On a 1910 trip to Paris, Theodore Roosevelt delivered his famous speech about “The Man In The Arena,” which has since been widely adopted by a very specific kind of Silicon Valley cretin. It’s quite a long speech, but here’s the part that they love to share:
all the residents of solano county i know are AGGRIEVED about this ridiculous scheme; no one wants to live in marc andreesen et al.'s fucking galt's gulch, jesus christ.
god knows why they can't just pay taxes in whatever bay area/silicon valley zip code they (sometimes) call home and work to make improvements to the existing infrastructure. or, instead of of acting like they're entitled to eminent domain and suing the holdout farming families to force them to sell their land for this powerpoint deck dream city project in a place none of them have likely even purposefully stopped in, they could throw some billions at solano county to, say, expand intra- and intercity public transit — considering its journey from "bedroom community for people priced out of sacramento" to "bedroom community for people priced out of sacramento and people priced out of BART's eastern/northern limits," those cities really need more and better public transit — cover every building in the county with solar panels, maybe put up a wind farm or three.
and if i'm making a wish list, rooting out all the Three Percenters in the sheriff's office and/or local governments would also be a great use of these philanthropic freaks' money. not that any of them would consider helping anyone else without literally profiting from it.
If these people actually read anything, they'd read Roosevelt's speech, like this bit:
"Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use—and such is often the case—why, then he does become an asset of real worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit."
Great post, Chamath seems to stands alone as v wealthy ex SV tech executive who goes out of his way to pump and dump on retail. You almost never see that from tech and not even wall street ex big bankers do it so brazenly. It's quite weird behavior. There are probably people suicidal from losses on the investments he shilled, and he doesn't even seem to care in the slightest with some of the replies to his for sure biggest fans.
"When you valorize the process of founding and funding a company without valorizing the actual output"
This is something that's bugged me for a while. Unfortunately, for work, I have to go on LinkedIn every so often. And there is this ever-growing group of people who aspire to be 'founders'. They want to learn how to create pitch decks and discuss tactics for investment. But they never actually speak about products, or what problems they want to solve. The actual product, the whole reason for founding a company, barely registers with them. It's just an aspiration to be a particular kind of person. Usually an arsehole.
This is so fantastic I want to share it on my LinkedIn to everyone who's ever connected with me throughout my career working at VC-funded technology companies.
I agree that AI is massively hyped. However, the large language models are not without useful applications. I have been getting a lot of value out of my GitHub copilot subscription. Copilot often catches patterns in the code I am writing, filling in code without me having to explicitly write it. As with all of these tools, it can come up with dramatically wrong answers so you have to check what it does carefully. On occasion I have to turn it off since it keeps trying to fill in completely wrong code. But overall it has been valuable and I plan to continue my $10/month subscription.
I've been living in the Bay Area and working in tech for three decades now. I'm an old-school programmer who started writing code in 1985 when my family purchased a 512K Apple Macintosh computer. I moved to San Francisco in the mid-late 1990's when the internet bubble was forming, and though there were a lot of bullshitters in the industry during that time, the dominant phenotype of the techie was still that of the computer geek. We all had our day jobs writing code for corporations, and in the evenings we'd hack on Linux, setting up our own servers and networks and building all kinds of stuff with layer-7 protocols like HTTP. I built a streaming MP3 server in 1998 that I could access from my work computer so I could listen to music at work. That was just the kind of stuff that techies did back then.
At some point over the years - probably right after the financial crisis of 2008, which coincided with the explosion of mobile - things started to change. While the early days of the internet weren't for the faint hearted - there was plenty of trolling on usenet forums - in the years leading up to the 2010's, a sort of institutional scamminess started to take hold. A big chunk of this was in the ad-tech sector, where there were legions of companies that existed solely to generate clickbait that would then drive traffic to other sites. The explosion in ad inventory due to mobile definitely paid a key role in this. At around the same time, more and more people started appearing on the scene that had never really built anything with the underlying tech and never would. In fact, there was even this belief taking hold beneath the surface that the most brilliant visionaries were almost never the ones that wrote the actual code - they were so brilliant, they couldn't be bothered with the details. To those of us who were writing actual code, this was just astonishing. The papers that were coming out of Google alone were foundational to every major advancement in big data and distributed computing at the time. Without that, the internet as we know it today wouldn't exist.
Further poisoning the Silicon Valley culture were the "one hit wonders" that got in early, mostly through luck, on early stage investments in companies like Uber or Slack. We all know about the "Paypal Mafia" from the late 1990's boom, and there's a similar phenomenon at play with the 2010 boom that just ended. That's why we have to listen to hucksters like David Sacks, Chamath, and Calcanis opine about the tech industry.
Frankly the whole situation gives me an icky feeling, which is why, 40+ years into programming computers, the best days for me are those where I'm building cool stuff with my co-founders and ignoring 99% of what the industry "insiders" and venture capitalists are saying.
Media’s culpability in all this is so huge; thank you for really bringing it into focus. Even if one doesn’t have the power to change things, one could make an effort not to hype up lies and cons and make it all *worse.*
Andreessen blocked me on Twitter, I noticed once. I had never interacted with him, so I suspect he's so touchy about the scammer behind WeWork being criticised he just blocks anyone who says anything bad about that POS. Another mediocre man who continues to scam without punishment.
What a disgusting timeline we live in. So much wealth and yet so much inequality.
"The man who points out how the strong man stumbles" teaches the next strong person how to keep their footing. The critic "spends himself in a worthy cause" by expending his resources for the sake of the common weal. The critic is the eyes that see the Emperor's nudity, and is the voice that articulates the people's concerns. The critic is the shepherd who directs the flock to the choicest succulents. A society sans critics shall fail.
