Today’s DealBook Briefing was edited by Jason Karaian in London.Īlthough trained in computer science, Mr. Most brought in professional management to either serve as chief executive or otherwise provide so-called adult supervision. All of his counterpart FAANG founders were in their 20s or early 30s when they took their companies public. He was in his 40s when Netflix went public in 2002 and had previously served as a public company chief executive. Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, has always been the adult in the room. But the key differentiator may be something less coldly financial and more softly subjective: Culture. There are many possible reasons for this, including that Netflix is a fraction of the size of the others and it has eschewed acquisitions that might attract regulatory attention. Only one of these has largely escaped the adverse turn in public opinion: Netflix. The Big Tech standard bearers are the so-called FAANG stocks: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Something has gone off the rails, whether this is the result of a conspiratorial “merger of a hacker’s radical individualism and an entrepreneur’s greed,” as Noam Cohen argued in his polemic “The Know-It-Alls,” or simply the result of how “audacity often veers into arrogance,” as suggested by Leslie Berlin’s calmer history, “Troublemakers.” This includes the shameful treatment of women and minorities, the exploitation of personal customer data, crushing competitors while colluding with peers and failing to help the government protect our national security.

The consistent theme that underlies many cultural critiques of Silicon Valley is that innovators behind the dominant platforms invoke a high-minded libertarian ideology to justify a range of unjustifiable, self-interested actions. As the internet moves into middle age, and technology has increasingly become associated with “Big Tech,” it is perhaps not surprising that the naïve presumptions of young love have begun to fade. What explains the end of America’s love affair with tech? As with many passionate affairs, time has a way of taming new love’s ardor. His latest book is “Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.” Knee is a professor of professional practice at Columbia Business School and a senior adviser at Evercore. Want this delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up here.

Three other astute observers of the tech industry - Leslie Berlin, Antonio García Martínez and Shira Ovide - also weigh in. In it, he uses a new book out this week from Reed Hastings of Netflix to consider what it says about the culture of Silicon Valley, and to explore how our relationship with technology (and technology companies) is changing. Today, we are devoting the DealBook newsletter to an essay by Jonathan Knee, who writes the “Book Entry” column for The Times.

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