Silicon Valley’s Most Disturbing Obsession | Vanity Fair

It’s not artificial intelligence, or even perfecting the “smart juicer.” It could be a lot more sinister.

Save this story Save this story ‘At the moment, I’m completely absorbed with end-of-year projects at school,” the e-mail read. It was 2012, and I was working on an article about an innovative new app that was being used by a handful of high-school students in Los Angeles. It had never been written about before, and so I found myself tracking down its co-creator, a freshman at Stanford. Evan Spiegel was elusive. He wasn’t secretive or a jerk, but just had a lot of homework to do. The day after the story was published, he e-mailed me: “If I fail my E40 midterm on Friday because of all this media

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