Slashdot Mirror
I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley
RomulusNR writes: "Salon has a story and review on "I Want To Blow Up Silicon Valley", a new indie film by a pre-tech-explosion SV resident. The place was a quiet backwoods small town when he was a kid; he comes back to find his home worth $2 million, his childhood hangouts filled with uber-wired techies, and all the unique local towns becoming one big bland electronic megalopolis."
he comes back to find his home worth $2 million
..and the problem is??
-Antipop
Hey, isn't every sci-fi flick about the degraded tech involved future: bladerunner et al. Now if it was an indie sci-fi flick called "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Valley", then I'd be jumping for tickets! ;)
kick some CAD
What with the internet and all, startups and making fortunes all across the country (and world) with tech sector growth strong in just about every major urban center you can think of, and many small ones. Is silicon valley gonna turn into a "quiet" tech town much like the old mining towns of the west are today?
"... Rob has returned to his old stomping grounds to sell his childhood home -- asking price: $2.5 million -- and to search for his long-lost high school girlfriend..."
is this what CmdrTaco does in his spare time?
Welcome to the FBI profile database, sonny.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...and let the chips fall where they may!
Pax Digitalia
There once was a day when people came to our houses and delivered our letters by hand, how neat that was. Who gives a shit. Everybody is always whining about something. I live in Seattle and I think the new economy rocks. I think being a web developer is fun. I make lots of money and that is fun. Let's enjoy it while it lasts.
Some day we will all be sitting around whining about how nice it was when the Internet was new, because you could do anything. Now there are so many regulations and rules. Capitalism ruined the Internet. We'll all be saying that in about 2 years. Or we will all be living in coutries that aren't so wacked like the U.S.
LoRider
Remember: we MADE this place a success.
Honestly, the jealousy is getting hard to bear. Just the other day I was in a boutique market, offering to buy the tres-quaint lampshade behind the counter of the seafood counter. A surly pissant engaged in cutting up fish looked at me and said "I bet you're one of those dot-commers!"
Of course I had to find the manager after that - paid $2000 to have the prick fired, too. That will teach him to open his mouth.
I loved the fact that he financed this film from the sale of some valley property. It cost him about $100k.
Is that ironic or what?
--
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Silicon Valley is just an extreme version of what's happening all over the country. While gentrification has some good points, it also tends to drive out low and moderate-income families, which does (IMO) negatively impact the area. Problem is most elected officials are obsessed with bringing money into their areas and don't really care about their current constituents. There are some exceptions though; NYC intentionally breaks up wealthy areas with low and moderate-income housing, which I personally support.
Now for a side-rant:
I understand the director's contempt for the cappucino-swilling, Armani-wearing "New Economy" type. Personally, I'm waiting for the shakedown to hit. I could understand if most of these noveau riche were engineers or scientists or financial types (whatever else you may say about the latter, it does require some amount of skill), but a lot of them tend to be the marketing and PR hacks who have no real knowledge or skills, but still manage to eke out six figure incomes by slinging buzzwords around like confetti.
People who move to SV do so because that's where the jobs in their field are. Not jobs to get rich, just "the jobs". Most of us would much rather be elsewhere, in well planned communities, with decent public transportation, out of the way of earthquakes, and not driving along a ridiculously inconvenient peninsula.
So, here is my message to long time SV residents: I'm sorry that your neighborhood got destroyed. But that was your choice, or at least your political inaction. Be happy that you can sell your home, move to a nice little community along the coast that's like the Bay Area used to be, and never have to work another day in your life. The rest of us have to pay high mortgages and make the best we can with the mess you left us. Believe me, we'd rather be somewhere else, too.
I don't mind the long-time, pre-Internet "Revolution" people complaining about the changing landscape of the Bay Area ... but I can't tolerate the so-called "noveau riche" who benefitted immensely from the Revolution (when IPOs still POPPED) and are now opponents of development projects that are necessary to sustain the economic growth in the Valley.
Case in point: Stanford University owns quite a bit of the land at the heart of Silicon Valley and was proposing to use some of it to develop new graduate student (and young faculty) housing. Presently, the university does not have enough on-campus housing spots (graduate students routinely get 'booted' off-campus) and off-campus housing is prohibitively expensive. Ironically, the biggest opposition for this new development came from people owning houses in the nearby area ... a huge chunk of whom are either Stanford faculty or recently enriched Internet tycoons. Their biggest complaint? Development may harm the aesthetic and/or comercial value of their homes.
