The Know-It-Alls

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

Noam Cohen

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786073686
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies
• Index: Business

The world’s tech giants are at the centre of controversies over fake news, free speech and hate speech on platforms where influence is bought and sold. Yet, at the outset, almost everyone thought the internet would be a positive, democratic force, a space where knowledge could be freely shared to enable everyone to make better-informed decisions. How did it all go so wrong?

Noam Cohen reports on the tech libertarians of Silicon Valley, from the self-proclaimed geniuses Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg to the early pioneers at Stanford University, who have not only made the internet what it is today but reshaped society in the process. It is the story of how the greed, bias and prejudice of one neighbourhood is fracturing the Western world.

Table of contents

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