Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
People generally <i>do</i> love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.<p>Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential.<p>Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber&#x2F;Lyft and they’ll call you crazy. But the media knows that, so it goes after the losers: It’s easy to point and laugh at the 100 things that look stupid, without realizing that “lol this social network for college kids thinks it’s worth $150m” seems just as crazy. Silicon Valley is the place that will be wrong funding Juicero in order to be right funding Facebook. You can’t have one without the other. (As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.)<p>But the media that sees itself losing its power, losing influence, and losing money. Of course they hate tech.