Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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!!

at first it was just the "li" button but he thought of putting the "ke" on the end

sometimes you really wish skynet would hurry up and get here so all these tech people will stop acting like history's greatest innovators and start denying that they're history's greatest monsters and hiding in underground caves and stuff

the title of 'inventor' probably puts those two items on a higher pedestal than is necessary. but jumping from like button and hashtag to skynet risks doing even worse.

well i wouldn't wanna do anything risky

haha react

Tech executives respond to incentives, but not all incentives are financial. “Zuck wants money, he wants power, but more than anything he wants to be admired,” Tavis McGinn, who once worked at Facebook as Zuckerberg’s personal pollster, told me. “If you can affect his ability to walk into a room and command respect, that’s a real leverage point.”

how about affecting his ability to not behave like a fucking five year old.

Adam Neumann is the logical conclusion of ten years of artificially low interest rates combined with no wage or demand growth. A guy who believes he is god because he loses money renting out desks.

pretty fucked up that large banks and investment groups made up of billionaires are just shooting their shot at anything that might make money because.. they have all the money already and can't make it grow any further

https://monthlyreview.org/2016/07/01/surplus-absorption-and-waste-in-neoliberal-monopoly-capitalism/

Burn Silicon Valley to the ground and salt the earth IMO

dude, that's mean, considering it was pretty fertile agricultural land before

Okay, beat their Teslas into plowshares and set up the world's largest organic farm.

so turn it into skywalker ranch?

thx for the link, Tracer Hand

you're welcome!

Something only glancingly mentioned in the WSJ article is that one of the main things producing the record-scratch when people starting looking at the IPO was the news that WeWork were rebranding to "We", which Adam Neumann had come up with privately and then sold to the company for $6m.

Matt Levine (whose Money Stuff newsletters have been great on this) points out that theoretically this shouldn't be a problem for WeWork - if you're losing money because you're investing every penny that you have (and more) in buying new places and setting them up, and they'll start making money in six months, and then you'll plow that money (and more) into buying more places, then nervousness from investors is fine - you just stop buying new places and in six months you'll be deafened by the roar of all the money you're making, and the investors will be "Oh shit, I wish I'd invested in this six months ago". Of course, in theory you don't have an lunatic in charge.

One of the things that has, I think, happened since the WSJ article is that the corporate structure and super-share stuff has been reworked, so the total control that Neumann has will at least die with him, and there will be (some, limited) oversight. Which might be one of the signs of the end of the age of the 'unicorn', tech companies that have all of the mini-fiefdom aspects of privately held companies and all of the barrels of cash of public companies.