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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Notes Introduction: Meet The Mindset     5   Elon Musk colonizing Mars : Mike Wall, “Mars Colony Would Be a Hedge against World War III, Elon Musk Says,” Space.com , March 28, 2018, https:// www .space .com /40112 -elon -musk -mars -colony -world -war -3 .html.     5   Peter Thiel reversing the aging process : Maya Kossoff, “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People’s Blood,” Vanity Fair , August 1, 2016, 2021, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2016 /08 /peter -thiel -wants -to -inject -himself -with -young -peoples -blood.     5   uploading their minds : Alexandra Richards, “Silicon Valley billionaire pays company thousands ‘to be killed and have his brain digitally preserved forever,’ ” Evening Standard , March 15, 2018, https:// www .standard .co .uk /news /world /silicon -valley -billionaire -pays -company -thousands -to -kill -him -and -preserve -his -brain -forever -a3790871 .html.     8   “fairer” phones : Bas Van Abel, interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human podcast, March 29, 2017, https:// www .teamhuman .fm /episodes /ep -30 -bas -van -abel -fingerprints -on -the -touchscreen.   10   cars into space : Joel Gunter, “Elon Musk: The Man Who Sent His Sports Car into Space,” BBC , February 10, 2018, https:// www .bbc .com /news /science -environment -42992143.   10   Biosphere trials : Steve Rose, “Eight Go Mad in Arizona: How a Lockdown Experiment Went Horribly Wrong,” Guardian , July 13, 2020, https:// www .theguardian .com /film /2020 /jul /13 /spaceship -earth -arizona -biosphere -2 -lockdown.

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Peters, “Bannon’s Worldview: Dissecting the Message of ‘The Fourth Turning,’ ” New York Times , April 8, 2017, https:// www .nytimes .com /2017 /04 /08 /us /politics /bannon -fourth -turning .html. 149   1960s science fiction novel : Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light (New York: Harper Voyager, 2010). 149   “In Silicon Valley” : Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live In,” Guardian , May 11, 2017, https:// www .theguardian .com /world /2017 /may /11 /accelerationism -how -a -fringe -philosophy -predicted -the -future -we -live -in. 150   “It’s a fine line” : Max Chafkin, QAnon Anonymous podcast, December 10, 2021. 150   “cognitive elite” : Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian , February 15, 2018, https:// www .theguardian .com /news /2018 /feb /15 /why -silicon -valley -billionaires -are -prepping -for -the -apocalypse -in -new -zealand. 150   Thiel also funded : Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin, 2021). Chapter 12: Cybernetic Karma 159   cybernetics : Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948). 160   “a kind of vaccination” : Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns (Charmouth, UK: Triarchy Press, 2016), 198–99. 161   butterfly flapping : Edward Lorenz, speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, December 29, 1972, transcribed in Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). 162   “anyone may publish” : Ken Jordan and Randall J.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Published simultaneously in Canada Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8021-2313-8 eISBN 978-0-8021-9231-8 Atlantic Monthly Press an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 154 West 14th Street New York, NY 10011 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com In Memory of V Falber & Sons CONTENTS Preface: The Question Introduction: The Building Is the Message 1 The Network 2 The Money 3 The Broken Center 4 The Personal Revolution 5 The Catastrophe of Abundance 6 The One Percent Economy 7 Crystal Man 8 Epic Fail Conclusion: The Answer Acknowledgments Notes Preface THE QUESTION The Internet, we’ve been promised by its many evangelists, is the answer. It democratizes the good and disrupts the bad, they say, thereby creating a more open and egalitarian world. The more people who join the Internet, or so these evangelists, including Silicon Valley billionaires, social media marketers, and network idealists, tell us, the more value it brings to both society and its users. They thus present the Internet as a magically virtuous circle, an infinitely positive loop, an economic and cultural win-win for its billions of users. But today, as the Internet expands to connect almost everyone and everything on the planet, it’s becoming self-evident that this is a false promise.

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Rockefeller and industrial monopolies like Standard Oil didn’t just go away. They were legislated out of existence. As the distinguished New York University and London School of Economics sociologist Richard Sennett notes, these progressives actually “set great store on the power of technology to build a better society.” But unlike “your garden-variety Silicon Valley billionaire,” Sennett explains, “the progressives of a century ago believed that once in power, the plutocrat would inevitably stifle talent which threatened his or her domain.”29 And that’s why, according to Sennett, “it’s time to break up Google.” The “problem is simple,” he says. “The company is just too powerful, as are Apple and many other big tech groups.”

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Rather than an Internet Bill of Rights, what we really need is an informal Bill of Responsibilities that establishes a new social contract for every member of networked society. Silicon Valley has fetishized the ideals of collaboration and conversation. But where we need real collaboration is in our conversation about the impact of the Internet on society. This is a conversation that affects everyone from digital natives to the precariat to Silicon Valley billionaires. And it’s a conversation in which we all need to take responsibility for our online actions—whether it’s our narcissistic addiction to social media, our anonymous cruelty, or our lack of respect for the intellectual property of creative professionals. The answer lies in the kind of responsible self-regulation laid out in William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, his excellent guide for building a good life in the digital age.67 “You have only one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg so memorably trivialized the complexity of the human condition.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

On June 19, he picked out RTX, the symbol for the defense contractor Raytheon, which you might recall as the maker of the Patriot missile that starred in the first Iraq War. Trading tripled that day from its typical level, but the stock failed to achieve liftoff, dropping instead. On that occasion as well, there weren’t too many hard feelings. The Charismatic, Prophetic Figure Though the term didn’t exist in Raskob’s time, and the Silicon Valley billionaires would deny it, these men are “influencers.” That status might not be explicit in the modern social media sense of Kim Kardashian or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who get paid upward of $1 million for a single Instagram post. If Musk’s tweets were for sale and compensating him for them directly were legal, they would fetch multiples of what people helping to hawk handbags and energy drinks receive because value can be created and turned into cash instantly in the stock or cryptocurrency markets.

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“They benefit from the fact that hedge funds are more cartoonish villains than them,” explains O’Mara. Chad Minnis, the retail investor who was incensed enough about the trading restrictions to start a registered political action committee, says that most executives and politicians leave him and his generation cold compared with no-filter Silicon Valley billionaires. “They have that way of talking—they use a lot of words and they don’t say a lot,” he says. “It doesn’t seem real. Elon talks to people the way that people talk to their friends.” Palihapitiya burst onto young investors’ radar a bit later than Musk when he lambasted hedge fund managers and came out against aid to failing companies on CNBC as the market was plunging in the spring of 2020.

