Silicon States
The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by Esquire
Winner of the 800–CEO–READ Business Book Award in Current Events and Public Affairs
In an era when faith in government and its institutions is quickly eroding, the businesses of Silicon Valley are stepping in to fill the gap. With outsize supplies of cash, talent, and ambition, a small group of corporations have been gradually seizing leadership—and consumer confidence—around the world.
In Silicon States, renowned futurist and celebrated international think–tank leader Lucie Greene offers an unparalleled look at the players, promises, and potential problems of Big Tech. Through interviews with corporate leaders, influential venture capitalists, scholars, journalists, activists, and more, Greene explores the tension inherent in Silicon Valley's global influence. If these companies can invent a social network, how might they soon transform our political and health–care systems? If they can revolutionize the cell phone, what might they do for space travel, education, or the housing market? As Silicon Valley faces increased scrutiny over its mistreatment of women, cultural shortcomings, and its role in widespread Russian election interference, we are learning where its interests truly lie, and about the great power these companies wield over an unsuspecting citizenry.
While the promise of technology is seductive, it is important to understand these corporations' possible impacts on our political and socioeconomic institutions. Greene emphasizes that before we hand our future over to a rarefied group of companies, we should examine the world they might build and confront its benefits, prejudices, and inherent flaws. Silicon States pushes us to ask if, ultimately, this is the future we really want.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ominous but shallowly argued volume, Greene, a director at the advertising giant J. Walter Thompson's Innovation Group, declares that the rapid growth of Silicon Valley represented by a cluster of digital technology firms including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Tesla has far-reaching consequences for society. Valley companies' increasing power and ambition to "disrupt," she writes, threaten to erode the foundations of democratic governance, put in place a global surveillance regime, and cede power over society to a group of privileged white men who "don't like paying taxes." Unfortunately, Greene is hard pressed to make sense of the complexities of big tech. In chapters about Silicon Valley's impact on government, media, education, healthcare, and other sectors, she combines insufficiently rigorous analysis with a plodding, repetitive style that circles back to the same rhetorical devices in chapter after chapter ("Where creativity, concepts, and culture could be innovative before, somehow technology and data have become the primary things associated with the future"). Moreover, the book portrays the region's encroachment on national sovereignty as unprecedented, but fails to acknowledge that older brands such as Ford, General Motors, IBM, and Pepsi were political entities long before Silicon Valley's time. Greene also attempts to shoehorn a year's worth of headlines into her analysis, touching on #MeToo and Trump-era populism before laying the blame for political breakdown at the feet of millennials too busy "growing mustaches" to vote. The result is a provocative yet often unreadable account.