So we found out people hate us...

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and as we asked the government to step in, we discovered the broader public really hates us. Like, something about the tech industry is repulsive to people on the outside.

It’s not that hard to see why we’re hated

Tech in the ‘00s was exciting because disruption wasn’t cool yet. If you said “move fast and break things”, people would think you’re dumb. Technologists at the time felt that they were stewards of the future. Ego wasn’t involved. I mean just look at these guys, you can’t tell if they’re running a board meeting or picking up their kids from school.

Compare that to the technologists in the age of social media. Everyone consumed too much Steve Jobs porn. Being a founder became cool. People want to do YC so they could tell people they did YC. Technologists today want to build a following more than they want to build a good product — we even coined a word for this strategy: “The Cult of Founder”. Everyone’s racing to make a hot take on Twitter for attention. SVB tweets are thirst traps for techies— lame content for likes.

This is why Silicon Valley is so hated online. It's easy to find founders pretending to be stewards of the future when the real motivation is fame and money just like everyone else. They just feel morally superior with how they go about it. “I want to make a product that a lot of people use” is a thinly veiled “I want to be famous”. When others express disdain for tech, we dismiss their criticism because we’re "building the future". If we want to be seen as stewards, we need to act like it and move without ego. Imagine being at a party and someone comes up to you and says “I literally save lives with my tweets”. You would think "what a loser".

People like Keith Rabois think they’re Steve Jobs when really they’re Keith Rabois. Lame, ego-driven nerds grasping at their 5 seconds of fame. In our tech bubble, we're blinded by our egos and interpret all criticism as criticism of technological progress. This blinds us from having the real conversation.

People want their institutions to serve them

People are genuinely frustrated. They work hard and can’t afford homes. Private equity investment firms drive the already out-of-reach prices up even further. Companies poison or kill us with little to no consequence. Companies can get away with seemingly anything. Our government acts like its constituents are corporations, not citizens. It feels like our institution is failing us. When Citizens United was overturned, our government allowed corporations to spend unlimited money in politics under the guise of free speech, effictively letting them buy the institution that was meant to protect us from them. So people now think corporations are the problem, which is sort of true but needs a slight edit: corporations involved in politics are the problem.

So the anti-SV crowd sees (1) ego driven nerds starting corporations and (2) large corporations buying elections, and would be happier burning it all down. They say things like billionaires shouldn’t exist and capitalism is bad. SV responds in a similarly polarizing way, saying the only answer to fixing a crumbling institution is to replace it with a corporation. Discourse becomes increasingly polarized. This is a downward spiral.

Society has a high propensity for catastrophe

An added mix here is that the 2020 pandemic made society too frenetic. The world operated too smoothly. Imagine every day you wake up, commute, work, home, dinner, gym, sleep, repeat. For many, life was on autopilot and was monotonous and boring. Surely this couldn’t be life, right? They'd almost want pain just to feel alive. That’s what Covid was for a lot of people.

By massively disrupting the treadmill, people felt alive. There were Reddit threads about people dreading going back to normal. We’d doomscroll twitter or refresh the news like it’s the score of the world cup and it felt like there was something every day. New death tolls. New covid waves. Hospitals at capacity. The stimulus checks. The election. January 6th. The 0% interest rates. The housing boom. Another stimulus check. The cost of shipping skyrocketed. Stocks skyrocketed. The shortages. The everything shortages. Crypto skyrocketed. Jpegs are now worth a hundred million dollars. Crypto crashes. Stocks crash. Russia invades Ukraine… it’s ongoing! I just recounted a decades worth of historical events, but it happened in 24 months. Our society as a whole is addicted to catastrophe to the point that we’ll will them to existence, like those in tech did with SVB, and like those outside of tech are about to with a broader bank fallout.

To recap, society has a high propensity for catastrophe, nerds with egos are annoying, and corporations own the government.

It feels like society is bursting at the seams, but there’s hope. These are tangible things we need to push our government to do:

Make sure depositors get their money. Things will get really bad if people can't trust parking their money in a bank account.
Overturn the Citizens United ruling. Big corporations are as threatening to average citizens as they are to startups. When a company becomes worth a trillion dollars, they have an unfair amount of power. In the business realm, we keep this power in check with antitrust laws. In the political realm, the check got overturned 10 years ago.
Build public transit and housing really fast. When people feel that they’re priced out from things they should have, they build resentment, and they are focusing that resentment to any wealth accumulated by anyone. Even if it was fairly accumulated. The answer isn’t to stop people from accumulating wealth, but to stop people from being priced out from a home and a community. People get older and inevitably want a larger space for their family. Today, we give them 2 options: Go find a remote job or commute and waste 12% of your day. Remote work is bad for the soul, but commuting is worse.

Silicon Valley receives the misplaced brunt of people's resentment towards crumbling institutions and overpowering corporations. Instead of getting defensive and pointing fingers back, we need to work together to fix the broader societal problems by working with our government, not outside of it. Silicon Valley typically hates dealing with the political process because it's bureaucratic and slow and we're used to moving fast, but we can't continue in isolation. We need the support of the government and people outside of SV.

We can make a society where homes, 25-minute commutes, and passionate work is not a luxury of the wealthy, and we have a moral imperative to do so before things get a lot worse.