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If you piss on anyone that aligns with you just because they have a huge net worth, then you won’t have anyone fighting alongside you,” went another. The Billionaires’ Clubhouse Aside from enhancing their brands and net worth, showing solidarity with the aggrieved traders unable to buy more GameStop shares also might have been a way for Silicon Valley billionaires to avoid the pitchforks of a crowd that ultimately was upset about economic unfairness. At the peak of the meme-stock frenzy, progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, invited Palihapitiya to a conversation on the live streaming platform Twitch. It fell through because of scheduling issues, but one wonders whether the talk would have been friendly or icy.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Table of Contents Cover Introduction Chapter One: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Two: Dividing Up the Turf Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Three: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Lower Wages and Greater Income Inequality Higher Prices Fewer Startups and Jobs Lower Productivity Lower Investment Localism and Diversity Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Four: Squeezing the Worker Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Five: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Six: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Monopolies (and Local Monopolies) Duopolies Oligopolies Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Seven: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Eight: Regulation and Chemotherapy Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Nine: Morganizing America Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Ten: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Key Thoughts from the Chapter Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Principles for Reform Solutions and Remedies And Finally, What You Can Do … Notes Introduction Chapter 1: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Chapter 2: Dividing Up the Turf Chapter 3: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Chapter 4: Squeezing the Worker Chapter 5: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Chapter 6: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Chapter 7: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Chapter 8: Regulation and Chemotherapy Chapter 9: Morganizing America Chapter 10: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Acknowledgments About the Authors Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Chapter 2 Table 2.1 The Largest Highly Concentrated Industries List of Illustrations Chapter 1 Figure 1.1 Merger Manias: 1890–2015 Figure 1.2 Collapse in the Number of US Public Companies Since 1996 Figure 1.3 Collapse in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) Figure 1.4 Frequency of the Words “Competition,” “Competitors,” and “Pressure” in Annual Reports Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 Zero and Negative Central Bank Rates Promote Cartels Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 The US Economy Has Become Less Entrepreneurial over Time Figure 3.2 New Firms Play a Decreasing Role in the Economy Figure 3.3 Growth Phases of Organisms and Companies Figure 3.4 Lower Productivity Growth as Fewer Firms Enter Figure 3.5 Investment Significantly Lagging Profitability Chapter 4 Figure 4.1 Variant Perception US Wages Leading Indicator Figure 4.2 Percentage of Workers with Noncompete Agreements, by Group Figure 4.3 States That Do Not Enforce Noncompetes Have Higher Wages Figure 4.4 Rural Areas Are Lagging (aggregate wage growth, year-over-year, third quarter 2016) Figure 4.5 Monopsonies in Labor Markets: Commuting Zones with High Labor Concentration Figure 4.6 Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Figure 4.7 Union Membership versus Income Distribution to Top 10% Figure 4.8 Wage Growth Closely Associated with Strikes Figure 4.9 The Great Suppression: Falling Unions and Increasing Licensing, 1950s–Today Chapter 6 Figure 6.1 Rail Mergers: Making of the Big Four Figure 6.2 Airline Mergers in Today's Oligopoly Figure 6.3 Banking Mergers in the United States Figure 6.4 Life Expectancy versus Health Expenditure over Time (1970–2014) Figure 6.5 Leading Global Meat Processing Firms Timeline of Ownership Changes, 1996–2016 Chapter 7 Figure 7.1 The First and Second Merger Waves (1890–1903, 1920–1930) Figure 7.2 Antitrust Enforcement Budget Figure 7.3 Twenty Years of Industry Consolidation Figure 7.4 Three Mega Merger Waves in the Past Three Decades Figure 7.5 Proportion of Completed Mergers and Acquisitions Chapter 8 Figure 8.1 Total US Patents Issued Annually, 1900–2014 Figure 8.2 Pages in the Federal Register (1936–2015) Figure 8.3 Companies That Lobby Extensively Have Higher Returns Figure 8.4 Revolving Door between Goldman Sachs and the Federal Government Figure 8.5 Revolving Door between Monsanto and the Federal Government Chapter 9 Figure 9.1 Largest Owners of US Banks (as of 2016 Q2) Figure 9.2 Share of Passively Managed Assets in US Markets Figure 9.3 S&P 500 Ownership by “Big 3” Figure 9.4 Net Investment by Nonfinancial Businesses Figure 9.5 Buybacks Zoom to Record Highs Chapter 10 Figure 10.1 Income Inequality in the United States, 1910–2015 Figure 10.2 The Global Wealth Pyramid, 2017 Figure 10.3 Rising Inequality.

