This is a long and very entertaining read. If you want to skip to the main accusation of hypocrisy, it is:
Speaking of facts: While presenting itself as the champion
of the working classes, the fact is Dentons Gawker empire is
guilty of almost every crime it accuses the tech industry of
committing, and several it doesnt. Denton, who now
encourages others to sneer at Silicon Valleys elite social
clubs, made his own millions as co-founder of First Tuesday,
an elite social club which spanned Europe during the first
dot com boom. While crying foul at the off-shore tax dodging
of San Francisco tech companies, Gawker Media is registered
in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying US taxes, an
arrangement which the New Yorker described as like an
international money-laundering operation. As Valleywag howls
that Google interns earn more than you, Gawker Media is
currently the subject of a class action lawsuit over its
earlier refusal to pay its own interns a dime for their
labour. And how about Valleywags mockery of lavish Silicon
Valley workplaces? Why not ask Denton about that when you
visit his steampunk office, featuring a lounge area that
looks like its straight out of the blue pill/red pill scene
in The Matrix, an office surfboard and a rooftop party deck?
Business Insider claims its one of the 15 coolest offices in
tech. And while youre there, make sure to also ask him about
Gawkers Privilege Tournament, a smug little contest in which
Gawker readers were invited to vote on which underprivileged
group (choices include: black, blind, transgender, people
with AIDS, the homeless, overeducated, and fat) should win
by virtue of its sweet, sweet moral superiority or as
Salons Katrina Richardson called the tournament: a
shamefully racist, sexist, homophobic and classist attempt
to silence large swaths of people.
I think in an abstract and idealized sense, stuff like Valleywag serves the tech industry by providing the role of watchman and magnifying glass. But on a post-by-post basis -- and if you think Paul Carr cherry-picked his examples, go on Valleywag, they're pretty much all just awful posts of out-of-context tweets -- it fails that goal tremendously. Just like Gawker itself, there are occasionally very well-put posts and actual newsbreaking -- they broke the Uber financial data a couple weeks back -- but it's hard to hold them in high esteem.
On a semi-related note: incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links.
I don't consider it censorship. I view it as curated content, which is what I strongly desire. Censorship would mean you or I couldn't get access to valleywag to see what it has to say. That clearly is not the case.
Oh hey look, Pando (well, Paul Carr) has decided to go after Valleywag's "class warfare" posts. I'm actually surprised it's taken this long. I think Valleywag has actually made some excellent points over the past few months, but has also managed to undercut their position by posting a bunch of irrelevant crap that doesn't matter.
If Sam Biddle actually cares about this stuff, I'd love to see him leave Gawker and strike out on his own. SV needs someone talking about this topic regularly.
Pando, being a de facto mouthpiece for today's top tier VCs, doesn't really carry much credibility on this subject, even though I do like Paul Carr.
The craziest thing to think about is that because a few kids at Instagram were dicks or because one or two of the thousands of Twitter employees did something bad, we extrapolate those behaviors to every tech startup worker.
My fiancee and I both work very hard, live in a modest house in the east bay and volunteer in our community quite a bit. I left San Francisco 2 years ago after being priced out of affordable living and I have no resentment to anyone working at a company that provides a lot of perks. So why am I lumped in with some guy at Instagram driving his Lambo to his mansion? We could not be any more different, beside the fact that both of the companies we work for are funded by VCs.
It can be both crazy and human nature. I think it's our duty to intercept and correct our harmful natures. The tendency to group and label people -- based on surface-level stuff like where they live or what color is their skin -- qualifies, in my opinion.
The people at valleywag have to know, deep down, about the fundamental dishonesty of what they do. They have a choice to do a different, honest job instead of pandering to the worst instincts of humanity.
The people at the second-tier mud-slingers that repeat stuff off of Valleywag (Business Insider) are just as culpable.
Or you know, it's not about individual people, but about what they do and cause AS a profession (or region or whatever).
That is, this or that individual X (say, tourist in remote beach) might be an OK guy, but the activity of all of them combined might be causing a certain phenomenon (say, pollute and disturb the beach, alter the local economy towards dependency on tourism, etc).
eh comeon tech workers are just people doing a job. the same issues/judgments apply to any profession (law, finance, journalism) but these guys are clearly just demonizing tech workers as a group when... they don't really cause anything en masse, are we blaming them for accepting salaries and being a little eccentric at times? they are just people with jobs.
this is real misdirected anger as the author points out, simply because tech workers are doing a little better than most. maybe there is resentment because people don't respect the work that they do ("they just press buttons and are overpaid") or there is jealousy because it is a profession where there is a huge amateur rank (people without degrees who are trying to bootstrap themselves into the tech world & making less than most of their college/masters-educated peers). I really think its something along the lines of this kind of phenomenon. Otherwise why not just complain about predatory lawyers/financiers etc.
