All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning — that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted — would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build — the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing — almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design. | |
— Gideon Lewis-Kraus | |
From his article titled: “No Exit: One Startup’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush“ | |
Appearing in: Wired magazine; dtd: May 2014, | |
[Emphasis is mine. — kmab] | |
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On This Day In: | |
2013 | I Do Not Fear It |
2012 | Until Found |
2011 | Reducing Goods To Data |
The Fog Of Civilization Building | |
Archive for June 22nd, 2014
Destiny For The Talented
Posted in Quotes, Work, tagged Economics, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, No Exit, On Capitalism, On Work, Quotes, Wired Magazine, Wired.com on June 22, 2014| Leave a Comment »