“In the multicultural allegory, the wealthy are per se oppressive, because their success creates misfortunes for others. The other two possible causes of poverty—bad fortune or bad choices—are rejected a priori. Quite naturally, multiculturalists conveniently overlook the fact that without productive people paying taxes, there could be no welfare for the poor.”

[...] it appeared to Thiel and his comrades, multiculturalism had the single, overarching purpose of coddling the weak. Stanford students, some of the most talented young people of their generation, shouldn’t need to be shielded from occasional strong language or from the uncomfortable fact that the world’s best thinkers were not neatly divided among various racial, sexual, ethnic, and social groups.

These two distinct pools of candidates for PayPal resulted in an initial staff that was nearly all white and nearly all male. Of the six original founders, the one nonwhite person was an immigrant from China. All were men. All but Thiel were twenty-three or younger. Four had built bombs in high school. A picture of the staff six months later shows that it had grown to thirteen and included one woman, an office assistant. “The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd,” Thiel recalled. “We all loved science fiction: ‘Cryptonomicon’ [by Neal Stephenson] was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”

Thiel’s complaint against eBay wasn’t so much about its monopoly powers, but that it was becoming a monopoly in online payments instead of PayPal. According to Thiel, a truly free market, with perfect knowledge and perfect competition, leads to failure for everyone. “Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit,” he writes, adding the emphasis. “The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly.” Thus, the goal of any sane start-up should be to create a monopoly. When Thiel uses the term monopoly, he hastens to add, he does not mean one based on illegal bullying or government favoritism. “By ‘monopoly,’ we mean the kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute,” he writes in Zero to One, his business-advice book.

Under this theory of benevolent monopolies, government regulations and laws are unnecessary. Taxes are in effect replaced by monopoly profits—everyone pays their share to Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal. And in contrast to the government, these profits are allocated intelligently into research and services by brilliant, incorruptible tech leaders instead of being squandered by foolish, charismatic politicians. Levchin, during an appearance on The Charlie Rose Show, was asked about the libertarian cast to Silicon Valley leaders. He said he personally was OK with taxes being used to build and maintain roads, for well-functioning law enforcement and national security. For helping those less fortunate, too. But, he added, “I have relatively low trust in some of my local politicians . . . to spend my taxes on things that really do matter. And so this lack of inherent trust of the local or broader political establishment is probably the most defining, most common feature of Silicon Valley ‘libertarians.’”

The tools for collaboration and direct publishing that Tim Berners-Lee had argued for at the start were introduced to the mainstream during these years as Web 2.0. This phrase immediately stuck in his craw, however. What exactly was new—2.0-ish, that is—about these companies built around user contributions? They were simply fulfilling the original vision for the Web, where “interaction between people is really what the Web is.” 5 There was one vital difference, however. In Web 2.0, the tools for sharing and publishing were part of a social network or service that profited off of what you created there. You weren’t publishing a video to the Web, you were publishing a YouTube video; you weren’t writing a restaurant review on the Web, you were posting a Yelp review. The truly new idea expressed by Web 2.0 was a commercial one, and perhaps that is why Berners-Lee couldn’t recognize it.

There is something jarring about a group of self-styled survival-of-the-fittest free-marketeers committing to a strategy of collective risk and mutual support. At least one pillar of the Silicon Valley ideology was toppled by this arrangement: that success was handed out to an entrepreneur strictly according to ability and hard work, no matter his station in life or place of origin. Marc Andreessen once expressed this faith in individual merit in an interview with the New York Times journalist Tom Friedman, offering another example of how the world is flat: “The most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily easily available to apply knowledge however they want. That is, I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field.” Somehow, things haven’t quite worked out that way. Instead, a collection of male executives from a single company, a few of whom were hired as much for their right-wing political beliefs as for any latent computer or business talent, managed to create a roster of successful companies. A kid in Romania, it seems, no matter how talented, didn’t stand a chance against these guys.

Considering their origin in university friendships and earlier start-ups, networks like the PayPal mafia tended to be nearly uniform when it came to sex, race, and educational background: white, male, elite. Somehow, though, the experience of profiting from connections and college friendship hasn’t diminished the lecturing from Silicon Valley about how other institutions—typically highly unionized ones like the public school system or the automobile industry—are rife with favoritism. Here is Hoffman explaining Detroit’s decline in The Start-Up of You, his business-advice book: “The overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. . . . Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism.” Hoffman makes no mention of any similarity to the PayPal mafia, which he describes this way: “My membership in a notable corporate alumni group in Silicon Valley has opened the door to a number of breakout opportunities.”

Who would have thought to impose the values of the lab on the world, anyhow? That person was Frederick Terman, Stanford’s ambitious provost who didn’t understand why his university and its students and faculty shouldn’t profit from their brilliant ideas. He promoted the idea that engineers should become rich and powerful, starting with two of his early students, William Hewlett and David Packard. Stanford benefited. Shareholders benefited. Society benefited. If engineers set the agenda for the country, and the world, then at last we would be certain that the brightest would be in charge, as his father, Lewis, the student of “gifted children,” had dreamed. Ordinary folks wouldn’t need to be weighed down by questions they couldn’t understand, anyhow. On efficiency grounds, Terman’s vision might make sense. On humanitarian grounds, less so. Do we really want engineers—and their hyperrational comrades—to determine how we live? Democracy, for all its faults, is the best way to ensure that the public is being served by its leaders. No one can look out for your interests as diligently as yourself and no engineer is so unemotional as to be acting purely rationally without bias or self-preservation.

But rather than offer a set of policy proposals, I would repeat a prescription for a just society that begins with “a commitment to the local, the plural, the small scale and the active.” Those are the qualities the Web must have, even if it means cutting off the flow of revenues to giant companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay. We can’t tolerate an Internet, or a society, led by a few self-proclaimed geniuses claiming to serve mankind. The Internet can and must work for us, instead of the other way around, through a diversity of voices and platforms free to organize and collaborate on their own rather than through a few centralized services. This way the Internet can help build the social connective tissue we so desperately need, as Berners-Lee originally intended.