I agree with the author's thesis that tech workers in general are over-entitled, live sheltered lives and take themselves too seriously. However, I have more empathy and sympathy for their plight because I'm one too, :) What the author missed out on motivation of programmers and over-estimates the power of tech and even buys into somewhat the illusions of tech.

> Our silicon age, which sees no glory in maintenance, but only in transformation and disruption...

Six years ago, there was a book thread on HN where the top comment was "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand - the rationale being that the book's recommender was inspired by the novel's protagonist Howard Roark, an architect who battled the will's of a tycoon (symbol for MBA), second-rate architects (symbol for non-startup programmers) and an unwieldy female love interest (symbol for social resistance against anything revolutionary to preserve status quo power & prestige) to carry out his individual vision of architecture from drafting papers to concrete. Speaking for myself, it influenced me greatly then, to be a man who endured pain and sacrifice to manifest his individual creative vision.

Like Howard Roark, there is a dark side however not to yield - almost a fear for the world not to acknowledge properly his genius or perhaps the other way around, for himself to miss out on the world (“I’m making more of a difference than anybody in government could possibly make,”). A thought that consumes him that he's willing to bomb his building because of the "corruption of the world that stained it". His general ass-holeness at every other character whom he sees either as intellectually inferior (MBA), spiritually inferior (mediocre architect who have settled), or sexually submissive (his female love interest). In the end, Roark prevails and I reveled in the world that Ayn Rand has constructed to highlight the stubbornness, the creative genius, and the triumph of the will.

> People who work in Silicon Valley tend to love ["Silicon Valley"] precisely because its over-the-top portrayals of the most infantile and socially dysfunctional aspects of the tech start-up culture are eerily on the mark.

Six years later, as a code monkey, I read a book about Japan, "Dance Dance Dance" by Haruki Murakami - whose early 90's Tokyo of excess parallels the surrealness of Silicon Valley. The male protagonist is a disaffected Japanese advertising executive in his late 20's who have lost faith not so much in his work as much as embraced the absurdity of the capitalist service economy, "My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape.I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death".

The protagonist is lonely and depressed and every day, he goes to a museum to look at the dry whale penis specimen just to relax himself. I'm reminded of the Silicon Graphics dino skeleton at Google. That a mediocre man who is powerless either associates himself with a shrine of manhood or is so awe-struck by another animal's oversized phallus that it takes him momentarily to the realm of absurdity, away from his usual daily pissing contests of "succeeding in life" to just take a moment to appreciate the moment of dry whale penis.

Howard Roark is represented here too as an male peripheral celebrity character who is also depressed because he is too good-looking to be always casted as "a handsome doctor or teacher" romantic lead in Japanese romantic comedies, resigned to play his role (and obligated to file expense reports for "personal entertainments" because of "tax compliance" reasons).

> The new wine is dying on the vine, and Dionysos, the telluric god of ecstasy, is nowhere in sight. It is unlikely that the next big digital innovation will lure him back.

I agree with the author's assertion that tech of today is actually quite plebian, an illusion and temporary sinecure for our modern anxieties. However, I don't think what he implies as the solution to indulge in our "Dionysian" souls, to go back to traditional public discourse of civic's, arts and humanities before permeation of Internet is viable either - as art imitates life, so does tech caters to it to the tyranny of A/B testing. We've created it in our image not some tech-Gods sitting in their LCD-glowing caves.

That the whole tech worship is no different than traditional athlete, celebrity or NYTimes Book Review worship. IMO, we are all so insecure to focus on which our surrogate hero's are better than the other we forget appreciating the ordinary people around us and reveling in our own mediocrity.