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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

Self-referential, technology-focused and shaped texts like this make me wonder what the new, dominant school of thought will be for this generation's western literature.

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?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-postmodernism

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> SV, entrepreneurship, and startup culture have had such a profound effect on the west

Only in your tiny bubble. People seriously believe this?

Yeah i'm really not sure if that was a troll or not.

"Heroes of a movement"? Can you actually call financial investment trends a "movement"?

More like "I am not aware that I troll therefore I am not."

That is a brilliant quote.

The modern Tony Stark is literally based on Elon Musk. Interest in Computer Science programs jumped after the Social Network movie came out. I think there's more truth in roymurdocks' comment then you give it credit for.

Stark is just as based upon older tech moguls like Larry Ellison, Richard Branson, or even Steve Jobs. Interest in archery jumped after the Hunger Games comes out. SV culture is significant, yes, but is it disproportionately so compared to other things?

Movie-Stark's mannerism is openly based on Larry Ellison, who helped finance (and even had cameos in) the IronMan films. Other self-styled magnates were also an influence, of course, but Ellison is the big one, afaik.

You realize you are posting this using about 99% tech developed in the valley, right?

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.

I didn't realize Bell Labs (Unix), Microsoft (Widndows), CERN (HTTP), and DARPA (TCP/IP) were based out of Silicon Valley.

He meant the really important ones like twitter and facebook and the other oft over-praised SV "tech".

Don't forget Flooz

Like my Nokia phone running Windows using the World Wide Web over 802.11 to an Alcatel DSL modem connecting to a Motorola DSLAM? - damnit, vkou beat me to the punch

What... Chrome and a Macbook?

Yeah, that's certainly 99% of the tech necessary for me to be posting this.

As the norm, my comments were read too literally. The topic for this thread was the future of fiction, not the exact location where most technology was developed. "SV" in this case is just a plug-in. If it makes you feel any better, substitute Austin, or Redmond, or whatnot. The exact location is not important.

"Westerns" aren't all about things that happen in the western U.S. Star Trek was a western.

That's a fair clarification - although I think there's a world of cultural difference between what people would describe as "SV" and "Non-SV" tech (By the latter, I don't mean running a TwitterForCats startup out of, say, Ohio.)

The bubble exists, but it's ludicrous to believe that SV startups don't have profound effects outside it. What % of people use Google, or Facebook, or Android/iOS every day in the west?

Can either of them be truly considered "startups" anymore? And Facebook wasn't even invented in SV.

Well if you tautologically redefine "startups" to mean "as yet unsuccessful startups," then no I guess there isn't much effect outside the Valley bubble. But those companies all started small in the Valley and grew exponentially along the classic "tech startup" path.

I would think the poster child for startups are unicorns: Uber, AirBnB, Square, Tesla, etc. Google and Facebook are far too down the line to be considered the stereotypical SF or Palo Alto up-and-coming challenger.

Yeah but how many companies actually adopted SV ways and values? Banks are still banks, you still need a suit. Automakers are still automakers, you still need to be there 9-to-5. Investors are still investors, and outside a few precious hubs (SV, NY, Boston) they won't just drop millions on a bunch of nerdy tweenagers with ambitions (unless they're Someone's Child, of course). Politicians talk a lot but the big public-investment moolah still goes almost entirely to large-workforce and well-connected companies.

SV companies influence consumers' lives, sure; but not really how post-fordist capitalism works.

Android and iOS phones? They might as well be any generic cheap Nokia, flavour du jour. Did Finnish culture have profound effects on the 40-60% of mobile phone owners at the time?

> Android and iOS phones? They might as well be any generic cheap Nokia, flavour du jour.

Obviously not, or people wouldn't be spending hundreds of extra dollars to abandon their generic cheap Nokias in favor of Android and iOS.

Few consumers spend their discretionary income on Android and iOS phones for reasons related to intrinsic advantages of the platform themselves. They buy Android and iOS phones because those are the two platforms that propagated for what they actually seek: mobile devices. It could just as well have been Symbian and QNX, if competitive forces played out differently. But the whole point is that these goods are completely substitutable. People only rationalize them post facto.

What are these "competitive forces" that aren't consumers choosing some platforms over others? iOS in particular wasn't jammed down consumers' throats; early adopters frequently had to jump carriers to get one, which forced carriers that didn't have the iPhone to accede to Apple's demands of them.

That Android and iOS won via some kind of accident of history is a fairly extraordinary claim, and requires some kind of actual evidence.

That platforms win by consumer preference is a truism that need not be underlined. Android benefited from homogenization by the OHA consortium, and its licensing permitting extensive reproduction by off-the-shelf producers of varying production quality. iOS benefited from Apple's branding and cult following.

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.

You're just redefining "technical and system properties" to be things you find important, rather than things the majority of consumers find important.

> 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.

Yes, Android and iOS were the winning ecosystems, there is no argument there.

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.

I think it's important to differentiate between the effects the products these companies create have, and the effects the companies themselves have on world/US culture.

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.

> 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.

But Exxon or Halliburton couldn't have developed these products. They wouldn't even try and fail to develop these kinds of products.

