I've read criticisms of silicone-valley culture before, but this one takes it much further. I think there are some very valid points in this, but I also think it's wishful thinking to hope that folks in charge will eventually become purely driven by fixing broad problems in society and not getting rich quick, or status, or being in charge, or what have you. The struggle between 2nd and 3rd "estate" (i think that was the term) people was interesting, conceptually.
I've always wanted to do a serious study of leadership in a given industry and quantify something like this. Like quantify actual individual leaders and do analysis and things.
I'd wager most "leaders" as you rise in a company are less and less about making any useful decisions and more and more about just giving a figurehead to help the underlings monkeybrains organize themselves.
One of the things I hate (hate hate) about my current company is the amount of ego-stroking and special-snowflake-celebration the founders/execs get.
The problem with this essay (good as it is) is that it neglects the fact that the only way the 2nd/3rd estates will ever succeed in purging the 1st is by refusing to work with them. Unfortunately, they can dangle some very shiny things in front of engineers to convince them to defect.
If technology is going to outgrow the existing manchild oligarchy, it has to leave Silicon Valley. It's impossible (for a critical mass of people, if not necessarily the individual) to be anything but The Man's bitch in a place where starter apartments top $3,500 per month and houses cost over $1 million.
Silicon Valley's a joke at this point. So where will the technologist's positive-sum impulse reconstitute itself? I have no fucking idea. It could be in Seattle, it could be in the Upper Midwest, and it could be in another part of the world. And who will fund the new way of doing things, one which will be more profitable (in the long term) and much more socially responsible, but less controllable by the people holding the pursestrings? Again, I honestly don't know.
If Seattle implements rent control, it will be the mother of all property investment opportunities as it turns into SF 2.0 over the next decade. Long-term renters will dance in the streets alongside property owners and everyone else will be priced out forever.
Sorry for hijacking the topic a bit, but I don't think it will be Seattle. And it's already too late for it to be Boston. I'd love for it to be Portland, but Portland's politics make that impractical. You need a hard to copy magical mix of social liberalism mixed with a healthy subpopulation of corporate whoredom to recreate Silicon Valley IMO.
I've always wanted to do a serious study of leadership in a given industry and quantify something like this. Like quantify actual individual leaders and do analysis and things.