Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

he didn't use that term when he opened his first roadside chicken shack

He did, however, use the appellation "Colonel" unironically.

(Yes, I know, he was actually a "Kentucky Colonel," but come on now, he sold shitty fried chicken.)

I remember hearing that Harlan Sanders had some policy that no one would ever be turned away for lack of money, but of course the company quietly dropped that philanthropic gesture when he sold it

He then went on to talk shit about their newly formulated gravy in public, quite forcefully

lol - in the 19th century "a Kentucky Colonel" meant an unofficial self-awarded military title.

And that's that:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/17/tech/elizabeth-holmes-bid-denied/index.html

I can't imagine listening to her make that extremely self-serving statement to the court just before her sentencing and anyone believing a single word of it.

all timer pic.twitter.com/1Ub2cbqvqF

— sclv (@sclv) May 29, 2023

Presented without comment:

The founder of a fledgling app says that San Francisco’s tech scene is afraid of sex, or at least the word “sex.”

Elizabeth Dell, the founder and CEO of the romance and sex app Amorus — an app that gamifies sexting for long-term couples — is accusing Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z) — the wildly influential tech venture capital firm based in Menlo Park — of hiding her successful sex tech mixer during San Francisco Tech Week.

hiding her successful sex tech mixer during San Francisco Tech Week

these words arent in the bible

Oh it gets rich:

“Part of this is to build community among the sex tech community, but part of this is also to bring this community to the wider tech community,” Dell said. “… Just like prop tech [real estate and property technology] or space tech or fintech [financial technology] or whatever, I want sex tech on the list.”

IDK, pretty sure porn is pretty well established in the wider tech community

It's not cheating if you fuck a robot.

https://i0.wp.com/relationshipchief.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023-05-17-09.30.08.jpg

EMERGENCY EYEWASH STATION

Must be AI, Musk would never kiss a black robot.

I hope that’s Michael Dell’s fail daughter.

lol if it's successful it would be something that would be used mostly by non long-term couples tbh

Are those midjourney or real? Either answer is kind of terrifying.

Execs at OneTaste, SF ‘orgasmic meditation’ startup, indicted by feds

Leaders at OneTaste, the once-celebrated and celebrity-endorsed “orgasmic meditation” startup founded in San Francisco, now face conspiracy charges connected to treatment that officials allege was sexual and psychological abuse and intimidation against OneTaste's clients, many of whom had come to the startup to heal from sexual trauma.

Nicole Daedone, OneTaste’s founder and former CEO, and Rachel Cherwitz, the company’s former head of sales, face charges of forced labor conspiracy in connection to their leadership of the company. Cherwitz, a Mendocino County resident, was arrested in San Francisco Tuesday, according to the Justice Department; Daedone is still at large.

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/onetaste-leaders-charged-with-conspiracy-18141101.php

The Netflix documentary on that was pretty nuts.

I had almost forgotten about that place! I remember when it opened and was advertising everywhere and ... I don't think anyone I know did not see some sort of red flag or another, just in the way it marketed itself.

Music won’t require personal musicians in fifteen years and your favorite “artist” will be a personal algorithm, though you will still have your favorite generic public celebrity musicians

— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) June 29, 2023

Everyone's fave band, The Algorithmics.

Nothing but the greatest respect for AI Lennox

🐦[Music won’t require personal musicians in fifteen years and your favorite “artist” will be a personal algorithm, though you will still have your favorite generic public celebrity musicians
— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) June 29, 2023🕸]🐦

Everyone's fave band, The Algorithmics.

― rick james, critical moralist (Hunt3r)

Nothing but the greatest respect for AI Lennox

― the best minds of my generation destroyed by woke (Bananaman Begins)

Yer 'Rythmics

Music won’t require personal musicians in fifteen years

uh, if you're willing to include very bad music, then music doesn't require a person right now, so that's hardly a 'prediction'.

your favorite “artist” will be a personal algorithm, though you will still have your favorite generic public celebrity musicians

i quickly lost count of how many ways that is wrong

'Personal musicians' though, sad to hear people won't employ their own troupes of lute playing minstrels in the future

I have a 20 piece string orchestra a la Louis XVI to serenade my soupers.

ain't gonna work on Vinod's farm no more

Haha

it's here, the flying car is here, finally

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QaTwebs5nY

the True Believers are willing to believe

According to 1970's Andy, this should've dropped around 1982

Whatever you think of them otherwise Zuckerberg seems like a much more interesting guy than Musk. Pro-natalism, media criticism, pro space colonisation etc are milquetoast things you'd pick up in SF tech circles. Zuck is like, no I'm not into that, I'm a Roman emperor actually.

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) July 8, 2023

this guy is endlessly amazing to me

I’d ask you what you think, but I really don’t care 🫶🏻 pic.twitter.com/k77rbk2b3M

— Zero (@bryan_johnson) July 2, 2023

does he actually think this is a look worth spending millions of dollars a month on?

request that user map weighs in on the whole mormanism of it!

also what the absolute fuck is that shirt

He has a store brand Willem Dafoe vibe.

Um “i want to show u nips but i’m skeered? here’s mischevious armpit adjacent holes!”?

full body lasering nbd

That guy kills me because he absolutely looks great for 60 but obviously as we all keep hearing is 45. Spend a million dollars on fun (and normal shirts) my guy

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

from the Krugman link:

One sad but true fact of life is that most of the time conventional wisdom and expert opinion are right; yet there can be big personal and social payoffs to finding the places where they’re wrong.

weird that he doesn't include "financial" payoffs ... like short-selling ... which is perhaps the most obvious example (ok maybe that's just me) of a "payoff" from being contrarian

i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that.

let's get that movie made!

(i think the social network managed to do this for startup founders.)

— Sam Altman (@sama) July 22, 2023

after having seen that tweet too many times, I think the bit of the calculus missed is these dudes are really seeing "very socially awkward, dickish guy overcomes some problems and meets some cool guys and is now a real life billionaire with lots of power. he's got a wife and kids, even"

to an extent they're not wrong. not a lot of billionaires out there who didn't screw people over and have a laissez-faire attitude about the personal information and property of others

it's hard to argue for the intended of message of the movie being "you didn't get it, mark. and you'll never get it" when the main character of the movie is an irl person who has never really had to understand that bit of social interaction and seems to be doing pretty ok irl

Idk that last scene with him alone at a laptop was by far the most memorable for me.

I'm just confused about the timing of the Social Network influencing people to be start-up founders. Like didn't Social Network come out AFTER like the 2nd dot.com crash? I feel like there'd been plenty of excitement and booms of startup founding before that movie.

The explanation is simple; that dude is dumm

in my limited experience, this shit really didn’t take off until after 2010: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_accelerator

there was always a hook-up between VC and startup founders but the idea you could just want to start a company, have no idea what you want to start, and then hook up with some people at an incubator hit its stride after that. and if you manage to hit on half an idea that people like, you pivot the whole company to doing that

I have a former coworker who worked at one that had an interesting, if very niche, idea. Within a year, they’d ditched that plan completely and were doing “something new!” which appeared to be shuffling papers around while burning the rest of their seed money so he quit to get a job somewhere that actually did something

the whole thing kind of killed a lot of new ideas that would have organically grown into businesses in that you’re not demonstrating that you have an audience, you’re demonstrating you have an idea that VC types would like. so we get an endless stream of “X, but online” and “uber but for Y”

Also, and I haven't seen the movie yet, but said physicist created a horrific weapon that instantly vaporized hundreds of thousands of innocent people and lived out his days in regret, so I'm not sure this particular physicist would be the one to motivate the kids to enter the field, IDK