Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

the dem party looking after their own story is at least plausible i much prefer the pure ideology of "woke bank"

"They were one of the most woke banks" -- James Comer on SVB Bank pic.twitter.com/nGw6GvZTRs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 12, 2023

Saw that headline today: "Was SVB too woke?" what the fuck are they talking about

They got a decade of goodwill from Prime two-day shipping, Google being a decent search engine, the iPod/iPhone, the first 18 months of Facebook when you reconnected with your childhood best friend... since then Amazon results became dozens of weird knockoff products, search got gamed, smartphones made your life worse and Facebook morphed into the boomer racism factory we all know and love. Only Bill Gates has managed a successful image rehab project.

he put the microchips in the vaccine tho

yeah he was just a bossy asshole in the 90s, now he's part if not leader of a sick perverted cabal

That's a word association I don't think you'll get very often.

"When I say bank, you say . . . "

"Woke?"

its a wild formulation, you can only tip your cap

bill gates is the largest farmer in america you know

thats how he grows the microchips

hes just describing banking

SVB committed one of the most elementary errors in banking: borrowing money in the short term and investing in the long term. When interest rates went up, the assets lost their value and put the institution in a problematic situation. https://t.co/HxsgqpZOuL

— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) March 14, 2023

Nice to have evidence that Larry Summers is dumber than any random person reading Matt Levine every day

he was the treasury secretary of the usa! what a world

more like larry winters

some interesting reactions from the vc ethnic minority

Alfred Rosenberg writing in the Völkischer Beobachter. pic.twitter.com/UwUl44ilEj

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 14, 2023

This sort of rhetoric is how you end up with things like the Rwandan genocide. https://t.co/6xjiwdG3uu

— Nate Fischer (@NateAFischer) March 14, 2023

tbf using 'euthanizing' is just giving them an opening

Wow, Andreessen has impressive knowledge of Nazi propaganda rags...

tbf using 'euthanizing' is just giving them an opening

― mookieproof, Monday, March 13, 2023 11:00 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

causing them to share it... its a reference to keynes “the euthanasia of the rentier” fwiw, plausible deniability for some inflammatory clickbait lol, good article tho

This Is a Bear Market pic.twitter.com/Y5566sm5ap

— Chairman (@WSBChairman) March 13, 2023

Adam Tooze

SVB’s depositors were in no regular sense, depositors. They are badly run and ill-advised businesses that for obscure reasons parked huge cash balances in a highly vulnerable bank. As Matt Klein remarks in his brilliant post at Overshoot the real problem at SVB was that its depositor was base was so “low quality” i.e. extremely prone to run with influence exerted by a small group of VC advisors.

...

On the face of it SVB is not a bank big enough to do systemic damage. That was the prima facie reason for exempting it from the oversight that extends to really big banks. Finance per se will not explain the emergency intervention.

But as should have been obvious all along SVB matters very much indeed, because its depositors are very powerful, very rich and very influential people who own a narrative that makes them indispensable to one vision of America’s future. And that force was brought to bear on the Biden administration over the weekend in an extraordinarily overt exercise of “venture dominance”

Only Bill Gates has managed a successful image rehab project.

By bottling piss.

And Steve Jobs had the good fortune to die before the tide of sentiment turned, so he remains in the popular consciousness as something like a secular prophet.

bill gates, rehabbing his image by getting divorced and his wife strongly hinting it was because he used to hang out with jeffery epstein

tbf he, his team, has done a great job at pr, he was a real villan at microsoft but now amongst casual libs at least hes thought of as "one of the good ones" "gave all his money away" "curing diseases", which is pretty infuriating since its just not true and hes gotten up to some nasty stuff, tho the tide has prob turned somewhat with the epstein news antivaxx shit and the general increasing dislike for the superrich

Tim Cook/Apple will always have Actual Hardware as an ace in the hole, not to mention this kind of goodwill you can't buy:

Meta is dealing with many challenges these days. It is grappling not only with a digital advertising slowdown but also with Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which have restricted Meta’s ability to collect data on iPhone users to help target ads.

yeah they make real things not disruptive services, was funny to see the startup defenders being all oh you tweeted that on an apple iphone running on an arm chip lol shut up all the companies affected by the bank run are like making apps to put local plumbers out of business none of you know how to make a microchip

yeah it's funny to see people hold up the FAANG companies as examples of startups or silicon valley disruptors when facebook opened sign-ups to everyone in 2006 and netflix pivoted to streaming in 2007. those companies are corporate monoliths, not disruptors

theyre the competitors of startups

miss the old microsoft days when they'd notice a company had a type of product they didn't offer, would buy out the company, and then after realizing they didn't care about that just kill the product

facebook's kept most of the acquisitions alive in some form, google innovated on the model by coming up with their own new products and then just shuttering them after a few years when they got bored

google is the best company i love how they work using their advertising empire to fund wacky ideas they then forget about and discard

they built an entire video game platform then didnt do anything with it lmao

yeah, and they're a distant third when it comes to being a cloud service provider. part of that is this instinct that their data centers are for google projects because they're going to come up with something huge any day now and they're going to need all of their capacity for their own shit

um its called dogfooding

i use their cloud (free tier)

theyre actually very generous shout out to google cloud

tbf all of their service offerings seem pretty good and some of them have mock or local versions you can run to proof out your software or run on your own!

they just have no chops for marketing to businesses, really. kind of a fluke that outside of search they ended up settling on email

firebase is really good, i tried to use amazons equivalent and boy was that a mess, tho tbf its basically the opposite of the thing aws does well

amazon's sloppy as hell with their new shit

half of it is a thin wrapper over a couple open source products, and the in-house stuff is basically "this other company has a product that does this, let's stand up a team to crank out something that does that"

if the latter ones are successful, they throw a little more effort in. if it's not, it goes into zombie mode and bug reports take a year to get fixed, if ever

they basically do the google thing of coming up with little projects and then never retire any of them

yeah the shear number of aws products is well a lot too much probably

half of it is a thin wrapper over a couple open source products, and the in-house stuff is basically "this other company has a product that does this, let's stand up a team to crank out something that does that"

― mh, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 10:55 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the aws firebase "amplify" was the former tho it was a wrapper on top of other aws products some of which are prob wrappers of open source things

their pitch was like once your app gets big its already on enterprise scale stuff, buddy no app built with this baby stuff is ever getting big lol

it's pretty funny that their stance is "well, we only have 100 customers using this product and they file bug reports on it constantly. lets just leave it up and if people keep paying who cares"

truly some ruthless bullshit

one of my coworkers found a bug in one of their lesser-used services that had open source components, made a fix and pull request, and then amazon didn't look at it for a full year

just like a real open source maintainer lol

silicon valley like a lot of industries have a social media problem where the loudest voices become defacto spokespeople, the mediating professional pr layer has been deleted

All these founder types waking up to discover a deficit of sympathy for them among the public at large should consider what making lames like Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen the "faces" of their industry has done for them. You guys need faces that are slightly less grotesque.

— Will 🦥 Menaker (@willmenaker) March 14, 2023

the top selling signature basketball shoe was kyrie irvings and nike had to drop him cause he was racist online, its tough for the brands right now

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snRlPpAZMuo

now i get it https://t.co/aLTWnSZsWc

— sophie (@netcapgirl) March 13, 2023

they basically do the google thing of coming up with little projects and then never retire any of them

― mh, Tuesday, March 14, 2023 10:56 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

the "never retire any of them" thing is really part of the DNA, to a fault.