Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)

https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/

by Apocryphon • 1 year ago

111 111 1 year ago

With Steve Jobs in exile and the Web’s billionaire boys’ club still a few years away, the Valley in the book is “a bland anarchy,” a kingdom “with a thousand princes but no kings.”

Yet it was the happiest time I remember in the whole saga.

vlark• 1 year ago

God, I miss Grantland. It was some of THE best writing on the web at the time. ESPN killed it and Bill Simmons went on to create The Ringer, which he then sold to Spotify. The Ringer pre-Spotify was good, but not as good as Grantland was.

low_tech_love4• 1 year ago

Ah, thank you so much for reminding me of Grantland!!

Animats2• 1 year ago

Computing was less annoying before it became a branch of the advertising industry.

m463• 1 year ago

There were a lot of annoying detours.

A lot of the bad parts of computing originated in hollywood. They wanted certainty that you could only play "protected" music or video.

This sort of thing made it "necessary" to lock bootloaders and eventually with the iphone... The ship of theseus didn't belong to theseus anymore, it was just a license.

now lots of devices are cash registers, surveillance devices, e-meters and pop-up generators.

germinalphrase• 1 year ago

Don’t forget our final and most essential technology - the slot machine.

bigpeopleareold• 1 year ago

... or that the marketing and sales department is the real scaffold for enabling computing for those without university access.

chgs• 1 year ago

I don’t remember any tracking or adverts on computers when windows 95 came out (there were adverts for computers, I used to jay money to receive them in the way if computer shopper.

the first real annoyances were Spam and Punch the monkey, both parts of the advertising industry.

ssivark• 1 year ago

This shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising — since this is what happened to every mass communication technology over the past few centuries: print, then radio, then television. The OG computing folks at Xerox PARC indeed foresaw all this, and McLuhan wrote about this in the 50s/60s.

imiric5• 1 year ago

Advertising is a cancer on society. It corrupts all forms of media, ever since the invention of publishing and broadcasting. The internet is its most lucrative victim yet. It's where they've taken the sociopathic ideas pioneered by Bernays to their maximum expression. It is the most powerful global psychological manipulation machine, influencing everything from what we spend our money on, to how we think and act. It is unequivocally a major cause of the sociopolitical unrest and conflicts we see today. The really insidious part is that most people don't consciously realize they're being manipulated, and are happy to exchange that for some "free" products and services. This has, of course, made many companies very rich, by operating in a dark data broker market exchanging the data we've given them, and more prominently, data they've stolen or inferred from us.

To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.

ghaff2• 1 year ago

Forcing people to fork out money for any product or service they used also made many companies very rich. See Microsoft, Oracle... A very long list. But you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.

alecco• 1 year ago

If somebody works for tobacco or predatory lending they are stigmatized. Perhaps we should extend it to people working in advertising or anything causing the major problems in society today. From sugar drinks to algorithmic timelines.

disgruntledphd25• 1 year ago

OK great, taking what you've said as true, what's your solution?

How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

_factor• 1 year ago

Advertising is like pollution. Normal people realize they’re getting poisoned, but they still get to where they need to be, so don’t bother to change it.

We need to make collected data and metadata public. If a cabal of advertisers is considered an ethical steward of the information, a public database can’t be much worse. Scare the bejeezus out of moms and pops and watch the tide shift.

voidhorse6• 1 year ago

One small beacon of hope, perhaps, is that I see perspectives like this becoming more common over time. A few years ago there were (anecdotally) way more true believers in the current MO of pervasive profit seeking to the detriment of all else, true believers in the "free market" etc.

It's easy to see how absurd the practice of advertising is if you think about the actual dynamic.

As human beings we all have intentionality. When we want something, we seek it. "Hey, I really need to cut the lawn, let me find a lawnmower"—I'll go out and research lawnmowers to find one that helps me accomplish my intended goal.

Advertising totally inverts this dynamic. Instead, apropos of nothing, some person I don't know and have no relationship with interrupts some other thing I am in the middle of intentionally doing to tell me all about their fancy lawnmowers. At its worst (and most effective) it short circuits my own potential formation of intentions and reshapes my intentions, manipulating me, and at its least effective it's just a completely annoying distraction from what I was originally trying to do. It's horrible and antithetical to any notion of respect and dignity you might ascribe to the limited time of other human beings.

TwoNineFive• 1 year ago

HN was also better before the advert and sales people flooded it.

markus_zhang• 1 year ago

This, to paraphrase Portlandia, is one of the dreams of the ’90s — that our work selves and our true natures could be one and the same.

