The Shill and The Dally: #FakeTech Comes To D.C. Again. When Will They Learn?

Don't lie in a federal government building, OK?

Kosplaying Karp — does he sell anything other than hype?

Once again the Hill & the Valley has rolled into Coruscant, Versailles, or Washington D.C. I’ve come to calling the whole thing the Shill and The Dally, which you are free to steal and use as you see fit.

Whenever this sort of thing happens I’m reminded of that old Coolidge quip — that many people come to Washington looking for things they ought not have and that if you stay very still they’ll get the hint and they will leave.

Sadly the denizens of today’s Hill & the Valley didn’t get that message.

And yet rather than go and interact with the Government the denizens of this year’s Hill & Valley conference like to interact mostly with each other. They swoop in and then they swoop out. I’m not there this year — no great loss! — but I have my spies fanned out, sending me reports back.

One of the best moments was when a protestor called out Karp for his support of the genocide in Gaza. Well done, ma’am, but Karp wishes that his tech were used more than it, in point of fact, is. Kosplaying Karp is more genocide curious than a proper génocidaire.

Whether this absolves him or not I couldn’t say. Isn’t it weird to shill for a genocide you aren’t a participant in so as to boost your stock price? Or is this just the logic of an over hyped stock market? I couldn’t say. But I do know that Peter Thiel is lying — or is it marketing? — when he says the Turning test has passed.

In the real world, economies we know are a combination of consumption, investment, net imports, net exports and, of course, the Government.

As we head into a recession the Government is looking more or more likely as a source of much needed capital. Of course whenever you hear private-public partnerships you should hear a government bailout.

National Security Advisor Michael Waltz told the audience that the administration would cut regulation and overhaul Pentagon contracting so that startups could easily compete for bids.

That’s welcome news but it’s not at all clear that many of the Silicon Valley firms could compete for bids under the law. Many of them have tech teams or capital which are decidedly foreign. They tend to have Indian, Chinese, Russian or Israeli problems.

And so the Government is going to try to figure out what and who is salvageable. This means that it’s going to be asking lots of questions and some of those questions will be intense.

Whenever there’s a recession people tend to run toward the government but DOGE has limited the government’s appeal. You sometimes wonder if causing all this volatility and pain was the point of DOGE.

Anyway, the congressmen and senators are only too happy to have them in the Imperial City — if only to fleece them for the campaign contributions.

But you can’t really talk or contribute your way to a government contract. And every time you talk in a government building — which the Library of Congress’s Visitor Center is — you’re more or less being recorded.

There’s another way, of course.

That involves actually having stuff the U.S. government can actually buy.

And that would mean coming to DC and having it assessed and vetted. It would also mean not taking weird foreign money or at least not lying about it when you’re asked about it. It would mean not having strange drug parties in the desert.

We don’t really care what you say. We don’t really care what you’ve done. We care about what you have and what you might do.

I’m happy to introduce you to the Real Government.

But that’s going to mean listening to what we have to say.

Stop shilling, stop dallying. Start contributing. If you can.