I agree with a lot of what he says but can also see that its mostly non americans who will see his perspective on the soullessness of silicon valley. Americans

I agree with a lot of what he says but can also see that its mostly non americans who will see his perspective on the soullessness of silicon valley. Americans tend to get defensive and start listing out flaws in other places the moment the focus is put on them. I think american exceptionalism and individualism has long made the concept of a caring society or building a better society irrelevant. Nobody cares about this beyond posturing. As long as the economic cycle can sustain growth it will be hunky dory but the moment things go wrong, the everyone for themselves frontier type economy can quickly unravel. You can already see the pretentions about human rights, freedom, liberalism, have long dissipated. The only thing that matters is making money and seen to be successful. The new world was based on a culture of plunder but at some point the population must stop and stabilize to build internal bonds. Building a genuinely caring society will by definition come at cost of individualism and economics. Most countries and people have thousands of years of history and culture and simply talking of freedom, democracy and human rights divorced from their context is completely insincere and irresponsbile. Democracy and human rights in the west was a slow steady evolution. China is more than 1 billion people, mess up the transition even slightly ignoring history and our own slow evolution and you are looking at a scale of human suffering not seen before, can anyone really be casual about issues like this. The sad reality is no one cares for these people beyond their own countries and human rights is just another tactic to beat others with. There are tons of problems in the US at the moment, starting with the politics that is destroying millions of lives in the middle east and creating a security surveillance state at home. Nearly all of the things that would be unthinkable just a decade ago from a western democracy have been confirmed and yet have met with little outrage and negligible civic reaction, which confirms the indifference to these values beyond posturing and this should be disconcerting for all.