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Table of Contents Cover Introduction Chapter One: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Two: Dividing Up the Turf Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Three: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Lower Wages and Greater Income Inequality Higher Prices Fewer Startups and Jobs Lower Productivity Lower Investment Localism and Diversity Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Four: Squeezing the Worker Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Five: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Six: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Monopolies (and Local Monopolies) Duopolies Oligopolies Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Seven: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Eight: Regulation and Chemotherapy Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Nine: Morganizing America Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Ten: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Key Thoughts from the Chapter Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Principles for Reform Solutions and Remedies And Finally, What You Can Do … Notes Introduction Chapter 1: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Chapter 2: Dividing Up the Turf Chapter 3: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Chapter 4: Squeezing the Worker Chapter 5: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Chapter 6: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Chapter 7: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Chapter 8: Regulation and Chemotherapy Chapter 9: Morganizing America Chapter 10: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Acknowledgments About the Authors Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Chapter 2 Table 2.1 The Largest Highly Concentrated Industries List of Illustrations Chapter 1 Figure 1.1 Merger Manias: 1890–2015 Figure 1.2 Collapse in the Number of US Public Companies Since 1996 Figure 1.3 Collapse in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) Figure 1.4 Frequency of the Words “Competition,” “Competitors,” and “Pressure” in Annual Reports Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 Zero and Negative Central Bank Rates Promote Cartels Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 The US Economy Has Become Less Entrepreneurial over Time Figure 3.2 New Firms Play a Decreasing Role in the Economy Figure 3.3 Growth Phases of Organisms and Companies Figure 3.4 Lower Productivity Growth as Fewer Firms Enter Figure 3.5 Investment Significantly Lagging Profitability Chapter 4 Figure 4.1 Variant Perception US Wages Leading Indicator Figure 4.2 Percentage of Workers with Noncompete Agreements, by Group Figure 4.3 States That Do Not Enforce Noncompetes Have Higher Wages Figure 4.4 Rural Areas Are Lagging (aggregate wage growth, year-over-year, third quarter 2016) Figure 4.5 Monopsonies in Labor Markets: Commuting Zones with High Labor Concentration Figure 4.6 Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Figure 4.7 Union Membership versus Income Distribution to Top 10% Figure 4.8 Wage Growth Closely Associated with Strikes Figure 4.9 The Great Suppression: Falling Unions and Increasing Licensing, 1950s–Today Chapter 6 Figure 6.1 Rail Mergers: Making of the Big Four Figure 6.2 Airline Mergers in Today's Oligopoly Figure 6.3 Banking Mergers in the United States Figure 6.4 Life Expectancy versus Health Expenditure over Time (1970–2014) Figure 6.5 Leading Global Meat Processing Firms Timeline of Ownership Changes, 1996–2016 Chapter 7 Figure 7.1 The First and Second Merger Waves (1890–1903, 1920–1930) Figure 7.2 Antitrust Enforcement Budget Figure 7.3 Twenty Years of Industry Consolidation Figure 7.4 Three Mega Merger Waves in the Past Three Decades Figure 7.5 Proportion of Completed Mergers and Acquisitions Chapter 8 Figure 8.1 Total US Patents Issued Annually, 1900–2014 Figure 8.2 Pages in the Federal Register (1936–2015) Figure 8.3 Companies That Lobby Extensively Have Higher Returns Figure 8.4 Revolving Door between Goldman Sachs and the Federal Government Figure 8.5 Revolving Door between Monsanto and the Federal Government Chapter 9 Figure 9.1 Largest Owners of US Banks (as of 2016 Q2) Figure 9.2 Share of Passively Managed Assets in US Markets Figure 9.3 S&P 500 Ownership by “Big 3” Figure 9.4 Net Investment by Nonfinancial Businesses Figure 9.5 Buybacks Zoom to Record Highs Chapter 10 Figure 10.1 Income Inequality in the United States, 1910–2015 Figure 10.2 The Global Wealth Pyramid, 2017 Figure 10.3 Rising Inequality.

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The Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence were bold statements against the abuses of monopoly power. Americans wanted entrepreneurial freedom to build businesses in a free market. Today, we need a new revolution to cast off monopolies and restore free trade. Chapter One Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning. —Warren Buffett Warren Buffett is an icon for Americans and capitalists everywhere. For decades, his annual letters have taught and educated Americans about the virtues of investing.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These narratives are tied to the forgery of universality: an article in the Atlantic magazine, for example, suggests that science is “in decline,” partly because the random nature of individual scientists’ “previous experiences” plays too large a role in scientific discovery—but that “outsourcing to A.I. could change that.”21 The viability of AI systems exceeding human thought is also conveyed through dystopian scenarios. The Guardian reported that Silicon Valley billionaires are “prepping for the apocalypse” by buying secure hideouts in New Zealand, the “apocalypse” being a situation of “systematic collapse” that may include nuclear war or “rampaging AI.”22 Similarly, Silicon Valley mogul Elon Musk has stated to considerable fanfare that current work on AI is “summoning the demon” and that AI is “our biggest existential threat.”23 These narratives are testament to the unstated consensus among experts that AI possesses transformative powers; this is why fantastical commentaries can pass without even referencing specific instantiations of AI or its history.

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Matt Karolian, “AI Improves Publishing,” NiemanLab, December 16, 2016.   20.   Hannah Jane Parkinson, “AI Can Write Just like Me. Brace for the Robot Apocalypse,” Guardian, February 15, 2019.   21.   Ahmed Alkhateeb, “Can Scientific Discovery Be Automated?,” Atlantic, April 25, 2017.   22.   Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian, February 15, 2018.   23.   Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence We Are Summoning the Demon,’ ” Washington Post, October 24, 2014.   24.   Glenn Greenwald, “Glenn Greenwald: As Bezos Protests Invasion of His Privacy, Amazon Builds Global Surveillance State,” Democracy Now!

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Noble, David F. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention New York: Knopf, 1997. Norvig, Peter. Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common LISP. Burlington, Mass.: Morgan Kaufmann, 1992. O’Connell, Mark. “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand.” Guardian, February 15, 2018. Olazaran, Mikel. “A Sociological Study of the Official History of the Perceptrons Controversy.” Social Studies of Science 26, no. 3 (1996): 611–59. Ophir, Adi. “How to Take Aim at the Heart of the Present and Remain Analytic.”

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

But over the last few years, as the zeitgeist has zigged from optimism to pessimism about our technological future, more and more pundits have joined our ranks. Now everyone, it seems, is penning polemics against surveillance capitalism, big data monopolists, the ignorance of the online crowd, juvenile Silicon Valley billionaires, fake news, antisocial social networks, mass technological unemployment, digital addiction, and the existential risk of smart algorithms. The world has caught up with my arguments. Nobody calls me the Antichrist anymore. Timing—as I know all too well from my day job as a serial entrepreneur of mostly ill-timed start-ups—is everything.

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Abby Jackson and Andy Kiercz, “The Latest Ranking of Top Countries in Math, Reading, and Science Is Out—and the US Didn’t Crack the Top 10,” Business Insider, December 6, 2016. 24. Natasha Singer, “How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding into American Classrooms,” New York Times, June 27, 2017. 25. Natasha Singer, “The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools,” New York Times, June 6, 2017. 26. Ibid. 27. Alter, Irresistible, 2. 28. Matt Richtel, “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute,” New York Times, October 22, 2011. Conclusion 1. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 3. 2. See, for example: Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (McGraw-Hill, 1999). 3.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

“I like going to Burning Man”: Will Oremus, “Google CEO Is Tired of Rivals, Laws, Wants to Start His Own Country,” Slate, May 15, 2013. 10. In 2007, Elon Musk did just that: Gregory Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires,” TechCrunch, September 3, 2013. 11. He also came up with the ideas: Sarah Buhr, “Elon Musk Is Right, Burning Man Is Silicon Valley,” TechCrunch, September 4, 2004; Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires.” 12. Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh: David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 2014. 13. While much has been made of the fact’: Zack Guzman, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Shares What He Would Have Changed About his $350M Downtown Las Vegas Project,” CNBC, August 9, 2016, and Jennifer Reingold, “How a Radical Shift Left Zappos Reeling,” Fortune, March 4, 2016. 14.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

This prompted a few head-scratching headlines that put Thiel’s Trump support in the context of his other contrarian bets, like seasteading and the 20 Under 20. But this turned out to be a prelude to what happened two weeks later, when Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times published an interview with Denton, who told him that he suspected that a Silicon Valley billionaire had been funding the Gawker lawsuits. Sorkin’s article may have pushed one of Thiel’s confidants to finally leak that he was behind it because the following day, in Forbes, Ryan Mac and Matt Drange broke the news that it was Thiel. Thiel then made his own call to Sorkin, who published the interview the following day.

