Contents

1. INTRODUCTION
   1. The Great Acceleration
   2. In Crisis There Is Opportunity
      1. Outsourcing Sacrifice
2. 1. COVID & THE CULLING
   1. The Culling of the Herd: The Strong Get (Much) Stronger
   2. Surviving the Culling: Cash Is King
   3. Crisis Management 101
      1. Overcorrect
      2. Going on Offense
   4. The Covid Gangster Move: Variable Cost Structures
   5. The Great Dispersion
      1. Working from Home
      2. Second-Order Effects of the Dispersion of Work
   6. The Brand Age Gives Way to the Product Age
      1. Welcome to the Product Age
   7. Red and Blue
      1. Red and Blue Social Media
      2. Red and Blue Search and Beyond
3. 2. THE FOUR
   1. The Power of Bigness / The Monopoly Algorithm / Featurization
      1. It’s All Tech Now
      2. The Four Expand Everywhere
      3. The Four Come to Hollywood
   2. Bigger Tech, Bigger Problems
      1. Standing Up Against the Four
   3. The Curse of Big Numbers
   4. Amazon
      1. What Can We Do That Is Really Hard?
   5. Apple
      1. Think Rundle
   6. Mad Men 2.0: Google and Facebook
4. 3. OTHER DISRUPTORS
   1. The Disruptability Index
   2. The Burning of the Unicorn Barn
      1. Enter the Unicorn
      2. SoftBank’s $100 Billion Unicorn Buffet
      3. Yogababble
      4. Thoroughbred vs. Unicorn
   3. When the Smoke Clears
      1. The Shiniest Unicorns in the Herd
5. 4. HIGHER EDUCATION
   1. Ripe for Disruption
      1. Scarcity
      2. Abundance
      3. Ivy-Covered Caste System
      4. Disruptive Forces
   2. The Crisis Is Upon Us
      1. Fiscal Shock
      2. Delusional
      3. Desperate
      4. Doomed
   3. The Road Ahead
      1. Scale
      2. Bait
      3. Twenty-First-Century Higher Ed
   4. Recommendations
6. 5. THE COMMONWEALTH
   1. Capitalism, Our Comorbidities, and the Coronavirus
      1. Sounds Great, but …
      2. The Role of Government
      3. Comorbidities
      4. Abandoned
   2. Capitalism on the Way Up, Socialism on the Way Down = Cronyism
      1. The Virtues of Failure
      2. My Dinner with Dara
      3. Cronies Gonna Crony
   3. Cronyism and Inequality
      1. Economic Anxiety
   4. The New Caste System
      1. Private Disneyland
      2. On Education, Again
      3. Wealth Privilege
      4. Cartoon
      5. Corporations Are (Rich) People Too
   5. The Exploitation Economy
      1. Superabundance
   6. Take Government Seriously
      1. You Get What You Pay For
      2. Test Kits
      3. On the Kindness of Billionaires
      4. Democracy’s One Weird Trick
      5. Vote
   7. Tragedy of the Commons
      1. Calling the Corona Corps
      2. Malefactors of Great Wealth
   8. What We Must Do
7. Acknowledgments
8. Notes