The article also notes that the essay has been picked up by a publisher (now available on Amazon for $5 - $8), so I presume this copy is not authorized.
Joe K's BorN is a great read. Love Hofstadter's quote on the matter:
“People who are normal, i.e., sane, sensible, don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.”
It's not perfect, but I find most news sites to be more readable after turning off CSS. The text will properly fill your window, and there are no annoying typefaces.
This is why modern browsers have a "please format the text I came here to read in a way that I can actually read it" button. It's ironic that online publishers are paying coders to make reading their publications so awful that the companies who write browsers pay other coders to remove the awfulness.
In part because text formatted into many shorter lines is easier to read. The longer the line and the more space you need between lines. This is basic typography [1].
But that doesn't account for the white space on the top. I don't get that in my Firefox but I checked with Chromium and I see it. It's the advertising/social buttons banner. Once again adblockers win the day.
I'm trying to get off HN like it's an abusive significant other. I don't know why, and I don't think it's healthy, but somehow I keep coming back for more.
We're sorry. We didn't mean to take your productivity out to the back and throw it under the lawnmower. Twice. Can't you procrastinate with us, just a little, please, for old times sake? It'll only take a minute. You can stay for a minute, right?
Hey, did you see there's a new release of Dwarf Fortress out? You should look at some of the engineering behind the B-29 cannon system. Isn't it interesting how the human body responds to long-term microgravity? How would you like to buy a South Dakota hamlet? Do you think malware could effectively exploit any flaws in multiprocessor computing?
Self-referential, technology-focused and shaped texts like this make me wonder what the new, dominant school of thought will be for this generation's western literature.
Post-modernism [1] has been considered "dead" for about 10-15 years with no discernible movement coalescing to replace it. SV, entrepreneurship, and startup culture have had such a profound effect on the west that it would be hard for authors today to ignore the tropes and heroes of this movement, which is what these anonymous authors have addressed head on.
Will kids in high school 30 years from now still be reading Salinger, Vonnegut, McCarthy, Orwell, Heller, Faulkner, Steinbeck and other classics? Or will there be some literary movement borne out of SV culture to supplement these classic texts?
> Post-modernism [1] has been considered "dead" for about 10-15 years with no discernible movement coalescing to replace it.
I think transmodernism is pretty clearly on track to win right now. Just look at the rapid increase in states legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational purposes.
Postmodernism was never alive in the sense to which the parent refers. Now that we've neatly rejected the premise of that comment, let's move on: nobody cares or knows about transmodernism, or any other literary movement (be it imaginary, as — in the case of transmodernism — or otherwise)
The days in which a movement could be dominant are long past us. That's sort of the point.
Pretty much no one is into Monstransmodism, which is why it will inevitably garner majority mindshare. (And therefore has already triumphed -- and pre-receded. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.)
It's true enough that postmodernism is dead in the water, though. One of the mysteries of the contemporary world is that all of its ideas are stagnant -- and yet no one has any idea what's going to replace them.
Not really. There are plenty of eras where ideas are clearly surging forward -- and sometimes not particularly good ideas (monarchism in the late 17th century, communism in the late 19th, fascism in the early 20th).
Interesting question but the specific work we're talking about it not going to shape literature. It's shorter than a long magazine piece. A new literature movement doesn't appear to be the ambition here.
In addition to this -- I'm not sure I understand why the primary discourse around this text is whether or not it conforms to a particular literary movement/genre's specifications. Those are all constructs that help us historically situate texts within a broader context; what is the goal of this exercise/conversation?
I've maintained that our descendants will be like the aliens from the ST:TNG episode "Darmok", except instead of historical metaphors we'll use lolcats, ragefaces, and mythical characters like Scumbag Steve and Overly Attached Girlfriend.
IMO the point is that we're already there, and have been for a while. It's only set in the future to trick the viewer into approaching the story as an outsider.
"Oh wow, that sucks, I hope we never toil at pointless tasks to earn points to buy worthless junk that doesn't make us happy"
looks around house full of consumerist garbage, contemplates largely nihilistic career
"Hm. Well... damn."
