“they were capable of folly”
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from Vanity Fair on Sean Parker:
Reggae plays in the background at Shawn Fanning’s huge 40th-floor apartment, directly over San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. It is late at night. [Sean] Parker stretches back on an easy chair and bemoans what he sees as the scarcity, in contemporary culture, of revolutionary thinkers on the level of, say, Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac. “They were capable of folly,” he says, “and willing to take risks in terms of their message. We live in an extremely repressive era, and we fail to realize how repressive it is, because we’re told that all these outlets for rebellion, like listening to rock music, are no longer satanic. Smoking weed—that’s sort of O.K. and acceptable in some circles.” To Parker, the implication is that people in his position have almost an obligation to do what they can with the tools at their disposal—software and the Internet—to free up society through disruptive technology. As he muses, it is clear that he sees entrepreneurship and invention as handmaidens of social transformation.
