For those who won't/can't make it through the article: - overarching theme is that "Silicon Valley is Rome in the time of Caesar"; things are good now because

For those who won't/can't make it through the article: - overarching theme is that "Silicon Valley is Rome in the time of Caesar"; things are good now because the winners win so big that they slurp up money from all over the world and get to spend it suing Gawker into bankruptcy. - minor theme is that "The Donald Trump phenomenon has been largely fueled by voters angry that their jobs are getting reamed by technology" - SV companies are swinging so much influence and money they're competing with nation states; - 12/20 of the most valuable tech companies in 2015 are in SV (representing 87% of the revenue); none outside of America, China and Japan. 11/12 in America are in SV. - the top 3 phone apps in India are owned by Facebook, and the vast majority of the phones run iOS or Android - Uber takes 20% of every fare back to SV, wherever it operates - Alphabet controls 12% of global ad spending - "Atoms" America is in trouble; "Bits" America is doing really well - when smart people anywhere in the world want to build a tech company, they go to SV; some investors don't even bother looking outside of SV anymore - tech makes things cheap/free, which means people can't earn money doing those things anymore; there used to be lots of map makers and map sellers, now there's just Google - "If you put all the current trends together, it seems obvious Silicon Valley will become the most powerful place on earth at the expense of just about everywhere else on earth. The one thing that might derail the Silicon Valley express would be something like the Russian Revolution, in which the workers rise up against the autocracy."