tech billionaire

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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

Today, the network effect of a mostly unregulated market has created tech companies of such astonishing power and wealth that they have become what the Oxford University historian Timothy Garton Ash calls “private superpowers.”3 Today we are all living under the big data spotlight of a surveillance economy in which we are incessantly watched by these corporate behemoths. Today we have returned to Polanyi’s world of Two Nations, with America’s nine richest tech billionaires being collectively wealthier than 1.8 billion of the world’s poorest people. Today we have such an infestation of violent content in our digital media that it seems almost normal for online audiences of millions to watch revenge porn, live beheadings, and suicides. Today we have become so addicted to our networked devices that the eight-second average attention span of a human being is now shorter than that of a goldfish.4 So the theme of Jaan Tallinn’s talk at the Tehnopol—the idea of treachery—remains extremely pertinent.

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If they were a country, this would rank them as the seventh-largest economy in the world, a couple of hundred billion dollars ahead of the annual GDP of India, with its more than 1.2 billion inhabitants.36 The personal wealth of the founders of these companies is equally astounding. The nine richest tech billionaires in Silicon Valley have a collective wealth that is more than that of 1.8 billion of the world’s poorest people, a quarter of the world’s entire population. “It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when one in ten people survive[s] on less than two dollars a day,” noted Oxfam’s executive director, referring to the surreal chasm between a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the rest of the world.37 This obscenity has a more local context too.

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Then there’s Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, whom we last met in Margrethe Vestager’s Brussels office, trying to convince the EU commissioner that the 0.005 percent tax his company paid to the Irish government was somehow in the public interest. Yet that’s the same Tim Cook who has been outspoken in his defense of immigration and minority rights and in his critique of the corrosive impact of fake news on our political culture. Yes, it’s complicated. As the Financial Times’ John Thornhill notes, today’s tech billionaires “have publicly stated ambitions way beyond making money and are extending their reach into areas such as transport, health and education.”11 For all their all-too-human shortcomings, Cook, Benioff, and Bezos are exceptionally smart and, in some ways, responsible people, who, with Bill Gates and a handful of other tech tycoons, are emerging as the philanthropic Carnegies, Stanfords, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Fords of the early twenty-first century.

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

Survival of the Richest ESCAPE FANTASIES OF THE TECH BILLIONAIRES DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF For Mark Filippi, Michael Nesmith, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Wish you were here. Contents Introduction:  Meet The Mindset 1        The Insulation Equation BILLIONAIRE BUNKER STRATEGIES 2        Mergers and Acquisitions ALWAYS HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY 3        A Womb with a View YOU ARE SAFE IN YOUR TECHNO-BUBBLE 4        The Dumbwaiter Effect OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND 5        Selfish Genes SCIENTISM OVER MORALITY 6        Pedal to the Metal DEHUMANIZE, DOMINATE, AND EXTRACT 7        Exponential WHEN YOU CAN GO NO FURTHER, GO META 8        Persuasive Tech IF YOU COULD JUST PUSH A BUTTON 9        Visions from Burning Man WE ARE AS GODS 10      The Great Reset TO SAVE THE WORLD, SAVE CAPITALISM 11      The Mindset in the Mirror RESISTANCE IS FUTILE 12      Cybernetic Karma HOISTED BY THEIR OWN PETARD 13      Pattern Recognition EVERYTHING COMES BACK Acknowledgments Notes Survival of the Richest INTRODUCTION Meet The Mindset I got invited to a super-deluxe resort to deliver a speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers.

