startup.com

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Fri Jun 1 11:44:21 PDT 2001


I saw startup.com last night. As you might have gathered from the reviews, it is a documentary, soap-opera take on two friends who start govWorks.com, raise 60 million, and have some kind of conflict that results in the tecchie founder being fired. The company fails and everybody has regrets.

The movie was remarkable in its inability/unwillingness to position this story in a larger context, be that social, historical, economic, whatever. No one else in the company gets any attention except the founding duo; no technical issues are examined, no employees are interviewed. Although the participants attempt to simulate consciousness at the denoument by noting that this is all about "human values vs money," the movie makers themselves are notably short on human values. Their perspective fits seamlessly into the capitalislt take on reality: business is a black box. Stuff goes in stuff goes out. If the stuff that comes out is more than the stuff that goes in, you have a profit, you are successful: happy ending. If not, not. Pet rocks, cancer cures, software portals, whatever.

That was mostly it. Interesting to sociologists and anthropologists, maybe. The people featured in the movie were not very likeable; they spoke a weird corporate psychobabble even when having personal conversations. The only thing that stood out was the enormously privileged background of the founding duo who were able to parely an idea into 60 million dollars on the strength of the speculative mania and their class background.

If you're interested in what passes for critical consciousness these days, it might be worth a look-see. Nerds beware: there's no programming in it at all.

Joanna Bujes



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