Like me, and perhaps like you, Silicon Valley has not ended up where it set out to go. It has certainly progressed, but perhaps not in the direction any of us imagined or in the way we would like to see it continue. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has called the current, centralized version of the internet “anti-human” and argued that it has failed humanity, rather than serving it.4 MIT professor, internet activist, and tech pioneer Ethan Zuckerman has deemed the modern web a “fiasco.”5 Indeed, Silicon Valley’s promise to make the world a better place seems increasingly hollow as it becomes clear that its values and intentions have been corrupted by a system that continues to prioritize the wrong things: profits, shareholders, consumption. Most compellingly, to my mind, it has undergone a profound shift from the thinking and psychological tenets on which it was founded, resulting in both an industry-wide identity crisis and a range of social impacts with which we are now grappling.
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