[EDIT] (SPOILERS!) I also take the vast wilderness outside the protagonist's window at the end to be real, not some kind of illusion or projection. I do so because the episode is more effective that way, so I'd guess that's what's intended—the viewer thinks this must be some kind of overcrowded dystopic future world-city or something the whole time, or that the Earth's surface is uninhabitable, or that this isn't even Earth, and that everyone's forced to live this way, but the reveal of the wilderness raises the possibility that in fact people could leave, but simply do not, and in retrospect one realizes that no pervasive, ultra-strict police force or anything similar is depicted. The closest they come are the drugged drinks, which are only given in some circumstances to some people (compare: anxiety meds, sleeping pills, et c.). We never see anyone try to resist the collection of "detritus", for example. The protagonist damages what may well be public property in his private room, and no-one seems to care. People are demoted to janitor status, but, crucially, we don't see them dragged away screaming or anything like that.
In fact the people of that world choose same option we see the protagonist choose on the gameshow, really, just less dramatically, every single day. Safety, comfort, and familiarity over freedom.
The modern Tony Stark is literally based on Elon Musk. Interest in Computer Science programs jumped after the Social Network movie came out. I think there's more truth in roymurdocks' comment then you give it credit for.
Stark is just as based upon older tech moguls like Larry Ellison, Richard Branson, or even Steve Jobs. Interest in archery jumped after the Hunger Games comes out. SV culture is significant, yes, but is it disproportionately so compared to other things?
Movie-Stark's mannerism is openly based on Larry Ellison, who helped finance (and even had cameos in) the IronMan films. Other self-styled magnates were also an influence, of course, but Ellison is the big one, afaik.
You realize you are posting this using about 99% tech developed in the valley, right?
I like the idea. Not sure if it will fly or not -- after all, once you've read one nerd-takes-the-world story, you've read them all. But we could do with a new genre.
Like my Nokia phone running Windows using the World Wide Web over 802.11 to an Alcatel DSL modem connecting to a Motorola DSLAM? - damnit, vkou beat me to the punch
As the norm, my comments were read too literally. The topic for this thread was the future of fiction, not the exact location where most technology was developed. "SV" in this case is just a plug-in. If it makes you feel any better, substitute Austin, or Redmond, or whatnot. The exact location is not important.
"Westerns" aren't all about things that happen in the western U.S. Star Trek was a western.
That's a fair clarification - although I think there's a world of cultural difference between what people would describe as "SV" and "Non-SV" tech (By the latter, I don't mean running a TwitterForCats startup out of, say, Ohio.)
The bubble exists, but it's ludicrous to believe that SV startups don't have profound effects outside it. What % of people use Google, or Facebook, or Android/iOS every day in the west?
Well if you tautologically redefine "startups" to mean "as yet unsuccessful startups," then no I guess there isn't much effect outside the Valley bubble. But those companies all started small in the Valley and grew exponentially along the classic "tech startup" path.
I would think the poster child for startups are unicorns: Uber, AirBnB, Square, Tesla, etc. Google and Facebook are far too down the line to be considered the stereotypical SF or Palo Alto up-and-coming challenger.
Yeah but how many companies actually adopted SV ways and values? Banks are still banks, you still need a suit. Automakers are still automakers, you still need to be there 9-to-5. Investors are still investors, and outside a few precious hubs (SV, NY, Boston) they won't just drop millions on a bunch of nerdy tweenagers with ambitions (unless they're Someone's Child, of course). Politicians talk a lot but the big public-investment moolah still goes almost entirely to large-workforce and well-connected companies.
SV companies influence consumers' lives, sure; but not really how post-fordist capitalism works.
Android and iOS phones? They might as well be any generic cheap Nokia, flavour du jour. Did Finnish culture have profound effects on the 40-60% of mobile phone owners at the time?
Few consumers spend their discretionary income on Android and iOS phones for reasons related to intrinsic advantages of the platform themselves. They buy Android and iOS phones because those are the two platforms that propagated for what they actually seek: mobile devices. It could just as well have been Symbian and QNX, if competitive forces played out differently. But the whole point is that these goods are completely substitutable. People only rationalize them post facto.
