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Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche
- hh3k0 8y agoAuthors nowadays have the tendency to (ab)use their own articles as vehicle to talk about themselves -- and it's ever too often either completely unrelated to the content or some superficial, forced connection. It's quite annoying.
- moreoutput 8y agoIts all Gonzo now.
- CPLX 8y agoThis phenomenon is called "journalism"
- isoskeles 8y agoIt's called narcissism.
- lawlessone 8y agoIt's to make them relatable
- cintrass 8y agoIn the case of Penny it's to hide the fact that if anyone is a poser, a grifter and a hypocrite, it's her. I didn't read this in detail, but I did notice at the end she explains how she went to a different party, away from those troglodyte bros and their crude money cult... and got hammered and wrote socialist poetry on a wall, falling asleep in a puppy pile of futurists, as she wistfully remembers growing up in a threat-free environment. She couldn't be more champagne socialist if she tried, and she's a perfect example of the privilege most of those people on the cruise were attempting to buy themselves into. Just of a different flavor. Of course with Penny, no matter what happens, you can be sure it's bad for women and it's men's fault, and something needs to be done about it. Just not by her. She's just there to get paid to go on a cruise after all. So relatable, much socialist.
- pavlov 8y agoI know. Like when Mark Twain visited Germany in 1878 and then used his report ("A Tramp Abroad") to talk about his own feelings rather than objectively describing the fascinating arts and crafts of Prussia.
- hh3k0 8y agoAh, yes – holding journalism to the same standard as works of semi-fiction is indeed called for these days. An excellent comparison on your part. Other people, however, may hold journalism to higher standards than those of infotainment that falls terribly short of the "info" part of the portmanteau.
- roguecoder 8y agoOr how David Halberstam selfishly described his reaction to seeing a Buddhist monk burn in Vietnam: "I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him." What an amateur. No wonder he only won one Pulitzer.
- CPLX 8y ago“John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.” That’s a well crafted line right there.
- thisismyusernam 8y agoYes, I laughed out loud with this line!
- shshhdhs 8y ago> I knew about bitcoin only as an investment vehicle favored by several essentially sweet nerds close to my heart—and I knew, too, that cryptocurrencies are the pet untraceable funding model of the far-right. The author really hasn't been paying attention if she failed to realize it is the pet funding model of drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, and money launderers, and only instead opted to use it to mock the political spectrum she doesn't agree with. This article is poor journalism at best. I can't believe someone paid the author to go on this cruise and to write such shoddy work. I'm not a fan of the cryptocurrency space, but I had to stop reading this -- it was a Im-better-than-you hit piece to justify the paid trip.
- eamann 8y agoYou weren't really paying attention if you failed to realize the author was a woman. Poor readership at best.
- dmreedy 8y agoYeah, she's literally, in that opening you quoted from, admitting to not having paid attention. Does the later choice of focus on the connection between bitcoin and, to quote, 'libertarian-shading-to-far-right` thinking render the observations she makes, on a cruise catering apparently to many people of that mindset, invalid?
- zackbloom 8y agoWhat a great writer!
- amvalo 8y agoI tried to enjoy this, but as writing it kind of flaunts "show don't tell." The author could have written half of this without ever setting foot on the boat. Like, it feels like she came in with her burns prepared beforehand, and only paid cursory attention to the people.
- warp_factor 8y agoTypical example of poor journalism. Written to be sensationalist and carry a narrative that was already all decided before setting a foot on that boat.
- olivermarks 8y agoHopeless juvenile article which is all about the writer and her naive opinions. Wondering why this made it onto HN? Is there some nugget here I missed?
- sleepybrett 8y agoHopelessly juvenile article covering a hopelessly juvenile "conference" for a hopelessly juvenile technology. So, it all lines up for me.
- LandR 8y agoNo. Just typical Laurie penny nonsense. I don't know why anyone pays attention to her.
- steve_gh 8y agoBecause she is funny. And possibly the bastard offspring of Hunter S Thompson and PJ O'Rourke.
- sneak 8y agoIt talks a lot about shame and misogyny and abuse of power, but doesn’t actually report on any instances of it other than “they hired pretty girls to party on the boat”, which I can assume were consensual transactions those women engaged in voluntarily. Where is the big dirt she keeps alluding to? Are we just supposed to hate them by default for being rich and white and male and schlubby and tasteless?
