Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Use this thread to discuss how 2 use luggage moar effective LUGGAGE ADVICE SOUGHT

I was picturing Yerac with bottles and maybe crackers stuffed in a suitcase and was pondering how endearingly on character that’d be!

lmao and rip to the scooter startup whose efforts at nominative determinism were a colossal failure

Unicorn, the electric scooter startup from the co-creator of gadget tracker Tile, is shutting down operations after blowing all its cash on Facebook and Google ads but only receiving 350 orders for its glossy white e-scooters, it claims. In an email to customers, the company says it lacks the resources to deliver any of its $699 two-wheelers, and won’t be issuing refunds “as we are completely out of funding.”

In a remorseful email, Unicorn CEO Nick Evans said the company had “totally failed as a business” and has also “spread the cost of this failure to you, the early customers that believed in us.”

Unicorn emerged six months ago as part of a new crop of scooter startups hoping to capitalize on the popularity of dockless rental services like Bird and Lime, while also pitching itself as an affordable alternative to shared scooters. In addition to having a striking profile — the all-white look was really something — the scooter was loaded with a lot of high-tech bells and whistles, like GPS tracking and smartphone-enabled locking. Naturally it included integration with Tile, Evans’ other company, which uses Bluetooth to track lost items, like a wallet, keys, or phone.

But now Unicorn is no more. The company claims it sunk all its money into advertising and marketing, as well as loan repayments and other expenses, with little leftover for production and deliveries.

can't believe that spending all your money on advertising and forgetting to keep some aside to actually build your product was not a gangbusters business plan

lolllll

“Unicorn”

I guess their value proposition was they had an app and maybe an additional piece of hardware tagged on to a scooter they were sourcing from segway

how is that not just committing fraud?

look if 'fraud' is disqualifying in and of itself then we're gonna have to shut down a lot of tech companies, can't we just keep turning a blind eye and pretend we're not heading for a colossal collapse for a little bit longer

Zuck's laughing all the way to the bank.

https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

...

WWhen the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.
They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

William Gibson called it the Jackpot, a better name than the Event

Allegedly this is real. I wonder why the author doesn’t disclose the names of the people at this conference though.

In any case, embellished or not, it’s true that the billionaire class isn’t interested in humanity’s collective future.

that story’s 18 months old tbf, i’m sure our overlords have reconsidered their approach and embraced eco-friendly socialism by now

He probably can’t identify 100 investment bankers by sight? He was just the hired help.

he said there were only 5 people in this room

a gift of accountability? https://t.co/QXF9SQ7jMS

— Erin Griffith (@eringriffith) December 9, 2019

I don't know what this site is, that Slashdot linked to in their item about the news, but it speaks to what I found weird about the whole Away story when I got round to reading it after discussion here had died down. Y'know, that the only quoted example of the terrible culture was this one leader.

https://daringfireball.net/2019/12/away_replaces_ceo

The original article was also really weird about the hire of an intermediary manager to sit between the exec and the customer experience workers, making their magic work of disrupting the luggage business briefly more tolerable. The workers loved him and his sacking was a blow to morale. The story seemed to bend over backwards to avoid drawing the conclusion that, perhaps, when there is a chronic work backlog, maybe a company just needs to hire more fucking workers.

I skimmed that yesterday but it's pretty obviously Gruber being a weird bootlicker and doing some weird "no, I am the woke one" about a man replacing a woman

you see, The Verge got played by people who wanted to actually make this a success story about replacing a woman (who was toxic!) with a man, who we have had in the wings as we engineered this cover story

fwiw someone on twitter pointed out that the incoming CEO is coming from Lululemon, who notoriously have a weird corporate culture that's been documented elsewhere, including a period where they were sending their employees to Landmark Forum sessions

fwiw if you're interested in the other follies of mr. daringfireball.net: indefensible: john gruber

https://vcstarterkit.substack.com/p/getting-carried-away

uh as much as I'm loathe to relate to VC types, there are some decent (and some truly awful) responses here

as much as the outsourcing and globalization of support has led to roles moving away from US companies... why the fuck did they not anticipate a huge surge over the holidays and just hire a communications team elsewhere. maybe even one where.. christmas isn't necessarily a holiday for the staff?

