A certain lack of vision

The struggle to maintain Twitter is a double referendum: first, on the sustainability of scale; second, on the pervasive belief in Silicon Valley that technology can be neutral and should be treated as such. This idea, that systems will find their own equilibrium, echoes the libertarian spirit that has long animated the Valley and fails to account for actual power imbalances that exist in the real world. In 2019, it also suggests a certain lack of vision or imagination about what social technologies can, or should, be.

Letter from Silicon Valley: Jack Dorsey’s TED Interview and the End of an Era by Anna Wiener, New Yorker, 27 April 2019