Late as always, since this shit always gets lost in the couch cushions…
Noah Smith’s actually good critique o’ Silicon Valley: “Useless Gawker-inspired rags with stupid names like Gizmodo & Whatthefuck are hypocrites for criticizing Silicon Valley despite themselves being mostly upper-class white people who do nothing to help others & are a parasitic cancer on the web, when the real problem with Silicon Valley isn’t that they’re evilly well-run businesses but actually incompetent, shittily-run businesses. Also, Peter Thiel is a shitty person”.
Sounds right to me.
OK, so I may have twisted his words a li’l bit on Gizmodo & Whatthefuck ( ¿Deadspin? That’s not a name you give a magazine — that’s a name you give a forgettable Marvel superhero ); but be honest: we were all thinking that.
Also, I love his reaction to the possibility o’ a tech bust: “It’s OK: it’s mostly computer dorks who’ll suffer, not normal people”. Ha, ha: fuck you, nerds; no mo’ $400 PlayStation 4s & $1,000 8-core 16GB-Ram monster towers for you. It’s just abandonware DOS games & SNES roms from now on, just like the rest o’ us plebs — the true sign o’ utter destitution.
What I don’t love is his goofy use o’ a screenshot from some generic tactical war game as some clunky metaphor for some theory vs. evidence bullshit. ¿Are blog readers so stupid that they can’t just read text if there’s not some irrelevant picture somewhere to ease them in? See, Sir Smith still hasn’t learned from the time he flunked economics in collegio — a true story, & a true English word — ’cause he thought it’d be great to put a screenshot o’ Golden Mario running through a bunch o’ coins in New Super Mario Bros 2: The Blandness Returns ’bove the abstract o’ his economic thesis on currency manipulation & fiber equilibriums.
Later on, Sir Smith demonstrated his expert knowledge o’ psychology by spewing some pseudoscientific bullshit ’bout what he called the “shouting class”, but what ordinary call “obnoxious assholes”, & which has existed since the cavepeople days when cavepeople would smash someone with a boulder if they saw a John McCain sticker on someone else’s wheel. This was inspired by him whining ’bout someone making fun o’ some Twitter thread thing he made wherein he talked ’bout how Democrats & Republicans should all stick dicks in each other’s bums & lick each other’s tears & some leftists rightfully called that “Family Circus shit”. This is 100% true if we translate “some leftists” as “J. J. W. Mezun”.
Join me next time as I twist the words o’ ’nother blog post.