> The interesting question, and I have no idea what the answer is, is whether Silicon Valley will recover from what's been done to it.

You're using language to pretend there's some agency behind the changes it undergoes.

> There have always been douchebags everywhere, but it used to be something that one was ashamed of.

This is not true at all.

> If you funded someone like Evan Spiegel, you didn't talk about it. You just pretended that it didn't happen and called it a learning experience.

So you're saying (a) this guy is a douchebag (what does that have to do with anything?) and (b) in the past, VC's or angels would fund cool people, friendly hackers, and they didn't care about money. Actually, that's not true. They invested with the goal of making money.

> Now, we have a culture that values material success at the expense of all else, isn't really about technology or progress, and views Sean Parker levels of douchebaggery as a positive trait.

I claim investors don't invest based on douchebaggery levels. Do you have reason to believe otherwise?

> The Bay Area used to be for misfits who chose to go off and do their own thing: live among the redwoods, play with circuits and computers, go mountain biking.

No it didn't. It was an industrial wasteland that created countless superfund zones, and people (real people, not the ones you read about in stories) moved here to work (or spy for Russia). That's why there's no orchards anymore.

> Now it's full of self-marketers who create the impression that they do all of that stuff, while actually being unimaginative corporate drones even worse than the last generation's kind.

Most people I talk to (in the industry) aren't self-marketers, they're just random developers. As for people making companies and such, do you think those people in the past, also, were not self-marketers? If they weren't self-marketing, how do you think they got funding? VC's were cold-calling?

> If Silicon Valley gets back to a culture of invention

I love all the ways you come up with encoding your worldview into your posts via premises behind other things you say. That way, it takes more effort to reply to you because it requires unwinding back to those premises, which means you don't have to see as many people disagreeing with you. It's a lot like arguing with a megaphone. In this case, it's your assumption that Silicon Valley had a culture of invention, which also assumes that it had a (in the singular form) culture. Actually, it was a bunch of people trying to make money, and they were all different people with different personalities. It always has been about making money. That's the history of America.

> a start would be to block the anti-competitive back-channelling and social proof checking; we couldn't eradicate all of it de facto but making it illegal would change behaviors enough to give us a chance at fixing the place

Not sure what this has to do with the presence of so-called douchebags that you started your post with, or why, but thanks for sharing your opinion.

> Another thing that Silicon Valley needs to do in order to save its character is fix the cost-of-living issue by crushing some NIMBYs.

This has nothing to do with any aspect of its character that you've mentioned. Software developers and silicon valley people and the like don't have trouble paying the rent. It's everybody else that just happens to be living here.