The Children of Silicon Valley

Back in the 70's you could be forgiven for ignoring computers, they were specialist tools that only people who were 'bad at sports' seemed to have any use for. But in making that choice, in the 90's your kids were talking to each other using "screens" and you always seemed out of touch with what was going on. You finally got a "computer" in the early part of the 21st century because you got tired of people laughing at you when you asked them to send you a print catalog. Now you want to get something done and that computer that you barely know how to operate doesn't work because of some sort of magical indigestion that randomly tries to sell you ED medicine with random pop up advertising.

Those people are really angry, they are frustrated and angry and pissed off that nobody told them that when the nerds reshaped the tools of the world into something they liked better, there choice to ignore nerds would leave them badly under equipped to live in that world. There was a big push to give people "computer literacy" which is sort of like being able to read, the essential skill that got you buy in the 20th century, but for computers in the 21st century. A lot of people decided it was too much bother and their life has become harder because of that choice.

What is interesting is that Alvin Toffler predicted this would happen in "Future Shock" [1], where he talked about how change that was fast enough could disenfranchise an entire generation or two. I don't think a lot of people appreciated it then.

One of the effects I've observed is people with sentiments exactly like those expressed in the original article. Anger at people who would change things and impose a burden on those who, for what ever reason, could not accommodate that change.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

I gave the author the benefit of the doubt until I got here. Most of the people that I've met that actually keep innovation progressing are quite interesting people with deep lives, including family, hobbies, interesting experiences, non-technical interests, community participation, etc.

I think the stereotype of "boring" comes from the focus on young developers, who aren't necessarily boring, but haven't become interesting yet. It's no surprise that a single 25 year old might not have a deep appreciation for the subtleties of humanity. If there was as much focus on other young adults, you'd probably find the same shallowness with different (and often less productive) outlets.

But, all is not lost! For in this conundrum is the thread of life itself: we must learn to deal with what we cannot change. I'm reminded of a quote about programming from the Tao of Programming:

A novice asked the Master:

    "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate
    Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and
    accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go
    Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the
    branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?"

    "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational
    purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not
    enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why
    are you bothered by its uselessness?"

Startups see no glory in maintenance, of course, but that's almost the definition of a startup: they have to do something new, big, and fast. I wouldn't ascribe that to the entire "silicon age" though.

For instance, look at open source communities. A lot of people are doing a lot of great work, some more revolutionary, but a lot of it quite incremental. Even fairly revolutionary ideas are often more concerned with engineering concerns like safety and robustness -- look at PostgreSQL, and the Rust language.

But before computers, some of us did that by reading books.

It's early days--through the mid-summer of its 14th year, the 20th was fairly peaceful. But at this point I don't see the 21st as doing worse than the 20th.

" I have seen young teenagers who just yesterday were ebullient, verbal, interactive, and full of personality turn into aphasic zombies within three months of getting a smart phone or an iPad."

I known for ten years some persons, now 25 or so, who have had cell phones since they were 15 and iPads since those came out. They have been, at every point at which I came in contact with them, lively and articulate. I met them when I was the dad driving around kids without licenses, so I'm not boasting about my generation.

"Becoming a boring human being is the fate of most people who keep the tech economy’s lights burning deep into the night."

From the point of view of an NYRB writer, perhaps. I doubt that the electrical engineers who made it possible to wire Manhattan shone at literary cocktail parties; yet I guess they had the decency to make more moderate piles of money.

"The new wine is dying on the vine, and Dionysos, the telluric god of ecstasy, is nowhere in sight."

The expression "new wine" I usually see in the New Testament "new wine in old bottles"; how that fits in with Dionysos, I can't guess. Is Robert Pogue Harrison a new pseudonym of Lewis Lapham's?

To the owners go the spoils, to the workers go the toils.

> "Becoming a boring human being is the fate of most people who keep the tech economy’s lights burning deep into the night."

