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The capitalists perpetuate capitalism through an ideology that stresses that the world will only get better with the right rich people in charge, and they only get louder about that promise when their regime is in crisis. It’s no wonder, then, that in a society where technology represents a substantial share of economic growth and political power, the capitalists that are adjacent to that particular gold rush breathlessly proselytize its utopian potential, promising it most fervently to the ones mining the gold for them.

every worker who could potentially exercise control over the means of production believes their bosses’ stewardship is leading the world to a better place. Another, of course, is a salary that prevents the need for much introspection.

For Yglesias, the very fact that something is the D.C. political consensus is enough to treat it as correct!

For Pressly, real privacy would mean not simply enabling people to participate in such decisions but mandating that far less data be made in the first place. Brought to its logical conclusion, his proposal evokes a kind of digital degrowth, a managed contraction of the Internet.

The highest compliment I can pay “The Right to Oblivion” is that it rescues privacy from the lawyers. Pressly’s version of privacy has a moral content, not just a legal one. And this gives it relevance to a broader set of intellectual and political pursuits.

That San Francisco is governed by a strong-mayor system is a “point of view,” in Moritz’s book. “And I just don’t happen to share that view.”

Moritz was born on Sept. 12, 1954, in Cardiff, Wales. His parents, Alfred and Doris, were German-Jewish refugees, and his father was a classics professor at the University of Cardiff.

Fabulous wealth did not appear to be in the cards, as Moritz went the route of the typeset drawer, heading into journalism.

In 1984, he penned the influential book “The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer.” By 1986, he was hired on by Sequoia Capital, and a storybook career ensued. He got in early on many of the companies on your phone: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube. As well as the phone itself — Apple.

Asked if he sees contradictions in his philanthropic and political giving, Moritz says he doesn’t. “The thing that gets lost on a lot of people,” he says, “is that the political stuff is a tiny percentage of the charitable giving. It takes a village, and it’s difficult to seek perfect alignment. I don’t worry about occasional overlaps.”

The jarring misstep by Moritz’s TogetherSF was, dutifully and thoroughly, covered by Moritz’s San Francisco Standard. If nothing else, Moritz could take solace that his journalists took him seriously when he told them at all-hands meetings that his own activities were fair game for reportage.

He also thinks Farrell will “be more forceful about getting uniformed officers on the street, which is the most effective, cheapest way to make everybody in San Francisco feel a lot safer.”