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?"

Comments

someone's gotta start the show

[themushroom]

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.

Re:someone's gotta start the show

[stevew]

Being a 30+year observer/survivor of Silicon Valley (and having gone through 3 start-ups) I have to ask - how is this any worse than now that it was during the Dot Com silliness?

For every roughly 10 companies started in the valley - 9 fail. Nothing new about that! It was that way before I got here!

New ideas are vital to the success of the place. Often they are bone-headed ideas? (How do you make money by giving things away for free - the common denominator in the Dot-Com era - as an example!) Others are obvious business models - Gee I think I'll build an on-line auction site (Ebay!) All have been tried - some failed and some soared.

Point is - this is just the normal rough-and-tumbel of Silicon Valley. The author needs to get over himself!

Re:someone's gotta start the show

[jeffmeden]

Being a 30+year observer/survivor of Silicon Valley (and having gone through 3 start-ups) I have to ask - how is this any worse than now that it was during the Dot Com silliness?

For every roughly 10 companies started in the valley - 9 fail. Nothing new about that!

Of small business entrepreneurial ventures, 9 out of 10 will fail, so that's not a revelation or admission of any sort. I think the real crux here is that the rate in the valley is more like 99 out of 100 will fail, and even though that sounds bad it's still not the actual problem; the problem is that the 1 that "makes it" is a bullshit platform like Instagram and the 99 that fail include actual valuable technologies like medical industry interop tools and the like.

Answer to your question

[Dishwasha]

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

Re:Dictator

[EricTheGreen]

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.

Was this article drafted

[Anonymous Coward]

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.