Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

lol

Etsy sellers left in the lurch:

"As you may have seen, we recently experienced a delay in our ability to issue payments to some of our sellers," Etsy posted on its website. "This was related to the rapid and unexpected collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

calling one of the most fawning, uncritical tech reporters of the last two decades the most "vitriolic voice in the tech ecosystem" is an incredible indictment of how unrigorous the press as a whole has been toward these dweebs https://t.co/VzivxfS2VH

— lauren (@NotABigJerk) March 14, 2023

lauren otm

although the distinction where Sacks says "in the tech ecosystem" is kind of telling -- reporters should be reporting on that, and not in it, right?

Is there a Sy Hersh type of reporter in tech? I can't think of one

interview is a nice overview of california capitalism as it relates to this moment

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/malcolm-harris-palo-alto-interview/

we need more mike davises, not more sy hershes

well sure, but by Hersh I mean someone who is embedded but actually critical of the tech industry

mike isaac (NYT) and john carreyou (WSJ) turned their reporting into books about uber and theranos. wirecard was brought down by reporting in the FT (now a major motion picture). etc. etc. and there is a decent amount of less journalistic more cultural criticism in the mainstream press these days.

kara swisher is worthless obviously

casey newton, zoe schiffer, will oremus, matt levine (sometimes), kate conger, julia carrie wong, nitasha tiku, sam biddle etc. are all good reporters afaict. they don't get 20k words in the new yorker, but neither does hersh these days haha.

the end of valleywag and the resulting anti-gawker media shitstorm changed the focus from gossiping about weirdos and their goofy business ideas for a while

a lot of the regulation-dodging hacks by uber, the theranos stuff, etc. kind of drifted until there was enough solid material to be published by larger entities with less legal risk

I'd add Molly White to that list, she's my favorite crypto chronicler.

But yeah, on the Twitter story especially Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton have been great.

Malcolm Harris’ latest book seems worthwhile https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/malcolm-harris-palo-alto-interview/

Article called

“The Obscene Invention of California Capitalism”

A conversation with Malcolm Harris about his new history of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, the West Coast’s settler ideology, and recent turbulence in the world of tech.

By Emma Hager

just posted that hun, and yeah, it's really good

The NYT is currently running an intense hate campaign against generative AI technologies, and is thereby creating immense damage not only to tech companies but to society and culture itself. I think it is crucial that we get together to create a counter movement.

— Joscha Bach (@Plinz) March 15, 2023

The Clone Wars are finally here.

just posted that hun, and yeah, it's really good

Oh snap, you did. My mistake

wirecard was brought down by reporting in the FT (now a major motion picture

and a comedy series running on Netflix ... not as funny as Silicon Valley tho tbh

i haven't read it but yasha levine's surveillance valley: the secret military history of the internet is maybe towards the hersh end of tech reporting?

(he wrote for pandodaily, which certainly had pretensions to proper investigative reporting in that world -- tho i mainly encountered them via tiresome inter-title sniping and beefing) (before that levine was an editor at the exile, where i get the impression he was more of an actual real journalist and less of a gonzo asshole than the better known names from that quarter, tho this isn't exactly a high bar to clear)

Pando held some promise but there was also a fair amount of toothless cheerleading. And then she crossed the "wrong people" a few times and it was game over for Sarah Lacy.

Also this:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-barney-frank-went-to-work-for-signature-bank

"Well, this all came up very suddenly."

This guy dashing away from his responsibility at full speed is breathtaking.

would be considered a little credulous by modern standards, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine is a great slice of cultural/technical history.

Fun chat https://theinsurgents.substack.com/p/ep-159-vcs-to-the-rescue-ft-ed-zitron

holy shit @ that barney frank interview, bro is snappish

BF went on the interview circuit immediately and had the same tone in everything I read.

The guy was on the board of the bank, he comes from the deepest of insiders, and then gets defensive when asked why he didn’t perform his job as expected.

I like his attempt to make a case that regulators don't have to wait until banks have crossed the legal boundary to be advised to increase their liquidity, whatever

sure, that sounds nice. I'm sure the government has the resources to do that, and that banks would totally listen when there's no threat of legal action

c'mon, Barney

VCs are geniuses, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise pic.twitter.com/gAYEvyjrem

— @shitmgmts✧✧✧@ms✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧ (@ShitMgmtSays) March 17, 2023

beautiful

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Frg4wsWXgAM-Jax?format=jpg&name=medium

love to rat out my bank that didn’t comply with banking law

chase apparently is highly algorithmic these days, though. some local lottery winner tried depositing her winnings and not only would they not accept it, they notified her they were closing the account. local bank personnel couldn’t override it!

they should be praising chase for loving the algorithm imo

The only metaverse story that’s worth it about now.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html

thats a great essay

good stuff

the story, not the metaverse

I was binging on The Cutting Room Floor yesterday - it's a fascinating website about cut content from video games - specifically Jet Set Radio, or Jet Grind Radio as it was for the Dreamcast:
https://tcrf.net/Jet_Grind_Radio_(Dreamcast)

