Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

i don't even cook much but the idea that making brownies is "bullshit" baffles me

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/lawyer-who-wrote-apples-insider-trading-policy-accused-of-insider-trading/

quis custodiet something something

maybe by bullshit, he means that food should be free and we shouldn't have to buy it? idk i mean, there are definitely times when i wish i didn't need to eat and deal with food because i don't feel like i have time or there are too many other things i wanna do, but it's more or less like sleep -- it's pretty necessary and actually enjoyable most of the time

I guess if you view the human experience as some grand experiment in creating technology, art, and furthering culture then maintenance activities like cooking food and organizing your socks become hindrances that steal your time. Or if you’re really on that edge, the time spent eating food is a barrier to true transendence and you’re chugging soylent or whatever

I like cooking and even, on occasion, enjoy doing dishes

I'll never forget reading a Michael Jackson interview when i was like, 10, al where he said he hated eating because it was such a waste of time, and that was my first inkling that there was something deeply askew w this dude

I'll never forget reading a lex post when i was like, 24, etc

some part of this is an artifact of an economy in which food preparation is chiefly a private matter. there's an alternate history where it got much more collectivized and we'd view cooking for yourself in the same way as like, generating your own electricity or something. like at the start of the 19th century, most americans bought all their food at the market and someone in their home (probably a wife or mother, or servants) prepared it. gradually different forms of restaurants emerged and became popular and it became more and more normal to take more and more of your meals out of the home, not to mention the role played by room-and-board rooming houses. always so interesting to see those portrayed in old movies. so idk we're on some kind of continuum where there are a range of different versions of your relation to food and cooking.

in the 1920s there was a small constellation of communist, left-socialist, and feminist-reformers who argued that it was crazy to have every individual home kitted out with all this space and hardware and plumbing for cooking, plus the assumption of who was going to do that cooking labor, especially in the context of public housing schemes that were struggling to design minimum-cost dwellings. communal dining for apartment blocks (basically like a cafeteria) were briefly experimented with in a few projects in the USSR before stalin consolidated and deradicalized the state's cultural program etc. moisei ginzburg's narkomfin building in moscow had units with very small, basic modular kitchens that could - in theory - be removed if you realized you were taking all your meals in the attached cafeteria and you'd rather use the square footage for something else. i could imagine someday being wooed by an apartment offering not a gym or a pool but a reliable square meal in the canteen as part of the rent, with some version of a miniature kitchenette (little cube fridge? single-rack oven for when you get the baking urge? i don't know) so you can fix up a few things yourself...

excellent post, DC!

. i could imagine someday being wooed by an apartment offering not a gym or a pool but a reliable square meal in the canteen as part of the rent, with some version of a miniature kitchenette (little cube fridge? single-rack oven for when you get the baking urge? i don't know) so you can fix up a few things yourself...

these exist already and are marketed at tech bros, often through renovating former SRO's which entail displacing poor people and other marginal individuals who often end up homeless as a result.

Eating food is enjoyable nearly all of the time! Outside of a few actually quick and simple recipes (and even those get boring) cooking isn't enjoyable - you can do enjoyable things while it happens, and of course of course it's necessary, and good takeaway every or even most nights is definitely a sign of privilege (and I try to pull my own weight in the home), but cooking is time that you could be spending doing something else that actually grows the soul like er ILXOR.com.

some people like cooking ...

my walking to the grocery store and cooking time is when i listen to podcasts

okay, so maybe Andrew is right

xxp I mean, my opinions are my opinions, not anyone else's..

But also, how?

I crave to work and to receive immediate clear feedback from that work. Furthermore, I want the product of my work to be enjoyable and depend almost entirely on my own performance. Cooking is a way to satisfy this craving while also making a product that can be shared with the family. I probably wouldn't have the craving if I had a different job.

also, I like holding ladderscooking dinner. It takes me out of myself.

Eating food is enjoyable nearly all of the time!

I have a friend who isn't that adventurous when it comes to food selection and tends to pick things that very much fall into a stereotypical kid-like selection: chicken strips, pizza, etc.

it finally, after way too many years, dawned on me over the weekend that part of this is a sensory issue thing. the first clue was his professed dislike of soup, and witnessing him grimacing and kind of powering through a sandwich after cringing at the texture of one of the toppings made it more clear. it's not necessarily flavors, it's textures and consistency and some foods really do bother him when he eats them

I think there's actually a link between the personality and mentalities that SV culture appeals to and an actual dislike of the act of eating. I'm trying to be generous here because there's enough "oh, all the software developers/weird VC guys are on the spectrum" talk and it's gross to frame it that way, but I really think a significant number of these people actually find the sensory experience of eating some foods to be overwhelming

i wonder how much is whether they raised eating foods like that growing up (basically pandered to) or if they just got smaller portions of adult food. I still have trouble understanding why (except for like, in infancy) kids are fed differently than adults.

hmmm. I'm not sure that "not enjoyable" maps very well to "bullshit".

btw, I often enjoy cooking or food shopping. they are a low-stress activities with usually enjoyable results, which stands in stark contrast to my all-too-frequent high stress activities that have nothing remotely enjoyable about them.

Aimless, my friend who works for Salesforce feels the same way

For his birthday party in December, he made this really amazing smoked mackerel

Meanwhile:

“She was going to herald a revolution in medical treatment in this country.”

