4 ms·

Love this: Their goal is to make themselves as appealing—or threatening—to a big player as possible so they can get bought out for a few hundred million dollar

by fatbird 14y ago

Love this: Their goal is to make themselves as appealing—or threatening—to a big player as possible so they can get bought out for a few hundred million dollars and then devote the rest of their lives to a) building Burning Man installations, b) investing in other people’s widgets, or c) both. They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it.

akkartik 14y ago
Also: "Why donate money when people can just download my app and instantly have a better life?" She's talking almost directly to Steve Jobs. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-jobss-public-giving http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-... The quote is a caricature of a more nuanced position, but articles like this are equally nuts: http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/09/steve-jobs-worlds-greatest-phi.html http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/09/steve-jobs-worlds-grea...
- cbracy 14y ago
  I'm a "she" by the way :)
  - akkartik 14y ago
    Oops, fixed! :)
- orionblastar 14y ago
  She's talking about others as well. Instead of helping people get better education to find better jobs, or even creating jobs, they'd much rather take the unemployed and say "why don't they just buy my app, smart phone, tablet, PC, etc and have a better life?" Well because most of the unemployed and poor cannot afford them and go without them. Then you have a lot of unemployed and poor who do buy that app, smart phone, tablet, PC, etc and suffer because they cannot afford food and shelter, but they got nifty things to improve their life. Just walk around homeless with a backpack and sleep near a dumpster, but use that shiny tech at the nearest library or Starbucks.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it. It's a disturbing attitude, but it's one that our culture and our public sphere have more-or-less explicitly encouraged. Nobody is supposed to live in the world as a whole anymore. You're supposed to build a perfect little bubble of your own possessions designed by your own mind to suit your own ego, and live in that. Anyone who cannot or does not do so is deemed a failure. The problem being, someone has to scrub the toilets, someone has to farm the food, there's only so much beachfront real-estate in the world, and many of us like having a world.
sskates 14y ago
Alright, I'll bite. I intensely care about maximizing my positive impact. After looking at a lot of things in college, including academic research, finance, consulting, nonprofits, and engineering at a big company, I concluded starting a company was the best way to have an outsized impact on other people's lives. That is why I'm running a company now. I am trying to build a Microsoft. It's very easy to be dismissive of widgets. For example, the entire internet is a mechanism to instantly teleport bits of information from one place to another. That's all the widget does. It doesn't help you do anything physical. It just lets you send bits from one place to another, nothing else. It sounds so trivial. Who would have thought that a widget for sending bits from one place to another could have such a big impact? Now I'm wondering- can you give a specific example of the company/person being described? These criticisms of Silicon Valley are always so abstract, it would be nice to have a few examples.
- fatbird 14y ago
  Instagram. An app for doing what we were all doing already anyway, but now with a lot of faux-effect filters. Sold for a billion dollars. All that time, energy, and money that did not one thing to help anyone else or measurably improve the world.
  - sskates 14y ago
    Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired- not that much effort to impact 30 million people. You might dismiss Instagram's innovations, but dismissing the importance of an interface is like dismissing a new programming language because there are already programming languages that are Turing complete.
    - cbracy 14y ago
      Just because 30 million people are using it doesn't mean it "impacted" them.
    - fatbird 14y ago
      Not seeing the impact there. Not seeing anything that couldn't be trivially handled by something already existing. I'm not saying Instagram is worthless. I'm saying Instagram is a new flavour of toothpaste. There's something kind of distasteful about a new flavour of toothpaste marshalling the attention and money that it did, but it's not that I blame Instagram for that. But I do compare it to, say, the Gates Foundation, and it's hard not to think "boy, that whole enterprise could have had vastly greater beneficial impact to a lot more people than it did." Where does the billion dollars that Instagram commanded go? Into a constantly recycling pool of geeks and cash in the Valley who keep funding more companies inventing new flavours of toothpaste, hoping to be either the next Instagram or the next Facebook buying Instagram. Ms. Bracy's whole exhortation is just this: Maybe direct some of that energy, some of that attention, some of that money and time, outside of the incestuous enterprise that is Silicon Valley.

