It has been the great collective self-deception of Silicon Valley, and perhaps of our age, that a person can engage in aggressive “disruption” of existing industries while pretending that they are not at least similar to the ruthless capitalist barons of the previous century, that there is not a drop of Carnegie or Rockefeller or Vanderbilt DNA in the whole business. Peter Thiel didn’t have to personally fire the bank tellers that he put out of a job at PayPal. He wasn’t deliberately driving down the stocks of the newspapers in order to boost the stock of Facebook, even if that was the
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