Give me a break, haven't they figured out that it was Stanford (and grudgingly give a nod to Berkeley) graduate students who helped fuel their recent gains? If they want to maintain the local boom, they had better make sure Stanford/Berkeley can keep attracting the best and brightest. Don't want to give MIT/Route 128 a chance to catch up and regain their early lead ...
If you don't believe me about this disturbing trend, go to any of the trendy Silicon Valley hang-outs and eavesdrop on the conversation of many of these VC/IPO types. At one point in the evening, you'll most likely hear something like "God, the Valley is getting so tacky. We really need to constrain development ..."
(This is sort of like the phenomenon observed by many sociologist of how many of the strongest proponent of strict immigration laws are the newer citizens)
is the story of a native american living in the 19th century - who becomes really pissed off when he finds out that his beloved californian home has been mined the fuck out of by cash hungry settlers.
The people that live anywhere now got no right to bitch...at least Steve Jobs didn't force the natives to convert to "Macism" - Just a little perspective.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Now when's it going to be screened in, say, Silicon Valley?
There are lots of major corporate research labs in or around SV, a bunch of excellent universities, most of the venture capital, and a culture where technical people move around freely and talk to each other. And all within a convenient drive (if you manage to avoid traffic). No other place even comes close, although a few other places (Boston, NYC, maybe Seattle) may get honorable mentions.
There's a phrase to describe things like this: Cultural Necrophila. Cultural Necrophila is committed by espousing how much better life was before X, where X is some arbitrary event (ie. "before the Internet was big", "before Clinton was president", "before the Vikings found North America"). It is slightly less productive than actual Necrophilia, and almost as tasteless. But, it must be part of human nature, because I'd bet that if decipher most Neanderthal cave paintings, they probably say "Things were better before the Cro-Magnons showed up. Now the land is expensive, they're making trails all over the place, and they're killing all the mammoths."
Moderators: this will be a very personal account. It may be offensive, provoke flames, and such, but, by goodness, it is fucking sincere. There is no (-1, Rant) option in the mod system, so please leave it as it is.
The Silicon Valley is a disgusting place. Believe me, I live in the very heart of it, as a grad student. I could care less about money; I just came here because I want to study what I like (Linguistics) with a bunch of amazingly talented people. I don't want to get rich quick, stock options, or a million dollar house, or to write software for search engines. I just want a postdoc somewhere after I'm done with my Ph.D., and a job as a prof. My perspective on SV is that of a grad student from another country, living in the Valley on $15k a year.
Here there's no sense of community, no care for the well-being of the local society, nothing. Just a bunch of money grubbing yuppies that like to boast about their success, and a bunch of poor mexicans, asians and blacks that keep it all together. I know this. I've worked a bit with the recent campaign to support the janitors' wage negotiations. I've met these people first hand. I've spoken with Mexican janitors, and they've told me in their own words, in Spanish, the language in which they dream and feel, how they live, how they are treated.
This society makes the janitors, who are truly *essential* to any society, invisible members. This is one of the most shocking things about SV for me. I mean, where I studied before (UPR), you knew the janitors, they worked the same hours you did, you'd talk to them, they'd have lunch with the secretaries and professors, and so on. Here in Stanford, the profs and secretaries don't speak the same language as the janitors; and more importantly, they don't work the same hours. The janitors work late shifts, starting around 8-9 PM, ending 2-3 AM. The people who work regular hours only see buildings that, seemingly by magic, clean themselves every night. They are totally disconnected from what keeps their workspaces functional.
Here's another story. Last time I went to SF (my easiest way of temporary escape), on the way back, I had the absolute misery of having to sit behind an asshole who bragged to a buddy about his work the whole fucking hour. He looked about my age (I'm 23), and did nothing but talk and talk (quite loudly) about how much of a fucking genius he was at doing Flash animations, how he wanted his boss' job, about how much better he was than the girl that was interning at his job, how much he was making, and how much of a success he was.
That very last bit was not my interpretation; I vividly remember the fucker uttering the words to his buddy: "You know what? I really feel like I'm a success." Here was a guy that, as far as his account showed, had done nothing in his life but stupid Flash animations. If he'd done something else in his life, he sure didn't mention it.
This idiot symbolizes for me what's wrong with the Valley: people making fortunes for what, when you come down to it, are just menial, unimportant jobs, people totally disconnected from the realities of social and communal life, and think themselves above everybody else. People who get easy money, and then just expect that just money will get them everything they want, with no idea about context (the building does not clean itself; the janitors clean it). They live their lives in front of a computer screen and lose contact with the very real world to which that computer is plugged.
