I'm not saying Instagram is worthless. I'm saying Instagram is a new flavour of toothpaste. There's something kind of distasteful about a new flavour of toothpaste marshalling the attention and money that it did, but it's not that I blame Instagram for that. But I do compare it to, say, the Gates Foundation, and it's hard not to think "boy, that whole enterprise could have had vastly greater beneficial impact to a lot more people than it did."
Where does the billion dollars that Instagram commanded go? Into a constantly recycling pool of geeks and cash in the Valley who keep funding more companies inventing new flavours of toothpaste, hoping to be either the next Instagram or the next Facebook buying Instagram. Ms. Bracy's whole exhortation is just this: Maybe direct some of that energy, some of that attention, some of that money and time, outside of the incestuous enterprise that is Silicon Valley.
==Theory of the leisure class
It's very easy to be dismissive of widgets. For example, the entire internet is a mechanism to instantly teleport bits of information from one place to another. That's all the widget does. It doesn't help you do anything physical. It just lets you send bits from one place to another, nothing else. It sounds so trivial. Who would have thought that a widget for sending bits from one place to another could have such a big impact?
Now I'm wondering- can you give a specific example of the company/person being described? These criticisms of Silicon Valley are always so abstract, it would be nice to have a few examples.