Last week, I wrote about one Silicon Valley investor's excited response to the government shutdown, a response sparked by his belief that "stasis in the government is actually good for all of us." It was an extraordinary statement, it seemed to me, not only because it ignored the very real damage the government's gridlock was doing to normal, non-wealthy people all over the country, but because it revealed a broader ideological shift among certain members of the technological elite, from political apathy to active anti-government hostility.
But this weekend, at a Y Combinator start-up school, one tech entrepreneur outdid that investor by not just cheerleading dysfunction in Washington, but calling for Silicon Valley to literally secede from the United States.
CNET reports that Balaji Srinivasan, the co-founder of San Francisco–based genetics company Counsyl, used his opportunity to address a roomful of aspiring start-up founders at Y Combinator to give a talk called "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit," a techno-utopian vision of a world free of the constraints of civil society:
"The best part is this, the people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there," he said. "We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like without affecting anyone who wants to live under the Paper Belt," he added, using the term "paper belt" to refer to the environments currently governed by pre-existing systems like the US government ..
As the Hudson continues to widen...
ReplyDeleteWhat idiots. The Federal Govt protects all their intellectual property. Without some kind of treaty with the United States, people in the US would simply take all their intellectual property. Since patent protections are a govt subsidy (govt created monopoly) Silicon Valley is arguably the most subsidized region on the US.
ReplyDeleteI seceded the dollar system by moving into gold, silver and bitcoin. End the Fed by minimizing the use of their "blood money".
ReplyDeleteWell, anybody doing business in high-tech who thinks that "intellectual property" protects his inventions or his code is an idiot. That affliction is usually cured very quickly by figuring out how much does it cost to litigate. The only people that particular piece of government fuckery benefits are patent trolls and IP lawyers.
ReplyDeleteNow, the real help from US govt to Silicon Valley comes in the form of freshly printed money, The insane valuations of companies making stupid products is solely due to the influx of that money into the market,
"ignores the very real damage the government's gridlock was doing to normal, non-wealthy people...." If you change [ignores] to [addresses] and delete ['s gridlock], then it makes sense.
ReplyDelete