Assuming that no one goes out of his way to be an idiot, this’ll be the last #QuoraGate post. As far as I can tell, it’s time to call it settled and over.
I’ll hold the specific communications back, out of concern for the privacy of all involved, so long as no one reopens the issue. The gist of it is: I gave Marc Bodnick a specific, safe means of communication that would allow him to indicate whether or not the ban was motivated by investor pressure. Response came back: my investor-pressure theory was, at least broadly, correct. Marc did not even attempt to deny it.
He did not name a culprit. I felt, at least, that a specific person has been suggested but I am not going to name him here. That is largely because I am not entirely sure that I believe that he is guilty. That investor is associated with Y Combinator, but it stands to reason that if Quora were under extortion from an investor, one mandate of that extortion might be that a rival investor take the fall. Given the rising tensions between Y Combinator and real VCs, it’s certainly possible that one of the latter might have intended blame to fall on the rival. This seems extremely far-fetched, but the fact that Quora would ban one of its top contributors indicates that something bizarre is happening; I just don’t know what, and no one who knows seems to be willing to say. I don’t think that we’ll ever know who was actually responsible for this debacle.
Of course, it’s also possible that no venture capitalists played any part in this, and that Quora is covering up for egregious incompetence and merely wants people to think that an investor was involved. This whole experience has been so bizarre that there’s very little that I wouldn’t rule out.
Quora isn’t just a message board. It’s a cloud service, and one that demands of its users (“Real Names” policy) that they stake their own reputations on the product, and given the sleaze that I’ve encountered, that’s an incredibly dangerous gamble that I can recommend to no one.
It’s been proven that Quora issues bans in bad faith and that it abuses power. That, itself, isn’t very interesting. Far more interesting are the wide-ranging implications of this. Quora proved, in 2015, that one computer programmer and writer couldn’t trust it with his reputation. Ok, that’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Banning a user in bad faith is a minor offense. What’s next, though? Is it possible that this is just the tip of the iceberg in the VC-funded world? It’s likely. In 2020, will a company experience a crippling failure of a critical product or service offered by a VC-funded company, because its investors decided that one of its competitors should succeed in its space? That’s exactly where we’re headed.
The problem with Silicon Valley, in its current iteration, isn’t only its crass veneration of power and money regardless of their source, but the naked joy with which people who have power will abuse it. Wrecking careers and crashing companies is just a game to them. The mindset on Sand Hill Road is that if you’re not abusing power, you don’t really have it. That’s incredibly disturbing, and I don’t see that culture improving but, rather, becoming more extreme over time.
#QuoraGate is over. To those who have supported me, thank you, and keep combatting misinformation. I shouldn’t have to defend myself against the absurd accusations that have been popping up on Quora. It seems that people refuse to accept that Quora’s moderation might be acting in bad faith, and therefore have to revive and distort ancient history (yes, I did have an alternate account that I used to browse health-related topics, because I didn’t trust Quora’s privacy protections; but if Quora banned everyone who used an alternate account, it would have few users left) and in order to make a case for the status quo. It’s stupid. It’s embarrassing to the technology world that they exist.
All of that said, I’ve won. I’ve won because, while I’ve seen a lot of bad behavior in my career, the ban on my account is the first public proof that these people truly are as horrible as I make them out to be, and that venture-funded technology really is so corrupt that an investor can call in a favor to cause a product failure. It also establishes that some of these people are afraid of me. If I weren’t exposing some inconvenient truths, they wouldn’t care. I find their use of stalkers’ tactics, in this particular case, to be extremely distasteful. However, this whole event proves not only Silicon Valley’s corruption, but also that, in my analysis of the Silicon Valley ecosystem’s corruption, I’ve hit these fuckers where they live. Remember that this blog post is why Paul Graham saw fit to ban me from Hacker News.
Having won this game, it’s useful to talk about what the next game ought to be. I’m starting to have thoughts about Silicon Valley’s successor. The bubble will break, and this bust is more likely to be fatal to the existing darlings than the one in 2000, and it’s possible that, if we play our cards right, we can make sure that, when the technical impulse reconstitutes itself in the wake of that bust, it does so in a way that doesn’t involve the parasites on Sand Hill Road.
