The Know-It-Alls
eBook - ePub

The Know-It-Alls

The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Know-It-Alls

The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball

About this book

Included in Backchannel's (WIRED.com) "Top Tech Books of 2017"

An "important" book on the "pervasive influence of Silicon Valley on our economy, culture and politics."
—New York Times

How the titans of tech's embrace of economic disruption and a rampant libertarian ideology is fracturing America and making it a meaner place

In The Know-It-Alls former New York Times technology columnist Noam Cohen chronicles the rise of Silicon Valley as a political and intellectual force in American life. Beginning nearly a century ago and showcasing the role of Stanford University as the incubator of this new class of super geeks, Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet.

Donald Trump's election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing: Facebook and Twitter, eager to entertain their users, turned a blind eye to the fake news and the hateful ideas proliferating there. The Rust Belt states that shifted to Trump are the ones being left behind by a "meritocratic" Silicon Valley ideology that promotes an economy where, in the words of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, each of us is our own start-up. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray. The Know-It-Alls explains how these self-proclaimed geniuses failed this most important test of democracy.

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Yes, you can access The Know-It-Alls by Noam Cohen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Business General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Introduction: “To Serve Man”
  6. 1. John McCarthy: “Solving today’s problems tomorrow”
  7. 2. Frederick Terman: “Stanford can be a dominating factor in the West”
  8. 3. Bill Gates: “Most of you steal your software”
  9. 4. Marc Andreessen: “By the power vested in me by no one in particular”
  10. 5. Jeff Bezos: “When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?”
  11. 6. Sergey Brin and Larry Page: “It was like, wow, maybe we really should start a company now”
  12. 7. Peter Thiel: “Monopolists lie to protect themselves”
  13. 8. Reid Hoffman et al.: “My membership in a notable corporate alumni group in Silicon Valley has opened the door . . .”
  14. 9. Jimmy Wales: “Wikipedia is something special”
  15. 10. Mark Zuckerberg: “Nerds win”
  16. The Future: “Local, small-scale, active”
  17. A Note to the Reader
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Notes
  20. Index
  21. About the Author