Silicon snake oil

Two prime examples, courtesy of two of the best communities on the web. First, through Unfogged, some wannabe Steve Jobs douchecopter explains how the Ipad means we all need to be excellent at our work or be unemployed forever:

And if you’re good at what you do, then I suggest making a plan to be excellent — or quitting and joining the 99% at Occupy Wall Street.

I think the polarization of wealth is as much about the “age of excellence and the end of good” as it is about the criminal Wall Street gambling d-bags who rape and pillage our economy with every trade they can. Certainly the financial crimes of Wall Street did damage, but what damage does putting out average products do to our economy?

It’s just the usual twaddle on how we all need to adopt to the increasing demands of the modern workplace yadda yadda, dressed up in New Shiney Apple snake oil, written by somebody who hasn’t done a day of honest work in his life.

Then at MeFi, another jerkfacewanting to do away with computer science departments at university because they’re not quite vocational training courses, demonstrating he has no clue about what universities actually do:

One good example is cited in an awesome book on educational reform called Crisis on Campus by Columbia professor Mark Taylor: one of the most pressing problems that humanity has today is obtaining clean drinking water. Yet no university has a Department of Water. Why is this? Because campuses are an endless successions of zero-sum games: the formation of a new department necessarily means that resources must be taken away from existing departments, so existing departments viciously defend the status quo, even when that doesn’t align with reality. Computer science education has not been in alignment with reality in a long, long time.

This is just hopelessly clueless about how universities work and like the earlier example, this guy too is obsessed by being the best, by seeking simplistic, business driven solutions to complicated problems. It’s a handicap in the geek mindset, something these silicon snake oil salesmen make good use off.