Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
Ah! I actually saw go and matrix on the same day as we arrived to the cinema too late for the earlier matrix show! I forgot everything but I remember liking it a lot.
Ah Go is one of those movies that got lost in the field in 1999; it would have been the top film of the spring in many other years, but opening 1 week after The Matrix leaves it with few people my age (I was a senior in HS when it came out) knowing about it.
The article seems to have a simplistic thesis that it doesn't really develop beyond: optimization, efficiency and focus is not fun, and these things epitomize SV. But I'm not sure that even scans.
Those things (optimization, efficiency and focus) can most definitely be fun. And SV is not really about those things.
SV is more about "relentlessness" and the wild (or Wild West) allocation of capital. This makes the Bay Area a kind of crazy frontier-town, and it comes with all the vices that entails.
The homeless crisis can be seen as one symptom of the Bay Area's frontier-town vibe.
Cash App founder Bob Lee's tragic death brought to light another aspect of the "funderbelly" of SV, in "The Lifestyle"^0
Debate rages for sure, but "fun" and "fucked up" commonly overlap: Emily Chang takes a kind of spurned spinster bias in Brotopia^1. The book is her SV expose that spins a yarn similar to the party-scene-disillusionment trope that's a common thread in 90s indie films, such as Trainspotting, and Doug Liman's Go. Chang's work, however, is in line with modern discourse style, as she takes a more furious, righteous bent, leaving little to the imagination as she passes judgement against what she sees as an emblematic American abomination.
A more recent, relevant and mainstream revival of that trope is 2022's Babylon by Damien Chazelle, set in 1920s Hollywood. One could hypothesize that the debauchery of Hollywood may mirror that of the Bay Area, possibly stemming from the lavish influx of capital to those whose maturity has yet to catch up with their wealth.
In the same vein, themes of "the price of fame" and the corrupting power of celebrity hint that life in the high line of Silicon Valley might be susceptible to a similar moral decay.
Of course, it could be something else entirely, but it might be the case that the issue is not that SV fails to understand fun. It's instead that it doesn't know how to handle it, or do it in a healthy way. Eventually, a kind of puritan sterility is the natural companion of such a debauched underbelly. It may therefore be that lifelessness criticized by the author is, paradoxically, the result of SV having too much fun, yet not having the integrity or morality to make it sustainable, or healthy.
If SV learns how to make its boom town vibe sustainable and healthy, it might be able to stay aloft to enjoy the whole ride. This could enhance everything about it.
based on what I know of "new age" cults these two things are not always mutually exclusive
ask anyone from an older generation who lived through the late 1960s/early 1970s as a young adult...
in the modern era I'd wager there's some degree of venn diagram overlap between MLM recruitment and "open relationship" people too
actually as I recall an example of this was shown in entertainment media in the 1999 movie "Go" where a cop and his wife are also running a MLM thing and try to recruit/sleep with one of their targets
You're throwing a lot of things out there and I really can't see a real connection between the Go documentary and all of this Palantir/no-prejudice/no-emotion/favorite-food talk.
Where is this data? Are you talking about the hilarious statistic that 94% of subscribers are happy with the service?
I tried to watch a film last night and searched for all of these very popular films.
* Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
* 28 Days Later
* Go
* Gladiator
* American Beauty
* Speed
Then I gave up. When you try 6 very well known films and none of them are on there it changes how you think of the service from "most stuff is on there" (like Spotify for example) to "I have to search Netflix to find something I like" (like a normal TV channel). It's very different.
For me, in an incognito window (so Google is less likely to tweak search results for my preferences), the Wikipedia page for the game Go is the first result, and five out of the top 10 are also about the game. The other results are Disney's "go.com" domain, golang.org, and the movie Go on IMDB.
Golang is often preferred as it's much easier to search for and no need to disambiguate between other things called Go (Chinese board game, 1999 film).
