One of the people involved in this "project" worked for me, and then during their term of working for me, worked very hard behind my back against me. I only found out about the project after I was fired and they had taken control of my startup, and I have to say: I wasn't at all surprised.
Boogie_Man · 2h ago
You should get a video crew to document you confronting them and release it as a competing film.
"Getting he ass 4: Chasing ideologues"
Loughla · 3h ago
How do you get fired from your own startup? I'm not involved in these things, but it seems like if you're the creator, you can't get fired?
dylan604 · 1h ago
it happens when you give up control to receiving funding. read your term sheets carefully and do not let those $$$ blur your vision on a bad contract. once a VC has done due diligence and you've shared all of your internal IP with them, you'd have to be one special snowflake to not be able to be replaced.
neom · 3h ago
Can't lead if nobody will follow. It was also my own fault- I'm not blaming them. They were a key leader in my exec team and I found out after they: hated startup, hated capitalism, and hated me.
BLKNSLVR · 2h ago
Wow, so they were a 'mole' from the beginning who only joined with the intention of destroying it?
That's sociopathic.
neom · 2h ago
I don't think it was that insidious. Once venture dollars got involved and we started to hire more "business people" - the folks who liked the social aspects of our work got turned off and became emotional, leading to a lot of shadow work I was totally unaware of, ultimately resulting in my ousting. I want to be clear: I have responsibility in the situation also, I was the CEO and it was my failure. I ultimately mismanaged.
brookside · 2h ago
I'm absolutely intrigued by your story and want to hear a fuller account, if there's any chance you are willing.
I'm still processing the whole thing myself to be honest, it was all quite a lot, traumatic, but once day I'll write a book about it.
uoaei · 15m ago
That assumption certainly isn't warranted. More like, they had some skills and some opportunity to benefit from them, then realized that ideologically they were far from accepting the status quo as expressed through the innumerable decisions and actions over the course of participating in that enterprise.
vkou · 2h ago
Or, perhaps, the parent poster is not giving us a holistic picture of what occurred.
idiotsecant · 1h ago
The red flags OP is throwing off are visible from space.
uoaei · 13m ago
On a forum where ideology is most often unexamined, or waved away purely in terms of profit, this one-sided and biased account should be treated with the appropriate context in mind.
gthompson512 · 1h ago
Sorry I read about this way long ago, what is meant by "worked for me" "project", "behind my back" and such. I didn't get the connotations for most of that from reading articles about this. What is the real story?
subjectsigma · 2h ago
Without knowing them, this seems exactly like the behavior of someone who thinks they can steal from others (mall owners) because those people are “in the wrong” (soulless capitalists).
And yes, unless they were running their own generator somehow, which the article doesn’t seem to imply, they were stealing
DrewADesign · 1h ago
The movie contains a lot of backstory that describes who they are, the economic forces in Providence at the time, and what lead them to do this.
You could speculate, automatically snapping to the least charitable assumptions, or you could actually watch it and find out.
(Everything in the apartment was purchased, and they anonymously gave money to the mall management every month by slipping an envelope of cash under the office door saying "thanks for the utilities.")
te · 4m ago
Really interested in seeing this movie, but lol at the thought that the owners of the mall ever saw a single cent from envelopes of cash stuffed under an office door.
doctorpangloss · 9m ago
Yeah. Sure. Let me know how your wife will feel if someone was living in your crawl space as an art project, “slipping an envelope of cash” under your door every month.
bigyabai · 1h ago
It sounds like they succeeded. If they can exploit a company's resources to their express advantage while not being a large enough problem to deal with, then capitalism is at a net loss. Getting the system to work against these types means investing in after-hours mall security, or getting investors to care about your hostile takeover situation. If the responsible individuals can't be assed to find a solution, then yeah, tough luck. The mall is theirs, the company is theirs too.
I applaud this kind of creative individualism. It should scare the people who think they're entitled to private property even when someone smarter comes along to whistle their same tune.
Animats · 4h ago
Done in 2003. Written up in 2018, with pictures.[1] This is PR for a movie about it.
The Secret Mall Apartment documentary got significantly more collaboration from nearly everyone involved, including a dump of the significant digital video stash from the project. Lots of people have tried making this documentary but until this one, nobody's gotten anywhere close to this deep about it. I'm on the periphery of this particular art scene and have seen lots of the related stuff.
iaaan · 3h ago
Tangentially related question: I recently got into 99PI and love it, listen to every episode that comes put now. Any other podcast recommendations?
xattt · 2h ago
Have you listened to the entire back catalogue?
zoklet-enjoyer · 1h ago
Great show. I'm actually listening to it right now haha. Been listening for years.
palmfacehn · 11m ago
Here's another interesting story:
"Man built a bunker under Hampstead Heath and lived in it for two years"
went to the documentary about this at a local theater a few days ago. was good, even kept my 10 yo niece’s attention.
for years i had been wondering why we didn’t have apartments/condos directly attached to malls, particularly in cold climates, so when the articles first started coming out about this it definitely scratched an itch. the movie has a ton of video footage they filmed back when they were using the space, including footage of them sneaking the couches, furniture, and 1000s of pounds of cinder blocks in. it’s pretty gripping in that “omg can they pull this off!!??” kind of way.
stego-tech · 1h ago
There's some in the US, but they're often considered "luxury" and significantly more expensive than comparable housing because of their "convenience" factor.
