The verdict seems to be in. According to the press, 2013 was just a god-awful, embarrassing, downright shameful year for the technology industry, and especially Silicon Valley.
Christopher Mims voices the prevailing sentiment here:
All in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry and the engine that powers it—Silicon Valley. Innovation was replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations. Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled—and for reasons outlined below, Google Glass doesn’t count.
He continues to point out the poor performance of high-profile product launches, the abysmal behavior of the industry’s “ruling class”– venture capitalists and leading executives– and the fallout from revelations like the NSA’s Prism program. Yes, 2013 brought forth a general miasma of bad faith, shitty ideas, and creepy, neoreactionary bubble zeitgeists: Uber’s exploitative airline-style pricing and BitTulip mania are just two prominent examples.
He didn’t cover everything; presumably for space, he gave no coverage to Sean Parker’s environmental catastrophe of a wedding (and the 10,000-word rant he penned while off his meds) and its continuing environmental effects. Nor did he cover the growing social unrest in California, culminating in the blockades against “Google buses”. Nor did he mention the rash of unqualified founders and mediocre companies like Summly, Snapchat, Knewton, and Clinkle and all the bizarre work (behind the scenes, by the increasingly country-club-like cadre of leading VCs) that went into engineering successes for these otherwise nonviable firms. In Mims’s tear-down of technology for its sins, he didn’t even scratch the surface, and even with the slight coverage given, 2013 in tech looks terrible.
So, was 2013 just a toilet of a year, utterly devoid of value? Should we be ashamed to have lived through it?
No. Because technology doesn’t fucking work that way. Even when the news is full of pissers, there’s great work being done, much of which won’t come to fruition until 2014, 2015, or even 2030. Technology, done right, is about the long game and getting rich– no, making everyone rich– slowly. (Making everyone rich is, of course, not something that will be achieved in one quarter or even one decade.) “Viral” marketing and “hockey stick” obsessions are embarrassments to us. We don’t have the interest in engineering that sort of thing, and don’t believe we have the talent to reliably make it happen– because we’re pretty sure that no one does. But we’re very good, in technology, at making things 10, or 20, or 50 percent more efficient year-on-year. Those small gains and occasional big wins amount, in the aggregate, to world economic growth at a 5% annual rate– nearly the highest that it has ever achieved.
Sure, tech’s big stories of 2013 were mostly bad. Wearing Google Glass, it turns out, makes a person look like a gigantic fucking douchebag. I don’t think that such a fact damns an entire year, though. Isn’t technology supposed to embrace risk and failure? Good-faith failure is a sign of a good thing– experimentation. (I’m still disgusted by all the bad-faith failure out there, but that should surprise no one.) The good-faith failures that occur are signs of a process that works. What about the bad-faith ones? Let’s just hope they will inspire people to fix a few problems, or just one big problem: our leadership.
On that, late 2013 seems to have been the critical point in which we, as a technical community, lost faith in the leaders of our ecosystem: the venture capitalists and corporate executives who’ve claimed for decades to be an antidote to the centuries-old tension between capitalist and laborer, and who’ve proven no better (and, in so many ways, worse) than the old-style industrialists of yore. Silicon Valley exceptionalism is disappearing as an intellectually defensible position. The Silicon Valley secessionists and Sand Hill Road neofeudalists no longer look like visionaries to us; they look like sad, out-of-touch, privileged men abusing a temporary relevance, and losing it quickly through horrendous public behavior. The sad truth about this is that it will hurt the rest of us– those who are still coming up in technology– far more than it hurts them.
This loss of faith in our gods is, however, a good thing in the long run. Individually, none of us among the top 50,000 or so technologists in the U.S. has substantial power. If one of us objects to the state of things, there are 49,999 others who can replace us. As a group, though, we set the patterns. Who made Silicon Valley? We did, forty years ago, when it was a place where no one else wanted to live. We make and, when we lose faith, we unmake.
Progress is incremental and often silent. The people who do most of the work do least of the shouting. The celebrity culture that grows up around “tech” whenever there is a bubble has, in truth, little to do with whether our society can meet the technology challenges that the 2010s, ’20s, and onward will throw at us.
None of this nonsense will matter, ten years from now. Evan Spiegel, Sean Parker, Greg Gopman, and Adria Richards are names we will not have cause to remember by December 26, 2023. The current crop of VC-funded cool kids will be a bunch of sad, middle-aged wankers drinking to remember their short bursts of relevance. But the people who’ve spent the ten years between now and then continually building will, most likely, be better off then than now. Incremental progress. Hard work. True experimentation and innovation. That’s how technology is supposed to work. Very little of this will be covered by whatever succeeds TechCrunch.
Everything that happened in technology in 2013, and much of it was distasteful, is just part of a longer-running process. It was not a wasted year. It was a hard one for morale, but sometimes a morale problem is necessary to make things better. Perhaps we will wake up to the uselessness of the corporatists who have declared themselves our leaders, and do something about that problem.
So, I say, as always: long live technology.
