This is another article that reeks of unsubstantiated, anti-tech sentiment.
"culture and fun has been sucked out of the city since the second tech boom ... when the artists [left] the sex parties would dry up ... Burning Man morphed [to] a multi-million dollar, helicopter valeted, elite event ... sex and intimacy parties altered by the world of tech and money ... You can smell hubris on the streets ... toxic and sometimes dangerous events that revert back to a very unprogressive and misogynistic dynamic, in which entrepreneurial tech 2.0 entitlement and hubris is leveraged to excuse treating women, usually lower on the career ladder, as little more than sex toys."
It's suffocating.
Yes, the events happen. They are almost always sincere, good-hearted, intimate, and problem-free. People in SF are experimenting to see if this is the vitamin that makes people happier in a culture that is hyper-connected, but scrutinized and isolating.
This writer takes these intimate events, and publishes an article about how they are "kinky" and "sexual." Author Andrew Chamings should write 1,500 words about he's the problem.
I agree that the author is opinionated, but it's not an uncommon opinion. Plenty of Bay Area residents who lived there before tech took over feel pretty "suffocated" by its dominance. I've seen first-hand how SF has changed, and agree with the author on a lot of points.
Maybe there would be less anti-tech sentiment if tech culture stopped taking itself quite so seriously and had a little perspective. A sense of humor would go a long way. It's possible to both enjoy these kinds of events and understand why some people might find them sad or weird.
The self-seriousness of the tech crowd, in my opinion, invites these kinds of hit pieces.
Your comment would be just fine without the first and last bits! Particularly the paragraph that starts with "Yes, the events happen" is really good and has much better signal/noise than the rest.
What's gratuitous is of course a matter of interpretation. But I'd say the first bit breaks the site guidelines by calling names ("reeks") and being a low-information rant. The last bit breaks the guidelines by being a personal attack.
Try reading just the 4th para ("Yes, the events happen") in isolation. Do you see how much higher the signal/noise ratio is there?
The first bit ain't attacking the author, though; it's saying the article reeks of those things. That's a very common and reasonable way of expressing that opinion, and it falls short of being ad hominem. Also, at the risk of focusing too much on semantics, "reeks" is an adjective, not namecalling; it's a colorful adjective, but - again - one very commonly used even here on HN (at least in my observation; I'm sure you've got better data on that front).
The last bit is indeed directed at the author, but in the context of the comment's overall point ("Vice journalists earn a living by twisting pure things to make them easier to ridicule") it's spot on and doesn't really cross any lines IMO.
In other words: pulling those bits into isolation and judging them on their own is disingenuous to the commenter's point. Same goes for the remainder of the comment being evaluated without those two bits. The whole comment is a single unified whole, and ought to be treated as indivisible; failure to do so leads to these sorts of misinterpretations.
"culture and fun has been sucked out of the city since the second tech boom ... when the artists [left] the sex parties would dry up ... Burning Man morphed [to] a multi-million dollar, helicopter valeted, elite event ... sex and intimacy parties altered by the world of tech and money ... You can smell hubris on the streets ... toxic and sometimes dangerous events that revert back to a very unprogressive and misogynistic dynamic, in which entrepreneurial tech 2.0 entitlement and hubris is leveraged to excuse treating women, usually lower on the career ladder, as little more than sex toys."
It's suffocating.
Yes, the events happen. They are almost always sincere, good-hearted, intimate, and problem-free. People in SF are experimenting to see if this is the vitamin that makes people happier in a culture that is hyper-connected, but scrutinized and isolating.
This writer takes these intimate events, and publishes an article about how they are "kinky" and "sexual." Author Andrew Chamings should write 1,500 words about he's the problem.