Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

wait, what is this thing?

https://www.platformer.news/p/-how-basecamp-blew-up

if you're outside tech then they're obviously awful people just based on this story, but there's a huge amount of schadenfreude inside tech too because they've written a bunch of very strident "here's how to run a company" books.

Picked this book authored by the Basecamp co-founders off of the shelf and opened it to a section I had highlighted when I first read it. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/aJHptrC8XK

— JT (@thejoshtorres) May 4, 2021

Picked this book authored by the Basecamp co-founders off of the shelf and opened it to a section I had highlighted when I first read it. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/aJHptrC8XK

— JT (@thejoshtorres) May 4, 2021

more coverage: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion

I’m learning some leadership lessons certainly, like “don’t call in to the very sensitive all-hands from bed”

I thought this had to be a joke

dan m, I think that Verge piece is exactly the same as what mookieproof posted?

weird, I assumed since it was a separate URL that it would have been different, my bad

So this kerfufle was triggered by employees posting to ilx's "Abysmal Real Names" thread?

Feels good to not know what Basecamp does.

^^

dan m, I think that Verge piece is exactly the same as what mookieproof posted?

― 80's hair metal , and good praise music ! (DJP), Tuesday, May 4, 2021 1:59 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think the author has a deal where he's allowed to post his stuff to his own site (which he sells subscriptions for) and the verge pays him to syndicate it.

the basecamp thing is definitely one of those “we’re the good guys” scenarios where leadership was even “doing the work” by telling the employees about the books they were reading, only for the employees to say “hey, maybe we’re doing some things wrong” only for the boss to point at the “we’re the good guys” sign on the wall

Ha otm.

I read their book about remote work when I went remote and it’s no better than any airport business book but it’s written in that y combinator style that simulates clear thinking.

Ironically for ilx I am reading this right now https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902 (who was into this idea and posted about it in re: Arsenal? I can’t remember). I kind of thought it was a cult 70s thing like the whole earth catalog and chaos theory etc. bit I saw it recommended a bunch and it is at least very short so I’m giving it a shot.

I was going to post "The Limits to Growth was a huge deal" but my supervisor is writing a book about the history of models, so I may have a pretty skewed perspective on this

Re not knowing what they do. This talk of "building cool shit" is much funnier when you do. What a bizarre economy.

the line between the Whole Earth Catalog and Q running through silicon valley, the free software foundation, and gamergate is a very bright and straight one

someone on twitter reminded me that the guy who was canned from Google for “just asking questions” originally had @Fired4Truth as his twitter handle

this will never not be funny

I'm asking what you think. You say it's a bad idea to hire people who say things for shock value. Presumably you mean to include Antonio, or you wouldn't have mentioned this. So are you saying that in a world of properly run companies, he should never work again?

— Paul Graham (@paulg) May 13, 2021

I ain’t clicking through on that

I think you can get the point without clicking. PG just being obtuse and acting like “don’t hire jerks” means that all of our best thought leaders will be unemployed

Ex-Facebook VR exec says he'll turn U.S. troops into 'invincible technomancers,' just raised $450 million https://t.co/xufDyzkh0n

— CNBC (@CNBC) June 17, 2021

"ex-facebook vr exec" doesn't really capture that guy's bio tbf

Is that the worst beard in the world?

Indeed. I don't usually notice facial hair but that's outstandingly bad

an acquaintance launched the public sale of his startup's crypto token, yesterday. it aims to eliminate global poverty by creating "a regenerative, bottom-up universal basic income (UBI) that can elevate all participants above the global poverty line."

"if the Torus can return $2/day to its participants (as Anatha Token), it can make poverty a disease we’ve cured"... so, peak silicon-valley optimism. it would be cool to see crypto/distributed finance eliminate poverty at any scale.

https://anatha.io/blog/token-sale
https://www.morningstar.com/news/globe-newswire/8255815/anatha-announces-its-accessible-equitable-public-token-sale-accepting-fiat-and-crypto

xpost that Facebook guy is Parker Luckey, who I interviewed once and might have been the most awkward conversation I've ever had, absolute basement boy

his sister is engaged to matt gaetz.

the Oculus acquisition still baffles me. "we integrated the phone with the ski goggles. now we want 3 billion dollars."