What are these "competitive forces" that aren't consumers choosing some platforms over others? iOS in particular wasn't jammed down consumers' throats; early adopters frequently had to jump carriers to get one, which forced carriers that didn't have the iPhone to accede to Apple's demands of them.
That Android and iOS won via some kind of accident of history is a fairly extraordinary claim, and requires some kind of actual evidence.
That platforms win by consumer preference is a truism that need not be underlined. Android benefited from homogenization by the OHA consortium, and its licensing permitting extensive reproduction by off-the-shelf producers of varying production quality. iOS benefited from Apple's branding and cult following.
What's relevant is that most consumers do not evaluate software platforms from technical and system properties. They seek mobile devices for their end use, and will inevitably steer towards what already has large units stocked, what is advertised and what is recommended via word-of-mouth which will usually create reinforcing loops from consumer impressions caused by the former two. That is to say, the mobile OSes are substitutable goods. Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance. If it weren't Google, it could have been Altavista or something else. If it weren't Facebook, it could have been MySpace, Friendster or something else. Especially social networks are by definition something that critically depend on Metcalfe's law. Mobile platforms as well, to an extent (largely because apps that people want will converge to them). People do not care that they use Facebook or iOS, they want access to networks of contacts and to communicate with them through a consistent mechanism.
As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
You're just redefining "technical and system properties" to be things you find important, rather than things the majority of consumers find important.
> Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
But iOS and Android won by providing superior messaging/browsing/productivity/entertainment, that's the entire point. Nobody is arguing that the kernel in iOS or Android is superior to QNX or Symbian (I have no idea myself, having never looked at the system level of any of those platforms), but rather that iOS and Android provided superior experiences, and that's why they won.
And in a lot of ways, it's the SV culture and its focus on consumer preferences (often mocked as childish and unserious -- "yet another cat photo sharing app") that made it possible for those two platforms to destroy the competition. It turns out consumers really do care if Instagram or Angry Birds is possible or available.
> For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance.
I have no idea where you get so much confidence that alternative OS platforms would have evolved "just the same" -- mobile platforms were a stagnant morass before iOS and (very shortly after) Android came around.
> As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
"Actual technological properties" here meaning apparently whatever you think is important, and not what actual consumers think is important. User experience is technology. Apple and Google are better at it than Nokia or RIM.
Yes, Android and iOS were the winning ecosystems, there is no argument there.
I was making the point that their influence on culture and society is limited, and using Nokia as an analogy. Nokia was Finnish, yet this didn't have any perceptible impact on its hundreds millions of users. None of them started going to sauna, spontaneously developed cross-country skiing skills or realized that having a summer cottage on a lake is holy grail of life.
And yes, smartphones do have ways in which they can influence behaviour to a larger extent than feature phones, but those too shaped the nature of mobile phone interactions for whole generations.
And most (global) end users are non the wiser that there is a place called Silicon Valley where these devices are designed, just like many people thought Nokia might be Japanese - but didn't know for certain.
I think it's important to differentiate between the effects the products these companies create have, and the effects the companies themselves have on world/US culture.
Clearly the products have had a profound impact on culture, but I think the impact would have been the same if they had been developed by Exxon or Halliburton.
As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.
> Clearly the products have had a profound impact on culture, but I think the impact would have been the same if they had been developed by Exxon or Halliburton.
But Exxon or Halliburton couldn't have developed these products. They wouldn't even try and fail to develop these kinds of products.
I think your missing the point. The idea is that it didn't really matter who made the product; it was the product itself that had the "profound impact on culture".
The product and the company that created it cannot be separated in terms of origination. The product required those specific inputs to exist. As such, it was the company that created the profound impact on the culture. To remove that connection is to pretend the product could have been created by any given corporation and corporate culture.
Maybe the difference is more subtle than I thought. The culture of a company like Google may be very tolerant and open, it may value self-actualization and support of individuality. This culture could be critical to the creation of Google products, like Search and GMail. It could even be said that products like Search and GMail could _only_ have been created by a company with the cultural values that Google possesses. Other organizations with different cultures may not even have been able to understand enough about how these products work to even try to produce them.
