I
n San Francisco, the crown jewel of Silicon Valley, there
are no poor neighborhoods, just poor people. Squeezed
between million-dollar apartments and Michelin-starred
restaurants is a rising tide of homelessness: vagrants beg-
ging for scraps from the tech zillionaires on Market Street,
families who couldn’t aord the rent after the latest IPO, Uber
drivers sleeping in their cars in the Safeway parking lot. The
nouveau wealth capital of America is a land of decadence
and irony, where Juul (banned from selling e-cigarettes in the
county) just bought a $400 million ofice tower and Vinod
Khosla thinks he owns the beach. Farther down the 101 inMenlo Park and Sunnyvale, Facebook and Google employees
are raising their kids tech-free.
This is the world the smartphone has built. In 1994, Vanity Fair
inaugurated the New Establishment list to celebrate the rise of
a new entrepreneurial class that promised—how young we were
then!—to “make the world a better place.” They were digital-
age whiz kids challenging the old boy’s club, rebels and hack-
ers getting their rst taste of real power. Twenty-ve years later,
the upstarts are now the establishment, the undisputed titans of
America’s second gilded age.
How quickly it all changed. Twitter, which aided the Arab
Spring, now abets America’s culture civil war, and its cofounder
Jack Dorsey is more concerned with going on silent retreats than
silencing Nazis. Mark Zuckerberg, who dreamed of bringing
free internet to Africa, spends his days dodging questions about
the genocide in Myanmar. Dara Khosrowshahi has righted the
amoral culture of Uber but is struggling to squeeze prots from
its gig-economy workforce. (For SoftBank leader Masayoshi Son,
self-driving cars can’t come soon enough.) Even Slack, which was
going to save us from the drudgery of work, has merely insinuated
drudgery deeper into the ber of our lives.
Unwinding the problems these entrepreneurs have wrought is
dicult, as anyone on the 2019 New Establishment list can attest.
YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki has spoken passionately of “trying to
strike a balance” between removing hate speech and cultivating
free expression but is quick with excuses when pressed on the spe-
cics (“If we were to take down every video...”). Poor Zuckerberg
couldn’t for the life of him gure out how to rid Facebook of anti-
vaxxers or Russian bots—at least until regulators began threatening
multibillion-dollar nes and high-prole tech insiders (including
Tristan Harris and Roger McNamee) began speaking publicly about
breaking up the company. “Fish don’t see water,” one tech investor
explained when I asked how Silicon Valley sees itself in this age of
cultural backlash. Another senior-level tech employee, who has
worked in the industry for more than a decade, wasn’t so kind. “I
don’t think they smell their own shit,” she said.
There is still a sense of wonder: Elon Musk is planning a Mars
colony; Satya Nadella is pouring money into articial intelligence;
Larry Page has invested in ̈ying cars. Wojcicki’s younger sister,
Anne, is building a genetic database that is already being used to
design new drugs (with a $300 million investment from Glaxo-
SmithKline) and fuel cutting-edge academic research. Je Bezos
has teamed up with titans of the nancial industry to lower health
care costs, while Brian Armstrong’s cryptocurrency exchange,
Coinbase, aims to disrupt the nancial industry altogether. In
Hollywood, technology has forced the studios to compete with
Net ̈ix and Amazon, fueling another golden age of video.
Meanwhile, venture capital is ̈owing outward, remaking the
world for better and worse. There are start-ups growing ̈aw-
less diamonds with plasma reactors, plant-based meats that
“bleed” beet juice, shoes made from eucalyptus ibers. One
start-up founder I recently met is growing genetically modied
mushrooms that can be turned into imitation leather for belts
and shoes, reducing the need for cows and helping slow climate
change. (A thousand artisan villages in India won’t know what hit
them.) Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and one half of
the eponymous V.C. rm Andreessen Horowitz, used to say that
“software eats the world.” These days it feels more appropriate to
say that “Silicon Valley eats the world”—or has eaten it already.Death to
the New
Establishment
(Long May
They Reign!)
SO MUCH FOR MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.
AFTER YEARS OF SCANDALS, OUR NEW MASTERS
OF THE UNIVERSE APPEAR EVEN MORE RUTHLESS THAN
THE OLD GUARD THEY DISPLACED BY NICK BILTON80 ILLUSTRATION BY KLAUS KREMMERZ