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Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)
- timewizard 2y ago> With Steve Jobs in exile and the Web’s billionaire boys’ club still a few years away, the Valley in the book is “a bland anarchy,” a kingdom “with a thousand princes but no kings.” Yet it was the happiest time I remember in the whole saga.
- vlark 2y agoGod, I miss Grantland. It was some of THE best writing on the web at the time. ESPN killed it and Bill Simmons went on to create The Ringer, which he then sold to Spotify. The Ringer pre-Spotify was good, but not as good as Grantland was.
- low_tech_love 2y agoAh, thank you so much for reminding me of Grantland!!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Animats 2y agoComputing was less annoying before it became a branch of the advertising industry.
- m463 2y agoThere were a lot of annoying detours. A lot of the bad parts of computing originated in hollywood. They wanted certainty that you could only play "protected" music or video. This sort of thing made it "necessary" to lock bootloaders and eventually with the iphone... The ship of theseus didn't belong to theseus anymore, it was just a license. now lots of devices are cash registers, surveillance devices, e-meters and pop-up generators.
- germinalphrase 2y agoDon’t forget our final and most essential technology - the slot machine.
- bigpeopleareold 2y ago... or that the marketing and sales department is the real scaffold for enabling computing for those without university access.
- chgs 2y agoI don’t remember any tracking or adverts on computers when windows 95 came out (there were adverts for computers, I used to jay money to receive them in the way if computer shopper. the first real annoyances were Spam and Punch the monkey, both parts of the advertising industry.
- genewitch 2y agoClick the link and put in the fifteenth word in the third paragraph, then click "about" and put in the fourth word in the second sentence. The good old days before cookies and trackers...
- vel0city 2y agoThe average Windows 95 machine was loaded with bundled software all asking to pay for a full license. ISPs were advertised in connection wizards built-in to the OS.
- ssivark 2y agoThis shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising — since this is what happened to every mass communication technology over the past few centuries: print, then radio, then television. The OG computing folks at Xerox PARC indeed foresaw all this, and McLuhan wrote about this in the 50s/60s.
- imiric 2y agoAdvertising is a cancer on society. It corrupts all forms of media, ever since the invention of publishing and broadcasting. The internet is its most lucrative victim yet. It's where they've taken the sociopathic ideas pioneered by Bernays to their maximum expression. It is the most powerful global psychological manipulation machine, influencing everything from what we spend our money on, to how we think and act. It is unequivocally a major cause of the sociopolitical unrest and conflicts we see today. The really insidious part is that most people don't consciously realize they're being manipulated, and are happy to exchange that for some "free" products and services. This has, of course, made many companies very rich, by operating in a dark data broker market exchanging the data we've given them, and more prominently, data they've stolen or inferred from us. To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.
- ghaff 2y agoForcing people to fork out money for any product or service they used also made many companies very rich. See Microsoft, Oracle... A very long list. But you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.
- mandmandam 2y ago> you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin. No they aren't. The situation is just so absurd and extreme, yet normalized, that accurately describing it makes people sound weird. That's why Chomsky speaks in that extreme monotone, to counterbalance the very real horror and extreme nature of the things he is saying.
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoHow does the belief that advertising drives major behaviour change square with 50+ years of psychological research showing that behaviour change is really difficult?
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- TwoNineFive 2y agoHN was also better before the advert and sales people flooded it.
- markus_zhang 2y ago> This, to paraphrase Portlandia, is one of the dreams of the ’90s — that our work selves and our true natures could be one and the same. I have always wanted to achieve this (to no avail so far). To live for something bigger. To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals. It may sound like, but is not, workaholism. Workaholism is escapism. Workaholism, like alcoholism, roots from a certain sad history one wants to avoid. This is not workaholism, but a conscious pursuit of perfection, of "Godhood", as one may say as an atheist.
- j4coh 2y agoEven Epsilons can be useful in this brave new world of finding purpose through your job.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoKifflom!
- MomsAVoxell 2y agoYou will be a functioning part of an egregore whether you like it or not!
- trhway 2y ago>To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals. A wolf walking half the Europe or an Arctic fox crossing the Arctic, and you think you have the drive to push, to evolve and to throw away the old self.
- voidhorse 2y agoUnfortunately, wage labor as our primary labor structure has a tendency to produce Severance far more frequently than it does a meaningful marriage between work and personal purpose. There are a lot of people that argue that if you were to eliminate wage labor, and distribute goods as equally as possible or at least take care of basic needs for free through universal income or some other means that people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true. As your post illustrates, working and producing is just as essential of an aspect of human life as consuming is—people want to produce, they just want it to be meaningful! They want to work on stuff that aligns with their own interests and beliefs. Ironically the people that claim that this isn't the case are probably the few that actually would prefer to never work (they want to keep wage labor in place so that they can extract capital from laborers while they relax and "lead" instead of produce themselves).
