You have all these Internet companies over the past decade, and the people who run them seem sort of autistic, these mild cases of Asperger's seem to be quite rampant, there's no need for sales, the companies themselves are weirdly nonsocial in nature. Google is sort of the archetype. But in a society where things are not great and a lot of stuff is fairly dysfunctional, that may actually be where you can add the most value. We have this messy real world where things are incredibly difficult and broken, and there are crazy politics, and it's hard to get good people elected, the system doesn't quite work. And then there is this alternative virtual world in which there's no stuff, it's all zeros and ones on a computer, you can reprogram it, you can make the computer do anything you want it to. Maybe that is the best way you can actually help things in this country. (P 384)
Packer quoted Peter Thiel, who is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. Thiel is one of the many protagonists Packer used to tell a gripping story on how America is going down. It's going down because of it's it's values, it's moral and it's obscure sense of equality. Even President Obama seemed to have believed that there wasn't much to be done about decline than manage it. (P 385) America is in a deadly race between politics and technology (P 387) that leaves no space or freedom to it's people and I have no idea how that can ever be fixed but I know, that capitalism isn't the answer.