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 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.