When #Wall_Street and #Silicon_Valley come together – a cautionary tale
►http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/25/darker-side-pay-per-laugh-innovations-silicon-valley
... Having wired up the world, Silicon Valley assured us that the magic of technology would naturally pervade every corner of our lives. On this logic, to oppose technological innovation is tantamount to defaulting on the ideals of the Enlightenment: Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg are simply the new Diderot and Voltaire – reborn as nerdy entrepreneurs.
And then, a rather strange thing happened: somehow we have come to believe that the second kind of disruption had nothing to do with the first. Thus the rise of massive open online courses (#moocs) has been narrated without much reference to the shrinking budgets of universities: no, the mooc-mania was just the natural result of Silicon Valley’s embrace of innovation – hackers-turned-entrepreneurs have come to “disrupt” the universities the way they have disrupted music or journalism.