Wikipedia Sucks!

are having a little image problem these days.

First Sean Parker, cofounder of Facebook, admits it has become a "monster".
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/9/1662 ... dback-loop

Then Sen. Al Franken points out similar things about FB, Google, Amazon etc.
https://www.recode.net/2017/11/8/166247 ... gle-russia

Basically the US antitrust laws are a complete joke and are simply not being enforced--or at best very spottily. Google really deserves to be broken up for dominating search for the past 10+ years; can you picture Jeff Sessions doing that? Hell no, he's too busy trying to throw black people in prison and make abortions harder to get. What a "hero".

Meanwhile the media are full of TRUMPTRUMPTRUMP and charming things like "Louie CK is Done" and such. Thus deflecting attention away from some really serious internet problems.

god damn this is repulsive. When someone calls himself an "Internet Visionary", run for it.

https://boingboing.net/2017/11/10/suppo ... y-how.html

(There is a Wikipedia connection. Not only has Rheingold been raving about the sparkly fairy magic of WP for years, his friend and neighbor in Marin, Fabrice Florin, was the Wikimedia Foundation “Product Manager for New Editor Engagement” from 2012 to 2015. This big, big Wiki-Fan was apparently another victim of the Tretikov "purges". I wonder if Rheingold's next narcissistic book will even mention the Wiki-Magic.)

Here is Corey Pein talking to Doug Henwood on Silicon Valley; Pein had gone in undercover to see how bad it is in San Francisco: http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArch ... _04_26.mp3 for his book Live Work Work Work Die.

The truth is horrific.

Review:
https://www.salon.com/2018/04/22/live-w ... ark-heart/

A sample:
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/core ... fraud.html

This is a major reason why I find the HBO show Silicon Valley so funny; it's not funny at all. I lived and worked there for 10 years off and on (although not directly in an IT related business). It's a horrible place to live in spite of the mild climate. Living costs are out of control, landlords are sadists, traffic is out of control, most of the companies are run by sociopathic raving lunatics, and everybody lies and manipulates each other. If you fail, you end up being forced out, stuck in a homeless camp or literally dead; and your chances of failure are 90+% because so many other people are developing very similar or identical products.

Tech nerds are not merely silly and awkward dudes with greasy hair and a fondness for video games and D&D. Many of them are severely mentally ill and need HELP, not a job writing code 80+ hours per week. One can easily say similar things about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Silicon Valley the show is not a "personality comedy" at all. It is pitch-black satire and a warning. The Gavin Belson character is disturbingly similar to some REAL tech CEOs. Go and read about the history of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. He's literally a bizarre cartoon character. If anything even MORE deranged than Gavin Belson. Ellison's Wikipedia bio has been heavily "sanitized", and cannot be trusted. The history is full of well-known sneaky paid editors.

Maybe I should buy copies of this book and give them away as presents. It is the only way most people I know will ever read it, or even know it exists. I expect the Valley PR firms will pull dirty tricks to "bury" it.

Maybe I should buy copies of this book and give them away as presents. It is the only way most people I know will ever read it, or even know it exists. I expect the Valley PR firms will pull dirty tricks to "bury" it.

They will try to bury it in Silicon Valley, yes, but outside of the tech bubble, this book will be fake-ignored by these firms because it cuts too deep. We're not dealing with how the CIA suppressed/minimized L. Fletcher Prouty's 1973 book The Secret Team by buying up as many copies as it could worldwide*, nor how Morley Safer was called in to sink Douglas Valentine's The Phoenix Program in 1990. The problem in Silly Valley is one you mentioned - they are coming to a saturation point, and I don't think many of these companies will survive. We know that most start-ups (and the number of new start-ups has dropped dramatically) want to be bought up, not thrive on their own. I think we are closer to the end of the tech capitalist world now then we know, but we can't know the actual truth because the secret figures in the hidden accounting books might scare off the investors and the public.

Tech nerds are not merely silly and awkward dudes with greasy hair and a fondness for video games and D&D. Many of them are severely mentally ill and need HELP, not a job writing code 80+ hours per week. One can easily say similar things about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.

At the San Diego WikiConference I saw at least one attendee who had Downs Syndrome in an elevator, his name was written on his lanyard in this Kindergarten scrawl. I was running too much to notice if anybody was doing Aspergers-style behavior.

I can easily see entire programming departments filled with people who need to take medication to keep the faces from emerging out of the walls and to keep "the voices" at bey. Either that sort of work is only appealing to mentally ill, or it's a sign that normal people don't want to "code" for a living, or the "Computer Science" departments in the universities are taking in some people that they drive insane or the only people who want do do this stuff in college are crazy to begin with.

Silicon Valley the show is not a "personality comedy" at all. It is pitch-black satire and a warning. The Gavin Belson character is disturbingly similar to some REAL tech CEOs.

That's because Mike Judge worked in tech for three months before dropping out and getting into animation, that and he probably read Valleywag and books on some of the CEOs to update his late-80s experiences (which were turned into a series of cartoon shorts called Milton and then reworked into the 1999 film Office Space). Gavin Belson is probably a composite of a couple of these insane slavedrivers the business press thinks we should admire.


