Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
The arc of tech parallels the arc from manufacturing to services. The Macintosh and the microprocessor were manufactured products. Some of the most celebrated innovations in technology have been manufactured products — the router, the graphics card, the floppy disk — while advances like IBM’s “business solutions” are viewed as little more than customer support. But things are changing. Technology as service is being interpreted in more and more creative ways: Companies like Uber and Airbnb, while properly classified as interfaces and marketplaces, are really providing the most elevated service of all — that of doing it ourselves.
.. Tech is no longer primarily technology driven; it is idea driven.
.. These choices, to insulate oneself, to make technology the central theme in your life, make some sense: The marketplace is competitive, and if you’re not working on this or that potentially industry-disrupting idea, someone else will get there before you. But it breaks down when you begin to question whether or not your idea is actually industry-disrupting or, really, meaningful at all.
.. A couple of months ago, I installed a Google Chrome extension called “Kill News Feed,” built by Neal Wu, a senior at Harvard who incidentally previously worked at the social network. Now when I absent-mindedly surf to Facebook.com, my News Feed is gloriously blank except for one line of text: “Don’t get distracted by Facebook!” it says.