The New Republic has picked up on the youth complex of Silicon Valley. On the one hand, I am quietly delighted that there are guys out there who feel they have to get Botox to succeed in business, and I’m sure more than a few second-wave feminists are chortling into their Tab this morning. But on the other hand…here I am, forty-two years old, and while I don’t have any kids, I also have seventeen years in desktop support and a hairline that’s stopped receding and started retreating.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of the perfect resume these days seems to be “dropped out of a prestigious university.” That’s the Facebook meme now, once removed from the Bill Gates idea, with the caveat that Microsoft was 11 years from Harvard dropout to IPO. If you were in the Valley in 2003, you’re a fossil now. Just our luck as GenXers – stuck on the one side with a bunk of Stanford brats who think thirty-two is ancient and on the other with parents who are still forwarding chain emails about Obama’s sinister Muslim takeover. Great time to be in technology, huh?
A lot of this isn’t new, of course. Silicon Valley’s always relied on the absence of work-life balance to drive things (flashback to thirty years ago and the “80 hours a week and loving it” shirts at Apple that were marked up to read 90 instead). And now you can get free food at work, run around shooting each other with Nerf guns at work, get somebody else to do your laundry, take the bus back and forth…it’s been years since I clubbed the whole “re-juvenile” phenomenon in this space, but damned if they didn’t win. It doesn’t help matters at all that this time out, the nerds have been enhanced and supplanted by the kind of Wall Street-seeking douchebros who will almost certainly be the focus of “The Wolf of Market Street” twenty years from now.
And make no mistake, it’s a bubble. $2 billion for Oculus Rift…from Facebook? Hot on the heels of spending a billion on Instagram? $19 billion on WhatsApp? Snapchat is out there turning down billions from Facebook and Google, and meanwhile, only Apple and Amazon are left in the business of selling goods and/or services for cash on the freakin’ barrelhead rather than relying on advertisers as the monopsony buyer of your personal data. The lunacy around Bitcoin should be enough to clench it – not to deny the potential of digital currency for some uses, but when Bitcoin knockoffs are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for NASCAR sponsorships?
To paraphrase PJ O’Rourke, the Internet now allows more people to make bigger and stupider decisions than anything in human history, with the exception of car keys and Irish whiskey. Now we just have to wait around for the dumb to shake itself out and hope we don’t get wrecked along the way.