Stepping into Silicon Valley’s construction zone.
A minor scandal erupted after Sarah Lacy, editor-in-chief of tech site PandoDaily, weighed in on the Bay Area Rapid Transit strike last week. She told Marketplace Tech:
If I had more friends who were BART drivers, I would probably be very sympathetic to their cause, and if they had more friends who were building companies they would probably realize we're not all millionaires, and we're actually working pretty hard to build something.
She then made the following characterization:
People in the tech industry feel like life is a meritocracy. You work really hard, you build something and you create something, which is sort of directly opposite to unions.
The response was harsh and righteous, ostensibly focusing on what, honestly, is a fairly standard conservative, or "pro-business," attitude about unionization. But what animated the response had little to do with unions or politics, and everything to do with the word "build."
The b-word has been in the business and tech lexicon for decades, but merely as a synonym — there are only so many ways to credit someone with the creation and growth of a company. And besides, in many cases, the expansion of a company involves literal, physical building.
But today it has infected the language of tech completely: there is no incorporation in Silicon Valley, just "building." Northern California, to hear the tech elite tell it, is more like a cluster of tech-focused kibbutzim than a spaced-out suburb dotted with office parks.
The infection has reached into tech's oldest territories too. In 2011, Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, which started in 1992, merged with another Microsoft conference and renamed "BUILD." It is still attended by "developers," however, as it was two decades ago. Today, in an announcement that it would shut down MSN TV, also known as WebTV, Microsoft posthumously baptized the product as something it had "built."
