Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

lmao

🙄✊🍆 pic.twitter.com/kDXWfkWnow

— Quantian📉 (@quantian1) June 16, 2018

An extremely good thread for this thread in turn.

Okay, now let's talk about the history of futurism in @WIRED. There is a ton here, but I think I've settle on a handful of articles that illustrate the broader trend.#wiredarchive

— davekarpf (@davekarpf) July 12, 2018

oh man do I remember that Long Boom issue and how stupid it seemed at the time

I just realized my arc with Wired Magazine has basically been a leading indicator of my arc with
SV & the Bay Area - loved it, then realized it was actually overpriced, largely mediocre and driven by zealous marketing, now just find it kind of pitiable and look for the decent spots in a sea of drying mud

well, I like *my* neighborhood

Speaking as someone standing in mud wait hold on

Everything’s relative. I live up the street from Trump.

that's a good thread! Wired has long been my shorthand for the 90s iteration of the wide-eyed fusion of techno-utopianism and ostensibly countercultural libertarianism (which fusion, circa 1970, you would have found in the overlaps between bucky fuller and stewart brand). great to have that laid out, with links, in one convenient place.

when i got to college in the early 90s my freshman year roommate described wired as "mondo 2000 for businessmen" which is still the best description i've ever heard

(of it)

as a college freshman I’d have been like “what’s mondo 5000?”

I had a bunch of issues of Mondo 2000 when they were new in high school. That was my shit.

yay

about halfway thru bad blood right now and it’s a compelling mixture of ‘haha these corporate dumbasses deserve each other, how did this go on for so long’ and ‘wow these sociopaths really fucked a lot of lives on their way to jail’

― CARL MARKS PRINCIPAL INVESTING AND ADVISORY SERVICES (bizarro gazzara), Friday, June 15, 2018 5:39 PM (four weeks ago)

yeah, same here. ridiculously compelling book

Got the audiobook on hold…

Dave Karpf's book Analytic Activism changed my whole game btw highly recommended

Yeah the Bad Blood story is a traet, as they say. Can't wait for the company to finally dissolve next month.

Reading Bad Blood (which is excellent) at the same time as going through a ‘disruption workshop’ at work has been interesting.

I work for a big company which, like many, is extremely nervous about being a big company. The external consultant running the event kept hammering the point that innovation isn’t enough - nor is being superior to the competition- you either have to change the entire frame of reference your industry is working with (a la Netflix, Uber, Air b’n’b) or get swept away by some start-up that will.

Which is kind of fine if you are lending DVDs through the post, less so in a highly regulated, reputation-driven business where the outcome of your service has a meaningful impact on the direction of the customers’ lives. The Theranos model of getting a rapid prototype to market in the belief that you can iterate your way to something amazing as you go, and the Safeway / Walgreens fomo, leading to avoiding awkward questions about efficacy, are both hugely relatable traps. Thankfully there are enough safeguards in place within the business to stop that with us but the disrupt-or-die model is absolutely going to lead to a Theranos Of Nursing / Social Care, Theranos Of Education, etc, etc at some point.

It already has if you’re in the states. Charter schools!

ShariVari, was there a breakdown of what the different company types are including one called "market shaper?"

Because I think my employer's executives were presented the same material and came up with presentations for the rest of us with some of that material

i mean there's a reason the word 'disruption' used to have / should still have negative connotations

I mean, fwiw I am in an industry where it's impossible for any product to make it to market in less than 5 - 7 years so no one's going to go wild and throw junk into the market but I _know_ people want to do exactly as you're saying.

I'd mention a couple missteps I know a little about but not outside 77 :P

I thankfully work in the one corner of technology business where “disruptive” is still a really bad term

I work for a multinational and we’re doing a mix of keeping our reputation high because everyone knows us and micro teams with startup culture mentality

Right now in one area we’re focusing on emphasizing selling a service/experience first and product second, while still staying competitive in the products we offer

Kind of a weird scenario but admittedly one only a huge company can get away with doing

Uh, so famed batshit political toonslinger Ben Garrison decided to do one on Elon Musk:

https://grrrgraphics.com/teslas-musk-mobile/

ben garrison... otm?

...yeah, fuckin' weird, ain't it

Old Wired and computer mags are fun to read, even though I lived through the era/had several Geocities pages/etc. there's a feeling of unreality about early-mid '90s technology now.

wish I'd kept a stash of PC Magazine and Byte. the former to look at the John Dvorak columns and laugh about how they were insanely wrong just a year later. the Byte ones because it was just a solid publication

see if you can spot the odd one out in this lineup of speakers for websummit, 'the best technology conference on the planet'

https://i.redd.it/m8eoc0tnr0g11.png

was ready to be surprised, and result exceeded expectations

it's surprising!

"Davos for geeks" - Bloomberg
"Glastonbury for geeks" - The Guardian

davos/glastonbury for racists morelike

Yeah, WebSummit has always been an embarassment but this is a whole new level. It's a fucking event that gets money from the government and city hall - should hope pressure will result in her getting kicked out before it actually happens.

https://websummit.com/speakers

lol oh shit I know someone on the first couple pages

gotta tell them to get Marine’s autograph

Wait how do u kno ronaldinho

knew that was coming

he opens my beers

https://gizmodo.com/san-franciscos-so-literally-shitty-its-getting-a-poop-1828342269

It’s so weird to visit a city so many times for over a decade and watch it literally turn to shit

At this point, for me - and I’m paraphrasing myself from another thread I think - it’s like somebody you had a big crush on in high school and 20 years later they’ve basically hit rock bottom but their family’s still rich so who cares

Meanwhile... https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-uninvited-from-web-summit/

that gizmodo article is disingenuous bullshit

like yes there is a poop patrol now but all of its snarky "points" are being made in bad faith

Over the years the page count just gets thinner and thinner.

http://owenyoungman.com/thenextmiracle/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/photo.jpg

that first paragraph deliberately misrepresents Kositsky (who is actually doing a really good job and is a very dedicated and p innovative guy) and his broader, actually correct point and then just goes downhill from there

xp

The UK edition is trying to keep the same kind of page count per issue by dropping issues down to 10 or maybe 9 a year now.

Theranos hits the very, very end of the road, after not finding a buyer for the patent portfolio. Will settle with its secured creditor by handing over the IP (such as it is) and return the last $5m cash in the bank to unsecured creditors.

lol at the idea of theranos’ ‘ip’

‘uh we have this commercial blood-sample scanner we took apart and put back together again, badly’

you never know when some stupid thing you wrote will turn out to be essential to someone else's invention if you squint hard enough