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by
Corey Pein
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June 13 - July 8, 2018
Simone was bone-tired. I didn’t blame her. She was the model of a twenty-first-century microentrepreneur, which is to say she was a grossly exploited worker.
“Fun” was mandatory in the Bay Area tech world, and inebriation strongly encouraged.
Gimmickry was not so much a last resort for desperate startup founders as a necessary means of distinction. The techies all seemed to have come off an assembly line, and anyone who stood out just a little bit became instantly memorable.
I love this book!!!
By emulating the performative, coked-up machismo of their overlords in the finance sector, the bullies were determined to avoid the old stigma of the computer nerd as a simpering eunuch.
I had heard it said that in Silicon Valley, those most slovenly in appearance possessed the largest bank accounts.
exactly. Valuations are the artful concoctions of founders and investors. After running a company’s self-declared financial figures through various arbitrary formulae—factoring in estimated future revenue, anticipated growth rates, and potential overall market size—the interested parties settle upon a plausibly vainglorious figure that represents not how much their company is worth, but how much it hopes to raise.
There were even apps for homeless panhandlers to collect Bitcoin, but more popular was an app developed to help the propertied classes report the unwelcome poor to the city’s nuisance hotline.
they spoke as though the victims of tech-fueled displacement and gentrification had chosen to live in poverty and squalor,
In this milieu, a certain tolerance for phoniness was a prerequisite. It was not enough to have the right skills, put in your time, and get the job done—you had to be fucking pumped about your job, or else it was time to find a new one.
It's like that at all the 20-something army fueled ad agencies too, only here in PDX they're "stoked", 24/7, year round.
Many of the hottest startups were built by patching other people’s code together with the virtual equivalent of duct tape and chicken wire.
“My role is, I’m stupid, I don’t know how anything works, and if I can’t figure out how to use this in four seconds, it’s over,” she said. I could tell she was passionate about being stupid.
I found that most startup founders told the truth about their sorry circumstances only while drunk or from behind the cover of anonymity.
the programmers knew that their own ladder to prosperity was on fire and disintegrating fast.
In the first seven years after the 2008 crash, sixteen million people left the U.S. labor force. And in that same period, thanks to Silicon Valley’s timely opportunism, the country gained an endless bounty of gigs.
the internet, with endless gigs and freelance opportunities, where survival becomes something like a video game—a matter of pressing the right buttons to attain instant gratification and meager rewards.
Fiverr offered a glimpse at the new model worker: a fat, depressed con artist forever scheming against his comrades, egged on by the distant architects of the virtual marketplace—the only real winners.
In a late capitalist society with dwindling opportunities for cash-poor workers and few checks on entrepreneurial conduct, what could be better to sell than false hope?
I knew that greedy people were the easiest to scam.
“My bosses are so bitter,” Joe said. “My vice president said, ‘If you understand the drug industry, you understand the tech industry.’ It’s a hustle. You’ve got to figure out how to convince people they want what you’ve got.” Cyrus corrected Joe’s memory: “He said, ‘Internet marketing is like selling crack to children.’”
tech: selling crack to children
“When Yahoo put together a newsroom, nobody’s covering Yahoo anymore. Because it’s like, ‘Hey, I might get hired by Yahoo at twice the salary. I’m principled, but not self-destructive,’”
The new tech media establishment introduced foreign customs to the culture of newsrooms. Challenging authority was out. Sycophancy was in. It had always worked that way in Silicon Valley.
And absolutely everything is "AWESOME"!
If online ad fraud is as prevalent as I heard at Ad:Tech, it follows that the overall revenues of the dominant ad-based internet companies—chiefly Google and Facebook—are significantly inflated by bogus transactions. And that’s a big deal for the stock markets as a whole.
“There’s nobody more gullible than a marketer chasing a trend,” he said. And no one cared about the truth so long as the charts kept going up.
Silicon Valley was “the most brutal capitalistic machine there is,” he said. “The strong get stronger and the weak get crushed. It’s very Darwinian.”
The vaunted forefathers of the internet were a clever lot of schemers whose transgressions were forgiven, per American custom, once they got rich.
As Google grew, it also shrank—small enough to fit inside a mailbox in Bermuda, where it funneled $14 billion in annual profits via an intricate series of transatlantic shell companies that allowed it to avoid an estimated $2 billion in taxes every year. “It’s called capitalism,” chairman Eric Schmidt said when questioned about it.
The best defense against legal criticism and excessive regulatory scrutiny is an enormous bank account. As Uber showed, politicians can be used to minimize any consequences for past misconduct.
The conventional wisdom held that illegal conspiracies were best conducted in secret. But the tech boom that began in 2005 changed all that.
Entrepreneurs devised new ways to break the law, while investors spotted and bankrolled the most promising schemes. That was the secret of the Silicon Valley shovel merchants.
the last thing that mattered in Silicon Valley was technological innovation. Marketing came first and foremost.
incremental advances in technology were less reliable generators of profit than, say, finding clever ways to rip people off,
Incredibly, technology had advanced such that I didn’t even need to think of a name for my startup with no idea—I could simply order one up with the touch of a button.
The judges tended to echo one another’s advice, which sometimes meant contradicting advice they’d given earlier.
Sounds familiar !
‘This isn’t any sharing economy—this is taking the responsibility of employment away from employers and putting it one hundred percent on people’s backs.’”
Naked racism from the mouths of serious political candidates was still vaguely taboo at that moment. But when it came to tolerating the rhetorical adaptations of resurgent fascism, Silicon Valley was once again on the cutting edge.
While no doubt mentally unbalanced, these young killers were, more importantly, targeted by a sprawling and sophisticated online propaganda campaign.
What the press obligingly trivialized as Gamergate was, in fact, the first neoreactionary terror campaign.
the Singularity, which is simultaneously a prediction, a program, and a set of doctrines.
If there was substance to Singularitarianism, then the ascension of Kurzweil at Google would one day be seen as a decisive moment in history, analagous to the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.
Like a lot of lucky, wealthy people, Diamandis had developed some curious ideas about why some people are rich and others poor, and about the secrets to success in business.
In 2013, Google obtained a patent for “gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations”—a tool for selecting “allowable permutations” in “hypothetical offspring.” The system assessed characteristics including “height, eye color, gender,” disease risk, and “personality.” In plain language, Google had patented a tool to create “designer babies.”
writer, Ken MacLeod, has been credited with having first mocked the Singularity as “the Rapture for nerds”
Technology does not equate to progress.
Does the perpetuation of unjust class structures by technological means count as “progress” in any meaningful sense? Clearly not.
