flâneur

Culture Shock in Silicon Valley - by Humzah Khan

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A small huddle gathers around the TV, drawn in by a choppy black-and-white city scene. Someone has just put on Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, a French film from 1895. They turn to each other, exchanging those grins of shared appreciation. Near the patio, on a whiteboard on wheels, a girl sketches a flowchart and solicits advice on whether to leave her consulting job for a startup. The DJ ignores the room, absorbed in a groupchat on his MacBook. A girl wearing an iPod Shuffle as a hairclip complains that the music is too loud and asks her friends if they want to leave and play Bananagrams. A boy is teased for claiming he dropped out of Harvard, because taking an “indefinite” leave of absence doesn’t count as dropping out. Stray packets of mushroom jerky litter the coffee table. Every other conversation around me begins with a reference to something called the orchestration layer. This is my first San Francisco house party, and all my conversation skills are flailing. The first tim

A small huddle gathers around the TV, drawn in by a choppy black-and-white city scene. Someone has just put on Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, a French film from 1895. They turn to each other, exchanging those grins of shared appreciation. Near the patio, on a whiteboard on wheels, a girl sketches a flowchart and solicits advice on whether to leave her consulting job for a startup. The DJ ignores the room, absorbed in a groupchat on his MacBook. A girl wearing an iPod Shuffle as a hairclip complains that the music is too loud and asks her friends if they want to leave and play…

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