I agree about "anthropological psychobabble". These folks missed the point. Silicon Valley is only partly about ideas and making change, and mostly about scoring big with pre-IPO startups. It is inexcusable for any anthropological study of Silicon Valley to ignore the effects of money on people's mentality. All I hear about at work and at parties is the stock market. The article made it sound as if the anthropologists think that the valley is some kind of Eden when in fact more and more people are miserable because of crowds, traffic, cost of living, lack of free time, and the imbalance between numbers of men and women. They don't mention any of this, maybe because they were too in love with their thesis, maybe because their data were too old. They really didn't describe the valley very accurately.
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I agree about "anthropological psychobabble". These folks missed the point. Silicon Valley is only partly about ideas and making change, and mostly about scoring big with pre-IPO startups. It is inexcusable for any anthropological study of Silicon Valley to ignore the effects of money on people's mentality. All I hear about at work and at parties is the stock market. The article made it sound as if the anthropologists think that the valley is some kind of Eden when in fact more and more people are miserable because of crowds, traffic, cost of living, lack of free time, and the imbalance between numbers of men and women. They don't mention any of this, maybe because they were too in love with their thesis, maybe because their data were too old. They really didn't describe the valley very accurately.