Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

I'm 37 and, God, people treat me like I'm a dinosaur. I've been programming C for 25 years and it's hard to relate to young people who don't know what a machine register is. We can argue about it, I can get downvoted, whatever.

I moved out of the Bay Area after 5 years, and to be honest, the divide between where I am and where the ideological center of Silicon Valley has drifted just continues to get wider.

It has little to do with politics, and it has more to do with the role of technology in human life and the future.

Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.

I used to be into that, believing that software was this wonderful force that is going to turn man from the ape he is into some kind of artificially-intelligent hyper-being. It's a fail, it's a fantasy. It's just not going to happen, and it's time to wake up from the dream. We're not going to be living on Mars or visit Jupiter or become immortal, not in the next 10 years or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. With high probability you're going to live out your life and die somewhere between 70 and 100. Just like the billions of humans before you. Get used to it! It's OK, even.

I moved away to get out of the shouting match, to get away from so many young bright software developers like me straight out of college, who just want to disrupt everything for no reason, and to get out of that echo chamber. Everyone's a unicorn. Everyone's gonna change the world. FFS your stupid chat apps are not going to change the world.

Moving out of the Bay Area is not about being disillusioned, it's about focusing on things that actually matter, instead of the silly bubble.

> I'm 37 and, God, people treat me like I'm a dinosaur. I've been programming C for 25 years

Exit out of vim, fire up Visual Studio Code, and start writing some Javascript. At this point, the 20-somethings will hoist your chair atop their shoulders and carry you around the office chanting your name.

I don't live in the US but I visit sometimes in Bay Area for business.

The most amazing cultural thing in SF that blew my mind was the existence of startup scene as a cultural phenomenon, subculture and lifestyle.

I'm not completely sure if this is cultural misunderstanding and I am missing something, but it seemed like for every real young entrepreneur there was ten dreamers who were just hanging in the scene for vibes. Dropping out from collage "to startup" but spending their time just hanging out with the group of people with the same subculture. It seemed like pitching a startup was a hobby and maybe phase in life just like sabbatical year.

I find it utterly fascinating. I have no idea if it has negative effects or if it's completely positive phenomenon. Clearly there is lots of young energy in the air.

10 years of Java with IntelliJ, and now I'm stuck back in this dungeon with C++ and emacs. FML, right?

> Visual Studio Code

Surely Atom would be a better "typical hipster editor"?

>> Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.

That's what it sounds like to me too. I find it particularly hard to reconcile claims of liberalism, or even libertarianism, with an industry led by Google, Amazon and Facebook, companies that basically make money by running roughshod over their users' privacy.

It's whichever sucks more 100s of MBs of memory for putting a text file on screen.

I am 44 and visit the Bay Area from time to time. I have the same feeling on various levels.

Anything older than two years has disappeared into a vortex. I mean I remember when the peninsula was the center of the tech industry - I mean Facebook came out of Palo Alto in 2004, it wasn't that long ago. Now the peninsula is the home of Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and other dinosaurs founded between the 1960s and 1980s, and now Facebook is considered a dinosaur next to upstarts like Snapchat.

People travel from Market Street to their startup office. Everyone has a Macbook. Everything is done on Slack. Food is delivered to the communal tables at 1 PM via one of the dozens of online services that exist that make startup life simpler. If your laptop is HP, if you actually send e-mails from time to time, if you still use IRC and Freenode (or heaven forbid, EFnet) - dinosaur.

I've been on the Internet since the 1980s. One reason for lacking techno-utopianism is I see what has happened. I see how Verizon/AT&T the monopolies seized control of what I guess they always controlled on some level. I see how they destroyed Usenet. I see the NSA monitoring what Americans are doing 24/7/365, and storing it forever in a Utah data center they are still building. I see intelligent conversations between academics fade away for alt-right 4chan "raids". There was always some dull-headed and anarchic forces on the net but now they have taken over. I see the collaboration and massive amount of free man-hours given to build the net being seized and expropriated by large corporations. I see people burned out with 80/90 hour week startup death marches, then get burned on options for Zynga/Skype option clawbacks, then have their marriages and families and lives fall apart - 40/50 something unemployable burnouts with broken families. While the VCs and bigcorp majority stockholders make out like bandits.

It is one reason experienced people are shunted aside - it is easier to sucker some kid in their 20s to throw a decade away slaving for peanuts for super angels, VCs and their LPs. All the while having the founders talking about the importance of company culture, as if you're in some cult - which on some level - you are.

Agreed. This is probably my biggest gripe with SV tech companies. They seem to genuinely believe that there is no natural intersection between tech / software innovation and ethics. I would love to see a law similar to GDPR come to the US for this very reason...

So Atom then ;)

It's not exclusive to Silicon Valley. Just go to any coworking space anywhere in the world, and you'll find a group of "serial entrepreneurs".

As a geographical outsider, it seems to me that this is more indicative that Silicon Valley runs on a deep amoral cynicism that uses hypocritical marketing messages to appeal to a segment of left-leaning youthful technological tastemakers.

I feel this is more of an indictment of the cynicism and hypocrisy of the gargantuan power players in SV than of the alleged political beliefs (techno-utopianism, liberalism) being discussed. The line of discussion that this thread represents, which seems common on HN these days, seems to disparage liberalism as if it is to blame for being used as cover by powerful corporations that seem to me to be more anarcho-capitalist than anything else.

Are there really very many techno-utopians in SV, or are they mostly people and companies who use the language of making the world a better place as a cover for consuming it economically?

> If your laptop is HP, if you actually send e-mails from time to time, if you still use IRC and Freenode (or heaven forbid, EFnet) - dinosaur.

I work at a FAANG company and while most people use mac, email is still without competition and irc is still somewhat used but on the decline since our company is so big we now have our own in house tool that works better.

Emacs?

> libertarianism, with an industry led by Google, Amazon and Facebook, companies that basically make money by running roughshod over their users' privacy.

That is the libertarian utopia right? Ultimate privatization, very few regulations on what businesses can do.