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It’s always the humans who are reduced to a few lines of code, and the artificial intelligences who learn to make more complex and willful choices. The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that most humans are essentially worthless and unthinkingly self-destructive. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever. Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space —as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars—despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials —the result would be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

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A big new idea will “disrupt” the status quo, take out the competition, grow the market to its full potential, and then—at the peak—execute its climactic “exit strategy” as a sale or IPO. Beginning, middle, and glorious end. Narratives of triumph, expressed in Return On Investment. The rhetoric of Silicon Valley—whether in the pitch decks of young developers, the talks by TED speakers, or the Joe Rogan interviews with tech billionaires—always bears the same hallmarks as these business plans. Progress. The future. Optimism. Transformation. Winning. But usually these are just euphemisms for conquest, colonization, domination, and extraction. They describe ends-justify-the-means campaigns to change the landscape and achieve a monopoly.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Morgan, has the country faced such a concentration of wealth and power. Peter Orszag and Jason Furman, economic advisers to President Obama, have argued that the fortunes created by the digital revolution may have done more to increase economic inequality than almost any other factor. Despite Marc Andreessen’s and Peter Thiel’s belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice—the result of the laws and taxes that we as a society choose to establish. Contrary to what techno-determinists want us to believe, inequality is not the inevitable by-product of technology and globalization or even the lopsided distribution of genius.

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People like Google CEO Larry Page, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame are among the richest men in the world, with ambitions so outsize that they are the stuff of fiction: Dave Eggers’s The Circle and Don DeLillo’s Zero K are populated with tech billionaires inventing technology that will enable people to live forever. But this scenario is happening in real life. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, and others are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in research to “end human aging” and to merge human consciousness into their all-powerful networks. As George Packer, writing in the New Yorker, put it, “In Thiel’s techno-utopia a few thousand Americans might own robot-driven cars and live to a hundred and fifty, while millions of others lose their jobs to computers that are far smarter than they are, then perish at sixty.”

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He wrote, “I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2500 founders YC has funded. I’ve also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.” If tech billionaires have achieved political and economic power unseen since the Gilded Age, they have also achieved cultural power. David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie’s biographer, has said, “Carnegie could never have imagined the kind of power Zuckerberg has. Politics today is less relevant than it has ever been in our entire history.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions playing simultaneously. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is 1 in millions.” In 2016 a New Yorker profile of venture capitalist Sam Altman mentioned in passing that “two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.” This promptly led to speculation that one of the billionaires was Musk. Others wondered how it was even possible for simulated beings to break out of their simulation. Journalist Sam Kriss complained that “the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult.”

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“Slightly revised 2012 December 21, Mayan Long Count Calendar 13.0.0.0.0, or day 1,872,000, end of the 13th b’ak’tun.” arXiv:gr-gc/9407002v2. Kosoff, Maya. “The One Technology That Terrifies Elon Musk.” Vanity Fair, June 2, 2016. Kragh, Helge. “Magic Number: A Partial History of the Fine-Structure Constant.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 57 (2003): 395–431. Kriss, Sam. “Tech Billionaires Want to Destroy the Universe.” Atlantic, October 13, 2016. Lawton, John H., and Robert McCredie. Extinction Rates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Lederman, Leon. The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Lee, Jennifer Lauren.

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“If I were a character in a computer game”: Moskowitz 2016. 4. “effectively zero”: Moskowitz 2016. 5. “The strongest argument for us being in a simulation”: Bilton 2016. This quote has appeared in many places with slight variations. In some accounts Musk puts the chance of being in “base reality” at 1 in billions. 6. “two tech billionaires have gone so far”: Friend 2016. 7. Speculation that Elon Musk was one of the billionaires: Kriss 2016. 8. “the tech industry is moving into territory”: Kriss 2016. 9. “basically a religious belief system”: Bilton 2016. 10. Gosse biography; invented aquarium; corresponded with Darwin: Thwaite 2002.

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

published a blog post: Dan Abrams, “Might a Gawker Hater Be Covering Hulk Hogan’s Legal Bills,” Law & Crime, March 9, 2016, https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/might-an-anti-gawker-benefactor-be-covering-hulk-hogans-legal-bills/. a public service: Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker,” The New York Times, May 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html. bully media outlets: Marina Hyde, “Peter Thiel’s Mission to Destroy Gawker Isn’t ‘Philanthropy.’ It’s a Chilling Taste of Things to Come,” The Guardian, May 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/27/peter-thiel-gawker-philanthropy-paypal-mogul-secret-war-billionaire.

