About This Project

‘wtflolwhy’ sums up, for the most part, what I think nearly every time I come across something I’m told is both new and important, or new but not important, and on some occasions neither new nor important.

The etymology, if you will, comes from what I would call the “phases” of my reaction to most things in technology, media, and culture:

🤡 First, I WTF.

🤹‍♂️ Then, I LOL.

🙈 Finally, I scream WHY into a pillow filled with shards of glass.

As someone who has now spent more than a third of his life in and around startups, Silicon Valley and its unholy progeny of venture capitalists, and what many would deem to be cutting-edge technologies, I did not always feel this way.

Cynicism and jadedness grow from seeds sown by unfortunate proximity to untold numbers of techno-visionaries whose new apps will “change the world” if only they can get a billion users and a billion dollars.

Unfortunately for most visionaries of this ilk, ideas are like assholes: everyone has them, and some of them are much tighter than others.

Not everyone can execute a good idea, and even fewer can execute it within the context of a successful business. There is almost always someone else who can do it quicker, better, leaner, and make it look cooler than you can (i.e., “tighter” a-la my crude analogy above.)

Someone much smarter than me referred to this phenomenon as “imaginary products solving imaginary problems for imaginary people,” which is truly keeping it 💯

But being a cynic all the time isn’t fun. It’s quite stressful. And a total cynic isn’t fun to be around, and I like being around. So, I am channeling my accrual of cynicism into critique, analysis, and thoughtful evaluation of (somewhat or not at all) important things that (may) deserve some additional attention. And music curation. Always music curation.