by fatbird 14y ago

akkartik 14y ago

Also: "Why donate money when people can just download my app and instantly have a better life?" She's talking almost directly to Steve Jobs. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-jobss-public-giving http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-... The quote is a caricature of a more nuanced position, but articles like this are equally nuts: http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/09/steve-jobs-worlds-greatest-phi.html http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/09/steve-jobs-worlds-grea...

cbracy 14y ago
I'm a "she" by the way :)
- akkartik 14y ago
  Oops, fixed! :)
orionblastar 14y ago
She's talking about others as well. Instead of helping people get better education to find better jobs, or even creating jobs, they'd much rather take the unemployed and say "why don't they just buy my app, smart phone, tablet, PC, etc and have a better life?" Well because most of the unemployed and poor cannot afford them and go without them. Then you have a lot of unemployed and poor who do buy that app, smart phone, tablet, PC, etc and suffer because they cannot afford food and shelter, but they got nifty things to improve their life. Just walk around homeless with a backpack and sleep near a dumpster, but use that shiny tech at the nearest library or Starbucks.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

They really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it. It's a disturbing attitude, but it's one that our culture and our public sphere have more-or-less explicitly encouraged. Nobody is supposed to live in the world as a whole anymore. You're supposed to build a perfect little bubble of your own possessions designed by your own mind to suit your own ego, and live in that. Anyone who cannot or does not do so is deemed a failure. The problem being, someone has to scrub the toilets, someone has to farm the food, there's only so much beachfront real-estate in the world, and many of us like having a world.

sskates 14y ago

Alright, I'll bite. I intensely care about maximizing my positive impact. After looking at a lot of things in college, including academic research, finance, consulting, nonprofits, and engineering at a big company, I concluded starting a company was the best way to have an outsized impact on other people's lives. That is why I'm running a company now. I am trying to build a Microsoft. It's very easy to be dismissive of widgets. For example, the entire internet is a mechanism to instantly teleport bits of information from one place to another. That's all the widget does. It doesn't help you do anything physical. It just lets you send bits from one place to another, nothing else. It sounds so trivial. Who would have thought that a widget for sending bits from one place to another could have such a big impact? Now I'm wondering- can you give a specific example of the company/person being described? These criticisms of Silicon Valley are always so abstract, it would be nice to have a few examples.

fatbird 14y ago
Instagram. An app for doing what we were all doing already anyway, but now with a lot of faux-effect filters. Sold for a billion dollars. All that time, energy, and money that did not one thing to help anyone else or measurably improve the world.
- sskates 14y ago
  Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired- not that much effort to impact 30 million people. You might dismiss Instagram's innovations, but dismissing the importance of an interface is like dismissing a new programming language because there are already programming languages that are Turing complete.
  - cbracy 14y ago
    Just because 30 million people are using it doesn't mean it "impacted" them.
  - fatbird 14y ago
    Not seeing the impact there. Not seeing anything that couldn't be trivially handled by something already existing. I'm not saying Instagram is worthless. I'm saying Instagram is a new flavour of toothpaste. There's something kind of distasteful about a new flavour of toothpaste marshalling the attention and money that it did, but it's not that I blame Instagram for that. But I do compare it to, say, the Gates Foundation, and it's hard not to think "boy, that whole enterprise could have had vastly greater beneficial impact to a lot more people than it did." Where does the billion dollars that Instagram commanded go? Into a constantly recycling pool of geeks and cash in the Valley who keep funding more companies inventing new flavours of toothpaste, hoping to be either the next Instagram or the next Facebook buying Instagram. Ms. Bracy's whole exhortation is just this: Maybe direct some of that energy, some of that attention, some of that money and time, outside of the incestuous enterprise that is Silicon Valley.