Silicon Valley’s ‘silence is complicity.’ Nerd Reich meets Decoder
“Silence is complicity, and people sometimes get mad. They say, ‘Don’t say all tech, don’t say all Silicon Valley.’ Well, where are all the techies in Silicon Valley, the CEOs, speaking out against this stuff? Where are the people standing up and saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to put my money against this. This is morally wrong. This is repugnant. We should do it another way’? Silicon Valley, per capita, has the highest collection of cowardly CEOs in the world. They all want to hide under a rock and be on whatever side wins.”
That’s an excerpt from my interview with CNBC reporter Jon Fortt on The Verge’s Decoder podcast. It is currently one of the top stories on the site.
Click below to hear (or read) the entire conversation (and welcome to all of the new readers who subscribed because of Decoder!):
Jon Fortt
As we mention during our conversation, Jon and I have known each other for decades. We met during our senior year of high school and both attended DePauw University, where we both worked on the student newspaper.
Bonus: During the summer of 1995, we both interned at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. Here’s the intern group photo with me on the left (with hair!) and Jon in the back.
After graduating in 1998, we both ended up in Silicon Valley, working at the San Jose Mercury News at the tail end of the dotcom boom. And the rest is history...
