The Kool-Aid Diaries recount the post-dot-com-bust boom in San Francisco. Roughly 2005 to 2017, as social media darlings took off, the kool-aid tasted sweet, and we still believed that technology would Make The World a Better Place.
PART ONE:THE WOOD-FIRED OVEN OF THE VANITIES
A Hungering Coast
The Franchise
Six Feet Apart
PART TWO:THE KOOL-AID DIARIES
Make No Small Plans
Tulum to Todos Santos
The Twilight of the Jester Class
PART THREE: UNFUNNY WORLD
A Laughless Place
Funnily Enough
Zeros
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A HUNGERING COAST
(first published by the Awl in 2012 as THE WOOD-FIRED OVEN OF THE VANITIES)
When Prince William and Kate Middleton were married last year, reporters fawned over menu items like quails eggs and Scottish langoustine canapés. The summer before, anticipation about Chelsea Clinton and Mark Mezvinsky’s customized $5-million reception hit a fever pitch: would it be vegan? (Answer: no. Beef short ribs were served alongside risotto.)But at the Zuckerberg–Chan wedding the other weekend, reporters could only note, as did the LA Times, that the food at the reception came from “budget friendly” restaurants like Fuki Sushi and Palo Alto Sol.Well, at least he wasn’t wearing that damn hoodie.Depending on how you look at it, the Facebook IPO marked the beginning (or end) of an era. But the Facebook wedding stood for something else entirely: the ongoing democratization of California’s eating culture.
TULUM TO TODOS SANTOS
I am on Powder Mountain speaking with the ski bunnies. It is 2013. The bunnies are telling me about hot yoga and cryptocurrencies. They are very serious. They run charitable organizations, they are committed to healthy living. I feel out of place. My hair is not shiny enough, my face is round and young-looking. I don’t have the right accessories, the right mannerisms. The bunnies view me as a curiosity, a relatively pretty tomboy with a PhD, not well-groomed enough to be considered competition. To them, I’m an asset. I speak the boys’ language, I can make conversation, but I won't call dibs on any of them. I find the boys annoying, off-putting even. The bunnies welcome me in.
ZEROS
Nine zeros after a one is one billion. Such platitudes are absent from the billionaire Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, in which he advises readers, young men, one can presume, on how to stop being zeroes and become some-One.The book is of course filled with other platitudes grasping desperately at depth, such as: “every moment in business happens only once”. Or “a great company is a conspiracy to change the world.”Thiel is one of those people who is very smart and also supremely unfunny. Call up a picture of him right now on your search engine: there’s nothing humorous about that waxy yellow-starched face.Unfunny-ness plagues others who purport to speak to Zeros. Jordan Peterson, with his twitching nervousness and jousting attempts at Nietzschean maxims that end up sounding like what a Wheaties box would read if it ran out of Zoloft. “if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”