Many believe the success of the industry, combined with its newfound cultural relevance and the glamorous pull of working for a top tech company, has reinforced not only Silicon Valley’s insularity, but also driven what some describe as outright hubris. (Humility, incidentally, was not amongst the qualities anyone I spoke to associated with Silicon Valley.) A woman at one social media firm explained the industry’s growing arrogance as stemming from a belief that no problem existed that tech could not solve. Such conceit becomes problematic, she explained, when lessons that could be learned from other industries, the past, or the experiences of others are ignored, which might potentially make the products and services of the industry better, safer, or more ethically informed. When I asked why this attitude was so prevalent, the woman described a systemic belief, particularly amongst executives, which held that those in the industry were the smartest and best suited to solve the problems they were tasked with, and therefore couldn’t “really learn anything from anyone else.” I asked what she believed informed this attitude, the woman replied the problem stemmed, in her experience, from a lack of awareness and emotional intelligence within Silicon Valley. When I posed a similar question to an engineer at a different company, his response illustrated her point: “I spend all day thinking,” he explained, “and believe I’ve exhausted all possible scenarios in that thought process and tend to arrive at the right answer.” The idea that there might be an alternate, let alone a better solution brought about by a different process or way of thinking was simply not a possibility that seemed particularly likely to him.

In addition to speaking to those who worked at tech companies, I also spent time with psychotherapists in the Bay Area, each of whom had clients who worked in tech. The arrogance exhibited by these clients was one of the more pronounced themes the therapists reported. One man, who worked in-house at a large tech company two days a week, described the attitude as one of “unaware exceptionalism.” When I asked what he meant by this, he explained that the perception of doing something new and radical was often accompanied by a sense of hubris and, in extreme cases, almost an expectation of worship. Another psychotherapist in San Francisco described a similar dynamic among many of his clients, which he ascribed to the “positive feedback loop”—both within companies and from society more broadly—that “exalted” tech employees for the skills and service they provided.