Reading David Roth’s brilliant essay Everything Is Silicon Valley Now, it’s easy to fall into something of a despair pit.
I wrote about the current golden age in Epic Boss Behavior. https://t.co/4vejtAlItP
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) November 14, 2022
It closes out with this sentence: “There’s nothing to do but look for the good stuff until the looking becomes too challenging, or until it’s gone.”
Bleak.
But I Think there are other things to do
Not everything is Silicon Valley now
Roth’s essay opens with a reference to Derek Thompson’s Atlantic piece about falling out of love with baseball. But here’s the thing: Thompson isn’t falling out of love with baseball in that essay – he’s falling out of love with Major League Baseball. That’s a big difference.
It’s fairly normal in America – and on the internet – to assume that the most polished version of the thing is the only version of the thing worth spending your time on. The World Series is Baseball – your local college’s DIII team does not exist. Formula 1 and NASCAR are auto racing – dirt oval racing doesn’t exist. Or, if it does, it’s not worth the effort to care about.
In politics this manifests as the attitude that presidential and senate races are politics, house races matter to the extent they involve a member who has become a national figure for some reason, and the city council or state senate don’t exist.
But here’s the thing: state and local politics, where the policy rubber hits the literal road, has a more direct and powerful impact on people’s lives than federal politics.
Thinking that the tip of the pyramid is the only part of the pyramid that matters is a choice. It may not be a conscious choice. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change it.
There’s nothing shameful about being a local celebrity
Ultimately, the over-optimization within silicon valley relies on centralization. You can’t optimize things that are too small to notice. But you can enjoy things that are too small to care about! You can enjoy them a lot!
Twitter seems out of control – and silicon valley-ized – because it’s a huge social network full of A-list celebrities. In comparison, becoming a bigwig blue check on a backwater forum where there’s no chance of getting a fav from Cardi B feels like failure. This is, basically, a formula for being miserable, sad, and like your future is at the whim of billionaires.
It feels cliche and almost conservative to be promoting local community, lower expectations, and human relationships as the antidote to the over-optimization of mass culture. But, honestly, it’s the only possible answer.