Milo Yiannopoulos: Powerful Silicon Valley Elite ‘Almost Entirely Unaccountable’

Entrepeneur.com / Gabriela Hasbun
Entrepeneur.com / Gabriela Hasbun

Jason Ankeny at Entrepeneur Magazine reports on Breitbart London’s own Milo Yiannopoulos, whose upcoming book The Sociopaths of Silicon Valley takes aim at uncouth dealings, both personal and professional, of giants in the tech industry:

Columnist and broadcaster Milo Yiannopoulos’ forthcoming book The Sociopaths of Silicon Valley tackles the subject head-on, exploring whether the executives running social media sites, online gaming platforms and other digital businesses have their users’ best interests in mind or are ignoring consumers’ rights and privacy laws to exploit personal data for their own financial gain.

Yiannopoulos began probing the Silicon Valley underbelly after selling his online tabloid magazine The Kernel to Daily Dot Media in early 2014. “It is important to know what sorts of people are running these businesses—they have as much, if not more, power than our elected representatives, but they are almost entirely unaccountable to ordinary consumers,” he says. “There’s a gap between marketing spiel and reality at Facebook—the ‘connecting the world’ marketing speak and the reality of building a furiously A/B-tested, sticky, addictive advertising network, which is what Facebook actually is. The great genius of Silicon Valley is that marketing. They’re really, really good at presenting capitalist business models and products as social enterprises.”

Yiannopoulos’ findings—based in part on dozens of interviews with Silicon Valley movers and shakers—align with other studies indicating that entrepreneurs rank high for sociopathic behaviors, alongside power-broker professionals like doctors, attorneys and bankers.

“You will find sociopaths at the top of every industry and in all sorts of positions of success,” Yiannopoulos says. “What’s different about Silicon Valley is that doctors and lawyers are constantly reminded by a variety of different mechanisms that they’re dealing ultimately with people—people’s feelings, their reputations and their finances. It’s very easy for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their employees to forget they’re dealing with people.”

Read the rest of the story here.

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