I believe the question is: "Do the cultural values of a company like Google impact the values (or culture) of their customers through their use of Google's products?"
I would argue that no, they do not. People want to find out where they can buy the cheapest dog food or recipes for something they need to cook. For sure, Google's may present articles that they might not otherwise see, but that's as far as I believe this goes; this other content need not be consistent with Google's values (very often it isn't). Ditto with GMail, I wouldn't think the culture of Google, as expressed through GMail, will make much of an impact on their customers at large.
But traditional/non-SV companies can and do change the world with products all the time. IBM was a massive company when they created the PC. VW invented the beetle (and reinvented it). Vanguard changed the world of investing.
None of these were SV startups with all the stereotypes that accrue to them. It's true that it's harder for big companies to innovate, but you can't say, "Only SV startups build products that change the world, ergo SV startups change world culture"
Completely agree. If these companies were impacting the culture as much as their products, entrepreneurship would be the career path dujour, but entrepreneurship rates are actually in decline.
> As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.
Parents staring at their phones instead of paying attention to kids.
Social networks and their impacts on relationships. Movies these days are unrealistic these days because so much important dialogue happens via WhatsApp, text messages and Facebook Messenger, etc.
Guess who will not be driving their own vehicles in 10 or 20 years? Consumers.
The vast majority of the billions of people using those products have no knowledge of SV, entrepreneurship, or startup culture. It's akin to claiming that filling up the fuel in your vehicle is exposing you to Middle Eastern entrepreneurship and culture.
Not sure what you are talking about with regards to no discernible movement replacing postmodernism - both New Sincerity and New Narrative authors and works have gained critical prominence as well as wider readership. Ben Lerner, whose works combine memoir, poetry, and fiction, was just awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Knausgard's memoir cum novel "My Struggle" is one of the biggest literary releases of the year.
From this, we can see that whereas postmodernism was concerned with the massive scope of societal and technological apparatuses which formulated our doxa (see: JR, Gravity's Rainbow, White Noise etc), these movements have instead shifted their lens to the internal scope of the individual in face of a mind-boggling hyperconnected and networked world. How we come to construct a 'self' in this environment and how that self is perpetuated have become increasingly popular themes. Poetry, interestingly enough, is actually at the forefront of incorporating technological themes into its practice. Scores of poets use autogenerated content or appropriate text from online sources or otherwise involve technology in their works.
Furthermore, it is not as though SV is some uncharted territory ignored by the literati. Plenty of contemporary fiction authors have addressed SV and its "tropes and heroes" - Dave Eggers wrote "The Circle" and Pynchon himself dressed down the dotcom boom in "Bleeding Edge", and those are just two of the highest-profile examples.
But I think the dearth of your SV literary movement is connected with the notion of your last paragraph. A literary movement borne out of SV culture to supplement these "classics" would probably be much like the SV blogosphere and tweet culture is today: a hollow echo-chamber filled with self-aggrandizing boasts, brags, and takedowns occurring within a delusional bubble where the ultimate focus is profit. There's a reason the work in the article is pseudonymous. Great literature and the profit-motive of SV are antithetical. Most of the "heroes" in Silicon Valley don't have the self-awareness to see how inane the business model of their unicorn is, let alone the perspective needed to write a truly great and meaningful work of literature.
Let's be real: in thirty years we will be confronting the ugly face of the adverse effects emanating from this 'movement' - massive income inequality, gross materialism and greed, the privileging of technological progress over human integrity, and endless surveillance (whether conducted by gov't entities or private companies - pretty sure now that the metrics / data genie is out of the bottle it won't be going back in). So I doubt a literary movement will come from SV internally. Instead, I believe that the great works read by future audiences will be written by outsiders to address the fallout from SV's "tropes and heroes".
Likely no. There is a dearth of 'literature' in terms of books and the like right now, it does seem. But everything is 'exploding' in the arts right now. Banksy is not a painter, but his work hangs in museums and is collected. Breaking Bad is not a play to read, but it is a strong work nonetheless. Iron Man is a movie, but Tony Stark is a character we all can reference just like John Galt.
