Don't Be Evil: Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers

DoubleClick deserved a mention, but wouldn't you say that was more of a financial turning point for SV than a cultural one? DoubleClick is just the money faucet. Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook all existed before DoubleClick's acquisition and were enjoying some level of hegemony, and their overall stated purpose hasn't changed. Apple still sells magical gadgets, Google still indexes everything, Twitter still shuffles sound bites around, Amazon still ships cheap goods, etc. If it wasn't DoubleClick, they probably would have found another money faucet at some point.

Also, the advertising focus has only affected some of the SV giants. Apple has resisted the selling-products-to-selling-users shift by becoming more dedicated to user privacy. They still have "customers" in the traditional sense, unlike Google or Facebook. But people still see all these companies as being united culturally or ideologically, especially outside the US where they are referred to collectively as "GAFA" (including Apple). They are exporting something, but what?

The article does a great job explaining what motivates the people behind these SV megacorps and ties the culture of these companies together into this "just build it" or "change the world with tech" school of thought that he identifies as "New Communalism". These companies and their followers seem intent on creating an alternate government system that solves social issues with technology and engineering instead of laws and courts. The focus is on taking heavily regulated things and "disrupting" them, which really means just getting around those regulations so they are no longer relevant. This works so well because the process of creating and spreading technology is now so much faster than removing or changing regulations, however, they don't take the time to learn why those regulations were created in the first place, so they end up reviving or exacerbating old social problems. This has become a pattern now where everything in American life that is regulated must now be "disrupted" by technology.

> trying so hard to police what is allowed to be said.

Eh. They feel responsible for people doing bad things with what they've made. Closest simplified analogy I'm coming up with is: Imagine you run a gigantic, crowded open-mic, and someone gets up and starts shouting "Fire!" when there isn't one. You would probably want to prevent that, cuz it's breaking this thing you made.