No, the world isn't seriously this disgusting. What you are looking at isn't even Silicon Valley. It's a bunch of fucking bloggers jerking around. Yeah, there are a lot of people who (for some reason) give a fuck. Some of these bloggers even have significant influence as a result. But please remember all the people with their nose on the grindstone doing real work in the Valley and elsewhere. They are the majority, and they are the tech scene. Lyon's Silicon Cesspool isn't the tech scene, it's the blogosphere, which has always been a piece of shit. Disregard it, and remember, "Friends don't let friends read TechCrunch."

Every industry has people within it that are unethical or try to game the system for their own benefit at the expense of others. If anything the technology industry is unique in how much good it has done, relative to the bad.

No doubt, it's up to us to decide where the balance actually lies.