From Academy Award-winning director @alexgibneyfilm, #TheInventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley premieres March 18 at 9PM on @HBO. pic.twitter.com/8hpnWMS7Zd

— HBO Documentaries (@HBODocs) February 15, 2019

I've not seen much video footage of her - is the above stuff all from before or after the scam was outed (so to speak)? She looks shifty as hell in every shot!

Must be from before. Errol Morris did a whole puff piece promotional thing on her, and I'm guessing a lot of the footage comes from that.

shiftiness reads as DISRUPTIVE to minds poisoned by silicon valley cult-of-ceo bullshit iirc

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/researchers-scared-by-their-own-work-hold-back-deepfakes-for-text-ai/

well, as long as this technology is only in the hands of trustworthy people like, er, peter thiel and elon musk

At the end, Theranos was overrun by a dog defecating in the boardroom, nearly a dozen law firms on retainer, and a C.E.O. grinning through her teeth about an implausible turnaround.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/inside-elizabeth-holmess-final-months-at-theranos

update to my last post here:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/twenty-minutes-into-the-future-with-openais-deep-fake-text-ai/

well i can see why the researchers were so terrified! GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT

https://twitter.com/juliacarriew/status/1104944041400004608

hadn't thought of this. VCs are so unbelievably weird.

that is a definite angle! people who think you need constant blood tests because you could, and it’d be useful

that’s the high-end money pitch, though. the mass market pitch that they were making was quick blood testing at walgreens or the battlefield and it was a value pitch. no time paying someone to take a blood sample large enough to test that would take a real phlebotomist, no analyst time that took lab shipping. the ability to sit someone in front of a machine and have a teledoc do instant prescription. instant flow from machine to prescription is the profit, nobody having to do the work of touching and talking to a patient

I mean, for people with low insurance coverage it’s a quick up sell — pay for a blood scan and we’ll give you drugs to fix what may ail you, or optimistically, send you to the right doctor immediately so you’re not stumbling through appointments, and all from a quick scan

the scale factor is that the afflictions treatable from a quick blood scan would be at a larger initial audience and it’d make the weekly scanners who are going to be told to eat one more salad the subsidizers of the system but it was still insanely dumb because blood tests don’t work like that

Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/style/uber-ipo-san-francisco-rich.html

One recent night, in a packed room with a view of the Bay Bridge and an open bar, real estate investors gathered. Standing at the front presenting was Deniz Kahramaner, a real estate agent specializing in data analytics at Compass.

“Are we going to see a one-bedroom condo that’s worth less than $1 million in five years?” he asked the crowd. “Are we going to see single family homes selling for one to three million?”

No, he said, not anymore. The energy rose as he revealed more data about new millionaires and about just how few new units have been built for them. San Francisco single-family home sale prices could climb to an average of $5 million, he said, to gasps.

Theranos-wise, I don't think that "this used to be some hassle and now it's no hassle" is a bad pitch, ever - there was a dedicated Weights & Measures building down the street from my house, where people would bring in things to weigh, and now there's kitchen scales.

crucial difference there is that kitchen scales actually do what they're supposed to

Sure, but that never matters to the pitch, right?

As a hypochondriac I do like the idea of running a Star Trek style tricorder over myself at regular intervals instead of worrying about mystery bodily symptoms and then not daring to go to the doctor because it usually sounds silly (plus I am fat so the answer to all mystery symptoms is "you should lose weight, eat better, exercise more" which tbf is certainly true anyway)

however, jabbing myself with anything ever or having anything to do with Theranos-level messianic quacks, not so much

(NB why yes, I would still worry in a different unhealthy way if I had this magical device, but hey, it would bleep and have flashy lights and offer the brief illusion of control)

lmao otm

Men hate vocal fry so much that they gave Elizabeth Holmes 400 million dollars

— Emma (@Merman_Melville) March 19, 2019

lol

see also

elizabeth holmes on a rollercoaster carefully screaming in a baritone

— Sarah Lazarus (@sarahclazarus) March 19, 2019

i_remember_nothing.mp3

do I have to resubscribe to HBO to see this? dark internet is striking out

i just bought a ticket from burbank to oakland on https://www.jetsuitex.com/. afaict it's uberx for private jets. you pull up to a private hangar at a regular airport. my ticket was $20 more than the flight at the same time on southwest. VC-subsidized transit. boy, i don't know.

Wagering that you will spend more money on VC-subsidized ground transport than on your air transport for this trip.

Also wagering that you will spend more time on the ground getting from Oakland to your destination than you will from BUR-OAK.

gonna get a car to the bart station and it's a back street hangar so hoping for no traffic but yeah, it's not really great if you aren't the kind of person who likes driving to airports.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/technology/venture-capitalists-ipo-pinterest.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/03/20/business/00strut1/merlin_151953237_6cd2da47-4b11-4d9f-8d48-b8e7b4a54e0b-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
Rick Heitzmann, a partner at FirstMark Capital, which has invested in Pinterest and Airbnb, said it was time to “tell our story.”

absolute hero imo

Man stole https://boingboing.net/2019/03/24/evaldas-rimasauskas.html?fbclid=IwAR0zPBGWxFPt3EWa9chp9eQdVhsjJJ8KNpshFUe2n2qPwj9EOeRa3m_hwDQ22m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills, which the companies dutifully paid

jeezus

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/24/evaldas-rimasauskas.html?fbclid=IwAR0zPBGWxFPt3EWa9chp9eQdVhsjJJ8KNpshFUe2n2qPwj9EOeRa3m_hwDQ

as much a hero as anybody who commits corporate fraud, i guess