The phrase ‘change the world’ is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of ‘early-stage investing’ and ‘beta tests.’ – George Packer
Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. – George Packer
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism’s dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems. – George Packer
It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn’t seem like fun to me. – George Packer
Jay-Z is a hero, Sam Walton is a hero – these are not exactly communitarian champions. These are – in some cases, literally; in others, just figuratively – gangster heroes. That’s who is worshipped: people who get away with it. – George Packer
Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating. – George Packer
The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive – that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They’re so easy to consume and so endlessly available. – George Packer
What I found in Silicon Valley is an industry that’s sort of been kept a very far remove from Washington and had an attitude of ‘Just let us do our thing and make the miracles that people love around the world and leave us alone.’ – George Packer
Often, foreign policy – which, by definition, is largely out of American control – is simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing, the unwise thing. – George Packer
The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy. – George Packer
Jay-Z has kind of shown that you can get to the very top without waiting, without following rules. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. People will admire you more if you break the rules. – George Packer
The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart’s bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin – ‘The worse, the better.’ – George Packer