Firing up the ol’ blogomatron again. The last one, livejournal, was in highschool/college. This one will hopefully be more cohesive and less whiny. Why Silicon Babylon? Besides the nice rhyme, it struck me as amusing that SV (Silicon Valley) is full of self-proclaimed tech evangelists deifying people that have built successful Stacks. To the uninitiated in web development, The Stack often refers to layers of different software that communicate to eachother in order to produce that pretty page you see in your browser. For example, you could have an SQL database storing and retrieving data for a Rails server that interprets the HTTP request from your browser and relays information to your computer in the form of HTML (that thing you tried learning once), CSS (that thing I tried learning once) and Javascript (I’d be loathe to describe Javascript in a parenthetical blurb). Each layer of The Stack often consists of a different language, a characteristic that brought the Tower of Babel down.

Silicon Babylon is also apropos for another reason:

ORIGIN Greek Babulōn (from Hebrew bāḇel), also the name of the mystical city of the Apocalypse. Compare with babel.

Babylon 2 |ˈbabəˌlän|

noun black English

(chiefly among Rastafarians) a contemptuous or dismissive term for aspects of a society seen as degenerate or oppressive, esp. the police: praise them for bringing a new rectitude to Babylon. ORIGIN 1940s: by association with Babylon1.

thanks Apple dictionary!

Is Silicon Valley sustainable financially? Socially? Environmentally? “Stay tuned” is too cliche and analog for this blog, so don’t touch that dial.