I have always wanted to achieve this (to no avail so far). To live for something bigger. To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.

It may sound like, but is not, workaholism. Workaholism is escapism. Workaholism, like alcoholism, roots from a certain sad history one wants to avoid. This is not workaholism, but a conscious pursuit of perfection, of "Godhood", as one may say as an atheist.

j4coh• 1 year ago

Even Epsilons can be useful in this brave new world of finding purpose through your job.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

Kifflom!

MomsAVoxell• 1 year ago

You will be a functioning part of an egregore whether you like it or not!

trhway• 1 year ago

To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.

A wolf walking half the Europe or an Arctic fox crossing the Arctic, and you think you have the drive to push, to evolve and to throw away the old self.

voidhorse6• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, wage labor as our primary labor structure has a tendency to produce Severance far more frequently than it does a meaningful marriage between work and personal purpose.

There are a lot of people that argue that if you were to eliminate wage labor, and distribute goods as equally as possible or at least take care of basic needs for free through universal income or some other means that people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true. As your post illustrates, working and producing is just as essential of an aspect of human life as consuming is—people want to produce, they just want it to be meaningful! They want to work on stuff that aligns with their own interests and beliefs. Ironically the people that claim that this isn't the case are probably the few that actually would prefer to never work (they want to keep wage labor in place so that they can extract capital from laborers while they relax and "lead" instead of produce themselves).

jajko• 1 year ago

You should travel around the world (or even your own country) a bit more. There is a lot of such people in various cultures and places, but you won't see them if living in any sort of success bubble (ie SV).

One of main reasons communism always failed - it never took this basic human nature into account, rather working with some idolized Star trekkish human with strong desire to work on bettering oneself and society, incorruptible, not selfish at all and so on.

crabbone2• 1 year ago

There are, without a doubt, a lot of jobs nobody wants to work. Not sure anyone wants to clean restrooms in fast food establishments, for example.

So, if we allow people to choose their jobs and don't have any mechanism that weeds out people who aren't good at what they chose to do, no incentive to work jobs nobody wants to do... we'll probably starve before the we die of lack of sanitation.

Communism had this core ethical belief that everyone should contribute as according to their ability and should be served according to their needs. I'm not sure if Marx believed this to be possible in the physical universe, or was it something that we should approach as much as possible given the constraints of the physical universe. But, countries pursuing communism so far all ran into the problem with lack of motivation, corruption and the need to build a police state in an attempt to counter the two.

So... maybe basic income isn't such a bad idea in the world where ambition can be more rewarding, but I still don't know who's going to work "bad" jobs if the alternative is to live off the basic income.

alabastervlog3• 1 year ago

people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true.

Confusing especially when most people do tens of hours of work outside of paying labor already. Sometimes another 40, or more. Perhaps with UBI et c. some folks would drop to merely 50-60 total hours of work, doing wage labor for only 20-30 of it.

But we only call the other things work when a rich person's paying someone else to do it for them (grocery shopping, lawn care, home maintenance, child care to include things like night time care when they're young ["night nanny" is a thing], meal planning, cooking, shuttling people places in cars, navigating healthcare, elder care, repairing clothes, and so on) because if money's not changing hands it doesn't count, I guess.

mistrial9• 1 year ago

no not so simple. Another underlying fear is that many people are predators. Universal income would enable unwanted predators. Of course, successful predators have already implemented long term income for their groups that is satisfactory to themselves and their chosen members. Many successful examples show that membership must be earned, showing some basic positives. Freeloading is also a fear, but it is related to gluttony. Successful people are also often gluttons, so that is not solved. Rivalry means "it is not enough to succeed ourselves, the opponent must lose" .. and gluttons tend to be rivalrous of other gluttons.

stevenae• 1 year ago

This still strikes me as escapism.

narratives12• 1 year ago

What are you escaping from in this case?

lo_zamoyski• 1 year ago

You might find "Laborem Exercens"[0] a good read.

[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

jgord4• 1 year ago

I think we're in for a new multi-decade round of 'eating the world' .. and Im going to annoy everyone by suggesting that the microkernel of this new megascale world-changing engine of growth is actually the tiny garage startup using Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning to tackle some previously too-hard problem in engineering/logistics/robotics/medicine/industry.

We are in a boom and bust and boom ... the current moment rhymes with 1993 of the internet boom - lots of hype, lots of big money .. but also something new and useful is emerging.

Its happening faster this time around ... BUT I do see a capital-to-startup impedance mismatch problem - imo, we need smaller, faster, standardized early pre-seed rounds : to build the future we need angels to take 10 x 30k bets, not 2 x 150k bets.

