The description of cluely's office makes me think of Sugar Ape magazine in Nathan barley.

This isn't a particularly acute or interesting comment but I feel the need to say: This is a fantastic, well written, and quite sympathetic account of the excesses of the world silicon valley VC has created. It's weirdly beautiful.

Devolution.

Wow this guy can write. I don’t even agree with his point or pessimism. I just enjoy reading this.

"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."

I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.

A lot of people here like this guys writing.

For a longer and more biting critique of SF one should read

Private Citizens (2016) by Tony Tulathimutte

“ Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire.”

> A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation.

Tangential, but this sounds an awful lot like Disgustipated (‘The Cries of the Carrots’) a ‘hidden’ song on the Tool album Undertow, including the exaltation part: the narrator of the song is a preacher.

I oppose all regulations (except self-regulation which is rooted in fear of consequences) and I despise all startups which profit from regulations. It's such a scam.

Most regulations achieve exactly the opposite of what they claim.

> Roy was still up. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. He and most of the Cluely staff were flopped on a single sofa. All these people had become incredibly rich; previous generations of Silicon Valley founders would have been hosting exorbitant parties. In the Cluely office, they were playing Super Smash Bros. Did they spend every night there? “We’re all feminists here,” Roy said. “We’re usually up at four in the morning. We’re debating the struggles of women in today’s society.”

Noticed this during the crypto hype as well and the articles about SBF-and-friends' Bahamas lifestyle. Are there more "startups" that feel more like VC-funded frat houses than actual businesses?

It seems people have figured out that sociopathy and self-promotion are rewarded in the current culture and that being a con artist has essentially no consequences anymore. And all of it is done by ambitious people who are p-zombies, lacking an inner life or curiosity about anything but how to make more money.