THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS

Lalka conducts a searching exploration of the entrepreneurs who ushered in the digital age—and the moral implications of their innovations—in this nonfiction work.

The author discusses how, in 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg started Facemash in his dorm room as a sophomore at Harvard, all the signs of Zuckerberg’s questionable moral compass were on display, including his disregard for the law and the privacy of others, a “disrespect for the dignity of each real person because it was just online,” and a profound insensitivity to the emotional injury caused by the site’s scathing judgments. Lalka goes on to describe how Zuckerberg would bring this mindset to Facebook and deliberately exploit the addiction to judgment and divisiveness social media generates while failing to sufficiently address the platform’s impact on vulnerable children. Contrastingly, Sergey Brin and Larry Page conceived of Google as an “anticorporate effort” that would make the Internet freer and more transparent—a grand project of democratization. However, per the author, they eventually betrayed these noble aspirations building a corporate monopoly that harvests the private data of its users to profit from their manipulation. In this provocatively thoughtful book, Lalka, who runs the entrepreneurship and innovation center at Tulane’s business school, questions why we trusted such figures with so much disruptive power. “Why did we assume that entrepreneurs, investors, and politicians wouldn’t serve themselves, even if it meant going against the very democratic principles that gave them opportunities, fueled their successes, or even enabled them to exist in business and society?”

Lalka covers a dizzying expanse of the Internet’s explosive growth and includes incisive profiles of controversial luminaries like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Travis Kalanick. At times, his presentation can seem a touch meandering and digressively ill-disciplined—he certainly casts a net so wide that his study risks devolving into a scattershot work with more breadth than depth. However, the cacophony of competing narratives ultimately congeals into a coherent whole focusing on the moral perils of the Internet’s expansion and cultural dominance. Of course, the Internet has provided an unprecedented access to knowledge, as well as heretofore unimaginable social connectedness, but it has also, per Lalka, eliminated jobs, subverted democratic and legal processes, and stoked all manner of cultural decline. One might suggest, as the author boldly does, that, in a meaningful sense, we are all now less free: “So maybe it isn’t an overstatement to say that your freedom to decide is lost in this equation. Your power over your data certainly is. There’s a reason so many tech companies have made so much money with this business model. They don’t have to pay you anything for the data they’re mining and all the value they’re gaining from your attention and experiences.” Lalka’s analysis is remarkably unflinching, calling to account these icons who are, after all, mere entrepreneurs, “never heroes fulfilling a sacred destiny.” The body of work addressing this subject now seems inexhaustible, but this book must count as among its most clear-eyed, well researched, and morally uncompromising examples.

An impressive work of research and intellectual reflection.