Last time San Francisco's BART employees went on strike, local car rental app seized the opportunity: nothing says solidarity like a private helicopter ride. Today, with more labor rumblings, Uber is offering free boat rides to avoid public transportation.

The marketplace of ideas! Survival of the fittest... company! Clash of corporations, let the best business reap all! San Francisco's latest attempt to smother a trivial problem with an overabundance of technology is here: Prim, another techie service for idle people who don't like laundry.

When the Valley vanguard talks about itself as special, separate, and generally better than anyone not involved in a tech company, it's usually rhetoric. At least it used to be. Tech people with money are creating a new fantasy land, a mountaintop gathering called Summit Outside. Welcome to camp.

Amid this hellish, malarial rant about innovation, or something, startup founder Francis Pedraza says one interesting thing: Snapchat is so simple, even the destitute can use it! We all need to think about the way "tech people" view the rest of us.

Between the rolling green hills of Aspen, monied tech chums have convened at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech 2013 conference, a vague confab about innovation, or something. On the agenda: defending their own existence.

The collapse of American industry is nothing in the face of disruptive apps. Don't take my word for it—the unbridled optimism of Startupvania is never wrong.

Albert Wenger is a top investor at Union Square Ventures, which has invested in radical companies like Twitter, Tumblr, and Kickstarter. Wenger's next idea is nothing if not radical: he and his wife want to homeschool their kids with the help of regular idiots like you and me. The Future Is Now.

Quora can be a place to discuss race relations, poorly. Quora can be a place to explain your company's position in the eternal geo-political battle between good and evil. Or it can be a cry for help: "I'm pretty sure my reality is stuck in a bubble of tech startup culture."

I hate it when people say startups focus largely on bourgeois concerns, like how "most boats sit unused for 95 percent of the year," according to TechCrunch. So it's refreshing to see "Boatbound" shake things up. Or splash things up, more like it!

Fresh off of pissing money across pristine California redwoods, garland emperor Sean Parker is ready for a new venture: your lungs. Your sweet, delicate lungs.

The Republican National Committee has hired a 32-year-old senior Facebook engineer and angel investor for its "newly created" Chief Technology Officer position. So much for the George Packer naysayers insisting that Silicon Valley is "decisively in the camp of the Democrats," despite evidence to the contrary.

George Packer's thesis in this week's New Yorker is simple and sober: "After decades in which the country has become less and less equal, Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places in America." Yep. But it's the hideous truth behind the gilded new information economy, and the sloppy apologias are already streaming out.