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Trump appeared with the women in a Facebook Live video that was broadcast just before he went onstage, and he told the Shelton story during the debate when pressed about his vulgar comments. “Kathy Shelton, that young woman, is here with us tonight,” Trump said. “So don’t tell me about words.” The following week, Thiel got a final push. The Advocate, the queer newsmagazine, published an essay criticizing his endorsement of Trump. “Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who made news this summer for endorsing Donald Trump at the Republican convention, is a man who has sex with other men,” Jim Downs, an author and American studies professor at Gettysburg College, wrote. “But is he gay?” Downs made the case that Thiel’s politics—in particular his dismissal of transgender rights as a distraction in his convention speech—constituted a betrayal of gay culture.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Instead of gleaming glass buildings and tastefully exposed brick, his new arrangements include a tepee, a building plot, some guns and ammunition, a compost toilet, a generator, wires and solar panels. Antonio isn’t the only tech entrepreneur wondering if we’re clicking our way to dystopia. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and an influential investor told the New Yorker in 2017 that around half of all Silicon Valley billionaires have some degree of what he called ‘apocalypse insurance’. PayPal co-founder and influential venture capitalist Peter Thiel recently bought a 477-acre bolthole in New Zealand and became a Kiwi national. Others discuss survivalism tactics in secret Facebook groups: helicopters, bomb-proofing, bitcoin, gold.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Might makes right. So, in their view, those of us who are attempting to promote the cultures, values, and languages of defeated peoples are retrieving failed approaches, teaching them to our kids, and weakening our society. These cultures don’t deserve to get taught, they feel, because they lost. The Silicon Valley billionaire with an apocalypse bunker in New Zealand uses a similar logic to justify creating the very conditions that are leading to a world where such a plan B should be required. The smartest, wealthiest technologist gets to survive because he won. It’s a hyperbolic, digitally amplified, zero-sum version of the same exclusion.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

We are still awaiting the productivity gains we were assured would result from the digital economy. With the exception of most of the 1990s, productivity growth has never recaptured the rates it achieved in the post-war decades. ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,’ said Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, who has controversially backed Donald Trump, put it more vividly: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters [Twitter].’ That may be about to change, with the acceleration of the robot revolution and the spread of artificial intelligence. But we should be careful what we wish for.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

All this happened in the span of roughly two years, beginning in the middle of 2013, when UberX first took off. At the center of this story, of course, is Travis Kalanick, who came to define what it meant to be a tech entrepreneur in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Kalanick is different from the last class of Silicon Valley billionaire sensations, and Uber is a different tech company. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others were pure “Internet” companies. Their products existed in digital formats only. From its beginning Uber was an Internet technology company that coexisted with physical objects, namely automobiles. Running it required someone who could master the new science of computers and the older arts of the industrial economy, including logistics.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

A Symposium, Encounter, June 1971, pp. 3–17. 23 James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual, Touchstone, New York, 1999, p. 17. 24 Ibid., p. 21. 25 Ibid., p. 329. 26 Ibid., p. 32. 27 Ibid., p. 19. 28 Ibid., p. 20. 29 Ibid., pp. 196–7. 30 Ibid., p. 256. 31 Ibid., pp. 256–7. 32 Ibid., pp. 402–3. 33 Ibid., p. 129. 34 Ibid., p. 131. 35 ‘Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand’, by Mark O’Connell, Guardian, 15 February 2018. 36 Irish Times, 13 June 2018; 23 July 2018. 37 George Orwell, Essays, Everyman’s Library, Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 164. 7. The Sore Tooth and the Broken Umbrella 1 Sarah Vine, ‘Gosh, I suppose I better get up!’

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

“It means that the cow is no longer alive. Death happens to all animals. All people. It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you one day.” As he said these things, Peter’s father seemed sad. Peter became sad as well. That day was a very disturbing day, and Peter never got over it. Well after he became a Silicon Valley billionaire he would remain radically disturbed by the prospect of dying. The initial shock was still alive in him forty years later. He never made his peace with death, the way most people learned to do, by ignoring it. Theirs was the acquiescence of an unthinking and doomed herd. The boy on the cowskin rug would grow up to view the inevitability of death as an ideology, not a fact—one that had already claimed a hundred billion human lives.

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Because Thiel saw a housing bubble, he was adamant that his employees not own their homes. He rented a ten-thousand-square-foot white wedding cake of a mansion in the Marina, a short drive from Clarium, with a terrace view of the illuminated dome and arches of the Palace of Fine Arts. He began to live the life of a Silicon Valley billionaire. He employed a staff of two blond, black-clad female assistants, a white-coated butler, and a cook, who prepared a daily health drink of celery, beets, kale, and ginger. At his private dinner parties, guests were given a menu printed with a choice of entrees. He flew everywhere on private jets.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

The result was A Crack in Creation, published in spring 2017, which tells Doudna’s personal story, although she deftly sidestepped any commentary or controversy on the patent dispute.10 In various permutations, Charpentier, Doudna, and Zhang have hoovered up almost every major science prize, with two conspicuous exceptions: the Lasker Award, which is often referred to as America’s Nobel Prize and the Nobel Prize. Those appear to be a sure thing, but to whom and for what is a topic of much speculation. The two women have shared the “Nobel Prizes” of Japan, Spain, Israel, and Canada (with Zhang), to name a few. The most lucrative award was the Breakthrough Prize, created by Silicon Valley billionaires including Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin (Google) and his ex-wife Anne Wojcicki (23andMe), and Dick Costolo (Twitter). At a black-tie awards ceremony in November 2014, Doudna and Charpentier received their awards from Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz. Charpentier flashed her Gallic humor on stage.

