{"id":5140,"date":"2013-05-28T19:47:27","date_gmt":"2013-05-29T01:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5140"},"modified":"2013-05-28T19:47:27","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T01:47:27","slug":"the-unexotic-underclass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5140","title":{"rendered":"The Unexotic Underclass"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/miter.mit.edu\/the-unexotic-underclass\/\">C.Z. Nnaemeka<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The startup scene today, and by \u2018scene\u2019 I\u2019m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people \u2013 observers, critics,  investors, entrepreneurs, \u2018want\u2019repreneurs, academics, techies, and the like \u2013 seems to be riven into two camps.<\/p>\n<p>On one side stand those who believe that entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems \u2013 capital B, capital P: clean energy, poverty, famine, climate change, you name it.  I needn\u2019t replay their song here; they\u2019ve argued their cases far more eloquently elsewhere.  In short, they contend that too many brains and dollars have been shoveled into resolving what I call \u2018anti-problems\u2019 \u2013  interests usually centered about food or fashion or \u2018social\u2019or gaming.  Something an anti-problem company  might develop is an app  that provides  restaurant recommendations based on your blood type, a picture of your childhood pet, the music preferences of your 3 best friends, and the barometric pressure of the nearest city beginning with the letter Q.  (That such an app does not yet exist is reminder still of how impoverished a state American scientific education has descended.  Weep not! We redouble our calls for more STEM funding.)<\/p>\n<p>On  the other side stand those who believe that entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems \u2013 capital B, capital P \u2013 that there are too many folks resolving anti-problems\u2026 BUT  just to be on the safe side, the venture capitalists should keep pumping tons of  money  into  those anti-problem entrepreneurs because you never know when some corporate leviathan \u2013 Google, Facebook, Yahoo! \u2013 will come along and buy what yesterday looked like a nonsense app and today is still a nonsense app, but a nonsense app that can walk a bit taller, held aloft by the insanities of American exceptionalism.  For not only is our sucker birthrate still high in this country (one every minute, baby!), but our suckers are capitalists bearing fat checks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>C.Z. Nnaemeka: The startup scene today, and by \u2018scene\u2019 I\u2019m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people \u2013 observers, critics, investors, entrepreneurs, \u2018want\u2019repreneurs, academics, techies, and the like \u2013 seems to be riven into two camps. On one side stand those who believe that entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}