I think the post-post-modern era will not be so easy to define. There will be common works, but nothing as ubiquitous as 1984 or Romeo and Juliet. Things are changing too fast these days, and it is unlikely to stop, we are splintering and that is not a bad thing maybe.
Got a good laugh at this: "When it comes to any sort of stunt that gets a lot of attention on social media, all roads lead back to Taco Bell or Mountain Dew."
I bought the kindle edition and I don't get the hype about this book at all. First of all it's barely a book, it's not even a novella, it's pretty much zine length. It's a 10-15 min read. I'm thinking I made a mistake in getting the electronic version since the charm seems to be in the physicality of it. There is some cleverness in the story but it's so brief that the real phenomenon here is not poignant satire, instead it's how the zine was delivered to its initial recipients and that it got their attention in the first place.
I don't get it either. The story is very short and barely funny. And, frankly, the whole thing feels like a PR stunt of some sort. Whatever the motivation, they seem to be succeeding though, it's definitely going viral.
I read the link, and I agree. It's just a few hundred words with ridiculous tweets interspersed. Whenever the first time I hear about something is from a story about how popular it is, my spider sense tingles.
I'm surprised you felt that way. I only read the (linked) introduction so far and I was bent over laughing. The story, punctuated by the tweets, is hysterical. I don't see how the length (Candide was also short) or physicality of it matters. I find that it is, indeed, poignant satire, and that is enough for me.
I remember once, years ago, a member of a 70's band (Jethro Tull?) being asked if he watched MTV. When he replied, "Yes," the commentator remarked that he was surprised that this person liked that music. The band member's eyes widened in horror and said, "I watch the news. That doesn't mean I like what I see."
I guess I love the book for the same reason that I hate HN, despite that I check it daily. Silicon Valley has had tremendous success financially, if not technically, and that has spawned with it a strange micro-culture that is easy to skewer when you take just a few steps away from it.
There are quite a few young founders getting trampled to death by llamas (users) after being (easily) influenced by tweets (and essays...) from thought-leaders.
This was a really great essay, very funny. Before I jump in with the rest of you claiming "sv echo chamber", I'd like to point out that these tweets can be made to look like asshats and can be made out to be inspirational and telling of a the silicon valley mind set. These are the bourgeoisie that are looking for that perfect work/life balance and want to see future push forward, though usually by building really simple technologies. They have the opportunity to become senile or play with philosophy because they are doing everything in the power to bet big.
As much as this essay shows how alien their world is to my own, it also shows what successful marketing/operations people think about while pushing for success.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadhttp://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/
And there are 140 original copies, but the article notes Farrar, Strauss and Giroux reached a deal with the authors to publish it.
“People who are normal, i.e., sane, sensible, don’t try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.”
I sometimes wish these news publications would just use Medium or similar blogging platforms.
But that doesn't account for the white space on the top. I don't get that in my Firefox but I checked with Chromium and I see it. It's the advertising/social buttons banner. Once again adblockers win the day.
[1] http://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/text...
Peter Thiel
I bet in Peter to be one of the authors of the book.
Hey, did you see there's a new release of Dwarf Fortress out? You should look at some of the engineering behind the B-29 cannon system. Isn't it interesting how the human body responds to long-term microgravity? How would you like to buy a South Dakota hamlet? Do you think malware could effectively exploit any flaws in multiprocessor computing?
This is great.
Hence the inspiration.
Post-modernism [1] has been considered "dead" for about 10-15 years with no discernible movement coalescing to replace it. SV, entrepreneurship, and startup culture have had such a profound effect on the west that it would be hard for authors today to ignore the tropes and heroes of this movement, which is what these anonymous authors have addressed head on.
Will kids in high school 30 years from now still be reading Salinger, Vonnegut, McCarthy, Orwell, Heller, Faulkner, Steinbeck and other classics? Or will there be some literary movement borne out of SV culture to supplement these classic texts?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-postmodernism
I think transmodernism is pretty clearly on track to win right now. Just look at the rapid increase in states legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational purposes.
The days in which a movement could be dominant are long past us. That's sort of the point.
