Silicon Valley Ecology

By Corey Paine

"Entrepreneurship" is really a topic that can't get any more popular nowadays, and the Premier put forward the call for "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" at the Summer Davos Forum in September 2014, and since then, the whole country has been in a "double creation" fever. In September 2014, the Premier put forward the call for "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" at the Summer Davos Forum, and since then, the whole country has set off a "double creation" boom. Look at Beijing's Zhongguancun Venture Street, Wangjing SOHO, and the startup parks, incubators, and venture capital cafes that have sprung up all over the country. As the world's capital of entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley, but also in front of us, the majority of Chinese entrepreneurs are competing to imitate and chase the object, and today we will look at the other side of this entrepreneurial mecca.

The subtitle of this book translates to "A Journey into the Brutal Heart of Silicon Valley. You may be wondering, when you think of Silicon Valley, you usually associate it with positive descriptions such as "high tech," "entrepreneurial," "vibrant," and "passionate. "Why does this book use the word "brutal" to describe Silicon Valley? That's right, this book is to overturn people's understanding of Silicon Valley. This book is a tour of the current technological entrepreneurial frenzy, depicting a hypocritical portrait of Silicon Valley, y exposing the bad habits of Silicon Valley culture, and sharply satirizing the Silicon Valley technology culture.

AUTHOR BIO

Corey Paine is an American research journalist and columnist, and a longtime contributor to The Dissident, a leading American magazine of cultural criticism. When you hear the name Dissident, you can probably imagine Corey Paine's writing style, which is surely a sharp challenge to certain entrenched opinions.

Full Outline

The contents of the book can be divided into three parts.

First, the authors seriously tell us that hard work is the least likely way to get rich in Silicon Valley today.

The second part is that Silicon Valley is the so-called "capitalism", and the big technology companies in Silicon Valley are more and more focusing only on profit and money, forgetting the original entrepreneurial spirit of "changing the world with technology".

The third part is that we need to be alert to the tendency of Silicon Valley's "technology fascism".

01

Working hard is the dumbest thing to do

In the author's view, working hard is the dumbest thing to do if you want to get rich in Silicon Valley. The author says that in the past few decades, Silicon Valley has painted a myth of wealth, where countless people worked through hard labor and then became billionaires.

But no matter what kind of wealth legends you've heard, to this day, if you choose to work hard in your field, it's absolutely the dumbest thing you can do to join the billionaire club. You read that right, it's working hard that's the dumbest! In the author's opinion, if you want to get out of poverty and become rich in today's Silicon Valley, you don't start a business, and you don't work hard, you sell shovels during the "gold rush." What does this mean? It means that in a gold rush, you don't follow the trend to dig for gold, but sell shovels to fools who think they can dig for gold and get rich. If you do this, you are sure to make a fortune whether the gold diggers can dig up gold or not. If you put this logic to Silicon Valley, when everyone is swept by the tide of entrepreneurship, what you need to do is not to start any technology company, but to serve those who think they can become the second "Zuckerberg" fool. How do you do that? For example, buy some server space and start a website hosting business, or become an Audemars Piguet landlord, these things do not require you to do any technological innovation. Here, the author uses his personal experience to reveal the cold-bloodedness beneath the Silicon Valley startup boom.

The first thing the author needed to do when he arrived in Silicon Valley was to find a place to live. Like most entrepreneurs new to the Silicon Valley area, the author's search for a place to live relied on a short-term apartment rental app, Audemars Piguet. The best place to stay on Audemars Piguet for a short period of time is a place called a "hacker apartment. This "hacker apartment" costs $85 per night, which is below the market average for the Silicon Valley neighborhood, but close to what some Americans make in a day. But when you pay $85, you're not staying in a hotel! It's not even an apartment, but merely a bunkhouse.

The ad for the "hacker apartment" makes its preference for techies clear: "We welcome passionate entrepreneurs, and we can help them expand their network," it says. But the landlord here isn't the owner, who is a European man who basically does nothing and surfs all over the world in various vacation spots, and the landlord is a manager hired by the owner because local regulations don't allow for second landlords.

