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Silicon Valley's Loony Cheerleading Culture Is Out of Control
Nerval's Lobster writes "Kernel editor-in-chief and noted firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos swings away at Silicon Valley's current startup culture, noting that it's resulted in herds of wannabe founders and startup groupies who don't exactly have a track record of starting successful companies or even producing solid code. 'Though they produce little of value, they are the naive soft power behind aggressive capitalist machines in Silicon Valley: the trend-setting vanguard of the global Web and mobile industries,' he writes. 'We should be very wary indeed of these vacuous cheerleaders whose vague waffle about the transformational potential of photo-sharing apps is more sinister and Orwellian than anything dreamt up by a dictator.' How long can such a culture continue before it dries up, and the whole tech-investment cycle begins anew?"
While the content being generated by these startups may be vacuous, there is at least the spark of new ideas (in some cases) or tangental thought that leads to other ideas. Someone else does the real legwork if it's a good spark, if these small startups can only talk the talk. Contrast the want-to-do's with the Microsoft archtype of staying safe and not innovating or thinking fresh.
There is some value to the cheerleading, even if it's just to provide grain for others to mill.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
How long can such a culture continue before it dries up, and the whole tech-investment cycle begins anew?
As long as people with money keep getting sucked in by it
than the attitudes prevalent prior to the dot com bubble (and subsequent bust) in the late 1990s? All of that money being poured into companies with little to no revenue and no solid plans to generate revenue. It blew my mind at the time.
"War makes me sad." - Me
"the transformational potential of photo-sharing apps is more sinister and Orwellian than anything dreamt up by a dictator."
Flickr is worse than Hitler? What?
No, Milo's prose is worse than a triple shot cappuccino addled New York Times intern.
Sounds like somebody got a hold of something too strong at Burning Man. Slow down guy, it's not worth getting that worked up about stuff like this.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I would agree Milo is laying it on waaaaay too heavy here....but, honestly, have you met the people he's describing? "Evangelists", "Community Developers", "Mentors", "Facilitators" and their ilk? They have no technical skills to value.
Someone found a thesaurus!
"The artifice of start-up culture is a portent of what is to come."
"At once the zenith of the cult of excessively educated bourgeois bohemians and nadir of a glossy new venture-capital-funded geek culture..."
This reads as a writers masturbatory exercise.