Both these quotes apply uncomfortably well to Silicon Valley global tech companies and their owners:

> "…what civilisation is, is 6 billion people, trying to make themselves happy by standing on each-others shoulders and kicking each others teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have; the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific knowhow, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us; the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary and we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are handed down as control icons. This is something … I mean, I don’t really want to get off on this tare because it’s a lecture in its self but … culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions; churches, companies, tax-collection schemes and what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual, we understand the felt presence of experience is what is most important. But the culture is a perversion; *it fetishises objects, it creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding* in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines; *processors of memes* passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood.”

Separately:

> "Don’t get the idea that it’s this liberal rap about how everybody has a piece of the action. You know, the Jews know something, the Buddhists know something, the Huichol know something. Nonsense! Rubbish! Nobody knows anything. These are different kinds of shell games that have been worked out by priestly castes of people to keep things under control. Institutions seek to maximize control, control, control! That’s what they’re into. Did you think they were in the business of enlightening you? Saving your soul? Forget it! Control is what this is all about. And to the degree that we commit ourselves to ideology, we are poisoned. Any ideology—Marxism, Catholicism, objectivism, you name it. Rubbish. All rubbish."

- Terence McKenna