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One company, which the Wall Street Journal called “The Epitome of a Stanford-Fueled Startup,” encapsulated in every respect the sham of the Silicon Valley meritocracy, from its charmed beginnings to its ignominious downfall. This company, called Clinkle, secured investors before settling on a produ…

[...] the last thing that mattered in Silicon Valley was technological innovation. Marketing came first and foremost. The actual products of the tech industry—computers and software—were less important than the techniques used to sell those products, and to sell shares in the companies that made …

The privatization led by Clinton and Gore enabled the dot-com boom of the 1990s as well as the bust that followed. Once more, the best-connected insiders emerged from the chaos in an even stronger position. Ghazi was working as an investment analyst during the boom, but his former company promoted …

In Ghazi’s telling, each tech boom began with a constant and a variable. The constant was easy financing, whether from government-subsidized borrowing or unsophisticated investors. The variable was whatever Silicon Valley was trying to sell at the time. In the early nineties, the boom was about har…

“It’s all about getting the chart that goes up,” a disaffected social media marketing expert told me over drinks. “There’s a whole industry devoted to making charts that go up.” To illustrate his point, he pointed me to the Guardian newspaper’s now-defunct “partner zones” program, which afforded la…