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There is also evidence that elevated levels of a protein called Klotho, sometimes dubbed the longevity gene, can improve cognition and protect against Alzheimer’s—at least in mice. A Japanese group named the gene after Clotho, daughter of Zeus, and one of the three Fates in Greek mythology. Several biotechnology companies—seemingly driven by Silicon Valley billionaires contemplating their own mortality—are desperately seeking genes that might slow down the aging process. Other genes that would be prime candidates for future genetic modification are those that govern risk for obesity and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and hypertension. We know humans will go to extremes to address body weight and heart health, from liposuction and gastric bypass surgery to billions of dollars spent annually on statins and other drugs.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

But to get there, we’d have to commit to steady contributions for many more years. Even if I’d somehow been able to get the big money at Acme by making it to Fifth Level and then officer, I knew that if I had enough money, I’d leave the company and pursue my own passions, as vaguely defined as they were. I guess I was outside of the zeitgeist of poetic tweets from Silicon Valley billionaires, who insisted it wasn’t about the money, it was about the joy of building teams and “making things,” their favorite humblebrag. For most real people I knew in corporate America, some of whom worked at those billionaires’ companies, it was about making enough money to get out. The people in the growing financial independence subreddits had an exact dollar amount in mind.

The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

A Symposium, Encounter, June 1971, pp. 3–17. 23James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual, Touchstone, New York, 1999, p. 17. 24Ibid., p. 21. 25Ibid., p. 329. 26Ibid., p. 32. 27Ibid., p. 19. 28Ibid., p. 20. 29Ibid., pp. 196–7. 30Ibid., p. 256. 31Ibid., pp. 256–7. 32Ibid., pp. 402–3. 33Ibid., p. 129. 34Ibid., p. 131. 35‘Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand’, by Mark O’Connell, Guardian, 15 February 2018. 36Irish Times, 13 June 2018; 23 July 2018. 37George Orwell, Essays, Everyman’s Library, Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 164. 7.The Sore Tooth and the Broken Umbrella 1Sarah Vine, ‘Gosh, I suppose I better get up!’

Plot 29: A Memoir by Allan Jenkins

call centre, Joan Didion, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, three-masted sailing ship

The peas are to be picked young, and sometimes when I eat them I remember Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, and I remember Lilian. 2011. It is one of the last nights before the closing of the best restaurant in the world. Dom Perignon has flown in 50 guests by private jet: serious wine investors, Silicon Valley billionaires, film stars, their boyfriends, another food writer and me. We are helicoptered into the beach like a scene from Apocalypse Now. We eat 50 small dishes – eggs fashioned from gorgonzola cheese, small, gamy squares of hare, sea cucumber filaments, rose petal wontons and peas. Excited conversation and Dom Perignon ’73 flow.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

(This, I realized with a small numinous thrill, was the very robot that had appeared on the cover of that week’s Time, a copy of which I’d bought in Heathrow Airport the previous morning, before boarding a plane whose in-flight entertainment package, I may as well tell you, included no fewer than four robo-centric film options: Big Hero 6, an animated children’s movie about a young boy and his robot friend; Ex Machina, an enjoyably creepy film about a Dr. Moreauvian Silicon Valley billionaire who holes himself up in a remote and hyper-secure mansion with a coterie of beautiful female sex-bots; Chappie, a just-about-watchable South African sci-fi romp about a police robot that gains sentience and falls in with a gang of armed robbers; and a bargain-basement B movie called Robot Overlords, which concerned the invasion of the Earth by tyrannical robots from outer space, and which starred a scenery-devouring Sir Ben Kingsley, whose fee I would guess accounted for much of the film’s budget.)

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

As we learned in Chapter 2, in 2008 Sinclair’s company was sold to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million, demonstrating that some of Ellison’s antiaging bets are not only edgy but also highly valued by the marketplace. Just as Bill Gates expressed an interest in biology, Ellison also says it could have been an alternate career, going so far as to actually spend two weeks working in the lab of Dr. Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize–winning biologist.65 Peter Thiel is another Silicon Valley billionaire who actively supports work on longevity and is propagating the meme of healthy life extension. The PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist was also the first outside investor in Facebook (and was played by actor Wallace Langham in the movie The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake).

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Uber’s investors did not put $13 billion into the company because they thought they could vanquish those incumbents under ‘level playing field’ mar- ket conditions; those billions were designed to replace ‘level playing field’ competition with a hopeless battle between small scale incumbents with no access to capital struggling to cover their bare bone costs and a behemoth company funded by Silicon Valley billionaires willing to subsidize years of multi-billion dollar losses. Given Uber’s growth to date, investor expectations that monopoly rents justifies the current level of subsidies and financial risks appears quite plausible.44 * * * 24 Work on Demand This account stands in stark contrast with the idea that the rise of gig- economy platforms will lead to increased competition, with lower prices and higher quality as the result: in the expensive pursuit of network effects, some platforms’ goal may well be to smother competition, rather than to encourage it.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

But it doesn’t follow that criticizing “professionals” or “experts” or “cultural elites” means that we are striking a blow against the real powers; and when we uphold amateur creativity, we are not necessarily resolving the deeper problems of entrenched privilege or the irresistible imperative of profit. Where online platforms are concerned, our digital pastimes can sometimes promote positive social change and sometimes hasten the transfer of wealth to Silicon Valley billionaires. Even well-intentioned celebration of networked amateurism has the potential to obscure the way money still circulates. That’s the problem with PressPausePlay, a slick documentary about the digital revolution that premiered a leading American film festival. The directors examine the ways new tools have sparked a creative overhaul by allowing everyone to participate—or at least everyone who owns the latest Apple products.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 46–47. 64. Greg Bensinger and David Benoit, “Icahn Targets Silicon Valley Directors’ Club,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2014. 65. Jessica Guynn, “Silicon Valley Staff-Poaching Suit Is Granted Class-Action Status,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2013; Dean Baker, “Silicon Valley Billionaires Believe in the Free Market, as Long as They Benefit,” Guardian, February 3, 2014; David Streitfeld, “Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, February 28, 2014; Angela Moscaritolo, “Suit Reveals Alleged Silicon Valley Anti-Poaching Scheme,” PCMag, January 30, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399555,00.asp. 66.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

This neoreactionary hero was everything writers like Moldbug wanted in a king—wealthy, cunning, ruthless, conservative, white, and nerdy. He was the PayPal founder, Facebook board member, major shareholder in a CIA-funded company, Donald Trump delegate, distinguished Stanford alumnus, venture capitalist, and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Here was a rich, powerful man, regarded by many as a public intellectual, who, three years before White House adviser Steve Bannon declared war on “the administrative state,” was willing to say, regarding the “monolithic monstrosity” of government, that “breaking it down is probably an improvement.”

