(2014-08-21) Metafoundry4 Indicator Species

Deb Chachra: on Indicator Species

It’s not so much that tech bros are bad in and of themselves, it’s that they’re a indicator species for an Ecosystem

The Silicon Valley startup ecosystem depends on Venture Capital. If VCs are putting in money, they want to see a return (and a big one, because of the expectation that nine out of ten companies, at a minimum, will crash and burn). And they want to see it ASAP, because that’s how the time value of money works

But there’s more to it. What makes a StartUp a startup isn’t that it’s new (we call that a ‘small business’), it’s that it grows rapidly, ideally exponentially (Exponential Growth). That pushes startups toward bits, not atoms (near-zero incremental cost), towards anything that leverages Metcalfe's Law, towards dark patterns of nonconsensual behaviour towards users (like strip-mining Contacts lists), towards eroding user privacy, to dumping everything users have created when the startup is acquihired, and towards falling back on invasive online Advertising because having a viable business model was a distant second to growing a user base.

which inevitably selects for people who are prepared to sleep under their desk for the chance of having a breakout company

The system doesn’t select for women, for people who have families or lives outside of work, for thoughtful people. And by not selecting for them, it actively pushes them out