Tarpley Hitt
RIP Good Times | On the Future of Big Tech
Tarpley Hitt
The trouble in Silicon Valley goes far beyond the tumult at Twitter and the implosion of FTX; in the sixteen months since Facebook rebranded as Meta, the company has shed thousands of employees, including 11,000 in a single round of layoffs, and has extended its hiring freeze. Across DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, Salesforce, and other companies, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022 alone, and stocks have taken...
Back in the Doomsday Spirit
Tarpley Hitt
There are a couple of anecdotes that routinely come up in media coverage of Sequoia Capital, the V.C. firm now notorious for investing and then losing $150 million in the crypto exchange FTX. A recent one is Sequoia’s assurance that its partners had run a “rigorous diligence process” on the failed platform. Another is the fact that Sequoia deleted a fawning, 14,000-word profile of FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, from its...
America’s Son | Who’s Afraid of Hunter Biden?
Tarpley Hitt
It is easy to discount most new entries in the canon of conservative cinema, on account of the fact that they tend to be bad. By conservative cinema I mean overtly partisan agitprop, not the Clint Eastwood kind, and by bad I mean their dialogue is sermonic, their symbolism is obvious, their edits waffle between awkward and uncanny, and their casts represent a collection of Hollywood afterthoughts who ascribe their...
“An Impossible Feedback Loop” | The Year in Mental Health
Tarpley Hitt
It’s no secret that the profound losses and disruptions to daily life of the past year have had a major emotional and psychological impact on nearly all of us. Many of the effects are obvious — loneliness, grief, disorientation, anxiety — and yet, aside from a profusion of dubious self-care tips and misused therapeutic language on social media, we have barely begun to reckon with their enormity and complexity, not...