‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley

The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s

The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites

I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.

Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty

This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘d...

The Rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business

What you need to know about the next big startup archetype

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?

The Nerd Reich

The Extremist Tech Authoritarian Politics of Silicon Valley

Technically Radical

Over 2024, we saw major tech investors and company owners overtly turn toward the right, overtly backing Donald Trump in his electoral campaign. This group of individuals, which commentators have taken to calling the “Tech Right”, are motivated by various concerns like the attempts by the Biden administration to regulate them and a general backlash against “wokeness”. Representative individuals and their respective justifications can be found in things like Marc Andreessen's essay The Techno-Optimist Manifesto or books like Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, and Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic.

Major Tech Investor Calls Architect of Fascism a 'Saint' in Unhinged Manifesto

Silicon Valley's 'techno-optimism' cult believes we should let rich tech guys do whatever they want.

‘Founder as Victim, Founder as God’: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and the two bodies of the entrepreneur

Silicon Valley’s tech moguls have increasing political ambitions, as spectacularly illustrated by Peter Thiel’s and Elon Musk’s involvements in the US 2022 midterm elections and 2024 presidential e...

‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley

As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewi…

The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0

Between 2011-2019, Leverage Research explored the deep psychology of Effective Altruism and Silicon Valley, then suddenly dissolved among rumors of "demons." What happened?

More Everything Forever

This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death...

Afterlives of the California Ideology| “Polemic Becomes Canon”: An Interview With Richard Barbrook on the Californian Ideology

In this interview, Richard Barbrook shares his perspective on the essay “The Californian Ideology,” which he published in 1995 and 1996 with Andy Cameron, who died in 2012. Richard Barbrook lays out the essay’s genesis, explores the inspiration offered by Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology, discusses his ambivalent but not simply dismissive relationship to California and the United States, and provides insight into the thinking around the masters program in hypermedia at the University of Westminster, United Kingdom, that he and Cameron were setting up at the time of the essay’s publication. In the essay they wanted to impart a different approach to digital technologies than was prevalent in the Californian computer industry at the time. Overall, the interview makes it apparent how “The Californian Ideology” should be seen in its temporal context—as well as how the basic questions the essay raises continue to shape the discussion about digital media and infrastructures today.