Interesting interview with Anna Wiener, The New Yorker‘s woman-on-the-ground in Silicon Valley. Her critique is informed by actually having spent a number of years in the trenches of tech, always on the non-coding side of the payroll.

Today’s iteration of Silicon Valley seems ahistorical, anti-intellectual, irreverent in a way that is more reflective of the current phase of capitalism than of any unique industry value. I feel the industry needs to be more closely tied to both the government and academia, and better integrated—not in the current NSA, Stanford-pipeline sort of way. We’ve lost, for example, the tradition of research labs. In the late twentieth century, the countercultural idealism hardened into a libertarian ethos, an anti-institutional, anti-government stance, and also this new form of hubris that was legitimized by venture capital. I think people are incredibly reluctant to surrender that underdog identity, regardless of how true it was, then or now.

Like the interviewer here, I read (and was blown away by) her memoir piece at n+1 back in 2016; if her just-about-to-drop book manages to sustain that same tension and vibe, it’ll be a great (but also enervating) read.