"The Gen X Investors and CEOs Who Run the Industry Are Stuck on the Idea That Private Money Will Protect Them from a Promised Hellscape"

"One way to respond to the Reaganite degradation of government and other public-sector institutions is to (1) get yours as fast and with as many zeroes as you can, and (2) tell yourself you're doing right and find motivated reasons to believe it. The idea of privately exploring space and privately colonizing Mars or other worlds as backups to Earth fits right in with this worldview. So does disrupting public goods (like money or transit) that you believe are doomed anyway. Collective action to preserve and improve these common goods requires coordination across centuries-old institutions—that's not easy to address through software, or without deeply human organizational work that Silicon Valley culture dismisses as 'soft skills.'"

Cyd Harrell at Wired writes that she has "come to recognize some of my generation's worst pathologies in the extractive, divisive models promoted by Silicon Valley's venture capital class."