not be interested in Theranos, but I'm interested in a FDA and healthcare industry that's capable of vetting things and adopting new technology. Their shell game only made it so far because of a lack of public interest in vetting their claims!

https://twitter.com/shanevader/status/773720109529509888

this replicant is saying many things that are true but is incapable of delivering any of it, and in pushing her company, drew resources and attention away from other companies that might be more successful in pursuing those goals.

like if I find out some day that a company that was on the verge of delivering a way to check for a disease I end up with, and I would have been diagnosed a decade earlier had theranos not driven them out of business, I'm going to be pissed

Sam Kriss on the SV/Muskian obsession with simulation theory:

"Tech billionaires want to destroy the universe"

...Just a little tweak to the formula: All that appears to exist must be destroyed. There’s something admirable in this blasphemous ambition, but it’s based on some very shaky ideas. It helps to look at an influence on simulation theory that’s a little better known that the Nag Hammadi codices: 1999’s The Matrix, in which a gang of heroic freedom-fighters try to wake humanity from a false computer-generated universe and return them to the real world. The film has plenty of knowing references to those older traditions, and to some newer ones: In one scene, Neo is shown hiding his cash in a hollowed out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (appropriately, a black hardback edition that doesn’t seem to have ever actually been printed.) The philosopher himself wasn’t particularly pleased, insisting in an interview that the film fundamentally misunderstood his work, that ‘The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.’ In The Matrix, there’s a real world behind the simulation. It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth. In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast. ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’ Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?

‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’

namaste

lol, I wrote a piece for my college weekly making almost the exact same point back when Matrix came out.

TS: https://twitter.com/benedictevans vs https://twitter.com/JoshConstine

btw lol https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/18/in-its-vrar-push-twitter-trolls-itself/