When “Silicon Valley” premiered on HBO in 2014, Silicon Valley hadn’t yet ruined the world. Those were the salad days for the titans of tech: Digital billionaires were superheroes feted on magazine covers and in the White House, not supervillains hauled before Congress for fixing elections, sowing genocide, undermining truth and monopolizing all the globe’s commerce.
One day, browsing Tinder, imagine that you come upon the profile of an obese, orange-haired real estate magnate and proud, raging racist. The first line of his bio: “Mexicans are rapists.” Formative business experience: Not renting to blacks. One of his profile pictures is a hand drawing of the continent of Africa across which he has scrawled the word “shithole.” Muslims: Don’t let them in. Jews, he tolerates, because sometimes you need a lawyer or an accountant, but he will also give a fair ...
DoorDash is the most popular food delivery service in the country, a freakishly fast-growing unicorn valued at $7 billion just six years after its founding, backed by some of Silicon Valley’s and Saudi Arabia’s leading investors. I’ll slinkingly confess that it is also a provider of my lunch two or three or five times a month, depending on how lazily bougie and nihilistic I happen to be feeling about leaving the house.
In 2010, I received an email from an ecstatic employee at a startup called UberCab. “What our tiny company is doing for San Francisco right now is huge,” he told me. The employee’s joy was contagious. Back then, as a naive, baby tech pundit, I was prone to spinning out elaborate visions of tech-abetted progress, and the more I learned about UberCab’s bold idea, the more deeply I swooned.
“Privacy” is something we all seem to want. You get mad when your privacy is invaded or in some way mishandled; when Equifax leaks your credit info, when your sexts show up on Reddit, when your psychiatrist’s office gets hacked.
A few months ago, I stumbled onto a new way of writing. I don’t mean an unusual literary or textual style; I mean a new physical method for the painstaking task of chiseling the formless geologic schists inside my brain into words and sentences crisp and coherent enough to please at least a few of my fellow human beings.
The Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s spendy new campus in Cupertino, California, is a majestic temple to pomp. An ethereal glass-and-marble cylinder set high on a serene hill, the venue feels like the architectural manifestation of the Apple co-founder’s famous “reality-distortion field.” It is an edifice meant to recall those moments when Jobs, smirking joyfully, would bound up to the stage, teasingly pull a black shroud off some new invention and instantly alter your picture of the future.
For months after the 2016 election, I wanted nothing more than to escape America. I don’t mean literally — in the cliché liberal way of absconding to Canada — but intellectually, socially, psychically. Donald Trump was all anybody talked about, and I needed sanctuary. I wanted to find places where the American president-elect and his American opponents and their American controversies simply did not exist.
“The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet: death by water, death by heat, death by hunger, death by thirst, death by disease, death by asphyxiation, death by political and civilizational collapse.
Friends, reporters, fam: It’s time we journalists all considered disengaging from the daily rhythms of Twitter, the world’s most damaging social network.
The internet expands the bounds of acceptable discourse, so ideas considered out of bounds not long ago now rocket toward widespread acceptability. See: cannabis legalization, government-run health care, white nationalism and, of course, the flat-earthers.
To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it.
According to pollsters and political reporters, a dispiriting dynamic has taken hold of the early stages of the Democratic presidential primary: Voters are discounting female candidates as unelectable.
“The Great Replacement” is a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that holds that white people face existential decline, even extinction, because of rising immigration in the West and falling birthrates among white women (caused, of course, by feminism).
There has always been a separate college admissions system for the wealthy, just as there has always been a separate criminal justice system for them. (See: Manafort, Paul.)
We all know that. Still, the blame-the-internet formulation has grown useless lately, because “the internet” has become inseparable from everything else.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
