The little private book that sent Silicon Valley into a whirl has now been published

http://scroll.in/article/801956/the-little-private-book-that-sent-silicon-valley-into-a-whirl-has-now-been-published

'Iterating Grace' could be a deeply satirical takedown of tech funding, or just a wicked joke.

Akshat Kumar 

In June 2015, a chapbook showed up in the inboxes and on doorsteps of 140 of Silicon Valley’s influential twitterati. The number was an obvious reference to the character limit imposed by Twitter.

Iterating Grace: Heartfelt Wisdom and Disruptive Truth from Silicon Valley’s Top Venture Capitalists has recently been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux; it can now be read by anyone who wants to, besides the lucky 140.

The profound and/or absurd book – it’s so short it wouldn’t even qualify as a long read on an intellectual website – which bears similarities to Mike Judge’s acclaimed HBO show, Silicon Valley, is a satire on the tech culture prevalent in the Valley and borrows heavily from the tweets of famous VCs, showing up as swirly hand-drawn typography through the book while forming an important part of the narrative.

But it’s not just what’s in the book that’s got people talking, but also the identity of the author. Is this a valley behemoth drawing attention to insider secrets? Why would anyone write a tell-all tale like this – and not reveal their identity though the book guarantees fame? Who is/are Koons Crooks?

The book is actually an introduction by Anonymous to the life of Koons Crooks. It tracks Crooks’s story from the dotcom bust in 2000 and 20011, leading to several unexpected consequences towards the end in the Bolivian highlands. The whole narrative is studded with references to the Valley. Krooks is a foot soldier of the first dotcom boom.

After the bust, Krooks goes through a process of metaphysical reflection, where he refers to the dotcom economy as “one big mandala – the Buddhist tradition of creating art out of sand and then wiping it all away”. The book is clearly satire – targeting all that goes on in the Valley, with a mock tragic obituary of sorts to an enigmatic cog in the wheel. Koons’s collection of ostensibly inspirational and insightful tweets from VCs turns to be a litany of silliness, seen in the context of the earlier bust.

“For months, Koons Crooks transcribed tweets, alone on his volcano… Crooks himself never tweeted. He never retweeted. But he had developed his own, impassioned way of favouriting.”

Ever since its publication, the who’s who of the Valley have been playing the whodunit game to try and identify the real Koons Crooks. Crooks has had the whole tech world speculating on Twitter!

Whether intended as a marketing tactic or not, the anonymity has worked superbly to interest potential readers. Among the speculative (or algorithmic as they would say in the Valley) attempts, there have been multiple blogposts, comment threads and a detailed statistical analysis on the manuscript text using Twitter analytics to scientifically identify the author.

“Crooks’s family recently deleted his account, but he seems to have followed a long list of founders, venture capitalists, and angel investors. He began to see, in their Tweets, hints of some elusive but irrefutable wisdom: a string of logic that underwrote the universe like code. For him, the tossed-off musings and business maxims of these men (they were almost all men) shimmered with a certain numinous lustre. He contemplated individual Tweets for days, sometimes weeks, expounding on them at length in the margins of his books about the sea, meditating on them as though they were koans. The answers he’d been searching for had been there, in the Bay Area’s innovation economy, all along – articulated, unwittingly, by an elite class of entrepreneurial high priests. Crooks could see that now from his new vantage point, 5,300 miles away from Silicon Valley and 12,000 feet in the sky. “Angel investor = herald, messenger. Message = Hello, World!” he scrawled beneath an illustration of beets in Chez Panisse Vegetables.”

Iterating Grace could be a carefully crafted masterpiece. Or it could be a gigantic joke, which paranoid tech stars are taking very seriously.