{"id":2121,"date":"2014-03-26T08:32:22","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T16:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2121"},"modified":"2014-03-26T12:45:01","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T20:45:01","slug":"twos-a-trend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2121","title":{"rendered":"Two’s a trend"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Republic has picked up on the youth complex of Silicon Valley.<\/a> \u00a0On 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\u2019m sure more than a few second-wave feminists are chortling into their Tab this morning. \u00a0But on the other hand\u2026here I am, forty-two years old, and while I don\u2019t have any kids, I also have seventeen years in desktop support and a hairline that\u2019s stopped receding and started retreating.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of the perfect resume these days seems to be \u201cdropped out of a prestigious university.\u201d \u00a0That\u2019s the Facebook meme now, once removed from the Bill Gates idea, with the caveat that Microsoft was 11 years from Harvard dropout to IPO. \u00a0If you were in the Valley in 2003, you\u2019re a fossil now. \u00a0Just 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\u2019s sinister Muslim takeover. \u00a0Great time to be in technology, huh?<\/p>\n

A lot of this isn\u2019t new, of course. \u00a0Silicon Valley\u2019s always relied on the absence of work-life balance to drive things (flashback to thirty years ago and the \u201c80 hours a week and loving it\u201d shirts at Apple that were marked up to read 90 instead). \u00a0And 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\u2026it\u2019s been years since I clubbed the whole \u201cre-juvenile\u201d phenomenon in this space, but damned if they didn\u2019t win. \u00a0It doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cThe Wolf of Market Street\u201d twenty years from now.<\/p>\n

And make no mistake, it\u2019s a bubble. \u00a0$2 billion for Oculus Rift\u2026from Facebook? \u00a0Hot on the heels of spending a billion on Instagram? \u00a0$19 billion on WhatsApp? \u00a0 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\u2019 barrelhead rather than relying on advertisers as the monopsony buyer of your personal data. \u00a0The 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?<\/p>\n

To paraphrase PJ O\u2019Rourke, 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. \u00a0Now we just have to wait around for the dumb to shake itself out and hope we don\u2019t get wrecked along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Republic has picked up on the youth complex of Silicon Valley. \u00a0On 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\u2019m sure more than a few second-wave feminists are chortling into their Tab this morning. \u00a0But … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Two’s a trend”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2122,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions\/2122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}