Pretty sure that's one of the mysteries of all cultures and periods of time ever, always, if you are of a certain disposition to think that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
"Oh wow, that sucks, I hope we never toil at pointless tasks to earn points to buy worthless junk that doesn't make us happy"
looks around house full of consumerist garbage, contemplates largely nihilistic career
"Hm. Well... damn."
[EDIT] (SPOILERS!) I also take the vast wilderness outside the protagonist's window at the end to be real, not some kind of illusion or projection. I do so because the episode is more effective that way, so I'd guess that's what's intended—the viewer thinks this must be some kind of overcrowded dystopic future world-city or something the whole time, or that the Earth's surface is uninhabitable, or that this isn't even Earth, and that everyone's forced to live this way, but the reveal of the wilderness raises the possibility that in fact people could leave, but simply do not, and in retrospect one realizes that no pervasive, ultra-strict police force or anything similar is depicted. The closest they come are the drugged drinks, which are only given in some circumstances to some people (compare: anxiety meds, sleeping pills, et c.). We never see anyone try to resist the collection of "detritus", for example. The protagonist damages what may well be public property in his private room, and no-one seems to care. People are demoted to janitor status, but, crucially, we don't see them dragged away screaming or anything like that.
In fact the people of that world choose same option we see the protagonist choose on the gameshow, really, just less dramatically, every single day. Safety, comfort, and familiarity over freedom.
Only in your tiny bubble. People seriously believe this?
"Heroes of a movement"? Can you actually call financial investment trends a "movement"?
I like the idea. Not sure if it will fly or not -- after all, once you've read one nerd-takes-the-world story, you've read them all. But we could do with a new genre.
Yeah, that's certainly 99% of the tech necessary for me to be posting this.
"Westerns" aren't all about things that happen in the western U.S. Star Trek was a western.
SV companies influence consumers' lives, sure; but not really how post-fordist capitalism works.
Obviously not, or people wouldn't be spending hundreds of extra dollars to abandon their generic cheap Nokias in favor of Android and iOS.
That Android and iOS won via some kind of accident of history is a fairly extraordinary claim, and requires some kind of actual evidence.
What's relevant is that most consumers do not evaluate software platforms from technical and system properties. They seek mobile devices for their end use, and will inevitably steer towards what already has large units stocked, what is advertised and what is recommended via word-of-mouth which will usually create reinforcing loops from consumer impressions caused by the former two. That is to say, the mobile OSes are substitutable goods. Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance. If it weren't Google, it could have been Altavista or something else. If it weren't Facebook, it could have been MySpace, Friendster or something else. Especially social networks are by definition something that critically depend on Metcalfe's law. Mobile platforms as well, to an extent (largely because apps that people want will converge to them). People do not care that they use Facebook or iOS, they want access to networks of contacts and to communicate with them through a consistent mechanism.
As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
> Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.
But iOS and Android won by providing superior messaging/browsing/productivity/entertainment, that's the entire point. Nobody is arguing that the kernel in iOS or Android is superior to QNX or Symbian (I have no idea myself, having never looked at the system level of any of those platforms), but rather that iOS and Android provided superior experiences, and that's why they won.
And in a lot of ways, it's the SV culture and its focus on consumer preferences (often mocked as childish and unserious -- "yet another cat photo sharing app") that made it possible for those two platforms to destroy the competition. It turns out consumers really do care if Instagram or Angry Birds is possible or available.
> For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance.
I have no idea where you get so much confidence that alternative OS platforms would have evolved "just the same" -- mobile platforms were a stagnant morass before iOS and (very shortly after) Android came around.
> As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it's a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.
"Actual technological properties" here meaning apparently whatever you think is important, and not what actual consumers think is important. User experience is technology. Apple and Google are better at it than Nokia or RIM.
I was making the point that their influence on culture and society is limited, and using Nokia as an analogy. Nokia was Finnish, yet this didn't have any perceptible impact on its hundreds millions of users. None of them started going to sauna, spontaneously developed cross-country skiing skills or realized that having a summer cottage on a lake is holy grail of life.
And yes, smartphones do have ways in which they can influence behaviour to a larger extent than feature phones, but those too shaped the nature of mobile phone interactions for whole generations.
