by
Adam Fisher
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Ray Sidney: I got burnt-out. I was not feeling very productive. I thought, You know what? I need to get away.
Charlie Ayers: A lot of the early-timers were looking at, like, How much does this island cost? There was a lot of distraction.
Ray Sidney: Originally I thought, You know what? I just need to take a month or two off, and then I’ll kind of get that fire back in my belly. And that never happened. I left in March of 2003.
lol
Blaine Cook: Rabble was pretty bored of working at Odeo and distracted in all sorts of different ways.
Rabble: I’m an anarchist. I think we should have a revolution and we should restructure and we should have democratic control and decentralized worker cooperatives and everything else.
Ev Williams: It’s hard to manage anarchists.
Biz Stone: They wore shirts that said ANARCHY. And then they would ask questions to all of Odeo, like, “What’s a good hedge fund to invest in?”
Rabble: I was waiting around for my stock options and ready to move on and had enough of the dot-com thing. I felt like I wasn’t changing the world enough.
Biz Stone: Those guys were a pain in the ass. They would specifically sit down during a stand-up meeting—on purpose! There was one stand-up meeting where they were sitting down and Ev was like, “Guys, please, I need everyone here by ten a.m.” Because everyone was showing up at noon or whatever. And one of the guys raised his hands and said, “I have a question.” And Ev was like, “Yes?” And he said, “What’s our motivation?” And Ev just lost it. Ev just yelled out, “It’s your fucking job!!”
lmao this is hilarious
Scott Hassan: That same type of technology will be used in tele-operated robots; some people call them Waldos. Think of this device as a set of arms that rolls around, that’s able to do stuff—two hands that can be manipulated from afar. Let’s say it fits where your dishwasher used to be, and whenever you need it, it comes out of there and it unfolds and it’s operated by somebody else in another location that has expertise that you want at that time. You want dinner made? Well, it’s just remote-operated by a chef, in some type of rig, so that when they move their arms, the robot moves its arms, in the exact same way. And that person is wearing these gloves, so that whenever the robot touches something, they can feel that touch. So that that person can pick up things and chop things and go into the refrigerator, open the doors, as if they were there. Then that same Waldo, when that person is done with making dinner for you, instantly switches over to this other person who loves to clean up, and then they go and clean up the whole kitchen for you. It’s the service economy, but it’s in your own home, right? And so you basically have expertise on demand. So, well, something like that is going to be widespread in maybe ten years.
is this guy a fucking moron? he is basically asking to be eaten
In the Silicon Valley where I'm from, the stories were almost never about money. They were tales about resistance, heroism, and struggle, yarns about the creation of something out of nothing-and the derring-do required to pull such a feat off. In short, they were about dragon slaying. That's still true, at least in the Silicon Valley I know.
Those were the stories that got me excited. And they still do.
I'm not saying there isn't an economic story to be told. In fact, I think that we are witnessing the greatest transition since the industrial revolution. A new economy— the information economy—is being created, and the center of that new economic order will be Silicon Valley. And if that's not the business story of the century, what is?
Still, the bigger question, in my humble opinion, is how that transformation will transform us. We begin to see the answer in the culture that's being created in Silicon Valley, now. It's future obsessed and forward thinking. It's technical and quantitative. It's market oriented. [...]
he's both wrong and not
[...] smiling and remembering details about their work. I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn't have a "real personality", but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that's the kind of person I am.
[...] Whenever I got a "brilliant" I took a little photograph of it on my phone and sent it to Bobbi. She would send back: congrats, your ego is staggering.
My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was. When I couldn't make friends as a child, I fantasized that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other student who had been in the school before, a genius hidden among normal people. It made me feel like a spy. As a teenager I started using Internet messageboards [...]
ouch
Is your dad as handsome as you are? I said
Why, are you thinking about going there? He's very right-wing. I would point out that he's also still married, but when has that stopped you before?
Oh, that's nice. Now who's hostile?
I'm sorry, he said. You're so right, you should seduce my dad.
Do you think I'm his type?
Oh yeah. In the sense that you greatly resemble my mother, anyway.
I started to laugh. It was a sincere laugh but I still wanted to make sure he would hear it.
That's a joke, said Nick. Are you laughing there, or weeping? You don't resemble my mother.
Is your dad actually right-wing or is that a joke too?
Oh no, he's a real wealth creator. Hates women. Absolutely detests the poor. So you can imagine he loves me, his camp actor son.
I was really laughing then. You're not camp, I said. You're aggressively heterosexual. You even have a twenty-one-year-old mistress.
That I think my father would actually approve of. Happily he'll never know.
cute/funny exchange
Bobbi: well you don't really talk about your feelings
me: you're committed to this view of me
me: as having some kind of undisclosed emotional life
me: I'm just not very emotional
me: I don't talk about it because there's nothing to talk about
Bobbi: i don't think "unemotional" is a quality someone can have
Bobbi: that's like claiming not to have thoughts
me: you live an emotionally intense life so you think everyone else does
me: and if they're not talking about it then they're hiding something
Bobbi: well, ok
Bobbi: we differ on that
gchat. is she lying??? to bobbi & herself?
I looked down at my own hands. Carefully, like I was daring myself, I said: if I lash out at you it's just because you don't seem very vulnerable to it.
He looked at me then. He didn't even laugh, it was just a kind of frowning look, like he thought I was mocking him. Okay, he said. Well. I don't think anyone likes being lashed out at.
But I mean you don't have a vulnerable personality. Like, I find it hard to imagine you trying on clothes. You don't seem to have that relationship with yourself where you look at your reflection wondering if you look good in something. You seem like someone who would find that embarrassing.
Right, he said. I mean, I'm a human being, I try clothes on before I buy them. But I think I understand what you're saying. People do tend to find me kind of cold and like, not very fun.
I was excited that we shared an experience I found so personal, and quickly I said: people find me cold and lacking in fun.
Really? he said. You always seemed charming to me.
I was gripped by a sudden and overwhelming urge to say: I love you, Nick. It wasn't a bad feeling, specifically; it was slightly amusing and crazy, like when you stand up from your chair and suddenly realize how drunk you are. But it was true. I was in love with him.
yikes. relatable
also, nice illustration of inside/outside, being unable to see how someone feels about the other, etc. always alone inside our own heads, with our stupid hangups about how no one else is like us!
Throughout Melissa's reading, Nick watched her face very attentively and laughed in the right places. My discover that I was in love with Nick, not just infatuated but deeply personally attached to him in a way that would have lasting consequences for my happiness, had prompted me to feel a new kind of jealously toward Melissa. I couldn't believe that he went home to her every evening, or that they ate dinner together and sometimes watched films on their TV. What did they talk about? Did they amuse each other? Did they discuss their emotional lives, did they confide in one another? Did he respect Melissa more than me? Did he like her more? If we were both going to die in a burning building and he could only save one of us, wouldn't he certainly save Melissa and not me? It seemed practically evil to have so much sex with someone who you would alter allow to burn to death.
love how this gets so off the rails. reminds me of high fidelity