Originally published at: The age of living cheaply on Silicon Valley's money fire is over | Boing Boing
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Moviepass never had a business model and blaming Millenials for its demise is incredibly stupid.
Edit: I’m going to go a little further and say a better conversation to be had is whether there is any room for the “growth at all costs” model of venture funding anymore. Millennials didn’t ask the Valley to give them free shit but if the Valley was going to market free shit specifically to them of course they were going to take advantage of it.
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I’m proud to say I have never set foot in the den of iniquity that is Silicon Valley.
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I’m pretty sure that the tech companies don’t care. They’re making money off of you not from a physical visit to a geographical area, but from you using their technology and services. Evidence suggests that you’re using a computer or phone right now.
Besides, what do you have against Gilroy? Wikipedia considers the Garlic Capital of the World to be within Silicon Valley.
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The shareholder-subsidised, worker-exploiting party eventually had to come to an end sooner or later, and the pandemic only accelerated the process.
An objection, though: posing the prior cheapness of Uber, Airbnb and so on as “subsidizing” the lifestyle of “millennials” seems to me a baited way of describing predatory pricing.
Same here. It’s not like they’re swimming in disposable income.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-millennials-are-running-out-of-time/
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Your daily reminder that generational categories are basically arbitrary bullshit, and that whenever someone blames any generation–millenials, boomers, whatever–for something, odds are that they’re just trying to distract people from the class issues.
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The funny thing is that traditional business models worked because there were alternatives. Like I’ve noticed with the whole food delivery apps is that they don’t really compete on price as much as they claim. And for me, it’s cheaper to order take out directly and brave the afternoon traffic. Things like doordash were okay when I was deathly afraid of getting covid but now I’m immunized, there’s no reason to use it; low cost or not.
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“Growth at all costs” violates thermodynamics and only sets people up to squander the resources they have on lame worthless shite.
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Yet…we’ve all pretty much gotten comfortable with subscription services/pricing structure and that’s how this is actually going to spiral. Your precious data goes in, price goes up, it’s a raging PITA to crack out of the (platform/app/simplicity/delivery/speed/measurement/etc.) structure, so it juuuuuust keeps rolling. People are slow to shut down items in progress and the muscle memory of using them. It’s just…there.
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I’m reading your mind right now.
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Uh… the underwriting of costs to “disrupt” existing industries has been around since at least the late 90’s. Amazon didn’t get huge because it was better than everyone else. Amazon got huge because their investors underwrote six straight years of massive loses to sew up the market. So not so much Millennial underwriting as it is vulture capitalist business as usual. And if this writer thinks it’s drying up, he needs to find a new line of work. Nothing has changed financially, and there will be more of these types of activities in the near future. I guarantee it.
Fuck everything about the idea millennials have been “underwritten.” Everyone of them I know is struggling and the fresh-out-of-college members of Gen Z even worse.
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I knew that. Better wear gloves, it’s dirty in there…
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Full PPE. Am not regretting it.
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He thinks: “Roger That!”
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Instead of trying to shame millennials, the article should investigate how rising income inequality has created vastly more capital than Wall Street can find productive uses for. How low price/earning ratios have driven investment into startups with no real chance to become profitable. The lack of any real attempt to explain why investors were willing to subsidize operating expenses in businesses that had low barriers to entry is notable.
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Yes, the MATH does not work, hoarding wealth is a dead end. Now to get the wealth hoarders to realize that, therein lies the rub my good friends.
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And if they got some free stuff along with way, I’m happy for them!
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