As you may have heard, the area around Rosenthaler Platz is awash with money and has been dubbed “Silicon Allee” (“Forget Silicon Valley”), thanks to all the successful web start-ups that have sprouted up over the past few years. Ambitious young entrepreneurs congregate in places like the laptop battery farm Sankt Oberholz or third wave coffee hellholes such as The Barn. With self-congratulatory swagger, techno-optimists from around the globe talk up their banal website or app as if it were the next Facebook, using terms like “native ecosystem”, “disruption”, and “going alpha” in a thoroughly inappropriate manner.
Inevitably, Silicon Allee has been infiltrated by cheerfully aggressive North Americans and this little video titled “Shit that Silicon Allee says” is a nice piss-take on the whole “tech scene” – in which hype reached fever pitch last year when Hollywood philanderer Ashton Kutcher invested in the totally frivolous Amen.
Though I suspect writer Marguerite Imbert of being the type that uses “über” far too much in day-to-day conversation, she’s got a few great lines. My favourites:
“Ashton’s at Betahaus?”
“What does ‘dot D-E’ stand for?”
“Spraycream?”