Anyone who thinks that the president of the united states is going to say anything controversial or interesting worth taking time away from going to the bathroom letalone building potentially world changing software is already in no position to imply that anyone else is a bore in any way, shape or form.

Get off that lawn, you old crank.

I've said the words, "I'm worried I'm becoming a boring person." This definitely resonates with me.

> Our silicon age, which sees no glory in maintenance, but only in transformation and disruption...

Six years ago, there was a book thread on HN where the top comment was "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand - the rationale being that the book's recommender was inspired by the novel's protagonist Howard Roark, an architect who battled the will's of a tycoon (symbol for MBA), second-rate architects (symbol for non-startup programmers) and an unwieldy female love interest (symbol for social resistance against anything revolutionary to preserve status quo power & prestige) to carry out his individual vision of architecture from drafting papers to concrete. Speaking for myself, it influenced me greatly then, to be a man who endured pain and sacrifice to manifest his individual creative vision.

Like Howard Roark, there is a dark side however not to yield - almost a fear for the world not to acknowledge properly his genius or perhaps the other way around, for himself to miss out on the world (“I’m making more of a difference than anybody in government could possibly make,”). A thought that consumes him that he's willing to bomb his building because of the "corruption of the world that stained it". His general ass-holeness at every other character whom he sees either as intellectually inferior (MBA), spiritually inferior (mediocre architect who have settled), or sexually submissive (his female love interest). In the end, Roark prevails and I reveled in the world that Ayn Rand has constructed to highlight the stubbornness, the creative genius, and the triumph of the will.

> People who work in Silicon Valley tend to love ["Silicon Valley"] precisely because its over-the-top portrayals of the most infantile and socially dysfunctional aspects of the tech start-up culture are eerily on the mark.

Six years later, as a code monkey, I read a book about Japan, "Dance Dance Dance" by Haruki Murakami - whose early 90's Tokyo of excess parallels the surrealness of Silicon Valley. The male protagonist is a disaffected Japanese advertising executive in his late 20's who have lost faith not so much in his work as much as embraced the absurdity of the capitalist service economy, "My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape.I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death".

The protagonist is lonely and depressed and every day, he goes to a museum to look at the dry whale penis specimen just to relax himself. I'm reminded of the Silicon Graphics dino skeleton at Google. That a mediocre man who is powerless either associates himself with a shrine of manhood or is so awe-struck by another animal's oversized phallus that it takes him momentarily to the realm of absurdity, away from his usual daily pissing contests of "succeeding in life" to just take a moment to appreciate the moment of dry whale penis.

Howard Roark is represented here too as an male peripheral celebrity character who is also depressed because he is too good-looking to be always casted as "a handsome doctor or teacher" romantic lead in Japanese romantic comedies, resigned to play his role (and obligated to file expense reports for "personal entertainments" because of "tax compliance" reasons).

> The new wine is dying on the vine, and Dionysos, the telluric god of ecstasy, is nowhere in sight. It is unlikely that the next big digital innovation will lure him back.

I agree with the author's assertion that tech of today is actually quite plebian, an illusion and temporary sinecure for our modern anxieties. However, I don't think what he implies as the solution to indulge in our "Dionysian" souls, to go back to traditional public discourse of civic's, arts and humanities before permeation of Internet is viable either - as art imitates life, so does tech caters to it to the tyranny of A/B testing. We've created it in our image not some tech-Gods sitting in their LCD-glowing caves.

That the whole tech worship is no different than traditional athlete, celebrity or NYTimes Book Review worship. IMO, we are all so insecure to focus on which our surrogate hero's are better than the other we forget appreciating the ordinary people around us and reveling in our own mediocrity.

There's a difference though: some ways of changing the world are much safer than other ways. Traditionally, it's been politicians who want to change the world, because they were the only ones with enough power to do so -- and people were rightly afraid (and still should be).

But technologists pose a significantly lower risk. Sure, there are exceptions, like the Manhattan Project. But for the most part, technology is opt-in, and people opt-in because it helps them more than it hurts them.