Silicon Valley is a new Rome, reshaping all life.

Yet it's dominated by people of one race and one gender, by those who seem to have a particular weakness for understanding human society.

And so we end up ruled by a cadre of messianic, limited men.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/24/writer-anand-giridharadas-on-techs-billionaires-are-they-even-on-the-same-team-as-us/

No matter where you lived on the planet Earth, when the Roman Empire started to rise, it had plans for you one way or another, through your legal system, or your language, or culture, or something else. The Roman Empire was coming for you.

Silicon Valley is that for our time. It’s the new Rome [in] that you can’t live on planet Earth and be unaffected, directly or indirectly, by the decisions made in this relatively small patch of [of the world].

So the question then becomes, what does that new Rome want?

And my impression of having reported on that world is that it’s an incredibly homogeneous world of people at the top of this new Rome. It’s white male dominated in a way that even other white male dominated sectors of the American economy are not.

And it’s a lot of a certain kind of man who often is actually more obtuse about understanding human society and sociological dynamics and human beings than the average person.

Maybe they didn’t spend a lot of time negotiating human dynamics at sleepovers, which is fine.

But when you end up with a new Rome and it’s hyper dominated by people of one race and one gender, many of whom are disproportionately socially unintelligent, running the platforms through which most human sociality now occurs --

— democratic discourse, family, community, so on and so forth —

...we all start to live in a world created by people who are just quite limited.

They are smart at the thing they’re smart at and they’ve become in charge of a lot of how the world works. And there’s simply not up to the task. And we see evidence of that every day.

For a long time, I have sensed but struggled to articulate this problem I observed in the Valley. It isn't just the hubris. It's a very particular kind of big, small man who dominates there, a man doesn't know what he can't see.

Read more in @TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/24/writer-anand-giridharadas-on-techs-billionaires-are-they-even-on-the-same-team-as-us/

And thank you to @cookie for giving me the chance to SAY IT TO THEIR FACES.