I’m slowly making my way through Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and I thought I’d benefit from a quick recap of where I’d got to so far. In essence the first part of the book is an account of behavioural surplus: data about user behaviour left over after narrowly technical requirements that can be […]
I’m enjoying Zucked by Roger McNamee more than I expected to. What’s useful about his account is the stress it places on the engineering capacity of startups. What makes cloud computing significant is not just enabling growth without major capital investment in infrastructure, but also “eliminating what had previously been a very costly and time-consuming process […]
I find it hard not to wonder how many interactions like this one, satirised so superbly by Silicon Valley, lie behind the tendency of digital elites to pontificate about social trends. On the one hand, data science emerges as a powerful means of generating knowledge of social life, building on past developments while becoming something […]
Another extract from Audrey Watters, this time from The Curse of the Monsters of Educational Technology, who analysis of the rhetoric of disruption has fast become one of my favourite examples of digital cultural critique. From loc 184: “The Silicon Valley Narrative,” as I call it, is the story that the technology industry tells about […]
Upstarts, by Brad Stone, loc 337-353 describes Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky’s preoccupation with Silicon Valley as a dissatisfied recent graduate of design school: At the time he was obsessively following the story of the fantastically successful founders of the video-sharing site YouTube; he was spending hours on the site as well as watching Steve Jobs’s […]
In his remarkably prescient Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank describes the rapid capture of the Democratic Party by the professional class which took place during those decades when economic transition left them ascendent within the country as a whole. This was originally a predominance of financiers within the party but, with a transition marked by the […]
A wonderful snippet I just came across on Wikipedia: Elon Musk, after viewing the first episode of the show, said: “None of those characters were software engineers. Software engineers are more helpful, thoughtful, and smarter. They’re weird, but not in the same way. I was just having a meeting with my information security team, and […]
From The Deep State, by Mike Lofgren, pg 255-256: The quality of blind self-absorption is not confined to our national security elites. Many Wall Street and Valley billionaires, living a hermetically sealed existence surrounded by sycophants and coat holders, appear genuinely surprised that their public reputation is not that of heroic entrepreneurs selflessly creating jobs […]
A really enticing analysis by Evgeny Morozov of the “eventual depoliticization of extremely political and contentious issues by wrapping them up in the empty, futuristic language of technology and innovation”. Silicon Valley increasingly dominates the discursive representation of our global future, with the amelioration of social problems limited to a technologically-driven intensification of consumption: Like […]
A bit later in Battle of the Titans, Fred Vogelstein transcribes a talk he saw Eric Schmidt give at a technology conference. From loc 1904-1918: We have a product that allows 82 you to speak to your phone in English and have it come out in the native language of the person you are talking to. […]
From Zero to One, by Peter Thiel, loc 155-171: Dot- com mania was intense but short— 18 months of insanity from September 1998 to March 2000. It was a Silicon Valley gold rush: there was money everywhere, and no shortage of exuberant, often sketchy people to chase it. Every week, dozens of new startups competed […]
This Wikipedia page makes for interesting reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia “PayPal Mafia” is a term used to indicate a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies[1] such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Matterport, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.[2] Most of the members attended Stanford University or University […]