We actually dont need to wait for AGI to achieve an incredible creation of wealth and improve our lives .. we can just _apply_ the tech that already exists in raw form today. The resulting growth will override a plateauing Moores Law, and use all those largely dormant many-cores on todays CPU/GPU/NPU hybrid chips.

Its the best of times and the worst of times - geopolitical and economic malaise coinciding with a Cambrian explosion of new technology.

I dont think most VCs have the background to recognize this new kind of startup .. but tech-founders who had an exit payout will be well placed to go fly fishing for them - Im hoping these people will step in and Angel invest, to build the future they see on the horizon.

paulddraper2• 1 year ago

Angel investing is a chumps game

blitzar• 1 year ago

I enjoy seeing geniuses who hit winning lottery tickets first go lose it all reinvesting in the lottery.

ghaff2• 1 year ago

I know someone who, at least over the last decade of so, says that he would have done far better just putting money in a NASDAQ index than doing angel investing.

jgord4• 1 year ago

fair enough .. how do we fund the next generation of tech development ?

Governments giving money as science grants ?

Are you against all VC investment in startups ?

Philanthropy donations ?

or.. would millionaires be the people starting new startups and doing science research to scratch their own itch ?

I guess the history of science and tech has examples of all of the above.

bartread• 1 year ago

I get the sense that the financial motivations - such as they are - may only be part of it; perhaps only a very small part of it.

I’d bet a lot of people do it for the status, because they want to be able to describe themselves as investors.

Whether or not that makes them chumps to people who actually do make real money as investors doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the target audience for the status message.

Less cynically, there’s also a motivation, at least amongst some, to help people building startups.

franktankbank• 1 year ago

We don't live in a digital world and dont eat bits for sustenance. Go get a real job. Rikesh can keep your LDAP up to date for 1 gallon of water a day and a bag of flour.

azinman2• 1 year ago

This was one of my favorite books growing up, something it seemed only I have read. I’ve never seen it talked about since. Might be fun to reread it now and see how it’s aged now that I’m on the other side.

low_tech_love4• 1 year ago

What a beautfiul, human-made illustration at the top of this article!

lm28469• 1 year ago

You mean the one that's been there since 2015 and which is attributed to an artist ?

https://web.archive.org/web/20150623211113/https://grantland...

https://www.mariozucca.com

whilenot-dev• 1 year ago

Poe's law strikes again and I hope GPs comment was meant as cynical remark against GenAI slop. It seems life isn't the only thing imitating art, algorithms imitate art as well now.

low_tech_love4• 1 year ago

Yes, I do, you got me wrong, I actually meant it. It’s a beautiful man-made illustration! Thank you for pointing me to the artist.

kelseydh• 1 year ago

The important thing is the sense of manic excitement that pervades the Mutiny scenes this season, and the way it bleeds into the show itself. We know exactly where computers are and aren’t going, but it still feels like anything is possible.

This accurately describes being in a rising tech trend. The most common experience is knowing where things are going but failing to find a way to catch the wave.

udev40962• 1 year ago

They didn't review halt and catch fire after season 2 which is disappointing. It was one of the rare shows which kept on improving after each season

teeray• 1 year ago

There were four full seasons of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

neogodless• 1 year ago

Important to note this was written in 2015 likely during the airing of Season 2, which is hinted at with "in a recent episode" wording.

Boy, those early seasons of "getting so close to success before all the self-sabotage happens" were kind of brutal in a way, but I still highly recommend pushing through to the later seasons.

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

Microserfs has a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and really did a great job capturing the zeitgeist of working in tech in the 90s. It was more about the early 90s than the late 90s when I started in tech, but not much really changed until the dotCom bubble burst in 2000. A lot of us who didn't happen to work for GiantTech in the 90s shared the existential anxieties described in earlier chapters of the book, but without the upside of lucrative stock options. It's worth a read if you haven't. A lot of it is still relevant today.

kristianp• 1 year ago

The Author, Douglas Coupland also coined the term: Generation X in the novel(?) of the same name. Edit: whoops, this is mentioned in the article.

Eric_WVGG• 1 year ago

It nails the period. When the article later talks about Coupland’s follow-up J-Pod, I think it’s important to note that the naivety that the book reacts to isn’t just his own, really the entire zeitgeist was like that. Hence the magnitude of 9/11 as a wake-up call.

Po Bronson’s “First $30 Million” is also a classic that seems to have been memory-holed.

Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)

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