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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

I guess they are pointing the fact that as soon as West Coast got access to the power through money, they did what the East Coast did: protect themselves from the plebe and create a new nobility with barriers to entry instead of using it for greater motives than simple personal accumulation.

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And this is exactly why SV is not anything revolutionary, despite the insistence of PG and co. There is no Golden Age, just a bunch of old guys accumulating wealth by exploiting youthful naivete by cranking out a steady stream of technological toys designed to hook us, rather than serve us.

I liked this sidenote in the article: "made their founders billionaires (New Economy founders typically retain large blocks of their own stock)"

Histoically, founders gave up most of their equity to investors. "A" round? Investors take 50% for $3 million and set aside another 20% for an employee pool. "B" round? The founders end up with 4% of the company.

I think pg helped everybody realize "Hey, us founders have the power here. We're not giving up shit. In fact, pay us out at each round too. We need to be millionaires sooner than any possible 5-year-out exit."

Isn't it different because those toys are part of our new people-as-a-product economy? To me it seems like this and the public-private-partnership blur factor make this different, and the walls are going to get a lot higher than in similar situations in the past.

Yet you'll still hear many people parrot the line that SV is a "meritocracy".

I see a lot of articles about how you need to be connected to find some capital and that the decision makers always rely on sergeants for introductions, so I guess the meritocracy soundbite is slowly coming to a rest.

But criticizing SV is still not finding a good way to conduct our life that would make us happy and avoid having a negative impact on the society in the long run. This is a negative feeling.

So if something is intentionally misleading by the Robber Barons of Silicon Valley ("it's a meritocracy" is the 21th Century version of "there's gold in them thar' hills" - the only people getting rich are the ones selling office space/furniture or developer tools now, or the big companies that swallow up competitors they have screwed for pennies on the dollar) it shouldn't be criticized because "it's a negative feeling"?

Part of the reason that this line of bullshit needs to be criticized is so that nobody else falls for it. Only be criticizing it can we start to look for alternatives.

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