Visiting The Moabites

[drealm]

I visited facebook this week. This was not something I was particularly looking forward to. I've had to deal with facebook before and almost every single idiot I've spoken to feels like they're silicon valley royalty or part of some technological renaissance. In actuality facebook represents a dark age in technological spirituality. Every coder who works here is a godless drone that prides them selves on quickly butchering code instead of making the effort to worship something more elegant that's beyond their beyond their own ego.

You'll notice when you first come in that everything here is a hacked project. Or a work in progress. Or "temporarily" under construction or just plain not working. In a normal setting putting things together with spit and ducktape is frowned upon. But in this place the mantra of "be stupid and ruin the world" or is it "move fast and break things"? has an enticing aurora that everyone buys into.

So I'm greeted at the front desk by fraternity bros. They have perfected the typical american low wage asshole behavior of working in customer service and being as unwelcoming as possible. I think all American companies that care about customer service should just bulk ship Japanese to their headquarters. Even if they don’t speak English they’ll do their job better. So we wait in the lobby for a half hour because people don't use clocks here and have no concept of stealing other people's time. The lobby is intentionally... "ugly". It’s adorned by some big lego glued together with flashing lights stapled on top. I think this is suppose to be art? Or a transformer, or I don't really care.

Now we're ready to go in but the frat bros want us to do a military style check in by filling out three documents on their electronic thingy. Of course on the last document I need to sign my signature electronically and the screen doesn't work.

Now we’ve made it through the gates and into the courtyard. We go on the standard tour seeing different landmarks that are suppose to mean something to someone. For example there’s an ugly construction crane that stands at the center representing their core values. I guess instead of people worshiping golden calfs they worship rusty building equipment.

To me it all just looks like an infantile play pen. Or a outwardly friendly zoo designed to domesticate raw human beings into goofy gullible slaves who joyfully work 7 days a week. There are random Disney inspired designs all over. The outsides of some building have been modified to look less like boring sterile stucco office buildings and more like a downtown plaza. This comes off as gimmicky but since the entire place is done this way, it’s aesthetically consistent so you don’t realize how shitty the architecture is. I’ve been told that Frank Gehry will be expanding this campus, no surprise there.

We make our way to the cafeteria. The food is fine but I miss eating Chinese food cooked by Chinese, which is what I now eat every day in my Chinese company. Over lunch we talk with two salesmen who are clueless about everything. I suppose they’re good at dealing with Americans who can be sold on sentimental ideas, but for Chinese hyper capitalists that worship money this mushy talk doesn’t fly very far. I throw them a few extremely simple technical questions that they can’t answer and are surprised I would even ask. I give up on them after that.

After lunch we get coffee from a specialty coffee shop. The only thing they did right in this place is the coffee.

We continue the tour seeing other landmarks. We visit instagram, but I’m not sure what this company does. If I remember correctly they have an app that shoots square shaped photos instead of rectangular shaped photos. Big innovation.

Outside there’s a wall at one end that looks like it’s done by cavemen. We’re also shown a candy shop. For some reason it’s very popular but I can’t figure out why.

We part ways and leave the Moabites their crane worship.

[Ghost]

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[fschmidt]

My daughter made tzitzit for me today. I will wear them from now on to distinguish myself from the Moabites.

[Jester]

....You'll notice when you first come in that everything here is a hacked project. Or a work in progress. Or "temporarily" under construction or just plain not working. In a normal setting putting things together with spit and ducktape is frowned upon. But in this place the mantra of "be stupid and ruin the world" or is it "move fast and break things"? has an enticing aurora that everyone buys into.

This is certainly how it felt to use their site.

Interesting post, thanks.