I think your missing the point. The idea is that it didn't really matter who made the product; it was the product itself that had the "profound impact on culture".

The product and the company that created it cannot be separated in terms of origination. The product required those specific inputs to exist. As such, it was the company that created the profound impact on the culture. To remove that connection is to pretend the product could have been created by any given corporation and corporate culture.

Maybe the difference is more subtle than I thought. The culture of a company like Google may be very tolerant and open, it may value self-actualization and support of individuality. This culture could be critical to the creation of Google products, like Search and GMail. It could even be said that products like Search and GMail could _only_ have been created by a company with the cultural values that Google possesses. Other organizations with different cultures may not even have been able to understand enough about how these products work to even try to produce them.

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.

But traditional/non-SV companies can and do change the world with products all the time. IBM was a massive company when they created the PC. VW invented the beetle (and reinvented it). Vanguard changed the world of investing.

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"

Completely agree. If these companies were impacting the culture as much as their products, entrepreneurship would be the career path dujour, but entrepreneurship rates are actually in decline.

> As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.

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.

The vast majority of the billions of people using those products have no knowledge of SV, entrepreneurship, or startup culture. It's akin to claiming that filling up the fuel in your vehicle is exposing you to Middle Eastern entrepreneurship and culture.

what percentage can even name the cities where those companies are headquartered?

Oh yes, they believe it.

That's some tight @ProfJeffJarvis shit right there. Excellently placed satire.

So excellent that the rest of the comments have deftly proven Poe's Law once again.

It's true enough that postmodernism is dead in the water, though. One of the mysteries of the contemporary world is that all of its ideas are stagnant -- and yet no one has any idea what's going to replace them.

Which was one of the original motivations for post-modernism. But it existed, so something else will.

> One of the mysteries of the contemporary world is that all of its ideas are stagnant -- and yet no one has any idea what's going to replace them.

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.

Not really. There are plenty of eras where ideas are clearly surging forward -- and sometimes not particularly good ideas (monarchism in the late 17th century, communism in the late 19th, fascism in the early 20th).

I've maintained that our descendants will be like the aliens from the ST:TNG episode "Darmok", except instead of historical metaphors we'll use lolcats, ragefaces, and mythical characters like Scumbag Steve and Overly Attached Girlfriend.

I guess that's a slightly better outcome than Idiocracy.

I've got a lingering fear that we're inching closer and closer to a 'Fifteen Million Merits' future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

IMO the point is that we're already there, and have been for a while. It's only set in the future to trick the viewer into approaching the story as an outsider.

"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.

I refuse to believe in a Star Trek future that does not include Seven of Nine.

Scumbag Steve, his hat aslant

Grumpy Cat, his paw raised

> Or will there be some literary movement borne out of SV culture to supplement these classic texts?

LOL

They will be reading memes and copypastas. Drink verification can will be to our children as 1984 was to us. Honestly, I envy them.

Not sure what you are talking about with regards to no discernible movement replacing postmodernism - both New Sincerity and New Narrative authors and works have gained critical prominence as well as wider readership. Ben Lerner, whose works combine memoir, poetry, and fiction, was just awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Knausgard's memoir cum novel "My Struggle" is one of the biggest literary releases of the year.

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".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism

Likely no. There is a dearth of 'literature' in terms of books and the like right now, it does seem. But everything is 'exploding' in the arts right now. Banksy is not a painter, but his work hangs in museums and is collected. Breaking Bad is not a play to read, but it is a strong work nonetheless. Iron Man is a movie, but Tony Stark is a character we all can reference just like John Galt.

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.

Not going to lie, it took me a minute. Brilliant post haha

The pdf of the book is linked to in the article, and after reading a little of it I'm struck by its similarity to "Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Books...

> Post-modernism [1] has been considered "dead" for about 10-15 years with no discernible movement coalescing to replace it.

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.

Postmodernism was never alive in the sense to which the parent refers. Now that we've neatly rejected the premise of that comment, let's move on: nobody cares or knows about transmodernism, or any other literary movement (be it imaginary, as — in the case of transmodernism — or otherwise)

The days in which a movement could be dominant are long past us. That's sort of the point.

Transmodernism isn't a literary movement, and no one needs to know what it is for it to become the dominant intellectual paradigm.

It's easy to say you've figured out what everyone is doing if you just introduce a term and define it as "what everyone is doing".

Pretty much no one is into Monstransmodism, which is why it will inevitably garner majority mindshare. (And therefore has already triumphed -- and pre-receded. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

Except for that I didn't introduce the term...

> Post-modernism [1] has been considered "dead" for about 10-15 years

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.

Interesting question but the specific work we're talking about it not going to shape literature. It's shorter than a long magazine piece. A new literature movement doesn't appear to be the ambition here.

I don't think so either. But, wasn't A Modest Proposal pretty short too?

In addition to this -- I'm not sure I understand why the primary discourse around this text is whether or not it conforms to a particular literary movement/genre's specifications. Those are all constructs that help us historically situate texts within a broader context; what is the goal of this exercise/conversation?

Would love to read more about SV Culture.

butterfield, levie, dorsey, zuckerberg, pisoni - hopefully.

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