It’s Getting Harder to Believe in Silicon Valley

Awestruck visions of the tech industry have become less convincing than ever.

.. Silicon Valley, by contrast, has trained its sights on how to “disrupt, transgress, and reengineer … humanity as a whole.”
.. Since the genre’s takeoff in the late 1990s, during the first dot-com boom, writing about the tech industry has traditionally fallen into a few limited camps:
  1. buzzy and breathless blog posts pegged to product announcements,
  2. suspiciously redolent of press releases;
  3. technophobic and scolding accounts heralding the downfall of society via smartphone;
  4. dry business reporting; and lifestyle coverage zeroing in on the trappings, trends, and celebrities of the tech scene.

.. Many failed ideas have been resuscitated and rebranded as successful products and services, owned and managed by people other than their originators. Behind almost every popular app or website today lie numerous shadow versions that have been sloughed away by time. Yet recognition of the group nature of the enterprise would undermine a myth that legitimizes the consolidation of profit, for the most part, among a small group of people.

.. When founders pitch their companies, or inscribe their origin stories into the annals of TechCrunch, they neglect to mention some of the most important variables of success: luck, timing, connections, and those who set the foundation for them. The industry isn’t terribly in touch with its own history. It clings tight to a faith in meritocracy: This is a spaceship, and we built it by ourselves.

.. the difference between the East and West Coasts is not fundamentally all that great. The tech industry owes a huge debt to the financial sector. Wolfe is eager to depict Silicon Valley as the new New York, but much of the money that funds venture-capital firms comes from investors who made their fortunes on Wall Street. (The tech industry also owes a great debt to “Main Street”: Private-equity funds regularly include allocations from public pension plans and universities.)