https://daringfireball.net/2019/12/away_replaces_ceo

hahahahahahahahhaahha

incredible

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELw20v-XkAAIPql.jpg

https://www.nuraphone.com

unbelievable

no YOU'RE a phone

ok yes fuck subscriptions in general but I am curious abt these headphones, afaik this design/tech/build is not elsewhere available?

otoh not sure I trust I would trust an app to EQ for me and am afraid what it would tell me about my hearing loss

EQ is a joke

?

When given the option I always adjust EQ levels to suit a given system.

to clarify w/r/t novelty of this technology I'm referring to isolating the low end over the ear and transmitting higher frequencies via earbud

mlk, gandhi, maggie

Most people that changed the world were workaholics. MLK, Gandhi, Hamilton, Thatcher, etc all worked nights and weekends.

But if you are not interested in changing the world, then working more than 40 hours a week is optional.

I choose to try to change the world. https://t.co/6G0OhMsY7t

— Auren 𝐇𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐦𝐚𝐧 (@auren) December 25, 2019

At least two notorious adulterers on that list, and it seems that Gandhi had a questionable sex life to say the least. I assume Maggie never fucked

Wait a mo. I consider it possible that Maggie and Dennis could have had occasional angry sex.

Who’d fuck someone named Dennis

hmmm, makes you think

Nura came up through the university accelerator I occasionally mentor at. They stared as a couple of PhDs with some tech to make adaptive hearing aids that worked with the strengths and weaknesses of people hearing. Headphones was mainly something to do whilst they worked out how do the re gu altitude stuff for a medical device.

Headphones took off and the rest is history. The tech is cool and sounds remarkably good but I find the weird nipples in the earcups to be pretty uncomfortable. Keen to try the nuraloop buds when the come out.

Subscription is ridiculous but that’s the way of things today.

Guess who's back!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/business/steph-korey-away.html

they must have figured out the people they sell luggage to only read lifestyle magazines, so any news article (or the verge) wasn't going to affect their sales, right?

of course they're suing the verge, though. classic thiel move

https://thebaffler.com/latest/certain-unflattering-truths-schaffer

I’ve come to the view this as part of the project of the book itself: to leave us unsettled by how its narrator, like all of us, remains somewhat in the Valley’s mindset, if not its pocket. This entanglement is a feature of the system that works, as she notes, precisely as designed. In the end, for all the generosity she extends to those around her, Wiener is unsparing with herself: “Certain unflattering truths: I had felt unassailable behind the walls of power. Society was shifting, and I felt safer inside the empire, inside the machine. It was preferable to be on the side that did the watching than the side being watched.” Wiener has written an indispensable chronicle of this era in tech, the consequences of which we will all reckon with as the next decade unfolds. Still, given the Valley’s unmatched ability to avoid any sense of guilt as the world around it burns, there is no doubt in my mind that while Uncanny Valley will be read widely and voraciously throughout the empire, Wiener’s readers—techno-skeptics and technologists alike—will be able to recognize themselves without feeling indicted.

But surely someone, somewhere, eventually, will need to feel indicted. At some point, we’re going to need the sharp end of the knife.

wow, Casper CEO on CNBC, when asked why the company priced its IPO at less than half of its private valuation: "I loved getting out and meeting investors. ... People got very excited" about Casper's mission. 🙃

— eg (@eringriffith) February 6, 2020

wonder if you could say they were…exuberant

is this the mattress company or ... ?

I'm sure they'd insist they're a sleep technology company

it's a platform for sleep

not hot dog

sorry, sometimes I get this thread and the thread for the Silicon Valley tv show confused

I got one of their pillows and some sheets on deep discount and they're pretty good if very overpriced

if you run their stock through the lazarus, the valuation becomes real

CSPR ipo delivers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-07/casper-sleep-slips-below-ipo-price-on-second-day-as-public-firm