And most (global) end users are non the wiser that there is a place called Silicon Valley where these devices are designed, just like many people thought Nokia might be Japanese - but didn't know for certain.
Clearly the products have had a profound impact on culture, but I think the impact would have been the same if they had been developed by Exxon or Halliburton.
As far as the cultural impact of the companies themselves, I think it's been modest at best.
But Exxon or Halliburton couldn't have developed these products. They wouldn't even try and fail to develop these kinds of products.
I believe the question is: "Do the cultural values of a company like Google impact the values (or culture) of their customers through their use of Google's products?"
I would argue that no, they do not. People want to find out where they can buy the cheapest dog food or recipes for something they need to cook. For sure, Google's may present articles that they might not otherwise see, but that's as far as I believe this goes; this other content need not be consistent with Google's values (very often it isn't). Ditto with GMail, I wouldn't think the culture of Google, as expressed through GMail, will make much of an impact on their customers at large.
None of these were SV startups with all the stereotypes that accrue to them. It's true that it's harder for big companies to innovate, but you can't say, "Only SV startups build products that change the world, ergo SV startups change world culture"
Parents staring at their phones instead of paying attention to kids.
Social networks and their impacts on relationships. Movies these days are unrealistic these days because so much important dialogue happens via WhatsApp, text messages and Facebook Messenger, etc.
Guess who will not be driving their own vehicles in 10 or 20 years? Consumers.
From this, we can see that whereas postmodernism was concerned with the massive scope of societal and technological apparatuses which formulated our doxa (see: JR, Gravity's Rainbow, White Noise etc), these movements have instead shifted their lens to the internal scope of the individual in face of a mind-boggling hyperconnected and networked world. How we come to construct a 'self' in this environment and how that self is perpetuated have become increasingly popular themes. Poetry, interestingly enough, is actually at the forefront of incorporating technological themes into its practice. Scores of poets use autogenerated content or appropriate text from online sources or otherwise involve technology in their works.
Furthermore, it is not as though SV is some uncharted territory ignored by the literati. Plenty of contemporary fiction authors have addressed SV and its "tropes and heroes" - Dave Eggers wrote "The Circle" and Pynchon himself dressed down the dotcom boom in "Bleeding Edge", and those are just two of the highest-profile examples.
But I think the dearth of your SV literary movement is connected with the notion of your last paragraph. A literary movement borne out of SV culture to supplement these "classics" would probably be much like the SV blogosphere and tweet culture is today: a hollow echo-chamber filled with self-aggrandizing boasts, brags, and takedowns occurring within a delusional bubble where the ultimate focus is profit. There's a reason the work in the article is pseudonymous. Great literature and the profit-motive of SV are antithetical. Most of the "heroes" in Silicon Valley don't have the self-awareness to see how inane the business model of their unicorn is, let alone the perspective needed to write a truly great and meaningful work of literature.
Let's be real: in thirty years we will be confronting the ugly face of the adverse effects emanating from this 'movement' - massive income inequality, gross materialism and greed, the privileging of technological progress over human integrity, and endless surveillance (whether conducted by gov't entities or private companies - pretty sure now that the metrics / data genie is out of the bottle it won't be going back in). So I doubt a literary movement will come from SV internally. Instead, I believe that the great works read by future audiences will be written by outsiders to address the fallout from SV's "tropes and heroes".
LOL
I think the post-post-modern era will not be so easy to define. There will be common works, but nothing as ubiquitous as 1984 or Romeo and Juliet. Things are changing too fast these days, and it is unlikely to stop, we are splintering and that is not a bad thing maybe.
It's really interesting -- I heard this 15 years ago. I think post-modernism has been "dead for about 10-15 years" for at least the past 15 years.
I guess I love the book for the same reason that I hate HN, despite that I check it daily. Silicon Valley has had tremendous success financially, if not technically, and that has spawned with it a strange micro-culture that is easy to skewer when you take just a few steps away from it.
... and bored anyone not in the SV echo chamber.
https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/671713994441293824
As much as this essay shows how alien their world is to my own, it also shows what successful marketing/operations people think about while pushing for success.