[...] You may find that, once you're released from having to understand it all, a certain fascination gets through. It can be like those times you hear someone playing the piano beautifully or a sax wailing through jazz improvisations, and the sounds ignite a longing in you, a desire to take up the difficulties, and learn how to play that music.

[...] He stares at his students for a moment and says of the million dollars, "For most of you, that would be nothing."

I considered the two nothings: the nothing expected of the online students, the million dollars that would be noting to the Stanford students, of whom everything is expected. [...]

At Stanford, the professors are there for the students, making sure they are well prepared and supported by all the resources the exclusive university can muster. Their students stand before the gateway to the summits of knowledge and riches, which is open wide for them. The gateway is otherwise well guarded. A note shown on the web page introducing the online class states clearly, understandably - but coldly - taking the web version in no way permits the students to use the facilities of the university.

Dreams of internet success impose a heavy burden on the recent immigrants. The newcomers soon find themselves buzzing like flies in the sticky paper of the startup life. The ethos that surrounds them says that founding a successful company - getting round after round of venture-capital funding, their startup then valued in the billions - is the measure of the highest personal achievement. It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fith or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by teh wayside - as the startup culture sees it - while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

The hopefuls pride themselves on the role they believe they will play as members of a vanguard that will disrupt the existing social, economic, and political structures. But the would-be CEOs can more accurately be called conformists. They want what they are supposed to want; they are the men in the grey flannel suits of our time: tee shirts and jeans, casual business khakis. They are not wild. They march down the startup alley of Second Street not as assemblies of punks but like a disciplined army on maneuvers - yet ever anxious. Their ventures are likely to fade away, as a fickle public disposes of both the soldiers and the code, app by app.

While listening to the MRI presentation I had a moment of believing that, in this grueling winnowing process, something good for society might emerge. I don't mean a grand scheme to rearrange the lives of human beings around the globe, but a targeted application that would improve the lives of those in need of the technology.

The the inevitable networking followed. A tall man of about thirty approached me. Enthusiastically, he described the app he was creating. Its algorithms would let employers scan resumes to see which applicants were a good cultural fit for their organization.

My reaction was swift. I told him that "fitness" was another word for selecting a person the group would be comfortable with, a type of person they already knew: guys like themselves. His app, I said, was a way to maintain the existing segregated technical culture.

HE listened patiently. "Well, all that may be true," he replied. "But I'm not working for society. I'm working for the company."

[...] inside the hatcheries of the startups, the founders and engineers must pitch their ideas as bringing light onto the universe, meanwhile assuring investors they will make money.

What assures venture capitalists is the promise of disruption. What makes money is smashing existing structures to replace them with new ones that can be owned by private investors. Wages earned across a wide spectrum of the existing order - small retailers, booksellers, taxi drivers, reporters, editors, schoolteachers, and more - are swept up like chips on a roulette table, everything going into the hands of the winner: the wealth of the many concentrated into the riches of the few.

The drive is to make a fortune, and it hardly matters what follows in its wake. "Change the world!" is but an advertisement, a branding that obscures the little devil, disruption, that hides within the mantra, a slogan to rally the youth, tell them it's fine, you are not here just to make money: You are noble.