When I got to San Francisco in 2010, I really wanted to do it all
Build a startup, create change through technology.
But the more I learned of the culture, the less I wanted to succeed according to its rubric. The turning point for me was Airbnb
Around 2011, Airbnb was REALLY taking off. All the benefits of a software business, none of the drawbacks of a real estate business. The best of all worlds.
This exploded into public awareness when a host found her apartment absolutely destroyed by a guest
Which, you know, of course: a system like that is bound to fail spectacularly on occasion.
But what shocked me was how unprepared Airbnb was to make their host whole again. They were dodging accountability and only public shame, orchestrated by the host’s desperate PR campaign, could make the difference
These guys were getting absolutely rich off the backs of the communities that hosted them.
And they couldn’t take care of someone when things went wrong?
It was such a breach of the basic, reciprocal, implied social contract we should all adhere to.
And what I was learning was that all of Silicon Valley business culture was premised on that kind of breach. Move fast and break society if it earns you a better valuation next round
Man, Steve Huffman tried to open the door for me, too.
Sometimes I look back and wonder if I fucked up. He’d invite me to hang at the beach with his YC buds.
But I just couldn’t get excited about them and their world. I couldn’t play the game the way they all expected. It wasn’t for me.
We haven’t talked in years. I got pretty mad at him and Alexis, after they returned to Reddit. I felt they had a greater responsibility to community health.
I mean, beyond fuck-you money, this is fuck-everyone money. And powerful, in that they can do more or less what they want any given year, and have access to anyone else they need to meet or influence.
Meanwhile, I’m not rich.
It feels like I could have been, if I’d made different choices. But I couldn’t do that any more than I could have sprouted wings.
It’s one of the enduring heartbreaks of my life that I found the Valley so inimical to my values.
So now I live in the woods, almost as far from San Francisco as you can get and still be in the US.
I’ve got a fiber connection and half a prayer everything I know about software and technology strategy can still matter, can still pay some bills.
It’s hard to spend a lifetime really learning something, knowing it down to your bones, only to find the Mecca of its practice so hostile to the vision of the future you hold dear.
@danilo I am in this picture and I do not like it.
I still live in the area, I haven’t had that big falling out with anyone personally, but the dawning realization that the engine of “tech” was just breaking existing laws with technobabble obfuscation (a partial list: illegal cab company, illegal hotel, illegal parking garage, illegal rocket launches, wildcat bank, mass art theft) and it only works because law enforcement is perpetually asleep at the wheel … makes it hard to maintain enthusiasm
@danilo I obviously think the crime-doers doing the crimes are to blame here.
But the sleeping regulators are also an important part of the problem.
If you are an executive who is not comfortable with rampant criminal behavior, but you’re also not an incorruptible paragon of righteousness (as most of us are not), there’s only so long you can watch the rest of the industry do a bunch of crimes before you can start wondering “wait, are these actually crimes or is it just acceptable CODB?”
@danilo If everyone is willing to externalize their costs but you, you get out-competed and replaced by someone else who is willing to do that externalizing. The incentives make the environment more than the personalities do.
@glyph@danilo That makes the responsible course of action, as someone with business expertise in the domain, being lobbying for regulation that will constrain both you and your competitors. Use your unique position to clearly inform lawmakers what your industry is up to.
Yep -- as I was reading @danilo's original thread, and that anecdote of realizing the Airbnb founders were happy to let their users/community bear the costs of entirely-foreseeable problems caused by Airbnb existing, my first thought was that one trend that unified the big Silicon Valley firms that emerged in the late 00s was ...
... "shrugging off externalities" as a business plan
One of the most interesting things to me has been watching the rare times when regulators actually do clearly see the potentially-malign externalities that are outgassing off a tech business model ...
... and pass regulations to account for them
I'm thinking of how many US cities began more-tightly regulating electric-scooter firms, and even (eventually) Airbnb
This regulatory action has, a far as I can tell, mostly been at the local or state level ...
... possibly because "local" is where government is most responsive to actual citizen needs (I say "most" not to say "it's super great and totes responsive", but to distinguish it from the federal level, which can be sclerotic) ..
.... and also because all the ill effects of those tech business models were highly visible, and perhaps more importantly physically palpable, on a local level:
Scooters lying askew on the streets; housing taken off the rental market
AirBnB triggered an explosion in home prices, capital gains tax evasion, foreign money laundering into residential real estate, and the commodification of residential housing by private equity Wall Streeters like Blackrock.
As global anti-democracy movements grow, a flight of capital out of repressive regimes like China & Iran accelerated housing unaffordability
Homelessness blew up because housing became treated like commercial real estate.
@Npars01@clive@danilo it’s a little unfair to put that all on AirBnB. They were one accelerant among many, on a market with some pretty bad fundamentals
@clive@danilo@glyph "shrugging off externalities". - I recall discussions with a VC guy, who was busily and regularly asserting that we shouldn't ignore the positive externalities. #sheesh
@clive@danilo@glyph indeed. And with a balance- impaired space, that sidewalk action is scary. We've experienced it. And we are not alone; there is an aging population, and the sidewalk e- scooters are are a threat.
@clive@danilo@glyph though, to be fair, we were out one day and met a young couple riding e-scooters on the San Francisco sidewalk. All of us waiting at a loooong light. Nice people. Why were they on the sidewalk? Well, they tried the street ( the label says not to ride on the sidewalk (giggle)). And the drivers terrified them. So, onto the sidewalk. And guess what? They hated the e-scooter experience, would never do it again. (Speaking as one who bicycle commuted through a Chicago winter, I stopped bicycling because of safety concerns/ bad drivers.)