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

The success of a city-state such as Singapore might offer a political model for the next century that’s more relevant than today’s groaning national and imperial institutions. The oft-mocked libertarians who tried to make New Hampshire a “free state” via ideological in-migration, or the Silicon Valley billionaires imagining “seasteading” as a way to build new political institutions on land reclaimed from Poseidon, might actually be visionaries. Small might be beautiful; exit and internal exile might eventually make the world anew. But it’s also possible that local experiments can’t really work in a mass society and a globalized world absent a revolution from above.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

(Minsky was on the scientific advisory board of Alcor Cryonics, a foundation for wealthy “transhumanist” true believers who maintain a freezer in Arizona for dead bodies and brains. The foundation’s multi-million-dollar trust is designed to keep the power on for decades.)15 Reading about Silicon Valley billionaires’ desires to live to age two hundred or talk with little green men, it’s tempting to ask: Were you high when you thought of that? Often, the answer is yes. Steve Jobs dropped acid in the early 1970s after he dropped out of Reed College. Doug Engelbart, the NASA- and ARPA-funded researcher who performed the 1968 “mother of all demos” that showed for the first time all the hardware and software elements of modern computing, dropped acid at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, the legal home for academic inquiry into LSD that lasted until 1967.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

We Just Call Them ‘Venture Capitalists,’” Intelligencer, December 2, 2020, Nymag.com. 2 Martin Kenney and John Zysman, “Unicorns, Cheshire Cats, and the New Dilemmas of Entrepreneurial Finance,” Venture Capital 21:1, 2019, p. 39. 3 Megan Cerullo, “Uber Loses an Average of 58 Cents Per Ride—and Says It’s Ready to Go Public,” CBS News, May 6, 2019, Cbsnews.com. 4 Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian, February 15, 2018, Theguardian.com. 5 Kate Aronoff et al., A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, Verso Books, 2019, p. 108. 6 Charlie Jarvis, “A Shopper’s Heaven,” Real Life, March 29, 2021, Reallifemag.com. 7 Adam Forrest, “‘It’s Scary’: Shoppers Give Verdict on Amazon’s Futuristic Till-Free Supermarket,” Independent, March 4, 2021, Independent.co.uk. 8 Chris Gilliard, “Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms,” Educause Review 52:4, July 3, 2017. 9 Chris Gilliard, “Friction-Free Racism,” Real Life, October 15, 2018, Reallifemag.com. 10 Lauren Smiley, “The Shut-In Economy,” Matter, March 25, 2015, Medium.com. 11 David A.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Sean Michaels, ‘Taking the Rick’, www.theguardian.com, 19 March 2008. 18. The 4channers here were more correct than the music and movie companies. Once legal streaming became available and affordable, few people bothered to pirate any more. 19. Trouble often started on Gawker, to such an extent that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel funded a Hulk Hogan lawsuit to bankrupt the site, likely as revenge for it outing him as gay years earlier. There is a good movie about the whole thing: Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (dir. Brian Knappenberger, 2017). 20. Don’t take my word for it – see for yourself here: Tom Cruise Scientology Video, www.youtube.com/watch?

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

A few weeks before Google purchased it, the company made international news with a machine learning algorithm that had learned to play twenty-nine Atari games better than the average human with no direct supervision.1 Now the same algorithm has replaced “sixty handcrafted rule-based systems” at Google, from image recognition to speech transcription.2 Most spectacularly, in March 2016 DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated go grandmaster Lee Sedol 4–1, demonstrating its conquest of one of humanity’s subtlest and most artistic games.3 After a long doldrums, Google and a range of other research outfits seem to be making progress on systems that can gracefully adapt themselves to a wide range of conceptual challenges. This phase shift has produced a new crop of centers and initiatives grappling with the potential consequences of artificial intelligence, uniting philosophers, technologists, and Silicon Valley billionaires around the question of whether a truly thinking machine could pose an existential threat to humanity. In the paper where he described the Turing test, Alan Turing also took on the broader question of machine intelligence: an algorithm for consciousness. The Turing test was in many ways a demonstration of the absurdity of establishing a metric for intelligence; the best we can do is have a conversation and see how effective a machine is at emulating a human.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

The B612 Foundation has their own project known as Sentinel that is geared to find asteroids down to 35 m in size. Amazingly they have raised from private sources about half of the $400 to $500 million that is funding the project. Rusty Schwieckart and Ed Lu have said their project is equivalent in cost to that of an Interstate highway exchange. They have pled their case to Silicon Valley billionaires with some success. Their sales pitch is along the following lines: If NASA won’t make defending our planet a top priority, then help us to plot the orbits of the most dangerous space rocks and to find a much higher percentage of the city killers. Help us to build a satellite with better technology to spot dangerous space rocks and do so up to a century in advance.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Elite networking forums like the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining. A new breed of community-minded so-called B Corporations has been born, reflecting a faith that more enlightened corporate self-interest—rather than, say, public regulation—is the surest guarantor of the public welfare. A pair of Silicon Valley billionaires fund an initiative to rethink the Democratic Party, and one of them can claim, without a hint of irony, that their goals are to amplify the voices of the powerless and reduce the political influence of rich people like them. The elites behind efforts like these often speak in a language of “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” more typically associated with barricades than ski resorts.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

I just don’t think that holding bake sales and begging for little handouts by nonprofits is going to act quickly or powerfully enough. Business knows how to get things done. But it has to have a conscience, it has to want to make the world a better place and not just make a profit at any cost. It clearly doesn’t today.” Anthony Sandberg may not be famous. He may not be a Silicon Valley billionaire. But he is a wealthy man, in every sense of the word. And to achieve this wealth, he never once deferred any meaning, purpose, adventure, or excitement in his life. He has always gone toward meaning, purpose, adventure, and excitement. His life is profoundly meaningful to him and to the many people he teaches and leads.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This ideal was always exclusionary (of colonized and enslaved populations, not to mention nonhuman lives) but today this ideal of civility risks being abandoned, rather than expanded. We live in a time when the life expectancy of many poor populations (notably many of the same ones that have swung behind right-wing populists) are in decline, while Silicon Valley billionaires speculate wildly and financially on innovations that might extend human life indefinitely. This is not ordinary economic inequality, it is an existential inequality, which is at the heart of the conflicted political times we inhabit. Where life is not being adequately supported in a medical and scientific sense, then there is a widening opportunity for others to come in and offer to support it in a deeper ethical and metaphysical sense, while promising more exclusionary forms of protection.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