But even with one concern or another, there was nothing to be done. The author rang the doorbell of the hacker's apartment. He was greeted by his roommate, a skinny New Zealander. Upon entering the apartment, the first thing he saw was a pile of flip-flops and five other short-term tenants. The New Zealand roommate told him that a Norwegian startup team would be moving in soon. When that happens, the "hacker apartment" will have three guests without beds. Okay, let's see, how many people live in this tiny apartment? The answer is seven! And there will be a team moving in! Just think about how bad this living situation is. And, these seven people **** with one key. The key is kept in a small combination safe in the apartment building, and the "hackers" take it out when no one is around, for fear that the neighbors will find out that there is an illegal group home, but maybe the neighbors are in the business too, who knows? The writer's room had so many beds that he thought he was renting a private space for $85 a night. While rechecking the contract, the author finally found the words "*** Enjoy Room" in the corner, which made him furious, but there was nothing he could do about it. The rent here is higher than in New York or London. A single room costs more than $3,000 a month, a studio without a bed is $2,500, a ****ing room is $1,500, an illegal snail house is $1,000, and the whole Silicon Valley is surrounded by these prices. If you want to save money, you have to live farther away, but the money you save will still be spent on transportation and time costs, so you have to accept this "slum".

These "hacker apartments" have become a disruptive innovation in the city's real estate market! At one time, these small apartments in the city were inhabited by outdated industry workers and their children who couldn't find work. But the technology boom and the startup boom have inexplicably made these tiny apartments valuable as investment properties. Even though these "hacker apartments" offer little more than a windowless room with a simple bunk, savvy investors are buying or renting them in bulk in Silicon Valley, subletting them to entrepreneurs who dream of getting out of poverty fast and getting rich, and, in the end, don't really know who's getting rich overnight.

Not only that, but in their eagerness to make a killing, landlords often evict tenants before their contracts expire. More commonly, however, landlords bully tenants and make life difficult for them with the aim of getting them to pack up and leave as soon as possible! An attorney for a tenants' rights organization interviewed by the author told the author, "Tenants are evicted simply for putting cups in the cupboards because the landlord says it's messing up his house. Landlords can find all sorts of excuses to evict tenants. Tenants eventually give up." Although, the organization this attorney works for is a pro bono organization that helps provide legal assistance to improperly evicted tenants, ironically, this same organization ended up being viciously evicted from their office because their landlord was hoping to be able to rent the house as soon as possible to a tech company that had gotten venture capital, which would then be able to raise the rent again!

02

Capitalist Exploitation

In the first installment, the author checks into a "hacker's apartment". Here he meets a Google intern. The intern tells the author, "It turns out that all the myths about Google are true! It really does have twenty cafeterias and gyms, it has everything." Every morning, the Google intern, along with other Google employees in the neighborhood, swiped their employee cards and boarded the company shuttle bus to Google's headquarters, thirty-five kilometers away. They start the day's work on the shuttle, which is equipped with WIFI, and don't finish their work until after 8:00 p.m. After going to the company cafeteria for dinner, they are also sent home by shuttle. This kind of treatment is standard among big companies in Silicon Valley. Even startups that work in garages offer free meals. Another tech company employee interviewed by the author said, "I work until 9 p.m. because if you work that late, you get a free dinner plus a reimbursement for the cab ride home." This has become his daily behavior, and he never even questions whether these things are right or not. Many of his Silicon Valley peers, like him, never questioned it, either.

One tech company's HR explained to the authors why these extra perks have intensified. It's an escalating, targeted conspiracy that includes free steak dinners delivered to employees' workstations, free laundry services, free gyms and bathrooms, free massage chairs, and, of course, free drinks and refreshments. Employees may get a $20 steak, but as they work overtime and extended overtime, they can provide the company with more than $200 worth of additional value for which the company does not have to pay any overtime, just a steak, because the employee's overtime is all "voluntary". Thus, these seemingly lavish benefits are a way of luring employees, and they provide an effective cover for long working hours. This is exploitation, this is capitalism! And a large number of employees are in the middle of it, but they don't know it, they don't think about it, they let it exploit them, and they're still willing to do it.

