My personal critique on Silicon Valley. Why I’m pro-Peter Thiel, less so almost everyone else.
My analysis
I grew up in the Bay Area — Alameda to be specific. I’ve witnessed the Bay Area to become a bizarre place. Silicon Valley in my eyes is San Francisco, Palo Alto, and San Jose. Truth be told to live anywhere in Silicon Valley is boring as hell — why all the kids like to live in SF mission or other places.
The Bay Area is no longer tolerant
When I grew up in the Bay, it was the most “chill” place to grow up. Very open minded folks. But now … very close minded. In fact if you’re a “liberal” in the SF-Bay Area, you’re probably incredibly intolerant towards the opinions of others.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions by “nice” people.
I have extreme distrust in Mark Z, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates. All of them seem to be nice guys, who are transforming society into something more generic, more stale, and more lame. For example Mark Z and “FaceMash”— comparing humans together:
The sneaky thing:
It seems all the FaceMash stuff has been scrubbed from the internet …. I wonder if Archive.org or The Wayback Machine folks are implicated?
Why we cannot trust nice guys
Truth be told, I think all of these guys have “good intentions”. I actually don’t suspect any malice in their hearts. But the problem:
If you got a bunch of nerds with a bunch of money using soft coercion to mould the world a certain way… isn’t this bad?
Why is over-fat, Type 2 Diabetes (caused by sugar) tolerated in society?
Coca Cola …. soft marketing sugar to kids and the world? Read this article and read the PDF document. Certainly Warren Buffett probably knows but doesn’t care, because he makes mucho dinero from Coca Cola. Considering I consider sugar evil then that makes Warren Buffett (unintentionally) evil as well.
“Movement is happiness!” – TM Coca-Cola
Why are we told to “balance our calories” and to just “exercise more”? Why do we believe in the “calorie in, calorie out” myth? Simple … soft propaganda and influence from Coca Cola. The logic:
You can still drink (sugary) Coca Cola beverages … just limit yourself to one a day! Just workout more!
But would you tell a heroin user to just “do a little” heroin every once in a while? No. All sugar is bad and toxic. If we started to think of sugar as “crack cocaine” with a smiley face, wouldn’t we think about sugar differently?
Back to the valley
So Silicon Valley poaches all the smartest and brightest (open minded, liberal tolerant kids) from all colleges and universities in the Bay. UC Berkeley and Stanford are hot. And what is their jobs?
Create addictive platforms to get people to click on more ads, and be addicted to their products.
Founder Fund Manifesto written by Bruce Gibney:
We are harvesting all the great minds in society to just maximize advertising dollars.
Boring!