Nowhere is this idea of entrepreneurship-as-humanitarianism more entrenched than in Silicon Valley, where company founders regularly speak of themselves as liberators of mankind and of their technologies as intrinsically utopian. After all, even a workplace software company like Rosenstein’s Asana could claim on its website that “we’ll improve the lives of every person on the planet.” A friend of Rosenstein, Greg Ferenstein, set out years ago to chronicle these grand claims and make sense of this new mentality radiating from the Valley. He was a reporter in the Bay Area who had written for various outlets, notably TechCrunch, the booster newsletter of Silicon Valley. He had become interested in the bigger ideas animating the people he covered—what win-win-ism imagines for the world and what, at times, it obscures.

Ferenstein interviewed many technology founders and distilled their ideas into a working philosophy. He calls this philosophy Optimism, though it seems to be just a slightly tech-inflected version of standard-issue neoliberalism. The ideology’s central thrust, he said, is a belief in the possibility of the win-win and the harmony of human interests. “The basis of old government is the notion of a zero-sum relationship between different classes—economic classes, between citizens and the government, between the United States and other countries,” Ferenstein said. “If you assume that inherent conflict, you worry about disparities in wealth. You want labor unions to protect workers from corporations. You want a smaller government to get out of the way of business. If you don’t make that assumption, and you believe that every institution needs to do well, and they all work with each other, you don’t want unions or regulation or sovereignty or any of the other things that protect people from each other.”

There is no discounting the audacity of this idea. It rejects the notion that there are different social classes with different interests who must fight for their needs and rights. Instead, we get what we deserve through marketplace arrangements—whether office software to make everyone more productive or the sale of toothpaste to the poor in ways that increase shareholder value. This win-win doctrine took on a great deal more than Adam Smith ever had, in claiming that the winners were specially qualified to look after the losers. But what do they have to show for their efforts, given that the age of the win-win is also, across much of the West, the age of historic, gaping inequality?

In a country that is losing its middle class, in a wider world racked by anxiety about globalization and technology and displacement, what is the win-win theory’s response to the problem of suffering? “It’s not an emphasis of this ideology,” Ferenstein said. Suffering can be innovated away. Let the innovators do their start-ups and suffering will be reduced. Each entrepreneurial venture could take on a different social problem. “In the case of Airbnb, the way you alleviate housing suffering is by allowing people to share their homes,” Ferenstein said. An Airbnb ad campaign along these lines featured older black women thriving now that the entrepreneurs had helped them to rent out rooms and make extra money. Of course, many poor people don’t own homes or have a surplus of space to rent out. And many African Americans find it difficult to rent on the platform—hotels can no longer easily discriminate by race, but spare-room hoteliers often do. But what was even more striking than these blind spots was the notion, implied in Ferenstein’s idea, that the winners should receive a kickback from social change.