I had never heard of David Shingy before I read about him on ValleyWag. First off, here’s a picture of this fellow:
I’ll save myself the trouble of being creative and simply share how Sam Biddle skillfully described the above curiousity:
“Shingy,” as he calls himself over, and over, and over again, is one of those professional nothings. His job title is “Digital Prophet,” which means he’s gloating about the fact that he has a make believe job at AOL, unlike most tech charlatans, who try to conceal it. Our Skrillex of the Valley is tasked with daytime TV spots, playing a cartoon, pulling nonsense trends and trivialities out of his hair like globs of whatever carcinogen jelly is keeping it aloft like that.
The thing is, I remember a guy just like this from my days at Apple in the late 1980s. I won’t name 
his name, but he fancied himself some kind of eccentric genius. The guy did absolutely nothing for the company except mince around and make predictions, prognostications, and ludicrous pontifications, all of which were bizarre enough to make him seem interesting.
The thing about guys like this is that the people who listen to them and assume they’re full of crap are too afraid to speak up, for fear of being seen as not bright enough to comprehend The Message of The Prophet.
Let me tell you something: I’ve actually worked with honest-to-God creative geniuses, and you want to know what’s queer about them? Nothing. They were normal, sensible people who didn’t dress weird, didn’t try to act eccentric, and were altogether fun to sit down and have a beer with. They didn’t make a point of trying to make fools of themselves in order to appear smart. You want to know why? Because they were smart. They didn’t have to fake it.
Hell, I could put myself out there as some kind of genius prophet too – – I wrote The World Connection back in 1983, when I was a teenager, which spelled out quite plainly how interconnected personal computers were going to change the world. That was ten years before the commercial Internet even existed, and I wrote a nationally-published book at the age of 16. But I’m not going to mince around on stage about it.
In any case, I guess having funny hair and black fingernails and collecting a six-figure salary is pretty awesome work if you can get it. At least I can take comfort in having more Twitter followers than this clown.