As I left Penn Medicine and headed back toward my friend’s place in Fishtown, I reflected on the CRISPR moonshot as lyrics from a classic song by Gil Scott-Heron rattled around in my head: “I can’t pay no doctor bill (but Whitey’s on the moon) / Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still (while Whitey’s on the moon) / No hot water, no toilets, no lights (but Whitey’s on the moon).” While many Americans still can’t pay doctor bills, the cash continues to flow to experimental medicine. As Silicon Valley billionaires and scientific entrepreneurs usher in a new era of medical inequality, some patients are shaking up the status quo. Time is running out—the oxygen is running low—as Whitey continues to reach for the moon. 9 FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL A decade before his CRISPR study got off the ground, Carl June led an experiment that was dubbed the “first-in-human” gene-editing trial.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Robert Geraci, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, wrote in an essay entitled “The Cult of Kurzweil” that if the movement achieves traction with the broader public, it “will present a serious challenge to traditional religious communities, whose own promises of salvation may appear weak in comparison.”7 Kurzweil, for his part, vociferously denies any religious connotation and argues that his predictions are based on a solid, scientific analysis of historical data. The whole concept might be easy to dismiss completely were it not for the fact that an entire pantheon of Silicon Valley billionaires have demonstrated a very strong interest in the Singularity. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and PayPal co-founder (and Facebook investor) Peter Thiel have associated themselves with the subject. Bill Gates has likewise lauded Kurzweil’s ability to predict the future of artificial intelligence.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Several generations of conservative politicians have asserted the same, and have been hailed for their wisdom. Today, left-leaning admirers of Edward Snowden and critics of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Guantanamo believe this to be true as much as the NRA, white militias and survivalist groups. The libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel blames big government on the enfranchisement of women, and he issues such grandiloquent Nietzscheanisms as ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.’ But, as his own last months before his execution in 2001 by lethal injection reveal, McVeigh’s rhetoric of freedom from arbitrary and opaque authority has a much wider resonance and appeal outside as well as inside the United States.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

Eastman narrates his life like a book of fables; each experience comes with a lesson. “I think that housepainting was probably one of the greatest helps,” he told me. It afforded him the chance to interact with a diverse palette of colleagues and clients, from refugees seeking asylum to Silicon Valley billionaires whom he would chat with if he had a long project working on their homes. He described it as fertile ground for collecting perspectives. But housepainting is probably not a singular education for geopolitical prediction. Eastman, like his teammates, is constantly collecting perspectives anywhere he can, always adding to his intellectual range, so any ground is fertile for him.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

In order to make sure that he is still around to enjoy escape into immortality, Kurzweil reportedly “takes as many as two hundred pills and supplements each day and receives others through regular intravenous infusions.”10 Kurzweil is quite a character. In 2009 he starred in a documentary Transcendent Man. Would you believe it, there was even a Hollywood version, called Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp, released in 2014. It is easy to dismiss Kurzweil as a crank. Yet quite a few Silicon Valley billionaires have embraced the idea of the Singularity. And in 2012 Google hired Kurzweil to direct its research into AI. The vision of the roboticist Hans Moravec goes further. He foresees a future in which part of the universe is “rapidly transformed into a cyberspace [wherein beings] establish, extend, and defend identities as patterns of information flow … becoming finally a bubble of Mind expanding at near light speed.”11 Inevitability is a big word When I contemplate the visions of the thinkers quoted above, my reaction is: Gosh!

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

Third, liberal lawmakers congratulate social media companies after they go on to censor content that Democrats don’t like. Fourth, tech titans manage to take their most aggressive actions of all just as Democrats are poised to take control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time in over a decade. And fifth—of course—Silicon Valley billionaires made staggeringly one-sided campaign contributions to those same Democratic candidates as a token of appeasement. In 2020, the mantra of “keeping money out of politics” was no longer a liberal slogan. Instead, blending profits with politics—and, ultimately, power—became the new progressive way.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Overton 1996, 21, provides one historical analysis of these relative disadvantages of small scale, but with little attention to the political forces underlying it. For a more detailed evaluation, see Smaje, Chris (2020) ‘Of Scarcity and Scale,’ Small Farm Future, 12 April, https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/2020/04/of-scarcity-and-scale/.   71. O’Connell, Mark (2018) ‘Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,’ The Guardian, 15 February.   72. For example, FAO 2016; UNDRR 2019; Wiebe et al. 2015.   73. For example, Badgley et al. 2007.   74. FAO 2016.   75. WDI n.d.   76. These data derive mostly from Lampkin, Nicholas et al. (2017) 2017 Organic Farm Management Handbook, Newbury: Organic Research Centre.   77. 

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Nosek had originally risen to prominence as part of the team that created PayPal—the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” Soon after receiving the video of DeepMind’s Atari-playing AI, as Nosek later told a colleague, he was on a private plane with Musk, and as they watched the video and discussed DeepMind, they were overheard by another Silicon Valley billionaire who happened to be on the flight: Larry Page. This was how Page learned about DeepMind, sparking a courtship that would culminate in the Gulfstream flight to London. Page wanted to buy the start-up, even at this early stage. Hassabis wasn’t so sure. He had always intended to build his own company.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Jonah’s desperation took human form in Carlos Watson, the relentless networker with a big smile and an enveloping handshake who had, in 2013, persuaded the richest woman in the world, Laurene Powell Jobs, to finance his high-minded BuzzFeed alternative, Ozy. When Carlos first sold the idea, it had been keyed to the dreams of Silicon Valley billionaires: BuzzFeed, but without the silly memes, the emotion, or the left-wing politics, and with a Black CEO who was a welcome change in a white-dominated industry. This was a website devoted to the things, Watson promised, that millennials really craved—new ideas, technology, and people, all wrapped around centrist politics so capacious that its marquee interviews, which Carlos conducted, included both George W.