You Are Not The Man In The Arena
all the residents of solano county i know are AGGRIEVED about this ridiculous scheme; no one wants to live in marc andreesen et al.'s fucking galt's gulch, jesus christ.
god knows why they can't just pay taxes in whatever bay area/silicon valley zip code they (sometimes) call home and work to make improvements to the existing infrastructure. or, instead of of acting like they're entitled to eminent domain and suing the holdout farming families to force them to sell their land for this powerpoint deck dream city project in a place none of them have likely even purposefully stopped in, they could throw some billions at solano county to, say, expand intra- and intercity public transit — considering its journey from "bedroom community for people priced out of sacramento" to "bedroom community for people priced out of sacramento and people priced out of BART's eastern/northern limits," those cities really need more and better public transit — cover every building in the county with solar panels, maybe put up a wind farm or three.
and if i'm making a wish list, rooting out all the Three Percenters in the sheriff's office and/or local governments would also be a great use of these philanthropic freaks' money. not that any of them would consider helping anyone else without literally profiting from it.
If these people actually read anything, they'd read Roosevelt's speech, like this bit:
"Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use—and such is often the case—why, then he does become an asset of real worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit."
“conveyor belt of mediocre men who have convinced themselves they’re gods.” Perfect. No notes.
Great post, Chamath seems to stands alone as v wealthy ex SV tech executive who goes out of his way to pump and dump on retail. You almost never see that from tech and not even wall street ex big bankers do it so brazenly. It's quite weird behavior. There are probably people suicidal from losses on the investments he shilled, and he doesn't even seem to care in the slightest with some of the replies to his for sure biggest fans.
"When you valorize the process of founding and funding a company without valorizing the actual output"
This is something that's bugged me for a while. Unfortunately, for work, I have to go on LinkedIn every so often. And there is this ever-growing group of people who aspire to be 'founders'. They want to learn how to create pitch decks and discuss tactics for investment. But they never actually speak about products, or what problems they want to solve. The actual product, the whole reason for founding a company, barely registers with them. It's just an aspiration to be a particular kind of person. Usually an arsehole.
This is so fantastic I want to share it on my LinkedIn to everyone who's ever connected with me throughout my career working at VC-funded technology companies.
So so good.
I agree that AI is massively hyped. However, the large language models are not without useful applications. I have been getting a lot of value out of my GitHub copilot subscription. Copilot often catches patterns in the code I am writing, filling in code without me having to explicitly write it. As with all of these tools, it can come up with dramatically wrong answers so you have to check what it does carefully. On occasion I have to turn it off since it keeps trying to fill in completely wrong code. But overall it has been valuable and I plan to continue my $10/month subscription.
I've been living in the Bay Area and working in tech for three decades now. I'm an old-school programmer who started writing code in 1985 when my family purchased a 512K Apple Macintosh computer. I moved to San Francisco in the mid-late 1990's when the internet bubble was forming, and though there were a lot of bullshitters in the industry during that time, the dominant phenotype of the techie was still that of the computer geek. We all had our day jobs writing code for corporations, and in the evenings we'd hack on Linux, setting up our own servers and networks and building all kinds of stuff with layer-7 protocols like HTTP. I built a streaming MP3 server in 1998 that I could access from my work computer so I could listen to music at work. That was just the kind of stuff that techies did back then.
At some point over the years - probably right after the financial crisis of 2008, which coincided with the explosion of mobile - things started to change. While the early days of the internet weren't for the faint hearted - there was plenty of trolling on usenet forums - in the years leading up to the 2010's, a sort of institutional scamminess started to take hold. A big chunk of this was in the ad-tech sector, where there were legions of companies that existed solely to generate clickbait that would then drive traffic to other sites. The explosion in ad inventory due to mobile definitely paid a key role in this. At around the same time, more and more people started appearing on the scene that had never really built anything with the underlying tech and never would. In fact, there was even this belief taking hold beneath the surface that the most brilliant visionaries were almost never the ones that wrote the actual code - they were so brilliant, they couldn't be bothered with the details. To those of us who were writing actual code, this was just astonishing. The papers that were coming out of Google alone were foundational to every major advancement in big data and distributed computing at the time. Without that, the internet as we know it today wouldn't exist.
Further poisoning the Silicon Valley culture were the "one hit wonders" that got in early, mostly through luck, on early stage investments in companies like Uber or Slack. We all know about the "Paypal Mafia" from the late 1990's boom, and there's a similar phenomenon at play with the 2010 boom that just ended. That's why we have to listen to hucksters like David Sacks, Chamath, and Calcanis opine about the tech industry.
Frankly the whole situation gives me an icky feeling, which is why, 40+ years into programming computers, the best days for me are those where I'm building cool stuff with my co-founders and ignoring 99% of what the industry "insiders" and venture capitalists are saying.
Media’s culpability in all this is so huge; thank you for really bringing it into focus. Even if one doesn’t have the power to change things, one could make an effort not to hype up lies and cons and make it all *worse.*
Andreessen blocked me on Twitter, I noticed once. I had never interacted with him, so I suspect he's so touchy about the scammer behind WeWork being criticised he just blocks anyone who says anything bad about that POS. Another mediocre man who continues to scam without punishment.
What a disgusting timeline we live in. So much wealth and yet so much inequality.
Hot damn Ed, hook it straight into my veins...
"The man who points out how the strong man stumbles" teaches the next strong person how to keep their footing. The critic "spends himself in a worthy cause" by expending his resources for the sake of the common weal. The critic is the eyes that see the Emperor's nudity, and is the voice that articulates the people's concerns. The critic is the shepherd who directs the flock to the choicest succulents. A society sans critics shall fail.
That guy's never been responsible for a liquidity event in his life