India was the Y combinator of the British empire

— Daniel Tenreiro 🦧 (@TenreiroDaniel) August 5, 2021

I know he means something stupid, let's click through and see if he clarified his thoughts at all

An outsize portion of the empire’s great talents were nurtured in the Raj. Fascinating phenomenon . . .

— Daniel Tenreiro 🦧 (@TenreiroDaniel) August 5, 2021

*screaming intensifies*

the Oculus acquisition still baffles me. "we integrated the phone with the ski goggles. now we want 3 billion dollars."

I heard Zuck on the radio awhile ago, and he has big plans for VR. Facebook has never been a leader in the hardware world, and he sees this as the future; you'll go to the office in VR, maybe have lunch while in VR, then attend a 'concert' after work in VR. If that doesn't sound dystopian, I don't know what is.

https://i.imgur.com/AFDRfK0.gif

I don't think you need to spend that money just to get into VR. Certainly none of that ip will make up zuck's horrible vr hell.

I don't think VR will ever be a real hit until they devise a blowjob machine that actually feels like a mouth to get the porn-driven mass adoption of VHS/DVD/streaming.

tragic lol @ this thread

25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0, its first real salvo in the “Browser Wars”. This launch taught taught me how a giant corporation could move at the speed of a startup. Here’s the story: pic.twitter.com/ZEYcxYrUgI

— Hadi Partovi (@hadip) August 14, 2021

this bit in particular:

Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.

— Hadi Partovi (@hadip) August 14, 2021

the distance between their ideology and the reality of what these people produce is astonishing / beyond parody

ah, I just noticed this dude is a director at the company that makes tasers and police drones

moving at the speed of a 100-person startup

lol seriously

I just can't get over how this was all in service of developing a product that was indistinguishable from an already massively popular one. I want to read the breathless thread about how people wrecked their lives to put out the Zune

"yeah I worked 90 hours a week, destroyed my marriage, and didn't watch my kids grow up but hey we shipped an important product"

"ah well at least you're rich now"

"oh no, no no no, but i have the satisfaction of having made other people rich"

completely deranged

— Kat Cosgrove (@Dixie3Flatline) August 15, 2021

I just can't get over how this was all in service of developing a product that was indistinguishable from an already massively popular one. I want to read the breathless thread about how people wrecked their lives to put out the Zune

in retrospect, the zune was the first time i really became aware of tech overbloat. it's still funny to think about. and the word 'zune' has to be a nadir of the english language. it still makes me cringe-laugh at how bad it is.

https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/z0kxIIl4fc0WfO3u7uB9B_TkCeP919kzD8xY5rqR0fiGzvHGGQfMaSsC7CCmQ3GRneB0Gb3Al07Z=s200

I just can't get over how this was all in service of developing a product that was indistinguishable from an already massively popular one.

That sort of product defined the Steve Ballmer era at Microsoft. Microsoft thought they learnt from Internet Explorer that they could crush any hot new tech product or service from another company simply by throwing money at it and melding it into Windows, but what worked for IE didn't work for Zune, Bing, Windows Phone, and several others - all reactions to competitors who got there first and did it better. Even IE itself would later crash and burn. Microsoft has since replaced it with Edge, a web browser most of us use exactly once, to download Chrome...

Now Edge is just Chrome

don’t forget that msft bought the world’s most popular video calling software and rendered it an unusable add-on to Teams right before the pandemic hit. has to be in their top 5 galaxy brane moves

oh yeah Bing! lmao

Tracer, which one? I’m thinking of Skype here, but they bought that in 2011 and have been fucking it up in various ways for a decade

I don't use Chrome anymore, now Firefox is my best friend