That led me to read about Swatch Internet Time, because the game originally had advertising billboards for Swatch, although they were dummied out. Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time system that appeared in a handful of Swatches circa the turn of the millennium two-two. Basically a gimmick. It resulted in a hilarious and also sad incident whereby Swatch paid for a satellite to be thrown out of Mir, but after protests from the amateur radio community the satellite was deactivated, but still thrown out of Mir, so the astronauts basically chucked a non-functional hunk of metal out of their space station for no reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_99

"Sputnik 99 was designed to periodically broadcast technical time-synchronization information and trademarked advertising content over amateur radio bands promoting the Swatch Group, the parent company to the popular Swiss watch retailer. Worldwide, this was considered as a flagrant misuse of amateur radio frequencies. Due to a huge backlash by amateur radio enthusiasts and amateur radio organisations over the proposed use of the AR frequencies for advertising purposes, the decision was made to disable the broadcast transmitter prior to its deployment from Mir. This was accomplished by removing the batteries of the broadcast unit from the satellite prior to its release, thus Sputnik 99 immediately upon deployment became just another piece of orbiting space junk."

Is there are a more potent metaphor for the dot.com boom? I can't think of one. The article also led me to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation.1

"Nation.1 was a project to create what was described as an "online country" – a conceptual country based on the Internet. It was to be owned, populated and governed by the children of the world. Its borders were defined by the age of its citizens, as opposed to geography or ethnicity. The central goal of Nation.1 was to empower young people with a voice and representation in world affairs."

It was devised by Nicholas Negroponte, a self-publicist who seems to have a 100% failure rate at everything except enriching himself and his friends. The entire project seems to have amounted to a bunch of press conferences, press releases, and magazine articles from a clique of people who presumably all supported each other. It's very hard to google and the website seems to have gone defunct in late 2000:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000925070418/http://www.2b1.org/nation1/

What was the real goal? I have no idea. Something about the lofty language - "already, Nation1 is a truly global project (with) taskforce members in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Canada, Malaysia, and France" - combined with the total lack of focus, lack of any kind of coherent idea, and the fact that grown adults devised it, made me wonder what was wrong with the world back then. Presumably the long-term plan was to use it to gather advertising data from kids, or use it as a tax haven or something. It put me me in mind of New Earth Time and the Clock of the Long Now, from around the same period.

Here are two of the funniest bits from that NY Mag article on the Metaverse (thanks for sharing!):

"It’s the first time I’ve witnessed any straight-up racism since I came to America. How strange to see it here from a bunch of Playmobil rednecks in a make-believe comedy club."

"It’s kind of like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly, is what VR Bangers is saying here. Is it a dream? Is it reality? We don’t know."

xp banging post!

Amazing work Ashley.

Nation.1 sounds like the evil version Cyberia - it was an 'online micronation' that I gathered was a pretty even split between teenage politics nerds and adult libertarians who thought it could be Sealand 2.

https://micronations.wiki/wiki/Virtual_Commonwealth_of_Cyberia

https://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/lobby/2673/history.html

Yeah great post Ashley. I'm reminded of Project Xanadu, a supposedly superior version of the web - 'the world wide web is what we were trying to prevent' was one of their mottos - by Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext. It was stuck in development hell for literally decades. When they finally released a demo/prototype in 2014, over 30 years after they started actual development work and over 50 since the idea first originated - and obviously long after the web rendered it irrelevant - I had a look and it took minutes to load, was agonisingly slow to use and quite bewildering. You can see it in action (working faster than I remember) in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIOuRuvQ10c . It's not clear if they're still fighting on, the link to the viewer on their project page https://www.xanadu.net/ is broken - though you can find instructions on how to use it including gems like "Click on blue to follow a xanalink-- but it looks wrong at first."

the beautiful bands of color remind one of yarn on a cork board

Maybe worth noting that Ted Nelson has uploaded a huge number of his (mostly self-published) books to the Internet Archive – the weird details of LITERARY MACHINES almost read as science fiction?

lmao

While some people have experienced harassment in Horizon Worlds, the major problem is kids. Under-13’s aren’t supposed to use the headset, but the app is overrun with children occupying their parents’ avatars, meaning that conversations are constantly interrupted by (1) apparent adults asking you in high-pitched voices if you like poop and (2) polls to decide if the poop person should be removed.

children love screaming about poop

“He said he wanted to eat my penis,” Nutsacksandwich says to me in a high-pitched child’s voice. This is my first conversation in the metaverse.

A panel appears in front of me. Nutsacksandwich has been reported, it says, with a picture of Nutsacksandwich’s avatar. Do you want Nutsacksandwich to be ejected? I give the question some thought. I decide to let Nutsacksandwich stay: I like his energy.

Maybe worth noting that Ted Nelson has uploaded a huge number of his (mostly self-published) books to the Internet Archive – the weird details of LITERARY MACHINES almost read as science fiction?

cheers, i'll definitely have a look at that.

frogbs is that one of your kids?!?

nah it was actually just me