James Howard Kunstler has a book called "Too Much Magic", about how moderns really do believe in magic when it comes to sustaining the unsustainable. This is especially true of things they only half-understand. People see that tech made a bunch of money in the past 35 years, so now they believe it to be a sort of magic that can simply cause money to appear wherever it is applied. Of course, part of what they don't understand is 1) Unless you're at the very top of the industry, being a code monkey is not that great a job, and 2) for every rags-to-riches success story like Apple, Google, and Facebook, there's a hundred startups that flamed out and went bankrupt after a year, or apps that languished in the App Store getting a handful of downloads a week, or social networks with a dozen people on them. An individual's chances of producing the next Flappy Bird are about on par with the chances that all the prom queens who get off a Greyhound bus at Hollywood and Vine have of really being the next Julia Roberts, with the sole exception that when the wannabe Steve Jobs falls flat, he'll probably just end up working at Best Buy instead of taking it in the ass in some cheap porno.

---

Too much magic.