Arguments
26

An Argument Across the Internet: Startups, VCs and Lifestyle

I love watching an argument unfold across the Internet. Here's a thread that bounced from evangelist-loudmouth-romanticizer to startup engineer to VC where everyone's right and everyone's a bit wrong too.

• "You might be sad that you work long hours and that sometimes your boss yells at you when tensions run high. But you also know that there is nowhere on earth like Silicon Valley…. There’s so much money in Silicon Valley now that a lot of non-like minded people have rolled in. Looking for easy stock options at a hot startup. They start whining when they realize that they have to give so much to make it [...]

4

Our Well-Paid Public Intellectuals Do It In Public (When Not At Davos)

Jeff Jarvis' Public Parts, released September 27th and currently 12,098 in "books" on Amazon, has come under review by Evgeny Morozov. It is a rather singularly vicious review. From early on: "Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates—'there is money to be made in privacy'—who are paid to mislead the 'netizens,' that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis’s scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi’s African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is 'howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret.' [...]