Zuckerberg Interview: FFS!
March 12, 2008 – 2:19 pmNow that Silicon Valley is slowly returning trickling back from Austin, I’d like to post something I wrote during The Zuckerberg Interview Soap Opera …
This is an example of the intellectuanal Ouroboros that hits Silicon Valley in waves. Let’s see what’s wrong with this intarwebs blow up, shall we?
- Who in their right mind goes to a keynote with Mark Zuckerberg and is DISAPPOINTED when it goes wrong? What the fuck did you EXPECT? I mean, come on, he runs a bloody SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE. That’s like running a “web mall” in 1997! What did you think you were going to learn? The secret of getting a hundred million users? Hint: Zuckerberg would pay to go to a keynote to learn that–Facebook barely has 60M. MySpace passed 100M in 2006.
- It happened at SxSW, a conference with no discernable purpose other than to meet Texas’s annual quota for bloated pointless panels in two weeks. The only thing worse than hearing people toss off “South by” in person is the flood of tweets from those there: “queueing for Zuckerberg”, “queueing for Google party”, “this blows, anything better happening?”, “I got to touch (some designer you’ve never heard of)!”, …. Please don’t confuse SxSW for real life.
- Valleywag “broke” it. Jesus Christ, people, have I taught you nothing? If there’s a blog post and it links to Valleywag, you can immediately skip the entire post. This should be built into Google Reader. The only thing worse than reading Valleywag is being ejected into the depths of space, naked, covered in honey and angry fire ants, wearing your kidneys as ear muffs, and with a ticking bomb shoved up your ass. But even then I think most people’s last words would be “thank the sweet merciful Lord that I don’t have to hear about Valleywag again”.
SxSW? Social networking? Valleywag? It’s the trifecta of “for fuck’s sake”. The US economy’s heading down the shitter faster than a Superfund chicken tikka marsala, the web industry is in the clutches of an intellectual stagnation that reeks of death, and you have a government hellbent on burning every last civil liberty in front of a crowd of “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”-chanting pantypatriots. That interview has the approximate news value of an ant chipping a fingernail during Hiroshima.
Dear Intarweb blogging peeps, please pull your heads out of your collective self-absorbed ani and get back to guessing what Apple will release next and drawing captions on cats.
Thanks,
Nat
4 Responses to “Zuckerberg Interview: FFS!”
I love you, man. Hot steamy man-love.
Who can i pay to punch Mark Zuckerberg in his whiny piehole mouth, anyway? And when did SxSW turn from indie rock mecca into Trendy Techno-Fuckhead City?
By rone on Mar 12, 2008
actually, just to clarify:
1) most of us did go in not expecting much, as has been the case with previous zuckerberg interviews, where the conversation is typically brief & not particularly revealing.
however, what we were NOT expecting was a) an interviewer who was overly focused on herself and/or her personal relationship with zuckerberg, and b) wasn’t very focused on asking [relevant] questions & instead spent more time expressing commentary.
2) valleywag didn’t “break the story” at all. owen live-blogged the event, but there was limited editorial commentary about what happened. in fact, owen is a friend of sarah lacy, and arguably downplayed the negative impact.
check techmeme river for the actual chronology: nick o’neill was the first notable critical voice that came out strongly against lacey, about 20 minutes after the keynote ended. next was daniel terdman at Geek Gestalt about a half-hour after that. my post was out about 2 hours later, and finally Valleywag’s slightly more critical piece (Twitterati lashes out…) another hour later. and again, note that Valleywag fingered the audience more than sarah.
so to be clear: we didn’t have our heads up our asses. we were reporting what happened. Valleywag tried to cover it up & redirect the source of the uprising to a “geek lynch mob”, which arrington later echoed.
so if you please nat — don’t downplay this event and blame it on some twitterati / digerati pulling a fast one on sarah, or on zuckerberg for being boring, or anything else.
this was all about sarah, and about her interaction with the audience.
for fuck’s sake.
– dave mcclure
check Techmeme river for the chronology. nick’s story came out after valleywag’s, but valleywag w
sure SXSW is a tech conference with people letting their hair down & blood-alcohol levels up, but STILL there are plenty of panels that have serious technology discussion. regardless, when 2,000 paying attendees are present at a keynote, it’s not unreasonable to expect a little bit of relevance in the keynotes.
By davemc500hats on Mar 12, 2008
I can’t decide what I like best in this post…”the web industry is in the clutches of an intellectual stagnation that reeks of death” or learning the plural form of anus.
By terrie on Mar 13, 2008
Dave,
If Zuckerman is a notoriously difficult interview, what’s wrong with the interviewer trying whatever technique is at hand to get him to open up for the paying customers? She’d’ve surely failed if she hadn’t, true? So why penalize taking a risk in an already doomed situation? Sounds like she was in a Kobayashi Maru scenario.
(Unfair of me to comment two months later, I suppose, when Dave may not be back to look in on his comment, so, as an exercise for the reader, come up with your own refutations.)
By John A Arkansawyer on May 12, 2008