You should be.

If you enjoyed this article, you owe it to yourself to read Dan Lyons' Disrupted, which is basically this in book form and a little more funny, a little more biting, a little less forgiving. You should also be aware that Dan Lyons has been a staff writer on HBO's Silicon Valley for two seasons and it shows.

The style of writing can trace a direct lineage to Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales from An Accelerated Culture of 1991:

I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.

Which, really, is where the current crop of Silicon Valley proletariat comes from. Those of us who came of age during the first tech bubble were either well-placed, well-protected and ruthless or utterly annihilated by the washout. The annihilated never recovered; they're the guys that started OWS, they're the guys that write dystopian tech journalism, they're the ones that talk about radical homemaking and living with less. The well-placed and well-protected became VC founders and corporate flacks where they distribute their parents' money to their friends.

One thing about this bubble vs. the last: at least my friends made money. I had friends at Loudeye making $180k a year. I knew a low-level programmer at HomeGrocer.com that made enough with his severance to buy a brownstone bunker in Oakland. This time 'round the market has been primed by the recession of '07 so everyone is willing to work for shit money plus stock options... which never vest and never will.

You think Bernie Sanders was a force in '16. The socialist backlash in 2020 and 2024 are going to be fearsome. An entire generation of Americans is currently getting a tip-of-the-spear lesson in income inequality.

I do not envy you.