A fascinating and thorough look into Silicon Valley and one of its key arteries, Y Combinator, in "The Viral Me" by Devin Friedman in GQ Magazine. Here are some key quotes:

YC lesson one: Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world... YC lesson two: Fuck the business plan. Throw your thingy up as soon as possible, see how people use it, and change it to fit what they want.

Devin does a superb job of immersing himself into valley culture and language while maintaining his critical distance. Some of the best parts of the article are classic reporting from conversations where you wish you could be the fly on the wall to hear more than the snippets we get such as:

"FB can already tell when you're about to break up with someone: certain communication patterns emerge"

A long feature the article takes the time to really understand and analyze how silicon valley is changing the world and why. The motivations behind why people do what they do and share what they share:

A more pessimistic way to look at it is that we're slave labor, getting lured by our desire to show off what we buy (Swipely) or our witty repartee (Twitter), by our need for affirmation (all of the above), or by our habit of looking at pictures of girls from high school all day instead of doing work (FB), and we end up not only driving traffic to these sites but filtering information so that FB and Twitter and Swipely can capitalize on it. They would say they're just trying to make it easier for us to find movies we like. That's probably true, too.

It's not a contradiction that everyone sees what's happening and continues contributing to the cyclone of personal information and social affirmation. Without meaning to he captures the real return on investment (ROI) that drives social media:

"In the best products, you put minimal amounts in," Brian says, "and you get a lot back out. Like Twitter. You follow ten people. You maybe tweet once in a while. And you get all this news content and information. You don't have to do very much, and you get a lot back. Facebook? The same thing. You connect to your friends and, boom, you're flooded with all this stuff. Maybe you put in one thing, and all day long you get all this stuff to look at. DailyBooth, the same thing. You take one picture and you get ten comments back for one post."

A setup perhaps to the next step, the evolution from the social layer to the game layer:

Now that the social layer has been built, some people say the next layer will be the game layer. The game layer will install game mechanics in everything, and game mechanics are a way to manipulate human behavior. The optimists say that we can use game mechanics to manipulate ourselves to be better—nicer, more productive, not as fat—and that the companies who figure out how to install that layer will be the next Facebooks. Here's how Rahul explains it: "The biggest trend in Web applications right now is adding game design. With the theory of game design, you want a curve like this: increasingly large payoffs at random but increasingly spaced intervals. So the first payoff is very small, and the next payoff is a little bigger, and the next one… To begin with, you get a payoff one out of five actions, then it's one out of twenty, then it's one out of fifty—but those intervals have to be random. That is the key to human addiction. And any system that has that property, whether it's Facebook, World of Warcraft, or physical drugs—that's what makes business work. Facebook is very watered-down. They could ratchet up the gaming significantly."

However what I find most fascinating about this article is the subjectivity that drives many of these startups. They focus, quite rightly, on frictionless products and services that speak to the ease of use that we expect from our evolving technology. Yet friction is what drives us:

But you know why I think they're really happy? Because they get to build all this stuff. The act of creation is maybe the most frictive thing going. Using the stuff is meant to be frictionless, but making it isn't. And their happiness comes from friction. Most happiness probably comes from friction. It's why having sex with someone you've fallen in love with (not the easiest, safest process, falling in love) is so much better than having sex with a prostitute (no friction there). And that is why the happiest and most fulfilled people who use social media are here. Making it. The only problem is that it's not scalable. That's the flaw, really, with this: The only way to scale it is to remove the friction.