This is a meme that comes up every few years like clockwork. Unfortunately, this one, like others before it, just shows how little people know about Hollywood. I guess it doesn't matter, as it makes for great link-bait. So maybe they know more than they let on, but dumb it down to "mean" people and "dying" industry. Yet, if that were the case, no one would want to take it over. The industry is, however, closer to a zero sum game than not. Offers to be a "partner" are offers to "take" some of the revenue.
There are two "modes" of entertainment (I am not counting learning or socializing, which are separate): "games" and "story-telling". I've pitched ideas on a cross-over between the two (over ten years ago), but really the two are very different, right down to how the brain behaves in each mode. Music is interesting because it doesn't take our full attention -- it would interesting to see other entertainment that had that same quality.
But anyhow, that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities in the space, or opportunities for other ways to spend our time.
Take music, for example. Drive a brand that curates indie music, and let people invest in the bands (real money), drive that band to their friends, and eventually take a token of their success some day (a 360 deal, not just records, but everything including merchandizing, live performances, etc -- that way each band can determine the best mix, which may be all album sales or free music distribution). Early fans have skin in the game, bands that pick up fans get money to accelerate their reach, and everyone can have fun in the process since they are all partners.
And as far as time, think of teenagers and college students (and 20 somethings), hormonally driven to socialize. It was a huge catalyst for AOL (chat rooms), Friendster/MySpace/HotOrNot/Facebook, etc. Later in life there are children, and the need for everything to be all about them, understand them, get away from them. But competition for time is such an open thing, that it seems out of scope unless it is a form of entertainment, even if it is entertaining, like sex.
It would be nice to get people to vote on movie selections so a theatre could get it and show it knowing that there is an audience. I'd love to see "Go!" again. There is a business idea for you.
So instead of "killing Hollywood", I'm going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show in PacHeights next weekend. It is not an iSomething, it is not virtual, it means real warm bodies and a preset schedule. See ya there!
Hacker Cinema
10 comments on Hacker News
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
Ah! I actually saw go and matrix on the same day as we arrived to the cinema too late for the earlier matrix show! I forgot everything but I remember liking it a lot.
Ah Go is one of those movies that got lost in the field in 1999; it would have been the top film of the spring in many other years, but opening 1 week after The Matrix leaves it with few people my age (I was a senior in HS when it came out) knowing about it.
The article seems to have a simplistic thesis that it doesn't really develop beyond: optimization, efficiency and focus is not fun, and these things epitomize SV. But I'm not sure that even scans.
Those things (optimization, efficiency and focus) can most definitely be fun. And SV is not really about those things.
SV is more about "relentlessness" and the wild (or Wild West) allocation of capital. This makes the Bay Area a kind of crazy frontier-town, and it comes with all the vices that entails.
The homeless crisis can be seen as one symptom of the Bay Area's frontier-town vibe.
Cash App founder Bob Lee's tragic death brought to light another aspect of the "funderbelly" of SV, in "The Lifestyle"^0
Debate rages for sure, but "fun" and "fucked up" commonly overlap: Emily Chang takes a kind of spurned spinster bias in Brotopia^1. The book is her SV expose that spins a yarn similar to the party-scene-disillusionment trope that's a common thread in 90s indie films, such as Trainspotting, and Doug Liman's Go. Chang's work, however, is in line with modern discourse style, as she takes a more furious, righteous bent, leaving little to the imagination as she passes judgement against what she sees as an emblematic American abomination.
A more recent, relevant and mainstream revival of that trope is 2022's Babylon by Damien Chazelle, set in 1920s Hollywood. One could hypothesize that the debauchery of Hollywood may mirror that of the Bay Area, possibly stemming from the lavish influx of capital to those whose maturity has yet to catch up with their wealth.
In the same vein, themes of "the price of fame" and the corrupting power of celebrity hint that life in the high line of Silicon Valley might be susceptible to a similar moral decay.
