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As an engineer, Chris could take solace in the cleverness and elegance of the nifty tool they were conniving, even if it wasn't quite the broad platform they'd quit their jobs to build. When he tried, he could burrow himself into the technology and forget about the rest. But when he stopped for a moment he remembered the cost. [...]
this is past me :'(
"Maybe Microsoft cares if you have a degree, but the startups don't, and the companies that care about preserving startup culture don't. It's a meritocracy out here. Especially if you drop out of a really good school with a good reputation out here, like CMU. [...]"
the irony of this statement is killing me
People from the East Coast arrived and thought, "This is a community where people's time is their own." They didn't think, "This is a community where you have to juggle five different things because only one of them is likely to work out."
"After trying so hard for so long to get rich on paper," he said, "I'm going to dedicate myself to something way bigger than myself." After having felt lonely as an entrepreneur, he wanted to feel as though he was part of a movement "That's bitcoin," he said.
The Ruby developer couldn't name a problem with payroll that his company was solving; he thought they were just solving a problem called payroll. He was only on payroll for the first time in his life, and needless to say had never himself run into payroll problems. But he was working for a startup with YC credentials that had leveraged new technologies and raised a lot of money, so he could reasonably feel now that he hadn't just joined a company that did something incremental—fixed the various problems with payroll, of which there are many—but something revolutionary, i.e., fixing the problem of payroll.
"What parts of the city are you looking in?"
"Oh, you know, the actual city." I asked what that was. "SoMa, China Basin, Mission Bay. What people like us call the city."
He'd been in the city for something like three weeks, and most of what he knew about it came from people who themselves had only been around for eight to 10 weeks. [...]
[...] "Let me tell you what the worst thing would be. The worst thing is that these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another year. So far, they only lost one."
Paul Martino on the Boomtrain guys
All the while, Martino's ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent "the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions," doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn't the discovery that you're unlikely to become a billionaire; it's the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.
But before she was a face of and a symbol for one kind of middle-class feminist reckoning, she was employed at the United Electrical Workers union, where she kept very, very busy. Coontz lists Friedan’s activities as including editing the community newsletter, assisting with the babysitting co-op, and working as an organizer for a 1952 rent strike. Her early writings championed the experiences of workers, and the first few drafts of The Feminine Mystique apparently included shows of solidarity for the ways Black, Jewish, and immigrant workers experienced their own forms of oppression. The published version, which Coontz justifiably refers to as watered down, still has a few offhand references to Friedan’s connection to the civil rights and labor movements.
Daniel Horowitz, who has studied Friedan’s political affiliations, believes that her feminism is, at its core, part of her left-wing politics. But publishing Mystique as a mainstream work in the 1960s was not anything like publishing a workers’ newsletter coming out of the 1930s and 1940s. Even if she couldn’t have known what a blockbuster her book would become, she did want it to reach as many people as possible, and that meant avoiding being blacklisted, no matter the cost. The Red Scare came for all manner of people, and no one was completely safe. Rebecca L. Davis pointed out in her book More Perfect Unions that just a few decades earlier, in the 1920s, when America was considering federal divorce laws, the comparison between that and the “easy divorce” available in Russia made lawmakers consider a simpler process as “equivalent to atheistic communism.” In the early 1950s even the avowedly left-wing magazine The Nation felt compelled to qualify, when writing about the release of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (to which Friedan owed a tremendous but barely acknowledged debt; Friedan reportedly considered de Beauvoir disappointing), that the book had “certain political leanings.” Friedan’s own paranoia meant that she refused to credit her secretary, Pat Aleskovsky, for the work she did on Friedan’s manuscript because Aleskovsky’s husband had been publicly suspected of being a communist; Horowitz’s research itself has since been used to suggest that feminism in America was all part of a “communist plot.”
sick
[...] Friedan says she used to be terrified of flying, but after The Feminine Mystique was published, she stopped being afraid. “Now I fly on jets across the ocean and on one-engine air taxis in the hills of West Virginia. I guess that, existentially, once you start really living your life, and doing your work, and loving, you are not afraid to die.”
<3