[michaelochurch]

This one seems more mean-spirited and anti-intellectual than the last one, not that the last was an era of virtue and heroism. The social distances between employees and founders, and between founders and investors, have become huge (and yet so many people are in denial about their prospects). We're now in a world where age discrimination in a job that requires many years of focused experience to be good at it is the norm and almost taken for granted. Meanwhile, startup cultures are a lot more corporate than in the last bubble; sure, there are foosball tables, but there's also that "Agile" shit that exists to cement the idea of the programmer as a permanent subordinate.

I don't care much whether "the market" goes up or down, but I want us to get our fucking values back. How the fuck did "tech" beget Snapchat and Clinkle? Those founders aren't fit to work in tech companies, let alone fucking run them. How'd we let ourselves get colonized by the mainstream business culture and rendered their shitty outpost, instead of being something unique in the world?

The 2011-15 bubble wasn't the worst in terms of numerical overrating of technology companies, but I'm afraid that it will go down in history as the time in which Silicon Valley lost what remaining character it had and became a sideshow for the existing corporate elite, rather than a credible opposition to entrenched and malevolent private-sector stagnation.