Silicon Valley isn’t a meritocracy. And it’s dangerous to hero-worship entrepreneurs

Alice Marwick’s article has already gotten a lot of well deserved praise, but this passage really stood out as a smart (and simple?) observation that I’ve rarely spotted in other articles:

Certainly, a level of material wealth is necessary to participate in San Francisco tech culture. Very few pointed to the elephant in the room of assumed wealth: “People behave as if we all make kind of the same.” To forge the type of social connections necessary to move into the upper echelons of the tech scene requires being able to take part in group activities, travel to conferences, and work on personal projects. This requires middle- to upper-class wealth, which filters out most people.

The result of this mythology is that it denies the role of personal connections, wealth, background, gender, race, or education in an individual’s success.