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French philosopher Paul Virilio has a quote I think about a lot: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
Now Jobs is long dead, and the “Star Wars” version seems to have won. Even if it was never the intention, tech companies became key players in killing our comity and stymieing our politics, our government, our social fabric, and most of all, our minds, by seeding isolation, outrage, and addictive behavior. Innocuous boy-kings who wanted to make the world a better place and ended up cosplaying Darth Vader feels like science fiction. But everything I am about to tell you really happened.
Wendi Deng, then the wife of News Corp titan Rupert Murdoch (whom I had taken to referring to as “Uncle Satan”), had chosen a diaper and sucker combo.
It was typical of the kind of tasteless dreck that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire churned out, always eager to get the words “lesbians” and “turkey basters” in the same sentence.
The takeaway from the show—and Gray’s overall point—was that everyone is interesting if you ask the right questions. This has always been my approach to interviewing.
You’d never know it, though, from listening to thin-skinned techies, too many of whom have resisted any legitimate criticism, while also becoming weirdly media obsessed. They can’t stop talking about how much they think the press is irrelevant and have tried to do an end run around journalists once the tongue baths they regularly got (and sometimes still do) ceased. The truth is that media is complex and it sometimes fails. It is also not particularly lucrative anymore, unless it’s a movie blockbuster or a hit TV show, and even that has come under huge economic disruption due to digital
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