Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

(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

Berkeley City Councilmember Ben Bartlett became the first elected official to purchase cannabis with cryptocurrency at a demonstration facilitated by the Blockchain Advocacy Coalition on Tuesday.

https://www.dailycal.org/2019/09/15/city-council-member-1st-elected-official-to-buy-cannabis-with-cryptocurrency/

He's running.

what the FUCK

After firing hundreds of staff, the WeWork CEO held a somber all-hands meeting explaining why it was a necessary move, but then trays of tequila were handed out and DMC from Run-DMC burst into the room and performed "It's Tricky" https://t.co/t9oGq8ebTb pic.twitter.com/cuq0aM1Tqi

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) September 18, 2019

I’m reading the Dune series and every time Herbert describes the spice trance I’m like damn... this must be how Jack Dorsey feels all the time

— Ipod ₂₀₀₁ (@alexqarbuckle) September 18, 2019

that wework story is amazing

yeah, it’s incredible in every sense of the word

He told at least one person directly that his ambitions included becoming Israel’s prime minister. More recently, he said that if he ran for anything, it would be president of the world, according to another person who spoke with him.

“The influence and impact that we are going to have on this Earth is going to be so big,” he said last year at a “summer camp” southeast of London, where the company’s staff were all flown for a music festival-like event. One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating world hunger.

He relishes trips in private jets. Last year, We bought one for more than $60 million, people familiar with the sale said. Mr. Neumann has borrowed more than $740 million against his stock and has sold multiple hundred million dollars of shares, people familiar with those sales say, eliciting widespread criticism from analysts and Silicon Valley investors. These share sales weren’t disclosed in the IPO prospectus.

this guy's net worth is like negative hundreds of millions lol

all this for the incredible revolutionary idea of... providing places where people can use their laptops

finally got around to reading this, which is majestic

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/silicon-valleys-crisis-of-conscience

jfc these people

Before the presentation, Van Noppen hosted a breakfast for a few members of the audience, including Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook employee and a co-inventor of the Like button, and Chris Messina, a former Google employee and the inventor of the hashtag. Messina wore a polo shirt, revealing a tattoo on each arm: a hashtag on the right, a Burning Man logo on the left.

co-inventor of the Like button!!