The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball

Amazon.com Price: $24.65 (as of 15/10/2019 00:06 PST- Details)

Description

Included in Backchannel’s (WIRED.com) “Top Tech Books of 2017”

An “necessary” book at 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 The us and making it a meaner place

In The Know-It-Alls former New York Times technology columnist Noam Cohen chronicles the upward push 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 wealthy 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 by way of the Web.

Donald Trump’s election victory used to be 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 at the back of by a “meritocratic” Silicon Valley ideology that promotes an economy where, in the words of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, each and every 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 necessary test of democracy.


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