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Yet these positive representations make the same point as negative ones: they reiterate the moral importance of hard work and the moral transgressiveness of elitism and excessive consumption (which has become, a century after Veblen, increasingly associated with wealthy women). Represented as hard workers who used their smarts to get ahead, good rich people are also often seen as minimalist consumers. Buffett, despite his billions, has famously lived since the 1950s in the same modest house in Omaha. Silicon Valley billionaires are known for their understated self-presentation (think of Jobs’s black mock turtleneck or Mark Zuckerberg’s gray sweatshirt).24 Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, and others are also lauded for their significant philanthropic enterprises across the country and the globe. Possessing a down-to-earth affect is another plus; in 2004 George W.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (New York: The Free Press, 2012), 10. 10. Daisy Grewal, “How Wealth Reduces Compassion,” Scientific American, Apr. 10, 2012. 11. Dacher Keltner, “Greed Prevents Good,” Room for Debate section, NY Times.com, Mar. 16, 2012. 12. George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes: The Libertarian Futurism of a Silicon Valley Billionaire,” New Yorker, Nov. 28, 2011. 13. The class basis of capitalism is nowhere to be found in the catechism because the emphasis is on merchants and customers coming together to voluntarily buy and sell goods and services in the market. In the case of labor, this is anything but a market where the two sides approach as equals. 14.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

This is the project of the Seasteading Institute, which is hoping to construct man-made islands in the international waters of the ocean, beyond the legal reach of any national government. These oases, where the rich would be free to prosper unrestrained by the grasping of the 99 percent, are the brainchild of Milton Friedman’s grandson and are being funded in part by Silicon Valley billionaire and libertarian Peter Thiel. Not all plutocrats want to escape to a Seastead. Paul Martin and Ernesto Zedillo are members in good standing of the global elite. Martin is a former Canadian prime minister, finance minister, deficit hawk, and, in his life before politics, a multimillionaire businessman.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women.25 In September 2015, 21 Democratic assembly members of the Californian legislature—including 11 blacks and Latinos—crossed party lines to vote with Republicans to stop a bill requiring steeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. “Who does it impact the most? The middle class and low income folks,” one of them shot back.26 Environmentalism fueled by West Coast billionaires and philanthropic foundations meant that working people lost the political party that was meant to represent them. Money can’t buy me love, but it had bought the soul of the Democratic Party. * In August 2014, Steyer’s NextGen Climate praised the RFS: “The RFS supports 73,000 good-paying, clean energy jobs in Iowa and is helping us reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.”

…

It was a means, not an end. And I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.23 Sue-and-settle came at a cost, not least to EPA’s integrity as a public agency. It transferred power from the legislative to the executive branches and thence to unaccountable NGOs funded by West Coast billionaires and progressive foundations. Reminiscent of Germany’s Energie Putsch masterminded by lobbyist/legislator Hermann Scheer ten years earlier, public policy was captured by green ideologues (Chapter 12). The extent of the collusion between the EPA and the NRDC and other NGOs in using the threat of litigation to capture federal policy and how the contrived sue-and-settle stratagem required EPA’s full complicity is laid bare in a 2015 report by the new majority staff of the Senate EPW committee under its Republican chairman, James Inhofe.24 It was something the EPA didn’t want the world to know about.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Gassée was a former top manager at Apple and was popular with Apple’s engineers, the Be operating system had a friendly feel that seemed very Mac-like, and the technology was state of the art. It was easy to imagine BeOS as the future of the Mac and Gassée back in charge of (at least) engineering. But Hancock told the press cryptically, “Not everyone who is talking to us is talking to you.” Meanwhile, Oracle’s unpredictable founder Larry Ellison, now a member of the Silicon Valley billionaire boys’ club, was stirring things up by hinting that he would buy Apple and let his good friend Steve Jobs run it. Jobs gave no credence to Ellison’s hints, and no one took Ellison too seriously, but Jobs did at one point call Del Yocam, Apple’s COO from the company’s best days and now CEO of a restructured and renamed Borland (to Inprise), to bend Yocam’s ear about their running Apple together.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

It is that moment when the history of the sport takes a big step forward, when human drama, grit, perseverance, and a bit of luck come together. The America’s Cup creates a new ideal, a new vision of what is possible on the water. It was unseasonably cold for the beginning of the best of three series between USA-17 and Alinghi 5, between the Silicon Valley billionaire—who had lost two Cup challenges and was determined not to lose for a third consecutive time—and the Swiss billionaire, who had won the last two America’s Cups and believed he would win again. The first race would be forty nautical miles (twenty miles to windward and return), and the second race would be a thirty-nine-mile equilateral triangle (with the first leg to windward and the other two broad reaches) with each of the three legs being thirteen miles.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

That iconic day has now ceased to exist in a fashion that even the Left once warned was fraught with dangers of fraud and a general inability to authenticate voter eligibility and identification—at least in consistency with standards of the past. Early voting even ensured that perhaps sixty to seventy million voters had cast their ballots well before the last presidential debate. Various Silicon Valley billionaires poured nearly $500 million into the race, focusing their gifts on targeted precincts felt to be vital for progressive candidates.13 The resulting conundrum led to immediate charges from the Trump camp of voter fraud—less than fifty thousand strategically placed votes had determined the election—and then countercharges against the Trump campaign of insurrection, treason, and coups, especially when Trump demanded recounts and questioned the legitimacy of the electors and their vote all the way into January 2021.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

The second was to strip the person of their identity altogether and claim that they were not really black, or not really gay, or not properly a woman, because if they had been, they would not have held those opinions. This second approach, which on the face of it was absurd, became quite common. When Peter Thiel, the gay Silicon Valley billionaire, expressed support for the Republicans in 2016, he was soon told that he was no longer entitled to his sexual identity. ‘By the logic of gay liberation, Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man,’ the writer Jim Downs wrote in Advocate magazine, ‘because he does not embrace the struggle of people to embrace their distinctive identity.’

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

One class exercise18 at the local junior high school, designed to help seventh graders sharpen their math skills, is called “How to Be a Millionaire.” * * * West Coast billionaires not only start young; they also tend to be more entrepreneurial and unconventional. The seeds for many of these fortunes are found in eureka moments of scientific discovery—when a new piece of software or hardware is developed, or when someone figures out a process that makes it possible to etch more circuits on a silicon chip or develop mathematical algorithms for a more efficient Web search engine. In fact, many West Coast billionaires did not even begin their careers with the objective of becoming wealthy.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Over this same period biofuels have generated enormous political swell in the United States, starting of course with the traditional advocates: farmers and their political allies who have always looked to ethanol as a way to diversify agricultural markets, generate additional revenues, and contribute to farm income and rural development. But there are new supporters: environmentalists (at least some), automobile companies, Silicon Valley billionaires, Hollywood moguls, along with national security specialists, who want to reduce oil imports because of worries about the Middle East and the geopolitical power of oil. More recently, they have all been joined by formidable new players: the U.S. Navy and Air Force, which are promoting biofuels development to improve combat capabilities and increase flexibility—and to diversify away from oil.