This morning’s Observer column.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” wrote Upton Sinclair, the great American muckraking journalist, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” That was in 1935, so let us update it for our times: “It is impossible to get an executive of an internet company to understand anything if the value of his (or her) stock options depends on not understanding it.”
There are two things in particular that the various infant prodigies, charlatans, megalomaniacs, sociopaths and venture capitalists who run our great internet companies have a vested interest in not understanding…