Silicon Valley Reinvented the City Bus, and Now It’s Five Years Later

A Brief History of how 40,000+ People joined this dumb Facebook tag group in the Year of our Lord 2023

In early 2018, Elon Musk was running out of ideas for his so-called hyperloop, and pitched the following on Twitter: “thousands of small stations the size of a single parking space that take you very close to your destination [and] blend seamlessly into the fabric of a city.”

Or, as someone who is smart and/or isn’t completely detached from reality would call it: a bus stop.

At the time, I was an angry student of urbanism with nothing better to do about this except pen a rant about it in my school newspaper and, because this was 2018 and this was kind of the thing people did on Facebook, I also made a Facebook tag group about this, called Did Silicon Valley Reinvent the Bus Again.

The tag group began as like any other tag group on Facebook - a humble abode for the hundred or so people in it who use it to comment under relevant posts, and which almost never had any actual posts inside it. And, that’s exactly what it should have remained, because this was objectively an incredibly niche subject. 

Even then, there were plenty of, for the lack of a better term, improbably dumb shit that tech “innovators” have come up that fit this general umbrella, from the “shuttle” service that Lyft thought of that promises “a low fixed fare along convenient routes, with no surprise stops” — literally a bus, to the one startup that came up with the idea of “[letting] neighbors pool their money to invest in their communities” and did not realize that they’ve reinvented taxes. Ok, honestly, I still think that second one has actually been performance art this whole time.

(Incidentally, when the thing that started all of this - Elon’s hyperloop - finally came to fruition, it turned out to be worse than anyone could ever have imagined. It was a bumpy single-lane road tunnel for Teslas only, with a maximum speed of 55 miles per hour, no passing lanes or shoulders, and no means of evacuation should literally anything go wrong. A city bus would have been better.)

But, alas, the group began to grow over the years as the tech world continued to pump out questionable ideas, and started getting more and more actual posts inside. Cut to now and, well, now it’s five years later, and the group has over 40,000 members and sees dozens of posts every day. And as the poor soul who has to approve each of these posts, I have to see each and every one of these bad ideas, and after five years of these horrors, the question has to be asked: who the hell is funding these dumb ideas?

The tech industry was supposed to be simple - consisting of smart people with can-do attitudes  who get together to come up with new inventions and ideas that solve problems or, to use the buzzword, to innovate. In fact, your parents and grandparents probably still think that’s how tech works. 

But the problem is, unfortunately, capitalism. Sure, maybe the industry began with kids in garages with the goal of innovation, but the people who funded the kids and got them out of the garages do it with the goal of profits. In other words, the industry has had to evolve beyond just the practical need of innovation, and instead must serve the appetite of capital for profits, too. And that appetite, as you can probably guess, is endless. And at some point, the industry has morphed, from a great idea leading to a group of people to form a startup to implement it with the help of capital, to a group of people forming a startup to look for an idea that could raise them capital. Hell, having a tech background isn‘t even a requirement anymore - for example, remember the dumb  apartment complex in Arizona that pretends to be a startup from last time? The founder is a former finance bro, with stints at McKinsey and Bain.

In the worst way possible, you might say the industry has matured. 

The mortgage bonds that served as one of the main culprits for the 2008 crash is a good analogy here. They were reliably profitable, so there’s demand for more of them, but there are only so many people with enough money to buy houses, and so a finite supply of mortgages to put into these bonds - unless, of course, you expand the pool by offering subprime mortgages to people who might not necessarily have had enough money to afford them. And given that there’s always more money that people would like to invest, expand the pool they did.

Same thing with tech startups - capital likes the idea of startups, with their potential to revolutionize entire industries and grow exponentially, as the tech giants of today like Facebook/Meta had once done. However, if the number of Americans who can afford homes is limited, the number of good start-up ideas are even more so. But, as with before, there are a lot of people with money who would like to invest that money.

And, the cherry on top is that the people with the money who decide whether tech startups get funded are not themselves in tech. As an investor who might give my money to a startup, my concern for that startup’s actual idea or product begins and ends with the simple question of ROI - whether the value of my investment will increase, in the same way that someone who invests in mortgage bonds won’t care to meet the people whose mortgages are bundled in that bond. If you’re investing in a company to make money from that investment, your concern at the end of the day is if your investment will make money, not if the company will make a profit, and certainly not if what the product or service the company offers is actually good or useful. Now, while these three things seem like they should be pretty intricately linked (i.e. a company with a good product should be profitable and thus be a good investment), they often aren’t these days. 

Look no further than Uber, which continues to increase in valuation despite being spectacularly unprofitable and losing billions every year. And until those increases in valuation stop, Uber will continue to be a good investment, record-breaking losses be damned. Now, of course, Uber isn’t a startup anymore, and the returns if you invest in Uber now will obviously pale in comparison to what they would be if you had done so when it was a startup. So, off you go to find the next Uber that will make it big - and chances are, it’s a bunch of techbros reinventing a  bus.

And all of this results in a system that keeps throwing money at more and more new startup projects that it considers to be good investments, which results in a startup ecosystem that is at once swimming in money but also running out of good ideas. The capital is demanding more startups that can generate ROI, even when there might not be a problem to solve or a broken thing to fix or an inefficiency to optimize. So, we end up getting a startup ecosystem that have become decoupled from the spirit of innovation - solving problems and fixing broken things and optimizing inefficiencies, but rather promise innovation for innovation’s sake: the current way of doing things works just fine, but we’re going to do something new anyway, and the only difference is that if the new way is hyped up just enough, some VC will give it millions in seed funding, even when it seems like it shouldn’t receive any.

There are probably some profoundly disturbing ramifications for all of this, namely the entirety of tech being a massive speculative bubble that might collapse to disastrous consequences for the world economy at any second - but I’m no economist. But what doesn’t require an economist to see is that the current system is simply not a good allocator of resources - billions are being dumped in the name of innovation and solving the world’s most pressing problems, all while nothing is actually getting done, and all while fostering the techbros’, as Dan Olson of “Line Goes Up” fame puts it, “technofetishistic egotism of assuming that programmers are uniquely suited to solve society’s problems” - all while literally nothing is being solved. 

The belief that this tech industry can somehow solve all of humanity’s problems is representative of a truly spectacular brand of delusional arrogance coming from a group of people who wouldn’t recognize a city bus if they reinvented it, which makes it so tempting to just blame the delusion on personal or moral failings of techbros themselves (of which there would be plenty). But, based on where the massive amounts of money are going towards, and where the media heaps its uncritical fanboying coverage, you get the feeling that society as a whole has bought into this belief, too.

And as long as this continues to be true, Did Silicon Valley Reinvent the Bus Again?, a dumb Facebook tag group I started while downing an entire bottle of Jack Daniels in undergrad, will continue to thrive with exciting new meme content mocking an endless flow of new, absolutely terrible innovations; meanwhile, the World, the IRL place where we live and where our actions have tangible consequences, will continue to languish from the IRL, tangible consequences of these ideas getting funding while actual proven good ideas do not.