Attention teen dropouts racing to SF: The tech bubble is lying to you
http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/08/04/attention-teen-dropouts-sf-is-lying/
Why share all this silliness? Because there appears to be a strange parallel afoot. Because I recently found myself entranced by Nellie Bowles’ terrific profile over in California Sunday magazine, a tale of the new hordes of “lost boys” of San Francisco, all these naïve, clean-cut, mostly white teenaged computer whizzes from affluent families who are dropping out of college (and, increasingly, high school) to move to San Francisco.
They’re here to code, of course. To found companies. To singe their brains with a million lame logos. Which is to say, not for the fame, or the girls, or the fun drugs, or the free love (different era, but still).
They’re here for the money. Hundreds of them, stacked on top of each other in viciously expensive SF apartments, sleeping on the floor, living out of backpacks, all for for the startup score, the “dream” of landing vast heaps of VC capital that comes from building yet another app, portal, algorithm for the sake of their multimillionaire captors, all to bring them, if not sex or depravity, then surely the tech equivalent – way too much cash, way too soon.
This is the tech bubble’s newest, most sinister message: Who needs college, really? Who needs exposure to a broad range of ideas, cultures, religions, literature, ways of being in the world exactly at the time you’re most open and impressionable to discovering them? Come and burn away the most supple years of your life at a mediocre startup that will almost certainly fail! Bury your face in a screen and work like a slave on something to make egomaniacal capitalist drones like Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel even richer! Because tech!
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