I'll stop here because this is becoming less and less coherent.
Used to be you never heard of cities/towns like Lewisville, Flower Mound, Highland Village, Denton, Plano or Frisco on the evening news (hell, even Lake Dallas [no relation] and Hickory Creek, two of the smallest ones around), now it's all about "new development [here]", "new shopping center [there]," etc. The first four cities on that list are in severe danger of being built out in the next 3 years. True, Silicon Valley already is, but this is news in North Texas, since there's just always happened to be land.
In Lewisville, some of the fields I would ride bikes through when younger are now huge parking lots with shopping centers (shockingly enough, all looking the same) on them. There are 2-3 gas stations on every major street corner, and even on some minor ones.
Expansion has occured so rapidly that street infrastructure cannot keep up, and local mass-transit is far worse than a joke. To give an idea: The main road linking Flower Mound to Lewisville and Interstate 35E is a two-lane blacktop road. Forget using it during rush hour at all ... hell, we used to not even have a rush hour.
*sigh* Wish my grandmother hadn't sold her house in East Texas (Berryville/Frankston/Lake Palestine area) ... I'd buy it and move out there.
--------------------
I haven't been back there in years. A coworker brought back a map from his business trip to Sunnyvale. I couldn't believe it. All of the wide open spaces were gone. It was sad to see how everything had changed. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't afford to live in my old neighborhood.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'm going to address your rant about Janitors first.
Yes, I've seen the recent spat between the Janitor's Union and the various local janitorial companies. It wasn't pretty. Guess what, though: several big high-tech companies came out on the side of the janitors. 3Com sticks in my mind as one. These companies were in favor of the janitors, even though this would probably hurt their bottom line. Gasp!
I hate to say this, but nowhere but academia do custodial staff work day shift. You need to get out a bit more. Janitors in all companies work the late shift.
Actually, since I tended to work 80-hour weeks the past years, I've gotten to know the people who clean my buildings. I'm not fluent in Spanish, and they aren't great in English (but not half-bad, either). They're nice, efficient, and decent people. I see nothing wrong with the arrangement where I expect them to do their job, and I do mine. My building should be "magically cleaned" in the morning, because that's what we're paying them for. I don't have lunch with them (but then again, I don't with the Marketing people, either), and I wouldn't expect them to invite me to one, either.
We live in a Meritocracy, folks. Or at least something that aspires to be. I shouldn't (and don't) look down at the janitors, as they do an essential job, and are good at it. But that doesn't mean I have to either (A) aspire to become a janitor or (B) feel guilty about what I do for a living. I'm sorry, but you don't get to make me feel guilty about being a white-collar worker, instead of a blue-collar one. I don't get to devalue his worth as a human being, but I do get to value my profession more.
One other thing I find highly offensive:
Just a bunch of money grubbing yuppies that like to boast about their success, and a bunch of poor mexicans, asians and blacks that keep it all together.
I guess I get to be a yuppie here. Yup, I'm money grubbing. So are my janitors - they're up here for the better pay and chance to get a better life than they might in other places (alot of the people that clean my building are illegals). Please don't pretend that they're here for the "atmosphere".
As for the racial remark, talk about being a bigot. Asians make up at least 30% of the yuppies, with foreigners another 20% or so. And which segment makes up the vast majority of public servants? (Postal workers, teachers, firemen, policemen)? Oops, that would be, ah, whites? Actually, I can't tell what half the population is out here, so trying to categories by look is foolhardy. Yes, many of the lower rungs of jobs are dominated by certain minorities. We don't live in a utopia. However, there are alot of people out here (of all races) that have gotten ahead through a combination of drive, hard work, and luck.
I guess I shouldn't be so hard on you. It was, after all, a rant, and rants tend not to be either coherent or well-reasoned.
Sorry for spending everyone's time.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
---
Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
The review/editorial on "I Want To Blow Up Silicon Valley" is ridiculously short-sighted. Tech has ruled and people have been making ludicrous amounts of money in Silicon Valley since the mid-eighties and before. It's nothing new. Long before there were any "dot-coms", Silicon Valley was flush with money. The dot-com backlash as of late is largely a creation of the media including Salon.com. Yes, there are problems with the extreme influx of money that the net economy has brought to Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas. I would say that the gentrification of certain San Francisco neighborhoods is far more substantial than homes in Silicon Valley going from "very expensive" to "extremely expensive". It's time to stop the blind demonization of all that is "dot-com", start looking at the real problems, and start looking for real solutions.
Things change. People don't.
People complain. Things still change.
Too bad what's happened to the Valley. It's just as bad up here in SF. If you hate it so much, go somewhere else. The past is past, it won't come back.
I'm doing what I can to find fun in the new SF. It's harder than it used to be. Is that the City's fault, or am I different now that I'm older? (*shrug) What's the difference?
--
....in this crazy upside down society of ours, that it seems that ones income is inversally proportional to ones real worth in society. Ie, the people who provide all the needs (food, clothing, housing), such as Mexican fruit pickers, bankrupt farmers (who get less for their produce than what it cost them to produce it) & 'out workers' in the rag trade (families of immigrants who spend 14 hours a day sewing shirts together, & only get 20c a shirt), have the lowest incomes in society. While the people on the highest incomes mostly do nothing of any intrinsic value (would there being any negative effects if all millionaires went on strike?) - does anyone remember in 'Hitchhikers guide to the Universe', where all the useless people like accountants, lawyers, advertising executives, management consultents (we had one at our work that was earning $1400 a hour, & was employed here for about 7 months - he made all sorts of suggestions & changed everything arround & then scarped before everthing fucked up, & went off to ruin someone elses business), marketing staff, sales excutives, stockbrokers, etc, colonised a planet (the spaceships with all the useful people crashed) & this planet ended up being called Earth later on, by their descendents.
1) Inheritance Tax 2) Property Tax
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Hasn't Silicon Valley been heavily dominated by the tech industry since the late 70s to early 80s? I mean, aren't there a bunch of EPA Superfund sites in the area caused by pollution from hardware manufacture, and weren't most of them created during the 80s? I mean, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition has been around since 1982, and was formed in reaction to groundwater pollution by Fairchild Semiconductor. Doesn't that mean the "high-tech" industry has been there for a looong time?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
does anyone remember in 'Hitchhikers guide to the Universe', where all the useless people [] colonised a planet (the spaceships with all the useful people crashed) & this planet ended up being called Earth later on, by their descendents.
Well, no.
But I remember how, in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the GALAXY" how the "A" ship had all the "useful" people and they deliberately crashed the "B" ship with all the "useless" people like the telephone sanitisers.
The B passengers ended up colonizing earth while the A passengers' new utopia was wiped out by a plague picked up from an unsanitised telephone.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This can be seen as a natural disaster- human overpopulation or even corporate overpopulation causing an unhealthy situation and eventual die-off of even the things that clustered in Silicon Valley and caused the problem (long after all indigenous 'organisms' be they people, parks, or art galleries are destroyed).
The question that comes to my mind is, if not San Francisco, where? If there was a powerful and world-famous cultural center populated by artists, writers etc. in San Fran, and if those people are absolutely unable to live in California anymore post-dotcom, where do they go? They must surely scatter and go _somewhere_. Where will be the next great collection, not of power (which shows up on the news quite easily) but of art and culture?
Meanwhile, I have to admit it amuses me that I live in a smallish Vermont town (Brattleboro) in which mailmen (+ mailwomen) still go around on foot delivering letters and smiling at people (at least some of the time :) ), in which there are art galleries and a few bookshops (we lost one recently, which was distressing, but I can count five others off the top of my head which might explain some of why the sixth couldn't make rent) etc etc etc. Sure, everything's dead by 10 in the evening, if not sooner, but so what? The point is, in this dumb little Vermont town, it turns out that I get more of the special charm and cachet of I Left My Heart In San Francisco... than San Francisco itself.
Definitely food for thought :) maybe the next San Francisco will be a virtual cultural center, existing only on the Internet, with its members scattered across all the cozy small towns of the world?
I think the original point was the absurd misplacement of money and it's effects. Is flash coding that much more difficult than scrubbing toilets? Some people make the mistake of thinking that they earned their wild scucess. Few people do, the rest of us are just in the right place at the right time. Sure, what you did to prepare for a living might not have been easy but is it really worth what you get out of it? Is your house really worth two million dollars? None of this is any reason to treat people badly.
Janitors in Louisianna work durring the day at least at every place I've worked. Here, you come to appreciate people who do any kind of work for a living. Humility is a great skill. Those that don't work are engaged in the much easier life of pillage and drugs.
