I'm really a bit shocked this was flagged. A blog post (marketed as a manifesto no less!) from the founder of Netscape and one of the biggest VCs in the business about the future of technology. I understand its potential for flame wars, but how could this not be on-topic for HN?
It’s a painfully dumb piece to the point that it’s hard to even nod along with the parts I agree with, because they’re so poorly-argued. There are paragraphs that are at-odds with the one right before, and not, apparently, on purpose.
If it’s not AI written from a much-shorter prompt then I don’t know how this came to be. Writing on a big dose of uppers then not re-reading before posting? It’s an amateurish mess.
I can’t imagine how this bad, obliviously-derivative, name-dropping-while-citing-misunderstood-ideas like a college freshman, bit of writing, could promote productive conversation, unless we want to do a deep-dive critique of it so folks can better learn how not to embarrass themselves with very-public internet posts.
Fair enough, but given that it was written by one of the most powerful tech VCs on the planet, I think it's worthy of discussion just to be clear about how powerful tech billionaires think.
I already liked the piece, but the cynicism on display here makes me like it better. It may have struck a nerve, which is usually a positive indicator that a set of ideas is hitting something in the zeitgeist.
The ideas aren't misunderstood. But then again, you didn't give any specifics. :)
1. There is no cabal of moderators waiting to censor posts. This is not Reddit. There is pretty much just dang as the primary admin.
2. Posts are just flagged by other users who feel it is off-topic, or not likely to lead to productive discussion.
I'm guessing that users who flagged this thought it was "not likely to lead to productive discussion". While I may not agree with that point of view, I certainly don't think it is some sort of "censorship".
I mostly agree with you, but sometimes it's not "not likely to lead to productive discussion", but instead just "I disagree with you". Which I do wish we had less of.
Read the other comments in this thread: HN, like much of west coast tech, has started to fracture along political lines.
When I first joined HN many years ago, it was a haven for techno-optimism (not unlike this essay), but has fallen back into being reactive, resistant, cynical, and sanctimonious. I guess that's what happens after too many years of b2b saas paychecks.
I don't think there is anything wrong with B2B SaaS. I think that's a red herring.
From my experience, the conformist attitude we see on display these days comes from FANG salarymen ("salarypeople", the reference to the Japanese cultural concept of "salarymen" is instructive). They have treated tech as nothing more than a fancy bourgeois "career path" -- like high finance in the 80s or big law in the 90s. An inoffensive way to make their parents happy and raise families with a good standard of living. Nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does mean the rebellious streak in the culture begins to fade.
As I remember it, the utopian feeling of tech communities of the early tech culture stemmed from cyberpunks homesteading the noosphere (a la Linus) or engineers-turned-accidental-entrepreneurs (a la Woz). A large part of it was the sheer thrill -- the fun -- of creation. It's not B2B SaaS that drained the fun out, plenty of fun B2B products were built in the post-Linus, post-Woz area. What drained the fun out, instead, is the corporatization of the entire industry via Big Tech.
We all used to complain about IBM/Microsoft in the 90s and 00s, rebelling against their industry dominance via open source (e.g. Linux) or engineering+design (e.g. Apple). Now the same sorts of people work for any number of IBM/Microsoft-sized corporations, exerting IBM/Microsoft-style proprietary control over individual lives, in comfortable salaried roles in the 2020s.
I'm not sure what to make of it, myself. On the one hand, "tech won". Heck, even Linux and Apple won, beyond my wildest imagination in the 90s and 00s. On the other hand, so did conformism and stagnation.
(There were other similar victories, I am just using Linux and Apple as easy illustrative examples from the last couple decades.)
Reminds me of this quote by jwz from way back in 1999. He was writing about Netscape but you could say the same thing about the whole tech industry today:
The company stopped innovating. The company got big, and big companies just aren't creative. There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is.
And there's another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter.
I’ll add that this kind of techno optimism isnt even the kind of person who builds a company. It’s the kind of person who has gotten too far from the beating pulse of tech.
Tech won - and thats created new problems. You dont fix that by burying your head in the past.