Tech workers are not notoriously predatory so why should they be demonized as a group...? They are labor for hire, non-unionized at that. if you think they are harming the world in some other way, it may be better to blame the businessmen designing the requirement specs, or the users whose interest keeps the projects funded
For the people who read the HN comments before reading the article: This is like 3000 words from one shitty technology website talking shit about another shitty technology website. Don't waste your time.
This is really sad because there is real inequality in this country but its between the bottom 40% who combined have less wealth then the heirs of Walmart.
These protestors been have duped into fighting amongst ourselves instead of focusing on the real problem. Thats why "we are the 99%" was such a powerful slogan, solidarity is the only way were going to fix the problems in this country.
It's not as hard as it sounds to report on Silicon Valley from NYC. It turns out, you just have to copy and paste tweets, add a bit of snark, and then contact the tweeter's employer for comment. It probably adds 10k pageviews if you get someone fired.
It helps that you don't have to be accurate. For example, take this juxtaposition:
"Anti-Foreigner VC Also Supports Hiring Discrimination" by Sam Biddle[1]
"Y Combinator reaches farther beyond Silicon Valley" - including startups from 22 different countries in the latest batch[2]
logically speaking, for "Controversy drives page views" = P and "Just ignoring them is the best revenge" = Q, in this case P implies not Q. if controversy drives page views then by definition they're hard to ignore (as long as they're controversial).
Yeah, getting kind of sick of residents of the home our two most evil industries (media and finance) talking shit about SV tech firms. New Yorkers drove our economy off a cliff but would rather bitch about fucking Google Glasses. Please.
Well, in defense of NYC, it has a lot of industries, not just media and finance. There's advertising, fashion, entertainment, art, food... This makes the city much more diverse than San Francisco, IMHO.
It breaks my heart to say it. I loved San Francisco for many, many years -and lived there briefly-. But every time I go back now I can't help but realize everybody looks the same and have the same interest and goals and take on life. This makes the city much less interesting.
Of course this is a generalization. I'm sure there are fantastic different kinds of people around, but as a casual observer, the valley has become a very homogeneous area.
Blaming Biddle for rape or murder threats against Justine Sacco is a big stretch when he only posted about the tweet. I don't see anyone blaming buzzfeed for the same thing.
This article makes some good points but lumps them in along with several ad hominem and other pointless attacks (who his father is does not change the validity of any of Biddle's points). Farhad Manjoo's critique was much more fair.
Besides how can anyone read Valleywag and not see how desperate and reaching most of it's articles are? Why should anyone even take them seriously?
As I was reading this article, I found myself wanting to click the links he was posting (to get context), but didn't want to give Valleywag my pageviews.
It wasn't something I'd read before, but having it summed up so succinctly assures me that it is definitely not something I'll be reading any time soon.
Not sure about the Gawker drama, but $155k for the train operator pay is quite remarkable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average train operator salary in the US is $46k: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/tr...
Look at BART salaries, compare them with SV engineer salaries. There is some validity to the comparison of playing one working class against another.
Not everyone in Silicon Valley taking the buses is making bank, just like not everyone protesting is making minimum wage. Part of this is protesting gentrification, part of it is frustration with a company in regard to ones situation.
A broader, non tech blog dialog is likely more beneficial than pando vs valley wag.
I actually read the whole thing :) loved every minute. Long long ago I enjoyed an occasional Valleywag article, can't say I've visited the site now for a few years.
I always wonder where people learned the notion that hypocrisy instantly invalidates any argument in a puff of smug smoke. Yes, Valleywag are pots to the Silicon Valley kettle. It's still funny, and still shines a good light on the idiotic self-important traipsing of the tech scene.
I agree with they accusations regarding Gawker. I didn't in the past. IMO, Back when Huffington Post and Gawker were relevant anti-establishment media outlets, they played a critical role in getting the message out about the corporate and political madness of the greed-obsessed right wing. Unfortunately, they both fell to the greed virus and became what they so vehemently claim they are not.
Neither has been anything more than a TMZ clone. Why would anyone in tech read either one? Especially Gawker. Gawker is about as relevant to technology (or anything besides the latest celebrity gossip) as People Magazine is.
