The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders
washingtonpost.com
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Post-modernism [1] has been considered "dead" for about 10-15 years with no discernible movement coalescing to replace it. SV, entrepreneurship, and startup culture have had such a profound effect on the west that it would be hard for authors today to ignore the tropes and heroes of this movement, which is what these anonymous authors have addressed head on.
Will kids in high school 30 years from now still be reading Salinger, Vonnegut, McCarthy, Orwell, Heller, Faulkner, Steinbeck and other classics? Or will there be some literary movement borne out of SV culture to supplement these classic texts?
Only in your tiny bubble. People seriously believe this?
Clearly the products have had a profound impact on culture, but I think the impact would have been the same if they had been developed by Exxon or Halliburton.
As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.
But Exxon or Halliburton couldn't have developed these products. They wouldn't even try and fail to develop these kinds of products.
None of these were SV startups with all the stereotypes that accrue to them. It's true that it's harder for big companies to innovate, but you can't say, "Only SV startups build products that change the world, ergo SV startups change world culture"
I believe the question is: "Do the cultural values of a company like Google impact the values (or culture) of their customers through their use of Google's products?"
I would argue that no, they do not. People want to find out where they can buy the cheapest dog food or recipes for something they need to cook. For sure, Google's may present articles that they might not otherwise see, but that's as far as I believe this goes; this other content need not be consistent with Google's values (very often it isn't). Ditto with GMail, I wouldn't think the culture of Google, as expressed through GMail, will make much of an impact on their customers at large.
Parents staring at their phones instead of paying attention to kids.
Social networks and their impacts on relationships. Movies these days are unrealistic these days because so much important dialogue happens via WhatsApp, text messages and Facebook Messenger, etc.
Guess who will not be driving their own vehicles in 10 or 20 years? Consumers.
Obviously not, or people wouldn't be spending hundreds of extra dollars to abandon their generic cheap Nokias in favor of Android and iOS.
That Android and iOS won via some kind of accident of history is a fairly extraordinary claim, and requires some kind of actual evidence.
What's relevant is that most consumers do not evaluate software platforms from technical and system properties. They seek mobile devices for their end use, and will inevitably steer towards what already has large units stocked, what is advertised and what is recommended via word-of-mouth which will usually create reinforcing loops from consumer impressions caused by the former two. That is to say, the mobile OSes are substitutable goods. Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance. If it weren't Google, it could have been Altavista or something else. If it weren't Facebook, it could have been MySpace, Friendster or something else. Especially social networks are by definition something that critically depend on Metcalfe's law. Mobile platforms as well, to an extent (largely because apps that people want will converge to them). People do not care that they use Facebook or iOS, they want access to networks of contacts and to communicate with them through a consistent mechanism.
As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
> Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
But iOS and Android won by providing superior messaging/browsing/productivity/entertainment, that's the entire point. Nobody is arguing that the kernel in iOS or Android is superior to QNX or Symbian (I have no idea myself, having never looked at the system level of any of those platforms), but rather that iOS and Android provided superior experiences, and that's why they won.
And in a lot of ways, it's the SV culture and its focus on consumer preferences (often mocked as childish and unserious -- "yet another cat photo sharing app") that made it possible for those two platforms to destroy the competition. It turns out consumers really do care if Instagram or Angry Birds is possible or available.
> For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance.
I have no idea where you get so much confidence that alternative OS platforms would have evolved "just the same" -- mobile platforms were a stagnant morass before iOS and (very shortly after) Android came around.
> As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
"Actual technological properties" here meaning apparently whatever you think is important, and not what actual consumers think is important. User experience is technology. Apple and Google are better at it than Nokia or RIM.
I was making the point that their influence on culture and society is limited, and using Nokia as an analogy. Nokia was Finnish, yet this didn't have any perceptible impact on its hundreds millions of users. None of them started going to sauna, spontaneously developed cross-country skiing skills or realized that having a summer cottage on a lake is holy grail of life.
And yes, smartphones do have ways in which they can influence behaviour to a larger extent than feature phones, but those too shaped the nature of mobile phone interactions for whole generations.
And most (global) end users are non the wiser that there is a place called Silicon Valley where these devices are designed, just like many people thought Nokia might be Japanese - but didn't know for certain.
SV companies influence consumers' lives, sure; but not really how post-fordist capitalism works.
"Heroes of a movement"? Can you actually call financial investment trends a "movement"?
I like the idea. Not sure if it will fly or not -- after all, once you've read one nerd-takes-the-world story, you've read them all. But we could do with a new genre.
Yeah, that's certainly 99% of the tech necessary for me to be posting this.
"Westerns" aren't all about things that happen in the western U.S. Star Trek was a western.
Pretty sure that's one of the mysteries of all cultures and periods of time ever, always, if you are of a certain disposition to think that way.
"Oh wow, that sucks, I hope we never toil at pointless tasks to earn points to buy worthless junk that doesn't make us happy"
looks around house full of consumerist garbage, contemplates largely nihilistic career
"Hm. Well... damn."
[EDIT] (SPOILERS!) I also take the vast wilderness outside the protagonist's window at the end to be real, not some kind of illusion or projection. I do so because the episode is more effective that way, so I'd guess that's what's intended—the viewer thinks this must be some kind of overcrowded dystopic future world-city or something the whole time, or that the Earth's surface is uninhabitable, or that this isn't even Earth, and that everyone's forced to live this way, but the reveal of the wilderness raises the possibility that in fact people could leave, but simply do not, and in retrospect one realizes that no pervasive, ultra-strict police force or anything similar is depicted. The closest they come are the drugged drinks, which are only given in some circumstances to some people (compare: anxiety meds, sleeping pills, et c.). We never see anyone try to resist the collection of "detritus", for example. The protagonist damages what may well be public property in his private room, and no-one seems to care. People are demoted to janitor status, but, crucially, we don't see them dragged away screaming or anything like that.
In fact the people of that world choose same option we see the protagonist choose on the gameshow, really, just less dramatically, every single day. Safety, comfort, and familiarity over freedom.
LOL
From this, we can see that whereas postmodernism was concerned with the massive scope of societal and technological apparatuses which formulated our doxa (see: JR, Gravity's Rainbow, White Noise etc), these movements have instead shifted their lens to the internal scope of the individual in face of a mind-boggling hyperconnected and networked world. How we come to construct a 'self' in this environment and how that self is perpetuated have become increasingly popular themes. Poetry, interestingly enough, is actually at the forefront of incorporating technological themes into its practice. Scores of poets use autogenerated content or appropriate text from online sources or otherwise involve technology in their works.
Furthermore, it is not as though SV is some uncharted territory ignored by the literati. Plenty of contemporary fiction authors have addressed SV and its "tropes and heroes" - Dave Eggers wrote "The Circle" and Pynchon himself dressed down the dotcom boom in "Bleeding Edge", and those are just two of the highest-profile examples.
But I think the dearth of your SV literary movement is connected with the notion of your last paragraph. A literary movement borne out of SV culture to supplement these "classics" would probably be much like the SV blogosphere and tweet culture is today: a hollow echo-chamber filled with self-aggrandizing boasts, brags, and takedowns occurring within a delusional bubble where the ultimate focus is profit. There's a reason the work in the article is pseudonymous. Great literature and the profit-motive of SV are antithetical. Most of the "heroes" in Silicon Valley don't have the self-awareness to see how inane the business model of their unicorn is, let alone the perspective needed to write a truly great and meaningful work of literature.
Let's be real: in thirty years we will be confronting the ugly face of the adverse effects emanating from this 'movement' - massive income inequality, gross materialism and greed, the privileging of technological progress over human integrity, and endless surveillance (whether conducted by gov't entities or private companies - pretty sure now that the metrics / data genie is out of the bottle it won't be going back in). So I doubt a literary movement will come from SV internally. Instead, I believe that the great works read by future audiences will be written by outsiders to address the fallout from SV's "tropes and heroes".
I think the post-post-modern era will not be so easy to define. There will be common works, but nothing as ubiquitous as 1984 or Romeo and Juliet. Things are changing too fast these days, and it is unlikely to stop, we are splintering and that is not a bad thing maybe.
I think transmodernism is pretty clearly on track to win right now. Just look at the rapid increase in states legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational purposes.
The days in which a movement could be dominant are long past us. That's sort of the point.
It's really interesting -- I heard this 15 years ago. I think post-modernism has been "dead for about 10-15 years" for at least the past 15 years.
I guess I love the book for the same reason that I hate HN, despite that I check it daily. Silicon Valley has had tremendous success financially, if not technically, and that has spawned with it a strange micro-culture that is easy to skewer when you take just a few steps away from it.
charm seems to be in the physicality of it
This is great.
Peter Thiel
I bet in Peter to be one of the authors of the book.
Hey, did you see there's a new release of Dwarf Fortress out? You should look at some of the engineering behind the B-29 cannon system. Isn't it interesting how the human body responds to long-term microgravity? How would you like to buy a South Dakota hamlet? Do you think malware could effectively exploit any flaws in multiprocessor computing?
I sometimes wish these news publications would just use Medium or similar blogging platforms.
But that doesn't account for the white space on the top. I don't get that in my Firefox but I checked with Chromium and I see it. It's the advertising/social buttons banner. Once again adblockers win the day.
[1] http://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/text...
Hence the inspiration.
“People who are normal, i.e., sane, sensible, don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.”
As much as this essay shows how alien their world is to my own, it also shows what successful marketing/operations people think about while pushing for success.
... and bored anyone not in the SV echo chamber.
And there are 140 original copies, but the article notes Farrar, Strauss and Giroux reached a deal with the authors to publish it.