Critiquing the tech industry has to be one of San Francisco’s favorite events in the armchair Olympics – but usually the harangues are coming from my friend that can’t seem to hold onto his personal chef gigs. Incisive commentary about the social merits of Silicon Valley from within the tech community are hard to come by (maybe because they are all fully employed).
Perhaps that’s why a critical blog post that tech news site The Next Web ran this week by normally ebullient reporter Hermione Way (who covers the start-up entrepreneur beat) set off so many alarms among her techie cohorts. Way, who I kind of think is a genius at being immersed in, and taking the piss from the tech industry, moved to Bay six months ago from the UK to interview start-up masterminds (we caught her before she’d even hopped the pond to learn about the life of a pro social networker), called out Silicon Valley on being motivated for all the wrong reasons:
I’ve heard pitch after pitch of the same technology and keep wondering why all these highly intelligent, well educated youngsters, many of whom have been educated in the best universities in the world (Stanford, Yale and Harvard) are not putting their brains to good use by solving real-world problems. Instead they’re building technology to solve trivial issues – like apps that show where to spot your nearest tofu cupcake and share it with your friends.
It’s an obvious critique that’s been levied by many people that haven’t met a fraction of the Internet entrepreneurs that Way has, but the post stirred up it’s fair share of wrath.
Robert Scoble, who found initial fame as a Microsoft blogger and has been called a “technical evangelist”, pointed to financier Cynthia Ringo and Kevin Surace of Serious Material as exemplars of conscious technology movers.
Over at Y Combinator, a start-up seed firm that operates news forums on its Hacker News website, some commenters thought the problem is that Way simply doesn’t understand what Silicon Valley is:
There isn’t a ‘problem’ with Silicon Valley, it simply exists like a beaker sitting over a bunsen burner. Over time different chemicals are available in the beaker and sometimes something magical happens, and sometime noxious fumes come out, but the place is an engine.
Of course, geographic locations don’t themselves create new techologies, socially-minded ones or otherwise — the people that live in them do. But to say that there is no culture of Silicon Valley – or hey, any place – is remarkably un-self aware. What is worked on, funded, and valued are trends that is agreed on by any community, even if, like Scoble, you can find exceptions to the rule. Here’s hoping that Way’s words will make techsters take a break from the coding-networking-developing grind to look at what they’re working towards.