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“You think a death threat’s irrelevant?”
“I was talking about your trash-can bullshit,” she said. “You think you’re the only one getting death threats?” She stopped spinning and stared at the screen for a second before typing something in, then spinning again.
Miles stewed. He hadn’t meant to make this about the threats, but all he could think now was that Lily had no idea what she was talking about. No idea what he’d been going through, or how hard he’d worked to avoid making it her problem. Maybe she’d read some comments online, received a few emails, but he had a drawerful in his kitchen! He won.
brutal
“I understand,” he said, “that someone of your talent and intelligence would want to find a more proactive solution for our nothing problem. And what I’m saying is . . . Please help me. Help me do that. I can’t just pack up and go find something to believe in. I’m sorry, but I can’t. Maybe you can, but you don’t know what it’s like for me. You don’t have kids. I can’t just leave a job like this and start a bakery.”
“I have a son,” she said.
“I’ve done good in my life,” Miles insisted, annoyed with the way she was looking at him, like he’d let her down once again by being so typically Miles. He would have known she had a son if she had told him. Or, if she had told him and he’d forgotten, wasn’t forgetting important personal information about a coworker a human enough flaw to be forgiven this once? “I worked on a show,” he said. “People loved it. They wrote papers.”
lmao
Despite the popularity of the adage, Miles did not believe youth was wasted on the young. The pleasures of youth were the by-product of its shallowness, the ability to feel things deeply and then forget them, to hurry from one moment to the next, taking life as for granted as possible. It wasn’t a waste; it was the point.
i like this
The pleasures it provided had only served to underline Miles’s creeping suspicion that his life was becoming unmanageable. A single present sentence from his daughter had been enough to make him feel invincible. It felt suddenly so pathetic. His life felt small, and far from him, and the comforts of the machine were being converted directly into back fat.
oof
[...] "successful" young writer: enthusiastic reviews; a brief life on the best-seller lists; translation into a dozen languages; and an option deal from a Hollywood producer with deep pock-ets. These very welcome developments coincided with the worst depressive episode of my adult life. I can't say what caused it, but I remember thinking of the poet Philip Larkin's line about bursting "into fulfillment's desolate attic."
Why should it have felt desolate? I'd always wanted to write novels and was now in a good position to go on doing just that. Part of the trouble seems to have been that your own fulfillment is no one else's, and therefore not even quite your own. Surely another part was that even the so-called systems-novelists I especially admired when I was younger alluded to the principal system, the economic one, more than they described or explained it: a trait of their work that had become less satisfying to me, without my knowing how to do things differently in my own. For now let it be enough to confess that I would like to live in a more fulfilling society or civilization than a self-destructive capitalist one (where, as it happens, the leading cause of death for middle-aged men in the richest country of the world is now suicide) and that these essays have been, among other things, a way of saying so. If they're assembled here in hopes of contributing to left politics, their origin probably lies in a wish to find, outside of art, some of the artistic satisfaction that comes of expressing such deep concerns that you cannot name their source.
[...] this new nerd culture is the best possible news for our collective future, given the awesome challenges ahead. Soon there will be nine billion people crowding this warming planet, and each one will come equipped with a supercomputer in their pocket. So I’m optimistic, bullish even. Who better to inherit the Earth, at a time of crisis, than a generation obsessed with science and engineering?
eeerrrmmm
Larry Brilliant: Steve used to write me when he started Apple. I would get these letters, and then one day he just called me. He said, “Do you remember when we would say ‘power to the people’? That’s what I’m doing, I’m giving power to the people. I’m building a computer that every person can put on their desktop, and I’m going to get rid of the high price of the mainframes.”
new forms of power arise tho (the underdog)
Sean Parker: And then it becomes the post–social media era. It’s all the people who would have become investment bankers who want to go start internet companies, and it’s a purely commercial, purely transactional world. It’s just become this transactional thing, and it’s attracted the wrong type of people. It’s become a very toxic environment. A lot of people have shown up believing, maybe correctly, that they can cash in. But that’s Silicon Valley the ATM machine, not Silicon Valley the font of creativity and realization of your dreams.
but surely that's always where it was going to end up under capitalism? if it's able to mint billionaires, it will
Chris Caen: This is a little clichéd and eye-rolling—and it’s not true for all the entrepreneurs—but I think for a large portion of the entrepreneurs here they generally kind of make the world better. Look at all these entrepreneurs who are living five to an apartment, who are not making a lot of money, and may never make a lot of money. They can get a six- or seven-figure job at a bank or a large company but they choose to do this. At the end of the day it’s not money, it’s this emotional connection: “I am somehow connected with this world in a different way, and I can act upon that.” I think that is unique to Silicon Valley. Even back to the original days of Atari, there was this idea that you can have an emotional-professional career, and that’s okay. You can say, “I want to do this because I want to do this,” and that’s accepted.
the alternatives also suck tho
Ralph Baer: They made a couple hundred Pong games during 1972 toward the end of the year. And it was thirteen thousand Pong games the next year. The competition made more than that, everybody was making knockoffs.
Al Alcorn: Bally copied it, but it was with permission because we had a relationship with them. Nutting just stole Pong and made a game called Computer Space Ball, because everything they had was Computer this—Computer Quiz, Computer Space, Computer Space Ball… Clever! Why didn’t they ask us? Everybody else stole it except Ramtek. When I say “stole it,” I mean just copied the circuitry that I designed. Ramtek actually looked at it and made their own electronic version. They made a copy, but they didn’t take the schematic.
i never wanna hear about china copying things ever again
also, "why didnt they ask us?" seriously? why do you think