These situations don't seem to be unfamiliar to us at all, and we've heard a lot about them even if we haven't experienced them. Previously, a non-famous self-media person through microblogging will be a company's overtime system in the form of a paragraph. Said, there is a network company in Shenzhen, the normal rules of five thirty off, but six thirty the company only sends a shuttle bus, no one forced you to work overtime, but in order to be able to decently sit in a one-person bus home, we are willing to take the initiative to work overtime for an hour; when six thirty ready to take the shuttle bus off, will remember another system, eight o'clock there is a working meal in the East LaiShun: kind of much, full, and fruits. We think about taking the shuttle bus home also have to cook their own meals, then take the initiative to work overtime for one and a half hours, eat a working meal and then go home; eight o'clock to eat a working meal ready to go home, and remember a company system, ten o'clock after the taxi reimbursement. After working more than ten hours a day, who still has the strength to squeeze the bus? Then take the initiative to work overtime for another two hours. The company's website is a great place to find out more about the company's services, and it's a great place to find out more about the company's services, and it's a great place to find out more about the company's services, and it's a great place to find out more about the company's services. One of the reasons is that the lyrics sing the heart of many current office workers, overworked, overdrawn health. In particular, the constant emergence of news of overwork death has given everyone a wake-up call.

03

Watch out for techno-fascism

The word "fascism" is no stranger to us, representing extreme forms of authoritarian rule. But what is "tech fascism"? And what does it have to do with Silicon Valley?

Startups are basically "monarchies". Of course, we don't call it that because it sounds weird, especially in the US, where anything undemocratic is uncomfortable. A "monarchy" is a dictatorship, where the founder is the sole arbiter, or in the extreme, a "fascist". But the truth is that founders of startups favor this type of authoritarian governance structure because it is the most beneficial to the survival and growth of the startup, and it allows the founder's will to be carried out efficiently and the founder's vision to be accomplished without being slowed down by the various systems of oversight, checks and balances.

As Silicon Valley has become increasingly crowded with startups, this "techno-fascist" mindset has spread from a purely corporate-governance approach to a political one. Key ideas of the trend include seeing corporations as the governments of the future and treating capitalists like founders as kings who want to live forever, with the option of escaping to outer space or to oceanic city-states, and who can play chess with robots and enslave them. Their first step is to exit democracy, and Silicon Valley is the place to do that. The exit from democracy will be followed by the creation of countless small corporate states that will make the world look like ancient Europe, with its city-states. Believers in this ideology hope to eventually create a society run by technology outside the United States. They believe that's where Silicon Valley will be in the next decade.

Just saying that might make it hard for you to imagine how crazy this idea is, so let's look at an example.In 2014, a Google engineer named Justin Downey drafted a ludicrous proposal. The proposal was threefold: first, to dissuade all current government workers; second, to transfer government power to tech jobs; and finally, to appoint Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, as CEO of the U.S.

Google's co-founder, Larry Page, used to want to take a part of the world and conduct unregulated social experiments. Believers in "techno-fascism" see this as a deliberate wording on Larry Page's part. They believe that what Larry Page is really saying is that he wants to roll back the law in the United States, and let the people who control the technology dictate it. They even believe that in the next few years there will be an explosion in the number of countries around the world, where every business is a country, a dictatorial monarchy. Bitcoin is the future of finance, corporate city-states are the future of government, and 3D-printed weapons are an example of emerging technology defying regulation.

You may think it's a fool's errand, but vigilance is still necessary, and it's better to be prepared for a rainy day.

Summary

First, we talked about the first part of the focus, is in the billionaire Silicon Valley, how to get out of poverty quickly, get rich? The answer is to "sell shovels during the gold rush". It exposes the rise of Silicon Valley, pushing up housing prices and creating a real estate bubble, and satirizes unscrupulous landlords and human indifference.

The second part is that Silicon Valley is the so-called "capitalism", exposing the exploitative nature of Silicon Valley tech companies behind the high welfare.

The third part is that the author warns of the need to be wary of Silicon Valley's tendency towards "techno-fascism".