TechFlash published a Redfin essay today asking folks in Seattle’s startup community to go ahead and disagree — yes by all means — but to stop being so nasty about it. Which of course has only incited more nastiness: 58 comments and counting. Why do you think Seattle has gotten into such a funk lately?
I wrote the post in an hour or two and then spent the weekend trying to decide whether to let it see the light of day. John Cook was supposed to publish a picture of Khan from “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan” as my picture but instead just inserted Ricardo Montalban below the standard headshot, with no explanation. While searching for the photo, I learned that Montalban’s ridiculous rubber pectorals were in fact real.
And to express how I felt about the need to disagree, to have it out, to get somehow to that lost little shivering creature of truth, there was a link in there to the opening monologue in “Michael Clayton” that spoke to me like nothing else in film in the past five years. Here’s the full clip:
[youtube FjTp3MSh-Vw]
And while we’re on the subject of stuff that didn’t make the cut… For the closing sentence, about how we are all “more delicate than we pretend to be,” there was a Flickr photo we never got permission to use, so you’ll just have to look at it on Flickr itself. If humanity had to send one picture into outer space to convince hostile aliens that our planet was worth saving, this one would be it.