Rebecca Solnit

Sometimes it appears that the country we live in is faking it, is pretending to be a country with certain values and principles to which its citizens pledge both a real and a imagined allegiance, and that we're really living a kind of fantasy life in which the truth is a lie and lies have become the truth.

So that when I hear a writer like Rebecca Solnit say, as she said last night, that the Silicon Valley gold rush is just the latest manifestation of the American west being laid to waste by the 'extraction industry,' I can hear the ring of truth in it and know that it doesn't apply to me but to almost everyone else in the audience.