How Silicon Valley is degenerating into a bubble of arrogance

Success breeds success, and inevitably fathers insufferable arrogance. That’s the lesson of a recent Business Insider article titled, “Silicon Valley is living inside a bubble of tone-deaf arrogance”, which notes “There has been a rash of incidents in which tech execs appear to have interpreted their personal economic success as proof of their permanent superior status to the rest of us…There is a feeling outside Silicon Valley that those inside the tech business are living in a tone-deaf bubble of arrogance.” [ Read the piece in its entirety here]

For decades, Silicon Valley has basked in the warm glow of cultural approval in the United States; a symbol of ‘good’ capitalism built on true entrepreneurship, merit and innovation. It was held up as the antithesis of Wall Street and its retinue of money-making suits blindly driven by profit. Heroes of the Valley, in contrast, were revolutionaries driven by grand visions be it of the technological (Steve Jobs) or global health (Bill Gates) kind. Even a less-glorious Mark Zuckerberg attained iconic status by the sheer dint of creating a product that changed our lives. They made the high-rolling bankers and investment brokers who brought the world to the edge of an economic meltdown seem like overpaid, not-so-bright goons.

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Who cared about the cheap antics of Gordon Gecko when we could worship the autistic genius of Jobs – and his ability to make us pay huge sums of money for stylish phone. That Silicon Valley was located in the uber-liberal, anti-establishment Northern California made all that talk of disruption and creative destruction all the more convincing. These guys weren’t just doing business, they were changing the world. The gospel of technology became the sacrament of a new kind of, well, everything. A new politics, new economy, new culture… Or not so new, after all.

Over the past couple of years, Silicon Valley has become a cautionary tale about the inverse relationship between financial success and vision. Each generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has proved to be less inspiring, less interesting, and worse, less intelligent than their forebears. There is increasingly little to distinguish the tech aristocracy today from the “ big swinging dicks" (as Michael Lewis put it) of 1980s Wall Street – caveman mentality, included.

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Earlier this year, Business Insider’s CTO Pax Dickinson was forced to resign over a series of misogynistic tweets. But as Jessica Roy pointed out , a senior executive at a hugely influential tech media publication had long been getting a pass for tweets such as these: “In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It’s his own fault for dressing like a whore though”; “aw, you can’t feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?”; “daddy needs you to show your breasts on TV to protest the patriarchy, baby. You wanna make daddy happy, don’t you?”

And as Roy notes, “Such a rancorous person doesn’t scale the corporate ladder-tweeting all the while!- without some sort of systemic acceptance (or at least tolerance) of his attitudes.”

While the BI piece expediently overlooks the Dickinson incident, it offers plenty of other evidence of the Valley’s decline into loathsome and clueless self-regard. The latest being AngelHack CEO Greg Gopman’s Facebook posts decrying the homeless in San Francisco: “The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay.”

These guys could make Gecko blush. But the Geckos of the world – with their ‘greed is good’ motto – at least possessed the virtue of self-deprecating awareness. Silicon Valley today combines the gross materialism of the Wall Street jocks with delusions of grandeur, aspirations of remaking the world in their own image, of ushering in a new era in human history.

“[I]n recent years, Silicon Valley has developed a secular theology that can only be described as millennial millenarianism-this generation’s conviction that it uniquely prepares the way for a fundamental transformation, a belief that is itself a recurring theme in human history,” notes Ari Ratner on Mashable, “Silicon Valley has always been a Promised Land with Biblical aspirations, concerned as much about the search for meaning as for money.”

But as Gopman’s little screed reveals, that search for meaning has long been abandoned in the pursuit of the next hot start-up – swanky offices and hipster digs included. All that’s left is yet another bunch of overpaid brats whining about poor people.

Read the Business Insider article on their website.