From Joel Kotkin at newgeography.com AMERICA’S NEW OLIGARCHS—FWD.US AND SILICON VALLEY’S SHADY 1 PERCENTERS

this is an excerpt from a reader’s comment on the article above:

The Valley’s failure to fulfill its promise seems to be due precisely to this: it lacks, shuns even, any appreciation for that which cannot be measured or valued in quantitative terms. All the qualitative longings of the human soul to reach above and beyond to something spiritual; all that the poets and the mystics have mused about; anything other than status, power, money, image, dominance, and elegant technique; all that belongs to what psychologists like to call the affective domain; all the finer things of human life that distinguish us from both ape and computer; all those ideals like romance, compassion, love, kindness, graciousness, beauty, human rights, and the simple affectations of the smell of a rose or nostalgia for the past; all this and much more the Valley has left unattended in its single-minded obsession with and ruthless pursuit of the refinement of technique. For in the Valley, higher technology automatically means more progress. Every human challenge is to be viewed as some kind of technical brainteaser that can ultimately find a technological solution—and it better make somebody filthy rich, and make it snappy, too!

HKO

“everything that can be measured is not worth measuring and everything that is worth measuring can not be measured.”

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