Taxis, mom-and-pop retail, newspapers, manufacturing. Millions of people pushed out of real jobs and into gig work. Companies breaking the rules and pushing established businesses to the brink with a mindset of "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission".
Sure, there were some within the "tech community" who didn't like the effects, but the overall vibe was this is progress. There was a lot of arrogance about companies needing to adapt and people needing to reskill. "Teach your kids to speak Python".
And why would you complain if you were making $200,000+/year writing JS at a company selling dog food as a subscription?
Now tech is coming for the tech people and somehow it's really the end of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockwell_(company)
This might have been the tipping point for disruptive startups.
But the “your job is toast, that sucks, learn AI I guess” people are a little quieter now, because it’s becoming evident that it might be their colleagues first.
> Taxis, mom-and-pop retail, newspapers, manufacturing. Millions of people pushed out of real jobs and into gig work. Companies breaking the rules and pushing established businesses to the brink with a mindset of "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission".
I think you need to make more distinctions there: "tech people" aren't all "SV startup types."
Because I'm a "tech person," and I hated Uber from the second I heard about its flagrantly illegal tactics. I've come to feel like SV is a cancer, for a multitude of different reasons, of which "disruption" is one of them.
The SV crowd was certainly more celebratory but in my experience, indifference and silence wasn't just limited to the "SV startup types."
k310•1d ago
Lord Love the Archive
https://web.archive.org/web/20260913210511/https://gornak40....
Kiro•1d ago