There’s a lot of chatter in Silicon Valley about changing the world, but our own world hasn’t changed that much.
Tech's right turn : the rise of reactionary politics in Silicon Valley and online
This dissertation shows how a group of conservative activists helped shape Silicon Valley and its digital technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. Operating primarily within a loose network of think ta...
An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption
Three recent books challenge the tech industry's myths of self-reliance and prescience.
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...
What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit
The long read: Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again
The internet seems ripe for change, and millions of people seem poised to connect in new ways, as they reconsider their relationship to technology.
The Internet Ideology: Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley
It knows how to talk about tools but is barely capable of talking about social, political, and economic systems that these tools enable and disable, amplify and pacify. Why the “digital debate” leads us astray.
All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology
A WIRED timeline shows how dozens of governments, companies, and other organizations across Europe are moving, or planning to shift, away from US Big Tech.
Institute of Network Cultures | Ben Grosser: Planning the Exodus from Platform Realism
Thinking about the current state of platforms, I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s articulation of capitalist realism, the idea that we don’t imagine or build alternatives to capitalism because we can no longer envision a world without it. Big tech, in a few short years, has managed to instill within the public a similar state of platform realism. So many are unable to imagine how global communication, media, search, etc. could ever function without the platforms. Despite a growing malaise, it’s become difficult for many to consider a world without big tech platforms as a viable conception of the future.
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
Can a human touch make Silicon Valley’s biggest discussion forum a more thoughtful place?
Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem | Aeon Essays
Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future
A forty-year career.
The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains, but either way they are absolutely the protagonists. Working within the industry, I’ve worked with quite a few non-protagonists who experience their time in technology differently: a period of obligatory toil required to pry open the gate to the American Dream.
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...
Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash
Here are two aspects of the anti-tech backlash that I believe are both true, and are actually reciprocally related to each other: Critics in media, politics, and even in tech itself, who spend all …
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewi…
During the 1980s and 1990s, networks of evangelists and venture capitalists fused technological boosterism with reactionary social ideals. Our video of the week examines the deep roots of Silicon Valley's shift toward the right. Featuring @beccalew.bsky.social at @westernu.ca buff.ly/ydgntnc
