What’s wrong with Silicon Valley?

Bill Wasik wrote a great essay on what’s wrong with Silicon Valley in this month’s Wired. I thought he got a lot of things right and shared it on Facebook. . . And then my Facebook feed went crazy.

I’m moving my comments here to add my two cents to the conversation.

I think there’s two things that are happening in Silicon Valley that are real.

Silicon Valley at its finest at its “Geeks in the Garage” moments. Where folks who like tinkering with stuff tinkered their way to something awesome. Those moments are about curiousity and the joy of building something cool. But the revolution has been comodified. Now every bit of tinkering is a Kickstarter project or a vc pitch away from being the next billion dollar acquisition. That’s always been there, but it feels like lately the ratio of garages to vc board rooms is out of whack.

The same thing happened to punk music and pop art. Silicon Valley has to figure out how to keep its success from killing what made it successful. Not only will we all make a lot more money that way, but it will be a lot more fun.

The second trend is the expansion of the cultural bubble that is Silicon Valley. There are conferences, parties, hackathons, meetups and events going on every night in San Francisco. A young programmer could live for years wandering only between their startup incubator to these events to their hacker house and back. It’s a land where everyone gets your JavaScript jokes and the t-shirts and the beer are always free. It’s not a bad life, but it means you’re living in an exciting and diverse place and walling yourself off from all that diversity. And that cultural bubble cultivates some pretty unhealthy world views (I’m looking at you Tom Perkins). Not everyone who writes code for a living is seduced (or even invited) into the cultural bubble. But there’s enough folks who live in that world and have enough power and money to make decisions that we should be concerned.

The challenge is to make tech more diverse, open and inclusive. It has to become a situation where when tech wins, everyone in the community wins. Because otherwise, all those Bud Light drinking, Internet Explorer users that don’t get invited to your meetups are going to smash the windows on your luxury bus.

It reminds me of one of my favorite Lemony Snicket pieces — http://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket