Author: Wendy Liu Publisher: Watkins Media Limited ISBN: 1912248719 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 235
Book Description
Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. "Lucid, probing and urgent. Wendy Liu manages to be both optimistic about the emancipatory potential of tech and scathing about the industry that has harnessed it for bleak and self-serving ends." -- Naomi Klein, author of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal "An inspiring memoir manifesto...Technologists all over the world are realizing that no amount of code can substitute for political engagement. Liu's memoir is a road map for that journey of realization." -- Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Little Brother Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Wendy Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that gave rise to Silicon Valley as we know it. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not just to enrich a select few.
Author: Deborah Perry Piscione Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 113732421X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
While the global economy languishes, one place just keeps growing despite failing banks, uncertain markets, and high unemployment: Silicon Valley. In the last two years, more than 100 incubators have popped up there, and the number of angel investors has skyrocketed. Today, 40 percent of all venture capital investments in the United States come from Silicon Valley firms, compared to 10 percent from New York. In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem where meritocracy rules the day. She explores Silicon Valley's exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business. Drawing on interviews with investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, as well as a host of case studies from Google to Paypal, Piscione argues that Silicon Valley's unique culture is the best hope for the future of American prosperity and the global business community and offers lessons from the Valley to inspire reform in other communities and industries, from Washington, DC to Wall Street.
Author: Ashlee Vance Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0762751916 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
Silicon Valley veterans and newbies alike will want to explore this book that delves into the rich history behind the region that birthed the world's most important industry. Technology journalist Ashlee Vance has captured almost every aspect of the area stretching between San Francisco and San Jose, California, starting with the eager radio and electronics enthusiasts of the early 1900s and ending with the computing powerhouses of today such as Google and Apple. Along the way, the book profiles the people and places that have elevated Silicon Valley to an almost mythic pedestal. This book delivers Silicon Valley, taking us from success story to failed startup and back again as we drive the roads from San Francisco to Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and San Jose. It's full of profiles of the larger-than-life characters that pioneered the processor, computer, and Internet revolutions. The book's vibrant design includes "Silicon Valley Soundbytes" packed with insider information and trivia, and "Click Here" sidebars, which suggest places to eat, drink, and shop. Place by place, readers get the inside scoop on all the addresses that count, which include Microsoft research centers; the headquarters of Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle; research powerhouses such as Stanford University, NASA Ames, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the Computer History Museum and The Tech Museum; the Shoreline Amphitheater; the Churchill Club; and many more.
Author: Martin Kenney Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804737340 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
This text explores the factors that have made Silicon Valley such a fertile breeding ground for new technologies and new firms. It looks at how its pioneering achievements begana̧nd the forces that have propelled its unprecedented growth.
Author: Paris Marx Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1839765917 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
How to build a transportation system to provide mobility for all Road to Nowhere exposes the flaws in Silicon Valley’s vision of the future: ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft to take us anywhere; electric cars to make them ‘green’; and automation to ensure transport is cheap and ubiquitous. Such promises are implausible and potentially dangerous. As Paris Marx shows, these technological visions are a threat to our ideas of what a society should be. Electric cars are not a silver bullet for sustainability, and autonomous vehicles won’t guarantee road safety. There will not be underground tunnels to eliminate traffic congestion, and micromobility services will not replace car travel any sooner than we will see the arrival of the long-awaited flying car. In response, Marx offers a vision for a more collective way of organizing transportation systems that considers the needs of poor, marginalized, and vulnerable people. The book argues that rethinking mobility can be the first step in a broader reimagining of how we design and live in our future cities. We must create streets that allow for social interaction and conviviality. We need reasons to get out of our cars and to use public means of transit determined by community needs rather than algorithmic control. Such decisions should be guided by the search for quality of life rather than for profit.
Author: Cary McClelland Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393608808 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
An intimate, eye-opening portrait of San Francisco transformed by the tech boom. San Francisco is changing at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, in recent decades the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley, the engine of the new American economy. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and cracks in the city’s facade—rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions—have started to show. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic works of oral history, writer and filmmaker Cary McClelland spent several years interviewing people at the epicenter of the recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, from native sons and daughters to the city’s newest arrivals. The crisp and vivid stories of Silicon City’s diverse cast capture San Francisco as never before. The book opens with a longtime tour guide recounting the history of the original Gold Rush and observing how little the people of his city pay attention to its history; it ends on Fisherman’s Wharf, with the proprietor of an arcade game museum reminding us that even today’s technology will become relics of the past. In between we hear from people who have passed through Apple, Google, eBay, Intel, and the other big tech companies of our time. And we meet those who are experiencing the changes at the grassroots level: a homeless advocate in Haight-Ashbury, an Oakland rapper, a pawnbroker in the Mission, a man who helped dismantle and rebuild the Bay Bridge, and a woman who runs a tattoo parlor in the Castro. Silicon City masterfully weaves together a candid conversation across a divided community to create a dynamic portrait of a beloved city—and a cautionary tale for the entire country.
Author: Alexandra Wolfe Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1476778949 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
"A Wall Street Journal columnist for "Weekend Confidential" explores the hubris and ambition of Silicon Valley innovators who are changing the world, tracing the stories of three upstarts who left promising college educations in favor of developing billion-dollar ideas"--NoveList.
Author: Margaret O'Mara Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0399562206 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 514
Book Description
One of New York Magazine's best books on Silicon Valley! The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects. Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market, or not. The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and, increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.
Author: Chong-Moon Lee Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804740630 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 462
Book Description
Looks at Silicon Valley's business environment, and what features have made it a fertile ground for start-up companies who develop radical and disruptive technologies.
Author: Wendy Liu
Author: Deborah Perry Piscione
Author: Mary Beth Meehan
Author: Ashlee Vance
Author: Martin Kenney
Author: Paris Marx
Author: Cary McClelland
Author: Alexandra Wolfe
Author: Margaret O'Mara
Author: Chong-Moon Lee