Thread by @cooperlund

Silicon Valley’s problem is, in large part, that they’ve stopped fixing the average person’s problems. Tech hasn’t improved most people’s lives in a noteworthy way in over a decade, and has made an awful lot of people’s much worse.

Most people outside the Valley can see this decay, not just in a lack of new services, but also in the rapidly declining quality of existing services like how Google search is now basically unusable.

And the VCs know it, too. They tried to get people excited about Web3 because there’s nothing interesting coming down the pipeline and they gotta get new companies to grow. There’s a crisis in tech, and that’s why tech keeps laying people off while the rest of the economy is fine

I think the reality is that tech is now establishment and mainstream, but nobody in tech is willing to admit it or, god forbid, act like it because being outsider rebels is central to their myth making and marketing. Nobody wants to be IBM, but that’s largely what tech is now.

You aren’t going to get explosive growth and change everything if you’re a startup now, you’re going to hopefully get bought by a bigger company. You’ve just got a corporate job now and that comes with a very different set of behavior and responsibility that people aren’t doing.

My laptop is lighter, my phone has a better camera, but beyond that I use incrementally better versions of the same apps. Hell, people are still laying GTA V and Skyrim, two ten year old games. Not a lot has happed in the last ten years by a lot of metrics.

Lauren's getting at another important facet of SV's stagnation - any interesting innovations are limited to a small subset of enthusiasts or professionals. VR and 3D printing are the same way. They can't make things break through to regular people anymore

Also, @edzitron is very good on this today in his newsletter

ez.substack.com/p/bank-men-fre…