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The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

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Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#121

Post by djhn »

jdminhbg wrote: post #89
djhn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Android and iOS phones? They might as well be any generic cheap Nokia, flavour du jour. Obviously not, or people wouldn't be spending hundreds of extra dollars to abandon their generic cheap Nokias in favor of Android and iOS.

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.

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#122

Post by adventured »

cmiles74 wrote: post #107
jdminhbg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#123

Post by Alex3917 »

nitrogen wrote: post #76
Alex3917 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmodernism isn't a literary movement, and no one needs to know what it is for it to become the dominant intellectual paradigm.

It's easy to say you've figured out what everyone is doing if you just introduce a term and define it as "what everyone is doing".

Except for that I didn't introduce the term...

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#124

Post by jdminhbg »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #119
jdminhbg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#126

Post by CPLX »

clock_tower wrote: post #81
CPLX wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So excellent that the rest of the comments have deftly proven Poe's Law once again.

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#127

Post by serge2k »

jdminhbg wrote: post #74
AngrySkillzz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SV, entrepreneurship, and startup culture have had such a profound effect on the west Only in your tiny bubble. People seriously believe this?

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?

what percentage can even name the cities where those companies are headquartered?

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#128

Post by ritchiea »

david927 wrote: post #106
ritchiea wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the story and the best jokes are in the articles about the book and the included text.

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 ha…

I didn't say the skewering was the problem. The book barely scratched the surface of the material that's out there.

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#129

Post by nmrm2 »

roymurdock wrote: post #23

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 t…

> Post-modernism [1] has been considered "dead" for about 10-15 years

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.

Re: The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

#130

Post by cmiles74 »

adventured wrote: post #122
cmiles74 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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