You might as well ignore Facebook and Instagram. If you want to be a billionaire, creating a social media company is probably the worst way to do it. Reading and obsessing over this kind of news is toxic for your brain.
If that kind of stuff gets to you, I would suggest the opposite of what the author did- don't read the news. These days there is very little valuable information because every media company is competing for eyeballs so they each try to out-do each other with sensational, deceptive and in some cases completely false headlines. I can't help but feel dumber every time I read Bloomberg news or the Wall Street Journal. Just don't do it. Go on a news diet for a week and see if you don't feel better and if you miss out on any important news.
I've found out that I'm much happier when I don't read the news, in particular news about politics. On the other hand, news about science & technology sometimes do make me happy.
Humans are social animals, and awareness of a negative state of our community makes us sad or mad, which seems meant to drive us to action. Evolution appears to be mostly about the code (genes), not the client (mind) or machine (body). From pre-history to present, communities've been composed of genetically-similar members. Over time this has been less and less true, corresponding with the accelerating decrease of travel costs. Now data (memes) have emerged as another evolutionary layer, at a higher level of abstraction.
Contemporary "political news" is propaganda carefully crafted by concerned corporations to misinform the viewer, both targeted "reverse lobbying" on specific issues and general-purpose anti-participation tactics. The idea seems to be to get voters to act against their economic and/or ethical interests either by convincing them to mis-vote (compared to how they would if they were more informed) or not vote, via manufactured dissent, character assassination, blurring of issues and facts, and irrelevant/impossible campaign promises (e.g. archaic issues like gender and reproductive rights and "border control" that's thinly veiled racism (and won't happen because companies want the illegals and they pay better)).
Call it reverse advertising. We've gotten so good at PR techniques that they've become invisible. Everything stays the same, but we rebrand it and view the world through the lens of the internet, detached from empathy with the bitter natural world, in a cocoon suckling the nectar of porn-- over-processed information.
This is why startups have only yet caused negligible political change. Software, and by extension most programmers, are effectively "brains in a vat." Shows how machines have already "taken over" the world, and haven't displaced us in the process. The singularity already happened, but we're still large, hairless bipedal rodents-- and computers are not. Human bodies need different stuff than machines, so we don't have to be competitive.
Likewise, hackers just want to have fun, and -- as this comment bears witness -- we just talk about it online instead of doing anything about it. Hackers aren't competitive with suits any more than computers are to biology. Suits want software, so nerds get paid, but then turn around and re-invest their money, move to Singapore and live it up, go on perma-vacation, etc. There are many brilliant hackers, many of them also more than charismatic and wealthy enough to get into national office. Instead they build the programming language they've always wanted, or take up cycling, or reconnect with nature.
When we do look beyond the bubble of hedonism, we're comparable to people who pray for things out of their control, i.e. asking for something, instead of either making adjustments to gain control or accepting that control is ultimately undesirable or impossible. Self-directed prayer (meditation), where one looks inward and develops a dialog with 'eir layers of consciousness, is something different, but other-directed prayer is the single-player version of "happy news" (porn), be it cat pictures or startup drama or gadget announcements or sports or esoteric programming language design.
Lighten up. We're not living in a literal 1984-meets-The-Matrix world just yet. Your perspective seems as narrow as you criticize others' for being.
Silicon Valley may yet reshape the world, even if some of us take scenic bike rides. (That was one of the bad things, if I'm keeping your argument straight, while empathy with the natural world in general is good. The problem with bike rides is they take time that could be spent running for president.)
I understand the point that many sectors of society could use some new life breathed into them, but I think the oxygen needs to come from where it will, and it will come.
No, but it is a Brave New World. We're the ones out on that island with the artists and scientists. We make tools of change, but sell them off so that we can go on bike rides. It's hedonism; this is the New Gilded Age.
I don't think it's healthy for anyone to want to be a billionaire. You can want to make money, maybe even a lot of it, but why the arbitrary huge value of a billion?
This got me wondering how many people have built successful products and businesses with the sole intent of making it big? In other words, if your end game is cashing out 1 billion, are you crippling your full potential? Are the real successes born out of greater passions? Happenstance plays its part for sure, but that’s part of my point. Not barring ones drive to hack and tinker, what might you be doing if money wasn’t the goal? What would you build and what road would that take you down?
I don't think there is any one rule that applies to everybody. Some people are just very skilled at making money. Warren Buffett has said that he always wanted to be rich. Others came into extreme wealth out of dumb luck and great timing (this seems more in line with Facebook and Google). The only common thread that I see is that to be successful you have to be doing something that you are very good at. That is a lot harder than it sounds because a lot of people feel pressured to do things that they really suck at but convince themselves that they are good at.
I mean - the only difference between FB and many other social networks is that everybody happened to be on FB. Of course it takes enormous amount of skill to operate on this scale, but if all those people weren't on FB, they would be on one of those other social networks doing more or less the same thing.
But Google is different. I mean - do you even remember how people used internet before Google? Google was not just "marginally better, more popular AltaVista", it dramatically changed the way we do things online. And then it did it again with GMail. Not to forget Android (though it's not in the same league as search & email). Anyway, Google had a good deal of luck and good timing, but it was by no way "dumb".
You're way out past the point that Google became Google. Two PhD CS students worked on a research project that became a multibillion dollar company. The project was not dumb luck, but the outcome was. It is not dumb luck when a hedge fund manager raises capital and makes billions of dollars. See the difference?
Yeah, I can guarantee you the billion dollar steel magnate is getting laid plenty. The only difference is you don't know his name or that he is on a yacht in St. Barthe's. Personally I'd prefer wealth without the fame.
If that kind of stuff gets to you, I would suggest the opposite of what the author did- don't read the news. These days there is very little valuable information because every media company is competing for eyeballs so they each try to out-do each other with sensational, deceptive and in some cases completely false headlines. I can't help but feel dumber every time I read Bloomberg news or the Wall Street Journal. Just don't do it. Go on a news diet for a week and see if you don't feel better and if you miss out on any important news.