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How the Social Tech Bubble Is Different
theodp writes "Tech bubbles happen, writes BW's Ashlee Vance, but we usually gain from the innovation left behind. But this one — driven by social networking — could leave us empty-handed. Math whiz Jeff Hammerbacher provides a good case study. One year out of Harvard, 23-year-old Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook, was given the lofty title of research scientist and put to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Over the next two years, Hammerbacher assembled a team that built a new class of analytical technology, one which translated insights into people's relationships, tendencies, and desires into precision advertising and higher sales. But something gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,' he says. 'That sucks.' Silicon Valley historian Christophe Lecuyer agrees: 'It's clear that the new industry that is building around Internet advertising and these other services doesn't create that many jobs. The loss of manufacturing and design know-how is truly worrisome.'"
Fox & Friends: "Mr Cosm, how would you describe the modern American economy?"
Cosm: "Well, we have primarily shifted to a PTE based model."
Fox's Token Blond: "What's that? Is that like China?"
Cosm: "Polished Turd Economics, you should be quite familiar with it by now."
Snide Male Co-Host: "You mean like the democrats?"
Cosm: "...well..kind of...that would make the Republicans unpolished..."
Blond: "[winces] Hey now....We'll be back folks after this commercial break."
commercial fade-in: "The new iPad 4G from....fades off..."
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood," says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. "An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn't fundamentally increase American competitiveness
Movies. Microcode. Pizza Delivery.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Do your tires have contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs?
I was going to post about how greed and the collapse of the middle class in the US has caused all of this, how intervention and care could have stopped it, how greed, particularly on the part of the political right in concert with greedy corporate interests have shaped this outcome. But I won't. What their greed has created will come to destroy them. Its been posted on /. for a long time now. There is no converting these people. They need to fall hard, and no amount of reasoning will fix them. They are like Adolph Hitler at the end of World War 2; in the bunker, scared, dangerous, not giving a damn about all the damage they caused, and utterly deaf to the collapse all around them. In the end, they bite on the capsule, proclaim their loyalty to Machiavelli and Ayn Rand, and swallow hard.
It's tragic how our era's finest mathematical and technical minds are working on social networking. It's not right that they're wasting themselves trying to figure out how to monetize people sending pet photos to each other!
Why just a few short years ago people in that field were really doing great things for the world--like repurposing the Black-Scholes theorem to create increasingly complicated derivative financial instruments. Those instruments powered a revolution that brought prosperity to everyone.
If we can't get our best and brightest to go back to investment banks and get to work on developing new financial instruments, I don't know what will happen to our fine nation.
The best minds of his generation are not, in fact, thinking about how to make people click ads.
Of course not. They're thinking about how to make robots click ads and take the people completely out of the loop.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC