SYNDICATED COLUMN: Satire – The Revolution Will Be Digitized
Thursday, May 24th, 2012 by Ted RallThis Time: Three Douches To Watch Out For
It sounds like the lede of another breathless Dot-Com Bubble 3.0 puff piece by David Carr.
Three douchebags hook up at a café-cum-gallery-cum-hacketeria in a section of Brooklyn so hip that hipsters can’t find it on an app. Eight minutes later, they’ve banged out a business plan. What for, they can’t say. All they know is, it’ll be wicked awesome sweet. They send out a few emails; before you can type 140 characters they’ve lined up $28 million in seed capital. (There’s also out-of-school chatter about off-the-book rubles. Whatever.)
Now everyone’s talking about Douchenet.
Not you. You’re not talking about Douchenet. No one you know is talking about Douchenet.
By “everybody,” we don’t mean “everybody.” We don’t even mean “a large number of people.” We mean “everyone who matters.” Which most assuredly doesn’t include you. Or, really, hardly anyone at all.
So.
What exactly is Douchenet? Who knows? Who cares? The point of a piece like this one isn’t to tell you what’s going on. The point is to blow some free publicity the way of well-connected 26-year-old friends of people who matter to people who matter. (Not. You.) Twenty-six-year-olds whose business ideas are obviously utter horsecrap, are clearly doomed to failure, but not before they walk away with even more cash, raised from unwashed small-time rube wannabe playas. That’s the point of a piece like this.
That, and to make you feel miserable.
You poor, stupid, underemployed schmuck. A schmuck who will never, ever come anywhere near millions and millions of dollars. No matter how hard or long you toil.
Id.
iot.
At first (and OK, 17th) glance, last week’s Facebook IPO looks like a fiasco. Federal investigators are looking into charges that Morgan Stanley knowingly set the share price too high in order to inflate its underwriting fees, leaving unsophisticated stock buyers holding the bag for an 18 percent plunge of a $16 billion offering. But that’s only half the picture.
Sure, millions of people lost their hard-earned savings. But three douchebags are rocking out.
Which is what matters.
Mark Miron, 26, got paid in Facebook shares for watching Mark Zuckerberg’s cat one summer. As of last week, he was worth $200 million. But he’s more than just another smug, Silicon Valley wanker with rich parents, who likes to wear blue shirts with white collars, and is smart enough not to let his friend’s friend’s cat die. I mean, he is that. But there’s other stuff too. Like, he made a name for himself at Google when he agreed with some other entitled kids-of-Boomers that having illustrators design the search engine’s front page for free (i.e. “exposure”) was a cool idea. (By “cool,” we mean cheap, cynical and exploitative.) Can you say moxie?
Marc Parker, 26, started out at Facebook.co.uk, where he came up with the idea to model the British version of the site after its American parent, down to using the same language. “I love the blue hyperlinks. The white background. So American. And yet so British.” Eager to be promoted from a prat or a git to a full-fledged douchebag, Parker moved to Palo Alto, California in order to relinquish first his British, then his American citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes on the £200 million he earned from the IPO.
Jeff Mark, 26, drifted from PayPal to Facebook to MySpace to Compuserve to Netscape back to Compuserve. (Though closed, he somehow managed to collect €200 million from the latter.)
The three men became inseparable—and insufferable—after a chance encounter at Bi-Nary, a macrobiotic air bar that caters to sexually indiscriminate coders on the edge of the foothills near the section of the Google campus where they test attack drones for corporations.
It was during a sex tour of the Bushwick section of Brooklyn that the three douches conceived Douchenet. “We were talking about how, even though douches run just about everything in multimedia, until recently there weren’t the authoring tools and the bandwidth and/or the tablet platform for douches to hook up to do douchey things,” said Miron.
“Yeah,” agreed Parker and Mark.
I reached out to (that’s e-talk for “called”) Margot Jefferson, an analyst at D-Freak, a firm that tracks douchebaggery. “Douches account for 33 percent of start-ups, which account for 82 percent of investor fleecing, which amounts to 126 percent of economic activity in the United States,” points out Jefferson. “So the ability to connect douches across digital platforms using digital things is a game changer,” she confirms.
Given the power and the track record of these remarkable entrepreneurs, Douchenet is a story about power, wealth, journalism—and yes, wealth and power—worth watching. Marc Miron, for example, wrote that article that appeared in Wired that time. And Parker’s dad is just ridiculously rich, so we know he’s smart. Douchenet brings to mind Wingnutnet, a website you’ve never heard of because it doesn’t exist, yet which I’ve been writing about forever, by which I mean 2011.
Sometime this summer, Android will release a free version of Douchenet, so people who sign up can begin registering their personal financial information for distribution to trusted sites in Belarus. Using the so-called “freemium” model, Douchenet will charge fees for actual features, like the ability to create an “avatar” that could be sold by Farmville, which would pay a fraction of a fractile of a percent back to the original user, i.e. Douchenet.
In a live Tweetathon, Mark said he was drawn to Douchenet less by the idea than by the people who came up with it. “When you make an investment, you are betting on the team more than the idea,” he said. “If the idea is wrong, but the team is right, they will figure it out.”
“Who knows where this will end up?” he added between tokes on a clove bong.
(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out May 29. His website is tedrall.com.)
