Reagan-Era Gen X Dogma has no place in Silicon Valley
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As a nucleus As a member of Group X, I usually settle for watching boomers and millennials make rhetorical bombs against each other. Me and my cohort connect quietly in society, especially in the modern technology industry, as an underestimated impact; Although we occasionally complain about being forgotten, many of us like to act from a cultural perspective. But I have recently come to know some of the worst pathologies of my generation in the extractable and divisive models promoted by the Silicon Valley venture capital class. It makes sense: many of them are Gen X, especially Gen X men.
The 10th generation workers were groundbreaking web boom troops in the 90s. Many who became wealthy used their new wealth to unexpectedly invest in more software. Along with our close cultural cousins, who are technically part of the mid-century boom but born back in the 1960s, if you consider them, you’ll find a huge percentage of people pulling the strings of Silicon Valley or distributing money. to the same thing. The values and mindsets of millennial CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Neumann get a lot of press, but do Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Marc Benioff, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Paul Graham, Alfred Lin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel? All were born between 1964 and 1973. These men of Gen X. run the valley, and their short-term and reflective approach shows a twisted side of the quiet habits of doing our things.
In a recent interview, Capitalist and software engineer Marc Andreessen (born in 1971, like me) avoided the “decline of state capacity” as an inevitable issue before discussing at length the widespread belief in the power of software to overthrow all its aspects. earthly life. He dismissed the historical sweep of the collective effort of society because of the “systematic failure of almost all public sector organizations around the world”. That said, he said he was sitting somewhere between a public network that publicly maintained transportation, water and energy infrastructure, communicating through publicly developed Internet connections and protected by a publicly funded Covid vaccine. Andreessen continued to talk about how only private companies, and specifically software companies, can address the problems we face as a nation and the world. I realized that Andreessen was selling Reaganite childhoods.
As Gen Xers we entered the networking industry after the serious uncertainties and accidents we experienced during our training years shaped our worldview and consolidated it for many. Unlike boomers, we don’t grow up duck lid drills; By the time we were primary school students, the US and the USSR had enough nuclear weapons to keep the fully engaged war from surviving. Day In 1982 he played on national television. As the kids discussed the horrible fairy tales, we actually discussed how much better it was to die quickly in the middle of the blast site than to have torturous poisonous radiation on the edge.
In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, Bush’s first administration was escalating tensions with Saddam Hussein and fighting for a recession. Gen Xers, who were looking for work after high school or college, found the landscape of corporate attackers, increasingly reducing or relocating union factory work and public institutions, and allowing some of us to be hired. While many private industries recovered, tax cuts meant that hiring in state and local governments never returned to the 1980s. It was hard to believe — in fact, most of us didn’t — that there would never be the institutional support that previous generations had for us. The reality is really a bit.
And then out of nowhere (except for a few that have followed the developments of Darpa and UIUC), a boom – a new industry, in addition to living a good life, to put our stamp on the world. For those of us who are privileged to participate, it seemed to us to recover the condemnation from all hope. What’s more, quick money and easy entry points confirmed that the strength of the generations we lacked so much in institutional affirmation would be found only through private enterprise and private enterprise.
In the 1980s, the bizarre additions to Morning in America jingoism, the AIDS crisis, and the suppression of interest rates revived an axiom that the government had not worked. For our generation the message was more pronounced: it couldn’t work, and it certainly wouldn’t be for us when we grew up. We knew that by the time we retired from Social Security it would be long gone if we didn’t get the bombs first. That was nonsense, but it was widespread nonsense that was encouraged by politicians and enthusiastically covered by the media. It’s hard to break the basic level assumptions set at the beginning of life, and it seems that many of our Gen X investors still think like 20-year-olds, all to the detriment of their imagination and innovation.
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