It’s the usual Silicon Valley sleight-of-hand move, very similar to Uber reps claiming drivers aren’t “core” to their business. I’m sure Substack is paying a writer right now to come up with a catchy way of saying that Substack doesn’t pay writers.

At a start-up competition in 2014 in San Francisco, Lisa Curtis, an entrepreneur, pitched her food start-up, Kuli Kuli, and was told her idea had won the most plaudits from the audience, opening the door to possible investment. As she stepped off the stage, an investor named Jose De Dios, said, “Of course you won. You’re a total babe.”Ms. Curtis later posted on Facebook about the exchange and got a call from a different investor. He said “that if I didn’t take down the post, no one in Silicon Valley would give me money again,” she said. Ms. Curtis deleted the post.

Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, at its parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube and Jack Dorsey at Twitter.  The Silicon Six

Other situations might admit changes requiring years of special training, very expensive equipment, or the use of special drugs.

When you look at those cities, you’ll also find some of the most innovative solutions to the way we conduct commerce. Not one-hour delivery or meal kits on demand, but the boom in a parallel retail model that is decidedly social and human focused.

Ed Finn, on the other hand, seeks to hold the technology industry to account: he believes we need “more readers, more critics,” posing questions about who technology serves, and to what ends.

Hartley too readily accepts Silicon Valley’s flattering self-descriptions of its values and vision for the world. The positivity of entrepreneurship does not sit comfortably with the skeptical outlook that the liberal arts nurture, and Hartley fully embraces entrepreneurship.

Hartley believes that liberal arts insights can right the ship: “We can pair fuzzies and techies to train our algorithms to better sift for, and mitigate, our shared human foibles.”

a techno-libertarianism that was contemptuous of most government attempts to regulate disruptive innovation.

radical libertarian ideology and monopolistic greed of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs helped to decimate the livelihood of musicians and is now undermining the communal idealism of the early internet.

Every time you check your phone and see a like or comment or retweet, your brain releases a little bit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward.

Even some of the world's largest companies live in constant "fear of Google"; sudden banishment from search results, YouTube, AdWords, Adsense, or a dozen other Alphabet-owned platforms can be devastating.

Google’s chief culture officer

Celebrities joined the service,

often winning the company’s weekly “Getting [expletive] Done” award,

Usually it’s not simply because the ideas are bad (although some certainly are),