My cousin worked his way through UC Davis as a Janitor. His hard work and good pre med grades earned him a spot at LSU Medical School. He has finished that and is on his way to intern in San Fransisco. I never asked him about his hours, but I don't think it was 8PM to 2AM and I hope he was treated with respect.
They author is not suggesting you be ashamed of your accomplishments. He is praying that people will keep things in perspective and act decent.
Heck, though this isn't the same issue, look at this year's presidential election. I wanted it to come down to ANYONE other than Bush and Gore. Now I'm stuck with no choice but to vote for one or to not vote.
The HELL you are.
Even if you've never participated in your local party machine, contributed to or volunteered for a candidate more to your likeing, or voted in the primary, there are more than two presidential candidates on the ballot.
Try voting your concience for a change.
A minor party candidate CAN win a big office. (Look at Jessie Ventura, the governor of Minnesota!) All it takes is voters who don't fall for the self-fulfilling prophecy that only a Republican or a Democrat can win.
The mathematical psychologists have a term for people who ignore the candidate closest to their opinion and vote for only for their best choice among those they perceive as "electable". They call such people "dishonest voters". And such behavior plays HELL with the mathematical models.
As long as you vote for the lesser of two evils, you support evil. By voting for a minor party candidate - even when he DOESN'T get elected, you say to the politicians "Here is a vote that you didn't get, that you COULD have gotten, if your position had been more like THAT guy's."
The only vote that DOESN'T count is the one that isn't cast.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The incentive to enable telecommuting as a real business practice would be so great -- and in the very place empowered to realize that potential -- that people would be moving back to Des Moines and Bombay before you could say "virtual corporation".
Seastead this.
Well the question is, if they were so smart, why did they all get killed...
For those of you who flunked Oregon geography, Washington Co. is to the West of Portland. 25 years ago it was part-rural, part-suburban. Then Intel came in, built a half-dozen campuses, invited their suppliers to also build there, & now it looks like SV North.
Lots of suburban sprawl, Hwy 26 is a parking lot of the day, & unless you have a blue badge & are vested in lots of stock, you have to put up with dweebs who happened to be lucky & have too much attitude. And every few years Intel (or Nike) complains that they need more tax subsidies, or else they're gonna take their new construction elsewhere.
Meanwhile, they bulldoze more & more of the native oak & pine -- & I mean real pine, not Douglas Fir -- so that they can build another office sprawl, plant it plane trees, & water the hell out of the grass so that you won't want to sit on it. It looks more like California every day.
Okay, this is probably nothing more than an articulate rant, but I feel better for having said it. And I look forward to seeing the movie.
Geoff
Sorry for the rant. But people like that make me sick that I like computers.
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
While you're correct, of course, this battle has been lost; the word has been assimilated into American English, and it's been mutated/mutilated along the way. This isn't the first word for which this is the case, and I assure you it won't be the last.
I can still remember that day very clearly. It was April 1999, and I was giving a talk at the Chicago Comdex show on the Linux community. While I was there, I stopped by the trade show floor, and wandered by the VA Linux booth. There, I was stopped by Larry Augustine, CEO of VA Linux.
"Ted! You want to move to Sunnyvale, right?"
" No..... but we can talk."
So I spent some time chatting with Chris DiBona, and the rest was history.
So I still live in the Boston area, with a 416k DSL line, and I telecommute. About every 6-8 weeks or so, I pay a trip to Sunnyvale to catch up with what's going on in the home office, and to sync up with the rest of the team there. I am very glad not to be living in Silly Valley. As I tell all my friends, the Bay Area is a wonderful place to visit, but I'd hate to have to live there.
Boston is really nice in that there are plenty of geeks if that's who you like to socialize with, but it's also possible to find folks who aren't geeks as well to socialize with, and that's a definite feature. And while the inner suburbs of Boston are pretty built-up, it's not far at all to get to some really nice parts of Massachusetts. I live 10 minutes from downtown Boston, but I'm also a 5 minute drive or a 20 minute walk from a very large nature reservation with lots of hiking trails in the forest. (And get this! I was able to buy my own house at this location while still living on an academic's salary at MIT --- a salary which would have caused me to be homeless in the Bay Area.)
Every time I visit Sunnyvale, it's clear that companies are desperate for engineers. I was amused by the fact that just about every single slide at the Sunnyvale AMC movie theater were recruiting ads. In the long run, companies are going to have to accept more telecommuters, or open offices outside of Silly Valley. It's only a matter of time.