Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015)

Nostalgia for Grantland, Microserfs, and 90s Tech Culture

• Multiple comments mourn the loss of Grantland and praise its long-form, thoughtful writing compared to later successors.
• Microserfs is remembered fondly as a near-definitive snapshot of early-90s tech work: anxiety, idealism, and pre-dotcom innocence.
• Halt and Catch Fire and Silicon Valley are praised for capturing the manic optimism of emerging tech waves, even when we “already know” how history turns out.
• Some regret that later, stronger seasons of Halt and Catch Fire didn’t get comparable critical coverage.

Computing, Advertising, and Surveillance Capitalism

• Several posters argue computing was better before it was captured by advertising and DRM: locked bootloaders, “cash register” phones, and pervasive tracking are blamed partly on Hollywood’s demand for control.
• Advertising is called a societal “cancer” and equated with propaganda: shaping culture, normalizing manipulation, driving consumption, and contributing to political dysfunction.
• Others push back: psychological research shows behavior change is hard; much ad spend mostly reallocates demand among similar products and is often poor ROI.
• Debate emerges over whether “honest” advertising exists; critics say emotional manipulation and lifestyle branding always outcompete straightforward product information.
• Proposals floated: stricter regulation of data collection, treating ads like pollution, or radically reducing ad-funded services. Counterpoint: ads currently fund independent media; removing them without replacement could be worse.

Work, Meaning, Wage Labor, and Systems

• One thread riffs on the “dream of the 90s” that work and authentic self could align. Some see this as a noble quest; others as another form of escapism or denial of mortality.
• Strong critiques of wage labor: it more often produces “Severance”-style alienation than meaningful vocation. Many argue people want to produce, but on their own terms.
• Proposed alternatives include UBI or guaranteed basics, with work chosen for meaning and supplemented by incentives for unpleasant jobs, plus automation.
• Detractors invoke “human nature” and the historical failures of communism: lack of incentives, bad planning without price signals, corruption, and eventual coercion.
• This broadens into a capitalism-versus-communism morality fight: one side emphasizes market coordination and wealth creation; the other stresses externalized harms, inequality, and moral blind spots about how wealth is accumulated.

Future Tech Waves and Funding Models

• One commenter sees a coming multi-decade boom driven by small ML/RL startups solving real-world engineering/logistics/robotics problems, akin to the early internet era.
• They argue existing tech is enough to create huge value; what’s missing is small, fast pre-seed funding and investors who recognize non-LLM AI opportunities.
• Many are skeptical of angel investing as a “chump’s game” that underperforms simple index funds, with status-seeking as a major motivator.
• Discussion of alternatives: government grants (with real-world examples of capture and abuse), traditional VC, philanthropy, or a return to bootstrapped, revenue-first products.

Miscellaneous

• Several users appreciate the article’s hand-drawn illustration, explicitly contrasting it with contemporary “GenAI slop.”
• A few lament that HN itself has become more crowded with marketing/sales voices, echoing the broader “ads ate everything” theme.