Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

BLUF: Facebook exacts threaten to pull out of silicon Valley unless they get their way which means quit it with all this democracy self governance stuff I’m going to update this with a transcript.
My recollection and paraphrase is they are saying: you don’t need public transportation because we 500 billion dollar market cap neighbor has all that covered. You don’t really need self-governance if you work for us or work with us. Democracy was only an experiment, the new thing is benevolent corporate Big Behebroth. (mixture of Big Brother and Behemoth, an old word for monster). Where do I sign up?

There was a black lady, a former Obama dude, and the real estate dude, who I think lives in Palo Alto, unless I am confusing him with the Google real estae dude. Tennis. Temes, something like that.

I think I did raise my hand and give some quick feedback. Maybe that is heckling and uncouth.

I shop at this cafe and chat up the owner and in fact have produced my own events there. Art, essentially, although art is subversive in that it requires having a heart and a brain.

Meanwhile, Palo Alto Weekly announced it took a $100,000 bribe from the same people. Or they applied for a grant and got it! Also, in a not necessarily related move, the food columnist for Palo Alto Weekly announced that founder of FB donated $100,000 to each of eight restaurants . And then somehow the pr person –maybe one of the five or six pictured above, explained which 8 restaurants were so honored. I mentioned something about Veruca Salt (the rock band, Seether — see here! — but also a character in a book but not actually a type of broth for ramen ).

Follow me on Plastic Alto, partial bibliography: Piketty, tho I have not read, I’ve read about; Chomsky; Bagdikian; Jerry Mander, Absence of the sacred; Roger McNamee on Zooked, but why does he continue to use the function? He livestreams his band there. Also: how much did he make going in and out of that investment? I guess Walter Isaakson on Jobs especially the parts about music. I guess Duck Soup by Marx Brothers. Underworld by Don Delillo mainly because it’s baseball season I was just reading 1,200 word excerpt –all in one sentence, no period or STOP — from “Absalom, Absalom!” 1936 by Faulkner. There is a remastered tape of his famous Nobel speech and we have been wrong he actually said “Man will not only persevere, he will remain. Or ramen. He will order ramen. Rock on! Right arm!” Ray Bradbury about burning books or memorizing them and ice cream George Packer, various, on Orwell, or “The Unwinding” or preview for such in The New Yorker. edit to add, an hour later: I wrote my headline first, which is typical of this medium, blogging, or wordpress, and the opposite of both newspapers – -where the headlines are written much later by editors — or academia where my teacher maybe Professor David Shapiro said that if you write a paper and cannot think of a good title that you have not written a good paper — but I checked “mansplaining” is in the lexicon but likely not in my new Webster’s Illy — but I did find Rebecca not Eisenberg but Solnit in 2012 using it. And maybe men cannot use this term. But — and I also admit there is no “black woman” in my video, just four men – – three white and one non-white, perhaps, hard to tell — but the speaker is a man and the owner of the cafe is Kathleen Daly a woman It’s named for her daughter, Zoe, who now works there but likely was away at university in June, 2018. I’m using mansplaining or “man-splaining” in the sense of tech people and millenials and people hooked up to the Brave New World talking to we the subject people, or aspiring to be such. Rebecca Solnit says she started using the term in 2008. andand: More importantly perhaps, I am conflating two separate nightmares; one, that FB as our overlords we will not need government by We The People, just a bunch of real time thumps up and thumbs down,as we lift the toilet seat in the a.m. then again as we place it back down for wife. But here he is saying Silicon Valley is not really Silicon Valley anymore so watch out because some indicator says we went from $100B market cap to $550B market cap slower than had been predicted by some tout early round investor and maybe there are fewer places to get really good latte in Eugene, Oregon. And I am saying “Silicon Valley” is a shibboleth on both sides of the creek and I still try to sometimes remember the name that came before “Santa Clara Valley” although that is named for a saint I don’t know — Rupa Marya has a song that awkwardly uses the Coastanoan or Ohlone name for here, I think. Or Malcolm Margolin at Press has written about this. Stanford ironically has a plaque near their knew power plant that says this was once an Ohlone world. I am suggesting that 250 years of eurocentric Catholic rule — cue Ben Gibbard, who was on Colbert last night — will be a cake walk compared to the next 200 years of rule by The BeheBroth. The Nazis had IBM, but what’s coming next will have smartphones. By the way, Jack London has The Iron Boot which imagines a 500 year struggle for socialism. Not all the cards/books/cds have been dealt, my friends. Or unfriends. Also: Murder Most Foul by Bob Dylan, which mentions — back on topic — Steve Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, who went to Menlo-Atherton. located two miles from Cafe Zoe.