After putting out the first chapter of “The Struggles”, a novella set in Silicon Valley, I’ve had a couple of requests come in about a more serious project that I had let a few people know about. I’m hesitant to share this, but… eh, what the fuck.
The extremely tentative title (as in, I haven’t come up with a better one yet) is Farisa’s Courage. (If you hate it, read and then suggest a better one.) The concept and main character came to me in 2013-14, and I’ve finally developed enough courage of my own to give writing this story (which is much harder to tell than a satirical one about Silicon Valley) a try. I’ve got about 120 pages “done” ( lthough that means so little in fiction because everything must be re-done several times before it is good) and I have a few chapters that are probably ready to be shared. Unlike my Silicon Valley novella, “The Struggles”, this projectis a lot closer to me, and it’ll probably take at least a couple of years. In truth, “The Struggles” is mostly a warmup round, to sharpen old tools. Farisa La’ewind’s story (whatever I end up calling it, in the end) is one that I have more emotional investment in telling right, because there’s a message in it (at least one) that’s worth getting out to the world. (That message probably isn’t obvious in the two chapters given here. Sorry about that.)
Like everything else, chapter numbers and ordering are very tentative. Below are what will probably be chapters 1 and 3.
I have no idea if any of this is any good. If it’s not, that just means the project will take more work and time. If it’s five years before I’m ready to write this work, then I’ll have to wait.
That brings me to 2016. I don’t like to talk about “resolutions” until I’ve actually achieved something toward them, but my goal for this year is to create. On the downfall of Silicon Valley and its ridiculous “unicorns”, I believe that “my team” is starting to win… and when the easy money goes out, so will the professional omerta that’s keeping a bunch of unethical founders’ and investors’ secrets wrapped, and a bunch of currently powerful people are going to have egg and worse on their faces. I doubt that I had all that much to do with it, but I played a role and I’m happy with that. I made it acceptable for the most talented people to admit, in the open, that Silicon Valley is not a meritocracy. I’ve helped to de-legitimize the VC-funded startup scene as anything other than money laundering for well-connected children of the existing corporate elite, and I’ve made some prominent people (hi, Paul Buchheit!) very angry in doing so. That’s good. It needs to be torn down. I’m confident now, however, that the process is running on its own momentum (regardless of whether or not I had much of anything to do with it) and that I can step aside and things will go just fine.
On the same token, I’m getting older. I’m 32 now. I’m don’t feel like I’ve changed much, physically speaking. If anything, I’m probably in better shape. Certainly, though, I’m more aware of my mortality. What comes with that is an increasing selectivity in how I spend my time. Tearing down rotting social edifices, like Silicon Valley, is noble work. I’m just not willing for it to be the only thing that I do. On my deathbed, I don’t want “Participant in 2012-17 Silicon Valley Teardown” to be my only accomplishment. Besides, while I’ve managed to block some of these people, especially the YC partners, from getting what they want (being loved) more than anything, I’m pretty sure that I’ve not made a dent in their financial well-being. They are still rich, and I am still not.
Programming is a very powerful creative skill. It gives a person orders of magnitude more ability at implementing her own ideas. That, I think, is what draws so many people (including myself) into it. This makes it such a hurtful, perverse irony that the tech industry has become what it now is: a corporatized, drama-ridden hellscape driven by petty feuds and pathological risk aversion (read: half-balled cowardice) in its leadership class. The zero-sum thinking that I encounter on Hacker News and Techcrunch is something that I take as a warning as to what I’ll become if I leave my heart in the startup industry for too long. I’m built to create, not to jockey for position in some macho-subordinate idiots’ game. Realistically speaking, I’ll probably be doing the latter for some time, because the corporate fucks have almost all of the money, but it’s not worth putting my heart into. Not at this age.
I don’t know where I’m going. What I do know, or think that I know, is that the reason for such widespread unhappiness in the U.S. and in the world is that we’ve deprived ourselves of creative process, which we’ve replaced with a constant search for approval and nonsensical “metrics”. It exists in personal life (see: social media) and the corporate world, and it all gets emptier every year. I don’t know how to solve it, and I’m thankful that I can say that I haven’t played much of a role in making the situation worse. At some point, we’ll all tire of this emptiness and get back to reading and writing and creating, one hopes. In any case, before I can solve this whole problem for the world, I need to solve it for myself.
