Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
So now I live in the woods, almost as far from San Francisco as you can get and still be in the US.
I’ve got a fiber connection and half a prayer everything I know about software and technology strategy can still matter, can still pay some bills.
It’s hard to spend a lifetime really learning something, knowing it down to your bones, only to find the Mecca of its practice so hostile to the vision of the future you hold dear.
It’s been quite a walk through the desert.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
Today all those guys are RICH
I mean, beyond fuck-you money, this is fuck-everyone money. And powerful, in that they can do more or less what they want any given year, and have access to anyone else they need to meet or influence.
Meanwhile, I’m not rich.
It feels like I could have been, if I’d made different choices. But I couldn’t do that any more than I could have sprouted wings.
It’s one of the enduring heartbreaks of my life that I found the Valley so inimical to my values.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
Man, Steve Huffman tried to open the door for me, too.
Sometimes I look back and wonder if I fucked up. He’d invite me to hang at the beach with his YC buds.
But I just couldn’t get excited about them and their world. I couldn’t play the game the way they all expected. It wasn’t for me.
We haven’t talked in years. I got pretty mad at him and Alexis, after they returned to Reddit. I felt they had a greater responsibility to community health.
At the time, Steve… disagreed.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
It drove me bonkers.
These guys were getting absolutely rich off the backs of the communities that hosted them.
And they couldn’t take care of someone when things went wrong?
It was such a breach of the basic, reciprocal, implied social contract we should all adhere to.
And what I was learning was that all of Silicon Valley business culture was premised on that kind of breach. Move fast and break society if it earns you a better valuation next round
I didn’t like that at all.
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
The primary externality Airbnb generated was RISK
This exploded into public awareness when a host found her apartment absolutely destroyed by a guest
Which, you know, of course: a system like that is bound to fail spectacularly on occasion.
But what shocked me was how unprepared Airbnb was to make their host whole again. They were dodging accountability and only public shame, orchestrated by the host’s desperate PR campaign, could make the difference
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
When I got to San Francisco in 2010, I really wanted to do it all
Build a startup, create change through technology.
But the more I learned of the culture, the less I wanted to succeed according to its rubric. The turning point for me was Airbnb
Around 2011, Airbnb was REALLY taking off. All the benefits of a software business, none of the drawbacks of a real estate business. The best of all worlds.
Except…
Aral Balkan
@danilo I hear you.
(It’s not you, it’s the system that’s monumentally fucked up. Your only problem seems to be that you’re clearly not an extractive and exploitative asshat.)
I hope to have the initial pieces of the Small Web* in a usable state next year. Come play with us – we don’t have any money and no one will become a billionaire but hopefully we can make things at least a little bit better :)
💕
Nicole Parsons
AirBnB triggered an explosion in home prices & rents, capital gains tax evasion, foreign money laundering into residential real estate, and the commodification of residential housing by private equity Wall Streeters like Blackrock.
As global anti-democracy movements grow, a flight of capital out of repressive regimes like China & Iran accelerated housing unaffordability
Homelessness blew up because housing became treated like commercial real estate.
Clive Thompson
One of the most interesting things to me has been watching the rare times when regulators actually do clearly see the potentially-malign externalities that are outgassing off a tech business model ...
... and pass regulations to account for them
I'm thinking of how many US cities began more-tightly regulating electric-scooter firms, and even (eventually) Airbnb
This regulatory action has, a far as I can tell, mostly been at the local or state level ...
Clive Thompson
Yep -- as I was reading @danilo's original thread, and that anecdote of realizing the Airbnb founders were happy to let their users/community bear the costs of entirely-foreseeable problems caused by Airbnb existing, my first thought was that one trend that unified the big Silicon Valley firms that emerged in the late 00s was ...
... "shrugging off externalities" as a business plan
A venerable strategy in business, bien sur
But rediscovered with exuberance by those guys
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
@glyph this is real as hell and especially visible with the self driving car fiasco
The shit is out there running people over and it takes how long to shut it down? It’s pathetic
Glyph
@danilo If everyone is willing to externalize their costs but you, you get out-competed and replaced by someone else who is willing to do that externalizing. The incentives make the environment more than the personalities do.
Glyph
@danilo I obviously think the crime-doers doing the crimes are to blame here.
But the sleeping regulators are also an important part of the problem.
If you are an executive who is not comfortable with rampant criminal behavior, but you’re also not an incorruptible paragon of righteousness (as most of us are not), there’s only so long you can watch the rest of the industry do a bunch of crimes before you can start wondering “wait, are these actually crimes or is it just acceptable CODB?”
Glyph
@danilo I am in this picture and I do not like it.
I still live in the area, I haven’t had that big falling out with anyone personally, but the dawning realization that the engine of “tech” was just breaking existing laws with technobabble obfuscation (a partial list: illegal cab company, illegal hotel, illegal parking garage, illegal rocket launches, wildcat bank, mass art theft) and it only works because law enforcement is perpetually asleep at the wheel … makes it hard to maintain enthusiasm
Danilo Campos 🇵🇷
@glyph yeah
WAY too much of the last cycle’s “innovation” was software outrunning sleeping regulation
It’s depressing stuff
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