Think of how much better it would be, if instead of thinking of the sidewalk as a hot new property to squat on, the brilliant tech mind had actively engaged with the city to develop good protected lanes for bikes & scooters? They'd be heroes. And their political clout would have accelerated development of a safe, fast travel network.
@artemesia@clive@danilo@glyph simple business case: more demand from potential riders who would ride if not forced into auto lanes & congestion., and won't ride on sidewalks because in many cases they are either too badly maintained, or they don't want to risk pedestrian traffic, or even no sidewalks .
@artemesia@PaulWermer@clive@danilo not sure what you are getting at here. You make money in this case by renting scooters. The “model” is just rental; these are strategies to boost demand. Most businesses do have a productive economic activity underlying them, even if it is buried under a pile of perverse economic incentives and crenellations of weird anticompetitive behavior
No, a simple shop makes money by renting scooters. A company distributing 2500 scooters across a city (and abusing public infrastructure by doing things like tying up every bike rack near popular attractions with truck-moved scooters at 7AM) is in the business of selling stock.
My question to the OP is, how are these tech geniuses supposed to make money by "the brilliant tech mind had actively engaged with the city to develop good protected lanes for bikes & scooters?"? There's no growth story, no greater fool to sell to, no elevator pitch, and as my largely rhetorical question pointed up, no business model.
@clive@danilo@glyph Fundamentally, all of the large businesses that run the world now are built on socializing externalities and privatizing profits. Tech just provided them an opportunity to do the same without having to build any manufacturing capacity or maintain as much plant overhead.
Now they can get started to generate pollution, consume electricity, destroy communities and pervert the real estate market with a handful of code and a single download server.
@glyph@danilo
I spend some time working at a regulator, the biggest forces were:
-another small cut to our funding, like last year and the year before that, slowly nibbling away at the size of the organisation
-we made very decent money working for the regulator, but the great money was in building a network and transferring to the companies we were supposed to be monitoring.
That atmosphere of individual corruption did more damage than any funding-cut ever could.
@Selena@glyph@danilo This. Every time you want to blame the regulators, remember what happened when Biden administration tried to hire @wiczipedia. Or how much flak Lina Khan is getting for trying to actually do her job at FTC.
@angdraug@Selena@danilo@wiczipedia yeah I am absolutely a Lina Khan stan. Her FTC is quietly doing some seriously important reform. (I don’t know if this warrants “disclosure” exactly but a personal friend works there and I admire them a heck of a lot for doing that work on a personal level as well, particularly given how much more they could be making in industry)
@glyph@danilo The SV VC-backed tech scene would have you believe that it's the center of all information technology, as Hollywood does with popular culture.
I can imagine it seems that way to those who are there, but it's not objectively true at all.
Ignore the reality distortion field.
There's a whole world of other options out there for people innovating and building cool stuff.
This is true at every layer of the stack, and there are still layers yet to be conceived.
The world needs people who understand this stuff and who have a conscience to stay engaged, now more than ever.
@marshray@danilo so, you’re not wrong, but there is — or should I say there was — a huge and vibrant engineering, dare I say it, “hacker” culture in the bay area. I feel like I watched it die. It’s hard to tease apart how much of this was just having a kid and less time for socializing, but there was a palpable shift in the culture here where meetup events shifted from “check out this cool gadget, I don’t know if it’s useful” to “here’s how to build your drop-shipping website in 3 clicks”
@marshray@danilo the shift is slow and subtle, and in some tiny ways I felt like I played a part in it. Not all of the shift to more commercialism is bad; having resources for cool fun projects is good. But eventually it all just got really same-y; no more demos of games, no more experimental computational art, just web frameworks and cloud infrastructure and eventually NFTs and ChatGPT demos.
@marshray@danilo in some sense this was inevitable. The reason that the bay area is a “tech capital” is specifically because of resource accumulation, and these sort of repeatable business-y things are exactly what the resource-accumulators want. The incidental joy and wonder and weirdness get optimized out. Hardly unique to this industry or this time, I know, but this is where I am.
This is how we know there's no such thing as a "good" billionaire.
Everyone with anything resembling a conscience, heart, or soul... can't do it. Won't do it. They can't stomach this sickness, and they turn away.
And that just leaves the assholes, who don't mind hanging out with other assholes, being assholes, playing increasingly cutthroat rounds of musical deck chairs.
(It’s not you, it’s the system that’s monumentally fucked up. Your only problem seems to be that you’re clearly not an extractive and exploitative asshat.)
I hope to have the initial pieces of the Small Web in a usable state next year. Come play with us – we don’t have any money and no one will become a billionaire but hopefully we can make things at least a little bit better :)
See, I appreciate that this comes from a kind place.
But the hard truth, and the point, is that, no, I do not have enough. The last decade has been a relentless slog to find productive application for skills I’ve spent a lifetime honing, in an industry with a greater appetite for harm than I’m comfortable supporting. It remains a challenge.
You can’t pay student loans or a mortgage on integrity.
@danilo The other externality is housing stock. Rich speculators buy up perfectly good dwelling houses to put on #AirB&B, meaning that low income folk in remote rural areas are forced into #Homelessness or #Emigration.
@danilo I had a friend who started at Uber right before they took off, after doing the same with another well known start up just before they crashed. Had this 6th sense in when to jump start ups. We fell away when I realized what kind of org Uber was, how how in on it he was.
I'm a mechanical engineer in a highly regulated, dangerous industry. Rule breaking isn't something I even think of doing. Written in blood. Literally. Was very impressed initially with that Uber did, cutting through all that red tape and getting it out to the world so quickly. Then I realize they had just ignored any regulations and just bullied their way.
I know in very real ways what engineering arrogance can cause. I know first hand how fucking hard to is not to maim or kill when you do not have control. That this culture has been developing driverless cars is profoundly, deeply disturbing to me.
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