It’s likely that this de-emphasis on content set the tone for the tech industry going forward. The idea that content is in a strange way secondary, even though the platforms Silicon Valley keeps inventing depend on it, is deeply ingrained.

The tech industry we know today is what happens when certain received notions meet with a massive amount of cash with nowhere else to go.

These are the argumentative gambits used in books by Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, in TED Talks and pitch meetings. Statements that claim that we “tend to assume X,” when in fact a brief reflection would tell us that no, we don’t tend to assume anything as stupid as X. Statements that blow up some study’s perfectly plausible finding to a gener

Silicon Valley founders, inventors, and moneymen routinely embrace the first-person plural when they’re really talking about themselves—although they will frame it in such a way that you cannot quite tell whether they are using the royal “we” or imagine a phantom team around them at all times.

Disruption is premised on creative amnesia, on a productive or at least profitable disregard for details.

Somehow the sudden heights of success to which these young people climb make people fixate on biographical data points that are, upon reflection, absolutely unremarkable.

And by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones don’t lead anywhere.

But more than most industries, tech companies seem to run on tropes and rituals that remind you of a tent revival: the mantra-like phrases, the messianic gurus, the cult of genius that barely manages to cover up its religious dimensions.

There is a tendency in Silicon Valley to want to be revolutionary without, you know, revolutionizing anything.