Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Return to ‘Disrupting’ After the Coronavirus
It’s time to imagine an alternative future for the tech industry
Right now, my Silicon Valley friends are feeling a lot of things.
Quite understandably — we all are. This is a perilous, slippery moment, one where straightforward precedents are hard to find. We stay home to the greatest extent possible. We hope the ground doesn’t give way from under us. We just don’t know. We wait and see. We work from home if we can.
Many tech workers are fortunate enough to be able to do so. (Though certainly not all of them.) Those who are currently working away from their supervisor’s physical presence and far from the influence of a campus that encourages maximum productivity have an opportunity to think about what they’re building — for the first time in perhaps a very long time — in real depth. What thoughts are they likely to have?
The old promise
First, credit where it’s due: Workers have at least a few things to be proud of in the coronavirus era. For starters, Facebook has taken this opportunity to seriously crack down on potentially fatal misinformation. As New York Times media columnist Ben Smith recently noted in a piece titled “When Facebook Is More Trustworthy Than the…
