The reason men like Musk and Bezos are worshipped by people who use Twitter like it's LinkedIn is because they're successful disruptors. They're the underdogs, the innovators, the vanquishers of the old Gordon Gekko approach to self-centered capitalism. Thanks to them we have returned to the power of the marketplace of ideas, where you can change the world with nothing more than a dream, a garage office and a substantial loan from your dad.
This is why thousands of STEM Steves and one to two STEM Stacies head down to Silicon Valley every year like it's the Gold Rush but, instead of gold, they mine your data for shopping preferences. These hopefuls are lured in with mantras like "Move fast and break things," or "If things are not failing, you're not innovating," or "Work hard. Have fun. Change history," thinking they too can become the next Zuckerberg, Musk, or Bezos respectively. But while those men became icons armed with nothing but a few lines of code and a good pitch, they're also the reason why those days are long gone.
Today, Silicon Valley has been turned from a temple to meritocracy to a pyramid project pre-Moses. While tech innovators may have traded suits for socks and sandals, and turned bleak cubicles into graffiti-covered break rooms with ping-pong tables, the end result remained the same. Several investigative reports have pointed out that, while mega-corporations like Google and Apple still tout their old soundbites of rewarding risk-taking and thinking out of the box, they cultivate a suffocating subordinate culture with the kind of orthodoxy that makes medieval crusaders look like pretty open-minded guys. No wonder that Silicon Valley is sometimes referred to as "feudalism but with better marketing," where a disgustingly rich upper-class of first-come executives control their lowly, semi-homeless software serfs with a carpal-tunnel-riddled iron fist.
This is why thousands of STEM Steves and one to two STEM Stacies head down to Silicon Valley every year like it's the Gold Rush but, instead of gold, they mine your data for shopping preferences. These hopefuls are lured in with mantras like "Move fast and break things," or "If things are not failing, you're not innovating," or "Work hard. Have fun. Change history," thinking they too can become the next Zuckerberg, Musk, or Bezos respectively. But while those men became icons armed with nothing but a few lines of code and a good pitch, they're also the reason why those days are long gone.
Today, Silicon Valley has been turned from a temple to meritocracy to a pyramid project pre-Moses. While tech innovators may have traded suits for socks and sandals, and turned bleak cubicles into graffiti-covered break rooms with ping-pong tables, the end result remained the same. Several investigative reports have pointed out that, while mega-corporations like Google and Apple still tout their old soundbites of rewarding risk-taking and thinking out of the box, they cultivate a suffocating subordinate culture with the kind of orthodoxy that makes medieval crusaders look like pretty open-minded guys. No wonder that Silicon Valley is sometimes referred to as "feudalism but with better marketing," where a disgustingly rich upper-class of first-come executives control their lowly, semi-homeless software serfs with a carpal-tunnel-riddled iron fist.