- wz1000 8y agoWe aren't supposed to hate them, we are supposed to laugh at them.
- strikelaserclaw 8y agoI generally enjoy articles like this but this one was a hard read. Something about the way the author jumps back and forth from people, events, ideas, internal monologues, to random facts about chairs.
- orasis 8y agoThis provides a condensation of what I’ve experienced visiting Silicon Valley as an outsider.
- TomVDB 8y agoAs a Silicon Valley resident, it doesn't come close to what I've ever experienced in my day to day life: one of your typical suburban grunt worker at a big corporation how goes to work in the morning and goes home in the evening for family dinner and invites friends over on the weekend for BBQ.
- 55555 8y agoI guess I'm in the minority but I thought it was excellently written and very funny.
- wklauss 8y agoI don't think you are. It is exceptionally well written and full of wit. Not all articles have to be like this, but in this case, this works and works wonderfully.
- atomical 8y ago> I am not 10 feet tall and 22, but I am a tiny hyperactive white woman with weird hair and poor boundaries, so I revert to an old standby and start serving full manic pixie dream girl. It’s not exactly an act. I’m a terrible actor. It’s just about dialing up the parts of my personality that men tend to find most delightful, giggling a bit more, scratching my arse a bit less, and hoping nobody Googles me. It helps that I don’t have to fake ignorance of the crypto-scene drama. I only have to pretend to care. Integrity and professionalism bordering on zero.
- ebullientocelot 8y agoThere's something positive to be said for intellectual honesty--if not on the cruise ship, in the writeup.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wklauss 8y ago> Integrity and professionalism bordering on zero. Absolutely not. You are considering she's there as a journalist to produce and informative piece of news. She's there as a writer to produce a feature about how does it feel to be in one of these cruises. By your standards, all gonzo journalism or, for that matter, any piece of new journalism is unprofessional. That is just plain absurd. The reader knows she is writing from a personal point of view and should be capable to understand what that means in the context of the experience.
- mindfulplay 8y agoVery well written and funny article documenting the shitcoin bros! I thoroughly got exactly what I wanted: the exact same shilling I expected from these fake-intellectual, tax-evading bros.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- atomical 8y ago> In 2017, Salman says, it was relatively easy to raise funds for a nine-figure ICO. There weren't many ICO's that raised nine figures. In fact most of them had a cap far below nine figures.
- api 8y ago"I, too, was a lonely intelligent child who knew the special horror, as most lonely intelligent children do, of thinking both very little and too much of themselves at the same time." Article is worth it for that line. What an outstanding description of my childhood and likely the childhood of half this site's visitors. Almost everything wrong with tech (at least socially) can be laid at the feet of what it's like to grow up as an overly smart over-educated nerd. If I were contracted by an evil genius to design a brainwashing program to turn kids into sociopaths, I'd just design something exactly like my experience in public school. There's a special kind of head fuckery that you get from being constantly told by adults you're superior while at the same time getting beaten, ignored, and humiliated by most of your peers. I spent most of my late teens and early 20s on a semi-deliberate quest to deprogram myself. I like to think I was somewhat successful.
- thetricia 8y agoThis, unfortunately, is how most business'y events are, unless very corporate or govt-related. Just slightly less blatant. I really envy people who have this ability to filter it all out and still feel at ease.
- tlb 8y agoThis reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", where he goes on a Caribbean cruise full of retired people. (Highly recommended. The story, not the cruise.) Don't read this looking for insights about Bitcoin, any more than you'd read DFW's article for insights about being retired. This is a fish-out-of-water story, and those kind of stories are best when they're about the fish itself, not about the water of lack of it.
- thisismyusernam 8y agoI really enjoyed this article. It really captures the weirdness of this kind of event, and rings true to the bandwagon-crypto people I've met, with a bit of good-natured caricature added. She also writes very well about the role of women during the event.
- roguecoder 8y ago"For instance, in October, artist Kelly Donnelly released the feminist anthem “I Am She” using Ethereum" - has anyone heard of this? It's the first mention I can find.