Apologies to Maurice Sendak for this post's title — Dave
Where is the biggest congregation of assholes on the planet? There are so many good candidates that this question does not permit an easy answer—Washington D.C., the financial district of London, Wall Street, Moscow, Riyadh, Beijing, etc. So many places, so many assholes.
I believe Silicon Valley is where the biggest group of assholes lives. This post was prompted by yet another write-up of these grown-up children called Silicon Valley Is Living Inside A Bubble Of Tone-Deaf Arrogance. It was written by Jim Edwards.
Before I get into that, let me tell you that this is one fucked-up group of monkeys. Talk about delusions of grandeur. Here they are, these monkeys, telling you how clever and smart they are, but viewed at the appropriate level of abstraction, they are all basically doing exactly the same thing—building "cutting edge" social toys ("apps", services, gadgets) to promote money changing hands, often with each other.
That same-old is supposed to be new? A capitalist revolution in the making?
These status- and wealth-seeking assholes are a highly social, highly cohesive group of bipedal primates who of course love the totally-cool toys they build. Because enough people outside Silicon Valley want to play with these social toys—they are highly social primates too—these "consumers" have made many of these alleged "entrepreneurs" stinking rich. Unfortunately, this new-found wealth only reinforces their inordinately high opinions of themselves.
In so far as their delusional view of themselves tells them they are the most "advanced" monkeys on the planet, some of these assholes have concluded that they are so superior to regular folks that they need to build their own hideaways where they can jerk each other off all day without being disturbed.
In short, these entitled assholes imagine they live in a Universe built just for them. The rest of us are just walking around in it.
Jim Edwards talks about these Silicon Valley assholes hating on poor people in San Francisco. Apparently, the very existence of these inferior indigents is fucking up their self-created technological utopia.
AngelHack CEO Greg Gopman apologized last week for a series of posts on Facebook in which he said that homeless "trash" had no place in the "heart of our city," San Francisco. He wrote:
The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it's a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that's okay.
It's ugly, class-war stuff. But Gopman isn't alone. There has been a rash of incidents in which tech execs appear to have interpreted their personal economic success as proof of their permanent superior status to the rest of us.
Some of them want to secede from America, or live on lawless artificial islands outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. Some of them want to sue their critics.
There is a feeling outside Silicon Valley that those inside the tech business are living in a tone-deaf bubble of arrogance. Inside the bubble, everyone is subverting! — disrupting! innovating! — in a permanent revolution of creative destruction.
From the outside, people see multiple billions of dollars swirling around companies that sometimes do trivial things...
Startup founders feel entitled to hate the poor.
Peter Shih, founder of a payments startup called Celery, wrote an infamous blog post in August about all the things he hates about San Francisco. Among his reasons: the homeless, the transvestites, the women, and the cyclists.
Cyclists?
Two startup millionaires have created a members-only "meritocracy" club. It requires a $2,400 fee.
The Battery was created by Michael and Xochi Birch, the people who sold Bebo to AOL for $850 million. It sounds awesome, according to SFGate:
"While 'private social club' connotes money, insularity and elitism to some, these social media millionaires want their establishment to reflect Silicon Valley-style meritocracy. They see it as an egalitarian watering hole where they want diversity, not homogeneity, to rule."
The club's own website calls it a place for those who "eschew status."
But the cost of eschewed status is steep: Membership is $2,400 a year, and you can only get in if you know someone else who is already a member. Valet parking is optional.
These new social millionaires elitists want to eschew status? You can get in only if you someone else who is already a member? Valet parking? Is this supposed to be some kind of fucking joke?
Edwards' inside/outside distinction is obviously right, but what's truly interesting to me about these assholes, as I said above, is that they see themselves as techo-optimistic, entrepreneurial libertarians, each of whom is doing his own thing, whereas all of them are actually doing the same thing with many minor or trivial variations. In short, they form a coherent human social group, with all that entails, and there's certainly nothing new about that. Thus they are all doing more or less the same things, and they all more or less believe the same things. I repeat myself, but you can't say it often enough.
Inside the Silicon Valley herd = Inside the delusional bubble of tone-deaf arrogance.
The first thing an actually independent-minded innovator would do if he found himself among this group of assholes would be to get away from them as fast as he could.
These fucked-up monkeys really do want to secede from this planet to a Happy Place where they can play with their toys and groom each other all day long.
One tech entrepreneur suggested Silicon Valley secede from the U.S.
In a speech titled "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit," Balaji Srinivasan argued that tech founders should leave the U.S. and form their own independent state, run by technology.
"The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t follow you out there," he said. "It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years."
CNET described the end of his speech this way:
"By the time he finished, a slide showing an artist's rendition of what a techno-utopia might look like if it were blossoming in the ocean off the coast of what could only be Northern California evoked his vision nicely [pictured above left].
But it still looked eerily like the floating space station in Neill Blomkamp's dystopian commentary Elysium."
Some time back I talked about this delusional techno-utopian "vision" in a post on seasteading.
I mean, some of this Silicon Valley monkey business seems quite unbelievable on the face of it, although on reflection it makes total sense if you are able to see typical human social instincts at work, if you look at these toy-happy jerk-offs from the outside as Edwards does. For example, human social groups of sufficient size are always hierarchical, and there is often a charismatic leader, as with this astonishing Yahoo example.
Yahoo published a book of notes written by Marissa Mayer's employees thanking her for being their CEO, as if she were Chairman Mao of China.
A Vanity Fair profile of Mayer described it thus:
To celebrate her one-year anniversary, her team sent a company-wide memo, which technology reporter Kara Swisher, who runs the Web site All Things D with Walt Mossberg, got hold of.
The memo encouraged employees to thank Mayer “for everything she’s done for Yahoo” by clicking on a link that read “yo/thxmarissa.”
The messages (which ranged from “Thank you for epitomizing the values of a Yahoo superstar” to “Marissa, you rock” to “Best CEO I ever worked for”) were collected in a book that featured photos of Mayer—wearing a red shirt to address a sea of purple-shirted, mostly male engineers; conducting an interview with Barefoot Contessa food guru Ina Garten; and more.
“Yahoo! thanks you, Marissa!” reads the spine of the book. Mayer then had copies of the book sent out.
It would be OK with me if these delusional primates exiled themselves to a few isolated high-tech utopias totally separated from where the rest of us live.
That would make it very easy to take them out in one fell swoop—precision targeting—just in case they become intolerable pains in the ass. Thus we could to some extent take care of the asshole infestation problem we have here on Earth.
Unfortunately, there would still be hordes of bipedal, big-brained wanna-bes my little scheme wouldn't take care of. Even if we wiped the Earth clean of these techno-utopian dickheads, there would still be armies of assholes looking to move up the monkey status ladder. It's damn hard to solve an infestation problem of this type. These aren't cockroaches I'm talking about here. These are extremely "clever" and powerful, highly social human predators operating without a clue.
The genus Homo is about two million years old. It's damn hard to believe that the shit I've described here today is the result of all that evolution, but there you are.
Brilliant deconstruction.
Like all assholes, these particular assholes wouldn't even make the grade at the Soylent Green processing plant. Which makes them surplus to requirements in all possible futures.
Posted by: Oliver | 12/15/2013 at 03:03 PM