Having never seen the movie myself, I can sympathize to the take in the linked article. Once I finally spent time in a major city as someone who grew up in more rural suburbia, I could see how entire buildings and districts "switched off" for certain parts of the day or week, disused, underutilized, and segmenting society off into neat little pockets of specific activities - just like suburbia does. It's cold and lifeless, compared to the "lived-in" feelings of more international metros (NYC springs to mind as the only American equivalent, and even that's disappearing one building at a time), and I could totally see why a rebellious artist (or several) might protest a building designed to operate for a third of the week just to remain lifeless the other two-thirds.
That's what I was wondering, do I get the whole story from the movie review, or should I actually watch the documentary?
gravitronic · 2h ago
Their act was cool. Post-hoc bolting a protest social action on top seemed dishonest.
It's fine to say you did something cool because you could, in fact the coolest things are done just because. Adding commentary that it was a protest for stolen / wasted space, spare me the minutes please
deadbabe · 3h ago
I love secret living spaces. Has anyone here spent time inhabiting one?
dgunay · 1h ago
Some friends of mine drilled some plywood into the trunks of a set of overgrown trees by the side of the road when I was a kid, to use as an airsoft arena. We didn't live there or anything, but it was cool to have a secret space that was relatively spacious and secluded from view by all the leaves and branches. Some nosy neighbors eventually dismantled it because they thought a homeless person was living there or something.
RandomBacon · 3h ago
No, but if anyone is interested: last time I visited the Ala Moana Center (an open-air mall) in Honolulu, I thought that would be a great place to do so: good temperatures, easy access to low-use back hallways, empty storage rooms off said hallways.
There might be other places in Honolulu. Because space has such a premium there, there are a lot of odd/conforming layouts in many different buildings, that it could be very easy to construct something in a corner or dead-end.
There are many walkable parts to the city and bus transportation, many people get by without cars there.
Just don't add to the homeless population there please. It's sad to see families with children in diapers, living in tents at a park :-/ It is not a place to "re-invent" or "discover" yourself, or "start-over".
GuinansEyebrows · 3h ago
one of my favorite cases of contemporary-ish american squatting.
"Getting he ass 4: Chasing ideologues"
That's sociopathic.
I'm still processing the whole thing myself to be honest, it was all quite a lot, traumatic, but once day I'll write a book about it.
And yes, unless they were running their own generator somehow, which the article doesn’t seem to imply, they were stealing
You could speculate, automatically snapping to the least charitable assumptions, or you could actually watch it and find out.
(Everything in the apartment was purchased, and they anonymously gave money to the mall management every month by slipping an envelope of cash under the office door saying "thanks for the utilities.")
I applaud this kind of creative individualism. It should scare the people who think they're entitled to private property even when someone smarter comes along to whistle their same tune.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-accidental-room/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22493078
for years i had been wondering why we didn’t have apartments/condos directly attached to malls, particularly in cold climates, so when the articles first started coming out about this it definitely scratched an itch. the movie has a ton of video footage they filmed back when they were using the space, including footage of them sneaking the couches, furniture, and 1000s of pounds of cinder blocks in. it’s pretty gripping in that “omg can they pull this off!!??” kind of way.
Having never seen the movie myself, I can sympathize to the take in the linked article. Once I finally spent time in a major city as someone who grew up in more rural suburbia, I could see how entire buildings and districts "switched off" for certain parts of the day or week, disused, underutilized, and segmenting society off into neat little pockets of specific activities - just like suburbia does. It's cold and lifeless, compared to the "lived-in" feelings of more international metros (NYC springs to mind as the only American equivalent, and even that's disappearing one building at a time), and I could totally see why a rebellious artist (or several) might protest a building designed to operate for a third of the week just to remain lifeless the other two-thirds.
More recently, an early mall in Providence (within walking distance of the mall in the article) was converted to tiny apartments: https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-first-shopping-mall...
I have heard that Manhattan has buildings like that, as well.
https://santanarow.com/
It's fine to say you did something cool because you could, in fact the coolest things are done just because. Adding commentary that it was a protest for stolen / wasted space, spare me the minutes please
There might be other places in Honolulu. Because space has such a premium there, there are a lot of odd/conforming layouts in many different buildings, that it could be very easy to construct something in a corner or dead-end.
There are many walkable parts to the city and bus transportation, many people get by without cars there.
Just don't add to the homeless population there please. It's sad to see families with children in diapers, living in tents at a park :-/ It is not a place to "re-invent" or "discover" yourself, or "start-over".