Of course, it could be something else entirely, but it might be the case that the issue is not that SV fails to understand fun. It's instead that it doesn't know how to handle it, or do it in a healthy way. Eventually, a kind of puritan sterility is the natural companion of such a debauched underbelly. It may therefore be that lifelessness criticized by the author is, paradoxically, the result of SV having too much fun, yet not having the integrity or morality to make it sustainable, or healthy.
If SV learns how to make its boom town vibe sustainable and healthy, it might be able to stay aloft to enjoy the whole ride. This could enhance everything about it.
0: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12085323/Inside-Lifestyle-Cash-App-founder-Bob-Lee.html
1: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum
> They wanted to have sex with me.
> They wanted me to join their religion.
based on what I know of "new age" cults these two things are not always mutually exclusive
ask anyone from an older generation who lived through the late 1960s/early 1970s as a young adult...
in the modern era I'd wager there's some degree of venn diagram overlap between MLM recruitment and "open relationship" people too
actually as I recall an example of this was shown in entertainment media in the 1999 movie "Go" where a cop and his wife are also running a MLM thing and try to recruit/sleep with one of their targets
You're throwing a lot of things out there and I really can't see a real connection between the Go documentary and all of this Palantir/no-prejudice/no-emotion/favorite-food talk.
Where is this data? Are you talking about the hilarious statistic that 94% of subscribers are happy with the service?
I tried to watch a film last night and searched for all of these very popular films.
* Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
* 28 Days Later
* Go
* Gladiator
* American Beauty
* Speed
Then I gave up. When you try 6 very well known films and none of them are on there it changes how you think of the service from "most stuff is on there" (like Spotify for example) to "I have to search Netflix to find something I like" (like a normal TV channel). It's very different.
For me, in an incognito window (so Google is less likely to tweak search results for my preferences), the Wikipedia page for the game Go is the first result, and five out of the top 10 are also about the game. The other results are Disney's "go.com" domain, golang.org, and the movie Go on IMDB.
Doesn't really suggest unfair weighting to me.
Golang is often preferred as it's much easier to search for and no need to disambiguate between other things called Go (Chinese board game, 1999 film).
Such BULLSHIT.
This is a meme that comes up every few years like clockwork. Unfortunately, this one, like others before it, just shows how little people know about Hollywood. I guess it doesn't matter, as it makes for great link-bait. So maybe they know more than they let on, but dumb it down to "mean" people and "dying" industry. Yet, if that were the case, no one would want to take it over. The industry is, however, closer to a zero sum game than not. Offers to be a "partner" are offers to "take" some of the revenue.
There are two "modes" of entertainment (I am not counting learning or socializing, which are separate): "games" and "story-telling". I've pitched ideas on a cross-over between the two (over ten years ago), but really the two are very different, right down to how the brain behaves in each mode. Music is interesting because it doesn't take our full attention -- it would interesting to see other entertainment that had that same quality.
But anyhow, that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities in the space, or opportunities for other ways to spend our time.
Take music, for example. Drive a brand that curates indie music, and let people invest in the bands (real money), drive that band to their friends, and eventually take a token of their success some day (a 360 deal, not just records, but everything including merchandizing, live performances, etc -- that way each band can determine the best mix, which may be all album sales or free music distribution). Early fans have skin in the game, bands that pick up fans get money to accelerate their reach, and everyone can have fun in the process since they are all partners.
And as far as time, think of teenagers and college students (and 20 somethings), hormonally driven to socialize. It was a huge catalyst for AOL (chat rooms), Friendster/MySpace/HotOrNot/Facebook, etc. Later in life there are children, and the need for everything to be all about them, understand them, get away from them. But competition for time is such an open thing, that it seems out of scope unless it is a form of entertainment, even if it is entertaining, like sex.
It would be nice to get people to vote on movie selections so a theatre could get it and show it knowing that there is an audience. I'd love to see "Go!" again. There is a business idea for you.
So instead of "killing Hollywood", I'm going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show in PacHeights next weekend. It is not an iSomething, it is not virtual, it means real warm bodies and a preset schedule. See ya there!