| It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet. It still thinks it's those counter-culture rebels hacking away in a garage, building products for the masses. Just look at them! They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take. They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)? They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring. They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones. They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference? It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast! |
1000x yes. This is exactly what happened.
An entire generation of impressionable youngsters, essentially brainwashed into believing to the depths of their soul that Silicon Valley is a utopian meritocracy, composed solely of founders out there saving the world by exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in the individual/social/collective/national psyche.
Like a burning-man-gone wrong style acid trip, where everything starts out peachy and Friendly and then somehow, imperceptibly, so slowly that you never even saw it coming until it was far too late, the place for your friends turns into the circus, like LinkedIn but even more shameless self promotion and rampant fakery, and one day you wake and realize to your horror that real people’s lives are being destroyed due to this tone-deaf technology juggernaut. Shifts in global politics. Bullying. Teen suicides. Cognitive bias amplified by the collective intelligence of some of the greatest and most misguided minds of our generation, all united behind their leader’s vision of a world of programmable social interactions, backed by an absolutely ruthless win at all costs mentality.
The war on reality has begun, people. It’s actually been going on for the last 14 years, but the masses are finally starting to pick up on it.
Facebook employees: it’s time to pick a side and engage in some public collective action like your frenemies at Google. The #techlash is upon us. Ethics is coming back into fashion. Take a stand. Not only will it help save the world, for real this time, it will look good on a resume.