《Chaos Monkeys》Antonio Garcia Martinez

As every new arrival in California comes to learn, that superficially sunny "Hi!" they get from everybody is really, "Fuck you, I don't care." It cuts both ways, though.  They won't hold it against you if you're a no-show at their wedding, and they'll step right over a homeless person on their way to a mindfulness yoga class.  It's a society in which all men and women live in their own self-contained bubble, unattached to traditional anchors like family or religion, and largely unperturbed by outside social forces like income inequality or the Syrian Civil War. "Take it light, man" elevated to life philosophy.  Ultimately, the Valley attitude is an empowered anomie turbocharged by selfishness, respecting some nominal "feeling-good" principals of progress or collective technological striving, but in truth pursuing a continual self-development regracted through the capitalist prism: hippies with a capitalization table and a vesting schedule.

What would the Valley make of my betrayal then? How much was I sacrificing by making it?

The capitalist hippies would take me back, I reckoned, I just had to be minimally successful. The Land of the Stateless Machines would continue crunching away, ingesting people and money, and outputting products, and they'd still be happy to grind me into the mix as well.

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For when I do leap into the abyss, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degrading attitude, and consider it something beautiful.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov

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A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away.  Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

- Leon Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails

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Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

- Edward Abbey, The Journey Home

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For my part, outside of physics textbooks, I found Truth to be a rather rare commodity, particularly in the tech world. I had also noticed that those who most made a big show of believing in Truth were unusually attached to whatever well-groomed pack of lies they held dear.