Pavlo’s Reviews > Uncanny Valley > Status Update

“I wasn’t eager to go to bat for older industries or institutions, but there was something to be said for history, context, deliberation. There was something to be said for expertise. But also, if we were going to abandon expertise, I thought, in moments of deep pettiness, then why weren’t my friends being given millions of dollars to run research projects on making better cities?”

“There was a running joke that the tech industry was simply reinventing commodities and services that had long existed. This joke was disliked by many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, though I thought they should be thankful for the diversion: it moved the conversation away from structural questions about why certain things, like mass transit, or housing, or urban development, had problems in the first place.”

“Is this just how things are now? I asked. It was bizarre to me that two different groups [Gamergate and the anti-woke far-right conspiracy theorists] would have the same rhetorical and tactical strategies.
My coworker was a connoisseur of online forums and bulletin boards. He looked at me askance. 'Oh, my sweet summer child,' he said. 'They are absolutely the same people.'"

“Over a year had passed since I left. I caught myself searching for my own face anyway.”

“Walking through downtown Brooklyn, the force of time tumbling forward, I felt, for a moment, that I might viscerally understand some of the rage and grief I witnessed from longtime residents back in San Francisco.”

“'We are making products,' the CEO said, building us up at a Tuesday team meeting, 'that can push the fold of mankind.'"

This is like reading Dickens

SF was a historically corrupt government, + a housing market built atop racist urban-renewal policies—real estate values had benefited as much from redlining as from discriminatory zoning practices + midc. internment camps – but these narratives, along with the reality that an entire generation had been prematurely lost to AIDS, undercut its reputation as a mecca for the free and freakish, people on the fringe