- jgord 2y agoI think we're in for a new multi-decade round of 'eating the world' .. and Im going to annoy everyone by suggesting that the microkernel of this new megascale world-changing engine of growth is actually the tiny garage startup using Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning to tackle some previously too-hard problem in engineering/logistics/robotics/medicine/industry. We are in a boom and bust and boom ... the current moment rhymes with 1993 of the internet boom - lots of hype, lots of big money .. but also something new and useful is emerging. Its happening faster this time around ... BUT I do see a capital-to-startup impedance mismatch problem - imo, we need smaller, faster, standardized early pre-seed rounds : to build the future we need angels to take 10 x 30k bets, not 2 x 150k bets. We actually dont need to wait for AGI to achieve an incredible creation of wealth and improve our lives .. we can just _apply_ the tech that already exists in raw form today. The resulting growth will override a plateauing Moores Law, and use all those largely dormant many-cores on todays CPU/GPU/NPU hybrid chips. Its the best of times and the worst of times - geopolitical and economic malaise coinciding with a Cambrian explosion of new technology. I dont think most VCs have the background to recognize this new kind of startup .. but tech-founders who had an exit payout will be well placed to go fly fishing for them - Im hoping these people will step in and Angel invest, to build the future they see on the horizon.
- paulddraper 2y agoAngel investing is a chumps game
- blitzar 2y agoI enjoy seeing geniuses who hit winning lottery tickets first go lose it all reinvesting in the lottery.
- rapind 2y agoBut I was sure I'd get rich off of Trump Coin!
- ghaff 2y agoI know someone who, at least over the last decade of so, says that he would have done far better just putting money in a NASDAQ index than doing angel investing.
- azinman2 2y agoThis was one of my favorite books growing up, something it seemed only I have read. I’ve never seen it talked about since. Might be fun to reread it now and see how it’s aged now that I’m on the other side.
- low_tech_love 2y agoWhat a beautfiul, human-made illustration at the top of this article!
- lm28469 2y agoYou mean the one that's been there since 2015 and which is attributed to an artist ? https://web.archive.org/web/20150623211113/https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150623211113/https://grantland... https://www.mariozucca.com https://www.mariozucca.com
- whilenot-dev 2y agoPoe's law strikes again and I hope GPs comment was meant as cynical remark against GenAI slop. It seems life isn't the only thing imitating art, algorithms imitate art as well now.
- low_tech_love 2y agoI did, I love illustrations and I mourn the day GenAI destroyed it.
- low_tech_love 2y agoYes, I do, you got me wrong, I actually meant it. It’s a beautiful man-made illustration! Thank you for pointing me to the artist.
- kelseydh 2y ago> The important thing is the sense of manic excitement that pervades the Mutiny scenes this season, and the way it bleeds into the show itself. We know exactly where computers are and aren’t going, but it still feels like anything is possible. This accurately describes being in a rising tech trend. The most common experience is knowing where things are going but failing to find a way to catch the wave.
- udev4096 2y agoThey didn't review halt and catch fire after season 2 which is disappointing. It was one of the rare shows which kept on improving after each season
- teeray 2y agoThere were four full seasons of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
- neogodless 2y agoImportant to note this was written in 2015 likely during the airing of Season 2, which is hinted at with "in a recent episode" wording. Boy, those early seasons of "getting so close to success before all the self-sabotage happens" were kind of brutal in a way, but I still highly recommend pushing through to the later seasons.
- ryandrake 2y agoMicroserfs has a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and really did a great job capturing the zeitgeist of working in tech in the 90s. It was more about the early 90s than the late 90s when I started in tech, but not much really changed until the dotCom bubble burst in 2000. A lot of us who didn't happen to work for GiantTech in the 90s shared the existential anxieties described in earlier chapters of the book, but without the upside of lucrative stock options. It's worth a read if you haven't. A lot of it is still relevant today.
- kristianp 2y agoThe Author, Douglas Coupland also coined the term: Generation X in the novel(?) of the same name. Edit: whoops, this is mentioned in the article.
- Eric_WVGG 2y agoIt nails the period. When the article later talks about Coupland’s follow-up J-Pod, I think it’s important to note that the naivety that the book reacts to isn’t just his own, really the entire zeitgeist was like that. Hence the magnitude of 9/11 as a wake-up call. Po Bronson’s “First $30 Million” is also a classic that seems to have been memory-holed.