"If the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men?"

Finally agreeing with Glenn Reynolds on something, I think that's the wrong question. The right one is:

If the Mark Zuckerbergs and Steve Jobs-types are so good, why's the internet experience such a fucking suck now? 

Represented by, say, Glenn Reynolds staying popular while making one wrong political call after another, like the recent "win from losing" fiasco? He might as well be Oprah, selling homeopathic "medicines" and anti-vaccine nonsense, as far as the internet "matters" to our lives. And despite the disbelief on Reynolds' part, Silicon Valley is a closed world - even to black millionaires:

"Two sources told Valleywag that West recently attended a dinner packed with venture capitalists at Laurene Powell Jobs' home where West supposedly had the temerity to trot out his tagline: "I'm the next Steve Jobs."

But some say West's efforts to drum up tech money for DONDA have not been fruitful.

…DONDA's road map may be hazy, but is it any more far-fetched than some of the ludicrous pitches propped up Silicon Valley's free flowing capital? Especially from investors who claim to back the founder, not the idea, and embrace failure—West recently said he lost $13 million on business ventures because "I didn't have the knowledge to do it the right way"—as a badge of honor.

West is clearly not waiting around for the Valley,...."

Just like I'm, clearly, not waiting around for Glenn Reynolds to ever decide to tell the truth, or be fair:

And whether I'm doing it the right way or not,...

 

"At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though it turns out laughing, which I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

…Led by discredited doctors and, incredibly, a former Playmate, the movement has frightened new parents with claptrap about autism, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and formaldehyde. The movement that was once a fringe freak show has become a menace, with foot soldiers whose main weapon is their self-righteousness. For them, vaccinating their children is merely a consumer choice, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school or drinking coconut water.

Thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013. I understand your wanting to raise your own children as you see fit, science be damned, but you're selfishly jeopardizing more than your own children. Carry your baby around in a sling, feed her organic banana mash while you drink your ethical coffee, fine, but what gives you denialists the right to put my health at risk—to cause me to catch a debilitating, humiliating, and frightening cough that, two months after I finished my last course of antibiotics (how’s that for supporting big pharma?), still makes me convulse several times a day like some kind of tragic nineteenth-century heroine? "

"It doesn’t matter what vitamins they’re on, how healthy they are, how natural everything is, everything organic. It’s irrelevant. Your child is going to get sick."

“California children betrayed: Governor Jerry Brown and the neutering of a law designed to make vaccine exemptions harder to get”

"Don’t get a flu shot, warns conservative talk show host Michael Savage, because you just can’t trust the government."

"More than 40 percent of child flu death victims were healthy"