secrets and bubbles

I saw a Mr. Owen Thomas speak at SXSW. His talk was titled "#siliconvalleyproblems: Can We Fix the Tech Mess?" and the talk had two themes which were really pretty different jammed into one talk with a funny title. The first theme had to do with how a city changes in a tech boom. With the exception of one year in New York, Owen has lived in San Francisco since the mid-1990s and has watched the city change. At some point the influx of tech workers created two societies, one of tech and one of everyone else. Techies lived lives apart and this created cultural challenges for nontechies. Housing pricing soared and this pushed many nontechies out of the city. When the tech bubble burst at the end of the dotcom era, the city was devastated as its economy was chained to tech instead of being diversified. At the end of the talk one of the questions came from a woman who feared the same thing happening in Austin. She said that she wasn't a techie and couldn't follow many of the references that Owen had name-dropped during his talk and she also asserted that the cost of living in Austin is ballooning as Austin becomes a tech hub. Owen suggested a crash in Austin would not come from the same circumstances as before as venture capital was fueling the artificial reality in San Francisco which eventually collided with actual reality. He felt that most now see venture capital as they might a casino, in that it is the stuff of luck and gambling, and in having our eyes open we insulate ourselves from a repeat of the American recession one before our most immediate one. The other theme in Owen's talk had to do with his own professional history which provides much insight into the history of blogging and online gossip. Owen started out working at suck.com which was the first webzine with keepers savvy enough to realize that they needed to publish content daily. Owen said that suck.com existed before blogging and served to define what would become the blogosphere and eventually Twitter. Sucksters wrote under pseudonyms. He felt that shock jock talk (having the audacity to say what is on your mind) is a cornerstone of blogging/Twitter culture and, hence, pseudonyms and anonymity are important. He found Secret, which I had not yet heard of, to be best app to emerge at the South by Southwest of 2014. It allows one to spread gossip anonymously on companies and Owen drew a parallel to Secret and the fuckedcompany.com of yore which took bits of gossip on flailing startups from anonymous submissions and just deemed that any one would-be fact coming from twenty different sources was actually fact that could be published at its site. Owen worked there too. I think Secret follows the same model without human editors. It has its own process for the equivalent of voting stuff up at Reddit. Owen felt that his prior place of employment and Secret to both be venues for people who love the places they worked while also being disappointed in them. Owen worked at Gawker next and is at readwrite today.