Hacker News Reader

Comment by richardjordan | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley has been filled in recent years by people who've seen movies like "The Social Network" and read TechCrunch with its myth of the heroic entrepreneur, and have come here thinking this is how it is.

They are emulating a simulation of a startup that really isn't anything like the real startup. It as if Baudrillard's Simulacrum of a startup has taken over Silicon Valley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

These folks feel they have to live some mythical startup lifestyle and - a particularly hated phrase in my book - fake it till they make it.

View on HN

> Silicon Valley has been filled in recent years by people who've seen movies like "The Social Network" and read TechCrunch with its myth of the heroic entrepreneur, and have come here thinking this is how it is.

Really? I seem to have met someone like this last year when I first arrived in the Bay Area, but he seemed to be focused on the racier party scenes in "The Social Network." There was one incident where he decided it would be dandy repeatedly to leap up and down from his bunk to the floor, in the process spilling a glass of beer on a woman's Macbook and upending it face-down opened on the floor. He didn't apologize to her or even acknowledge that he did it.

This guy has the gall to mumble editorial comments under his breath while I'm trying to talk business to someone.

He's also the quintessential example I give of shallowness I've encountered in the Bay Area:

    "This needs better design."
    "Really? Do you know what those buttons do?"
    "...no."

When pressed for what better design constitutes, he recommends a different font and "some gradients."

In fairness, not knowing what buttons do at a glance can indeed be an indication of bad design.

Sure, but unless the buttons function as buttons was obscured, not pressing them to find out what they do during a critique is shallow.

I don't remember much (or any) of The Social Network being set at SXSW or anything like SXSW. :)

This story is actually as old as the gold in them thar' hills. Sub 'California (or 'The West' or 'America') for 'Silicon Valley'. Sub other industry and era-appropriate myths for 'The Social Network'.

And we kind of need all the fantastical bullshit self-reinvention... because a tiny little bit of it is really new and great. The only way to find and fertilize that tiny genuine seed is to welcome all the other crap in large volumes.

If you want Makers, you also have to humor lots of Fakers.

faking it is fine if you actually make it. if you don't, then you're just a baller on a budget

tell them welcome back!

ITT: People in SF get a taste of LA and NYC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com