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* Robin Ramsey also mentions it on pages four and five of his "View from the Bridge" column in Lobster 75, brought up because Prouty had discussed the concept of "detailees" in his book. A "detailee" is a CIA officer who is sent to work in another branch of the US "military-intelligence apparatus" as Ramsey puts it, and he has been noticing that a large number of the Democratic candidates for 2018 are ex-CIA and ex-military; the possibility is there that this is an operation to head off any future Democratic presidential candidate from being antiwar in any way. If not, then happenstance and careerism are funny things.

Strelnikov wrote:

Silicon Valley the show is not a "personality comedy" at all. It is pitch-black satire and a warning. The Gavin Belson character is disturbingly similar to some REAL tech CEOs.

That's because Mike Judge worked in tech for three months before dropping out and getting into animation, that and he probably read Valleywag and books on some of the CEOs to update his late-80s experiences (which were turned into a series of cartoon shorts called Milton and then reworked into the 1999 film Office Space). Gavin Belson is probably a composite of a couple of these insane slavedrivers the business press thinks we should admire.

It's bizarre that HBO pays the bills for this show and it continues--like The Big Bang Theory, real-world nerds absolutely hate it, and make their hatred clear on the web whenever possible. HBO is just a division of Time Warner, a massive media empire that runs on political favors and ass-kissing. Surely they are getting some kind of pressure in the background. If you are at all right and this country's political structure is going in the Guatemala direction, canceling a TV show would be a trivial matter to keep Valley billionaires happy.

ericbarbour wrote:

Strelnikov wrote:

Silicon Valley the show is not a "personality comedy" at all. It is pitch-black satire and a warning. The Gavin Belson character is disturbingly similar to some REAL tech CEOs.

That's because Mike Judge worked in tech for three months before dropping out and getting into animation, that and he probably read Valleywag and books on some of the CEOs to update his late-80s experiences (which were turned into a series of cartoon shorts called Milton and then reworked into the 1999 film Office Space). Gavin Belson is probably a composite of a couple of these insane slavedrivers the business press thinks we should admire.

It's bizarre that HBO pays the bills for this show and it continues--like The Big Bang Theory, real-world nerds absolutely hate it, and make their hatred clear on the web whenever possible. HBO is just a division of Time Warner, a massive media empire that runs on political favors and ass-kissing. Surely they are getting some kind of pressure in the background. If you are at all right and this country's political structure is going in the Guatemala direction, canceling a TV show would be a trivial matter to keep Valley billionaires happy.

They cannot touch the show because Mike Judge created it; this guy gave Fox a decade-plus of solid ratings for King of the Hill, his MTV work before that did well, I'm guessing the ratings of Silicon Valley are good as well. Ever since Terry Gilliam's Brazil was dicked with by the studio in 1985, it looks really bad when a film or TV show (and it's usually films because they are one-and-done things*) are killed/mutilated outright after they are made, especially with a known director. This happened for stupid political reasons with Judge's Idiocracy (2006) and it made for a big outcry - "the Republicans tried to kill Mike Judge's film" was the general jist. HBO will not kill a well-performing show no matter how angrily the Silly Valley droids scream about it.

One thing that I haven't brought up is the Peter Theil vs. Gawker battle - that showed the media that these tech leaders are like James Bond villians, and really, nobody likes being told that their business is obsolete by a bunch of STEM dorks whose own businesses (especially Lyft, Uber and Airbnb) are shot full of legal holes and on the verge of being outlawed. Theil gets "a pass" because Palantir is a CIA subcontractor, but he is loathed by anybody with half a brain. We are not marching to Guatemala - this is a period that will see how well Silicon Valley does when it is extremely stressed because they have finally reached their limits. I don't think they will do well. The Thiel-Gawker episode may be seen in hindsight as the Charlottsville of techbroism, where the wave finally broke.

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* Much like the two books I mentioned, Brazil and Idiocracy were films that were very singular; they didn't spawn sequels, and the films were both examples of dark humor and satire aimed at the countries they were made in. Brazil is a jab at Thatcher's Britain during the IRA bombing campaign and the mindset of the Tory party ("remember our struggle against the Nazis", which is why almost everybody is dressed in variations of '40s clothing and the technology is neo-retro) while Idiocracy is an open slap at the essential dumbness of the Bush II years in America, with government support for Creationism, the coarse TV shows (Ow! My balls! is obviously a swipe at Jackass), and the cookie-cutter strip mall culture. Brazil was ganked because the ending was too bleak, while Idiocracy was seen as a bridge too far by Twentieth-Century Fox because of Rupert Murdoch, who was making a shitload of money off Bush II's dumb wars and cultural fights.

(Postscript) I do not agree with Pein in the Henwood interview that Silicon Valley might have outgrown its bubble phase; i.e., that it can't be killed by the market anymore. If anything, I think Silicon Valley has tried to build a Dyson Sphere around the bubble nature of the computer-Internet-biotech-service job-etc. agglomeration that is "tech" and it will collapse in the next Wall Street tumble (because it is highly tied to the financial sector), or when the SEC and other regulators finally realize that it moves money around, but no true value is being made off a lot of it, and the almighty boot comes down on the Valley's neck....or any number of other scenarios.