Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

one last story: my former boss at this place was very high up at Le@n !n Canada and was well acquainted with $heryl S@ndberg. unfortunately she was sacked just as the scandal from a few months back was breaking out so I didn't get to inquire about how her good pal was handling all of this. (appropriately enough the sacking took place because she was giving her male bosses a little too much pushback. but as it turns out she got out at an excellent time.)

feel free to keep going! today i heard a couple variations on 'uh-oh tableau to salesforce' from friends around both, and your stories are much more interesting

so I was working for a blockchain startup

can we back up to how this even started, was the alternative mugging grandmas

For real

the silicon valley startup whose business model was to steal bongos from grandmothers and use them to join the fall foundered when mark e. smith died, but not before raising $100 million in venture capital through ycombinator

He's optimized the space with the ingenuity of a startup founder, installing ample shelves and hooks for storage and even some foam acoustic panels to mitigate the noise from below and beyond his window.

daamn these startup founders really are more ingenious than the rest of us

https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/startup-CEO-lives-works-Zeitgeist-Vivek-Kumar-13969019.php

nice place to live if u spend half the year in pittsburgh

so I was working for a blockchain startup

can we back up to how this even started, was the alternative mugging grandmas

a fair question lol, a few years back I had just gotten my technical writing certificate and I was looking for work in a couple different cities, and I just so happened to get a job working for a *different* blockchain startup, before it was quite the dirty word it is now. the job itself was sort of a nightmare, but it was specifically because of the asshole who ran the place - everyone else was great and the work was sort of interesting, not to mention getting to meet all the industry's weirdos and psychos. then I left to work a steadier corporate job for a couple of years, and one of my former co-workers tapped me for this job, where I'd be working with some of those same people I liked, without (that) asshole boss, and for considerably more money than I was making at the time. so that's how that started.

since I last posted at least one exec has left the company, I'll be surprised if they survive the summer

tbh i don't really understand what "blockchain" even means and i don't give a fuck.

I strongly suspect knowing what it means would never, ever impact your life in any meaningful way

great! *whistles and skips*

(i mean, tbh, i do have some idea, but mostly a vague notion that it's connected to cryptocurrency)

Do you know what a database is? Imagine that but extremely slow and used for fraud.

^^^^ yes

One of the equity crowd funding sites I track offered me the opportunity to fund a startup that loans people ‘fiat currency’ secured on their crypto holdings. Other than the use of the term ‘fiat currency’ sending me purple with rage, even though that is exactly what they wanted me to invest; this seems like a perfectly legitimate way to light a pile of money on fire.

The same crowd funding platform was recently also offering me an opportunity to earn 19% ‘risk free’ on secondary debt for construction finance. I need to unsubscribe from this email nonsense.

I used to be quite positive about equity crowd funding but it appears to only attract the dross that can’t get funded elsewhere. I did some work for a company that had equity crowd funded because it couldn’t get other finance, it then attracted traditional investment which was tranched based on hitting customer acquisition targets. They failed to even hit a tenth of the first target so they are now out shaking down the gullible in another equity crowd funding raise.

Of course, whatever else happens the equity crowd funding platform gets 30% of the loot.

ed you are also supposed to defend pittsburgh here

I’m assuming you could still rent a whole city block in Braddock for whatever he’s paying for the 85 sqft in downtown San Francisco.

Zeitgeist is not downtown SF, it's in the Mission several miles southwest.

Mountaineering is an extreme example where you’re trying to summit, while also trying to survive.

In some ways, it is like a startup, where you’re trying to maximize and become a unicorn, while also making sure details don’t pull you under. https://t.co/lYADRGMdVG

— Stanford Business (@StanfordGSB) June 29, 2019

Both are full of idiots that die and nobody cares

The most overlooked engine of growth is the individual. If you are really looking to move the world forward, begin by innovating on the inside, and disrupt yourself. https://t.co/SwYIgcnIqh

— Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz) June 28, 2019

chugging expired milk to disrupt myself

knocking over a marching band in a domino formation is how i disrupt my sense of personal ethics

Getting back to Zeitgeist...

There's something quintessentially San Francisco about a startup CEO living and working above a longtime bar.

Soon there will be five startup CEO's living and working up there, and no more longtime bar. Ah, metastasizing gentrification. So quintessentially SF. One day in the near future Vivek Kumar will be reminiscing wistfully about back when he used to have to step over puddles of vomit when he left for his morning lattes.

most of the people who used to live above Zeitgeist worked at Zeitgeist or other neighborhood spots. the rents were insanely cheap (my friend rented a room for $300/month there from 2007-2009) and allowed weird people to live in SF, as was kind of possible then.

that some yuppie trash now runs a start-up out of the place is yet another sign that we are in the worst of timelines, and San Francisco as a city is one of the biggest victims of it.

Wow, $300 is insanely cheap. I was paying more than twice that for a similarly sized space in Oakland around the same time. I did have a little kitchen tho and a nice bath. But I also had to deal with the heroin addict who lived downstairs and had a personal grudge against me...long story. Anyway when I was partying at Zeitgeist it was mostly with said yuppie trash so I can't be too self-righteous about it.

Stanford Engineering alum/Youtube engineer techbro binges LSD in quiet hippy coastal town, ends up violently rampaging against friends, bystanders and finally law enforcement before being shot into submission.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/05/bodega-bay-deputy-shoots-s-f-man-in-grips-of-lsd-rampage/amp/

jeezus!

what kind of lsd are these techbros brewing up that makes you do that

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

holy shit.

what kind of lsd are these techbros brewing up that makes you do that

― mh, Sunday, July 7, 2019 10:12 AM (two hours ago)

"On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene"

Wow, $300 is insanely cheap. I was paying more than twice that for a similarly sized space in Oakland around the same time.

idk, around that time probably about half of my friends were paying $300 - $400/month in rent in Oakland and SF. I was living in a kinda big 2 bedroom apartment w/my bf and we each paid $425. ...It's the beauty of rent control. Though some of them lived in "non-compliant" warehouse spaces.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EByG98VVUAExCxi.jpg:small

The Corn Belt is a place where agriculture is changed so often you can't call bullshit on someone who tells you they're going to do it too.

And sure, people who have never grown anything in their lives will write words & fill up paper with splotches of ink critiquing the people actually in the arena.

Even in the face of regulatory incompetence, the jealousy of the coastal organic food types, and the false narrative of a "big ag" backlash, America's farmers go on producing record yields that feed the world.

They did put a golf course on the other side of the highway exit that only went to the county dump. Renamed the exit, they did. ... That was about 15 years ago though. They haven't really changed it since.

lol mh

What does this even mean? pic.twitter.com/7EpH4wEzyk

— Nathan McDermott (@natemcdermott) September 6, 2019

you have to pay to zip them up & it takes ages

They catch fire unexpectedly? The CEO is making an ass of himself on social media?

get ready for self-wearing pants

Insufferably annoying people wear them?

they’re ugly as shit?

think yall are over thinking it, those are actually wearable electric cars

btw in case it wasnt obvious you use your dick to drive

a thin veil of faux sophistication barely concealing an out of control musk

Pretty scathing column in the Guardian on the whole Epstein mess and what it means for 'tech intellectuals': https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/07/jeffrey-epstein-mit-funding-tech-intellectuals

xxp - so what does it say about the evolution of the dick that so few Americans drive manual transmission?

morozov also fired his agent for being a main conduit between epstein and these guys. it’s all so gross. and so damning as far as why tech has ultimately been so lacking in imagination despite all that money.

Kickstarter is doing illegal retaliatory firings of employees for union organizing:

https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-union-drive-historic-tech-industry