There was a lot of mismanagement and silliness in the 1990s, but the mean-spiritedness of this startup bubble– the crushingly low equity percentages for the engineers doing the actual work; the inept, well-heeled founders like Lucas Duplan; the use of investor-level interconnectedness for extortion and petty revenge– is new, at least at the current extent, and it’s going to be much more toxic to the Valley’s persistence. I don’t know if the crash will happen in 2016 or 2019 or 2030 but, when it does, there’s going to be a lot of bad blood. The knives will come out, secrets will be spilled, and currently sterling reputations will carry stigmas that make Enron or Amaranth look quaint in comparison. The most bubbly of bubble artifacts– in particular, the incubator called “Y Combinator” (a name ripped off from a distant relative of mine, by the way)– will either end their existence outright, or they will persist in a degraded state and cease to be notable.
Silicon Valley might not recover, and I hope that it doesn’t, because Silicon Valley is now, quite clearly, bad for technology. Such a severe concentration of capital and opportunity lends itself naturally to in-group malfeasance, oligarchy, and in the long term, poor performance and a culture that values marketing over innovation or excellence. We see that now, with venture funds being money-losers that suit the venture capitalists’ careers but not the funds’ investors, and with nepotism trumping merit. Ideally, the successor will be “post-location”. If that’s too much to ask for, perhaps it will at least be distributed enough to be robust against location failures. If technology reconstitutes itself mostly within the same nostalgia-ridden NIMBY-infested suburban office park (i.e. Silicon Valley) as the current incarnation, that will be a failure.
In understanding what to build next, it’s worth looking at what went wrong, this time around. Technologists love to write history off as irrelevant, because “this time it’s different”, and yet the future always proves that it wasn’t so different “that time”. People don’t change very much, and the fact that humanity favors anti-intellectualism in its leaders (foolish certainty over honest uncertainty) means that there’s a strong tendency in humans not to learn from history, but to make the same mistakes, over and over again. I prefer not to do that. Technology isn’t always used for good purposes but, broadly speaking, it’s humanity’s only way out– out of scarcity, out of slavery, out of war– and (until we reach a post-scarcity state that I don’t expect to see within my lifetime) we are dependent on the economic growth that it enables. Silicon Valley and its venture capitalists (“Sand Hill Road”) have proven, so many times that they make a caricature of themselves, that they can’t be trusted to run it. So what went wrong, precisely?
I mentioned a cultural enemy, which is the belief within Silicon Valley that power must be abused or one does not have it, and I think that ties in to the whole Silicon Valley mentality: cheap, fast, and sloppy. Sloppiness isn’t always bad. In an experimental stage for a new idea, it can be harmless. The problem is when sloppy cheapness (open-plan offices that corrode morale) and sloppy quickness (the two-week “sprints” of “Agile” pathologies) begin to be seen as virtues, or (worse yet) when artifacts of sloppiness become permanent and even beloved features. Then you get a culture where the ability to “pitch” investors and peddle influence becomes more important than the ability to build an excellent product (because no one would know, or care about, the difference anyway). Silicon Valley is defined by sloppy thinking and sloppy work at all levels, and this extends to corporate cultures and even to moral decision-making. This explains the abuses of power and the ethical sloppiness that became #QuoraGate. Quora’s syphilitic “Real Names” policy allowed it to become a breeding ground for witch hunts (accusing someone of having sock puppets is like accusing that person of having secret, demonic magic powers; it’s salacious, unprovable, and irrefutable) and that left it in a state where investor extortion could easily be covered up.
What we need, more than ever, is for those of us who give a damn about technology to come up with an antidote to cheap, fast, and sloppy: we need to revive technology’s former build-it-right culture. This means no more build-to-flip companies with obnoxious cultures, no more ostracism and unemployment for our older brethren just because 40-year-old programmers “know too much” (i.e. know that their stock options probably won’t make them rich, and might tip their juniors off to the fact), no more bad software built by people who expected to be two promotions beyond it by the time it starts to fall apart, no more leaving important products to be administrated by political axe-grinders and spineless extortion targets, and no more veneration of these Sand Hill Road clowns who’ll simply inject their horrible values into anything we let them touch. We need the right people in charge and the right things to be built, and that’s only going to happen if we commit ourselves to doing things right instead of doing them cheaply and sloppily. When it comes to defining and creating this culture, the time is now.
