Carlos Bueno

[Commentary] Silicon Valley has become a social clique with its own subculture. We’ve created a make-believe cult of objective meritocracy, a pseudo-scientific mythos to obscure and reinforce the belief that only people who look and talk like us are worth noticing.

After making such a show of burning down the bad old rules of business, the new ones we’ve created seem pretty similar. Because the talent market is tight, that insularity presents a problem. It’s hard to find good people to hire.

The problem with gathering a bunch of logically-oriented young males together and encouraging them to construct a Culture gauntlet has nothing to do with their logic, youth, or maleness, but more with the fact that all cliques are self-reinforcing. There is no way to re-calibrate once the insiders have convinced themselves of their greatness.

The first step toward dissolving these petty Cultures is writing down their unwritten rules for all to see. The word “privilege” literally means “private law.” It’s the secrecy, deniable and immune to analysis, that makes the balance of power so lopsided in favor of insiders.

Then, try, just for a moment, to suppose that it’s probably unnatural for an industry to be so heavily dominated by white and Asian middle-class males under 30 who keep telling each other to only hire their friends. You want a juicy industry to disrupt? How about your own? [Bueno is senior engineer at MemSQ and the author of “Lauren Ipsum," a children’s novel about computer science and critical thinking]