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He also quietly began funding a Super PAC, Endorse Liberty, seeding it with $2.6 million—more, by a huge margin, than Paul had raised from anyone else. “Men and women who want freedom and growth should take action,” Thiel said in a statement in late January 2012 when the filings became public. “A good place to start is voting for Ron Paul.” * * * — paul and those close to him found the idea of a tech billionaire throwing his weight behind their campaign thrilling—and a little perplexing. Paul had no major supporters in the business world—though that was part of the point of his antiestablishment candidacy. Moreover, Thiel’s Super PAC was just odd. It was run not by political types or stalwart libertarian activists, but by a group of political neophytes that included Stephen Oskoui, a Stanford-educated online marketer who was friends with Luke Nosek of Founders Fund, and Jeffrey Harmon, who was known as the guy who’d popularized the Orabrush, a $5 “tongue cleaner” that supposedly combated bad breath.

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Mostly though, the New York real estate mogul seemed indifferent to his Silicon Valley backer. “Peter is outside the area that Trump admires,” said Bannon. What Trump seemed to care about was Thiel’s money—and the legitimacy it conferred on Trump—as well as about the potential to use Thiel as a conduit to reach other tech billionaires. For his part, Thiel hadn’t instantly appreciated Trump’s value either. After the convention, Thiel enjoyed his boundary-breaking role—he had been the first gay person to talk openly about his sexuality from the stage of the Republican convention—but resisted when Bannon and other members of the campaign attempted to involve him further.

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

They can repeat tasks, but they can’t analyze or question the systems to which they are contributing. The more that real colleges incorporate the methods of their online competition, the less of this deeper learning they can offer. For these reasons, many of the most ambitious engineers, developers, and entrepreneurs end up dropping out of college altogether. One tech billionaire famously offers $100,000 to twenty young people each year to abandon college in order to pursue their own ideas. The message he’s sending to students is clear: if you want to get somewhere significant, don’t worry about school. When we reduce education to its utilitarian function, it may as well be performed by computers.

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Progressives, meanwhile, hope that the blockchain will be able to record and reward the unseen value people are creating as they go about their lives—as if all human activity were transactional and capable of being calculated by computer. We must learn that technology’s problems can’t always be solved with more technology. 49. Some of the more farsighted tech billionaires are already investing in plan B. Instead of undoing the damage, reforming their companies, or restoring the social compact, they’re busy preparing for the apocalypse. The CEO of a typical company in 1960 made about 20 times as much as its average worker. Today, CEOs make 271 times the salary of the average worker.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

I emailed him back. ‘I’m a journalist …’ I never heard from him again. * The Village Pub in Woodside, near Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, looks like no big deal from the outside, but when you get inside you realize it’s massively upmarket and filled with tech billionaires - the restaurant version of the nonthreatening clothes the tech billionaires were wearing. I told my dining companion, Michael Fertik, that he was the only person from the mysterious reputation-management world who had returned my email. ‘That’s because this is a really easy sector in which to be an unappealing, scurrilous operation,’ he said.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

It seemed odd, I said, given all this seismic activity, that superrich Silicon Valley technologists were supposedly apocalypse-proofing themselves by buying up land down here. “Yeah,” said Anthony, “but some of them are buying farms and sheep stations pretty far inland. Tsunamis aren’t going to be a big issue there. And what they’re after is space, and clean water. Two things we’ve got a lot of down here.” It was precisely this phenomenon—of tech billionaires buying up property in New Zealand in anticipation of civilizational collapse—that constituted our shared apocalyptic obsession. This was the reason I had come down here, to find out about these apocalyptic retreats, and to see what New Zealanders thought of this perception of their country. In any discussion of our anxious historical moment, its apprehensions of decay and collapse, New Zealand was never very far from being invoked.

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Creative forces had been unleashed, he said, and it was now clear how we could get to Mars. It was Zubrin who had brought Musk into the Martian fold—before he started SpaceX, Musk had donated $100,000 to help fund the Utah station—and he was now a sort of John the Baptist with respect to the billionaire space entrepreneur. (Musk was one of a handful of tech billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who were investing large amounts of their fortunes in the prospect of privatized space travel, projects that were as often as not presented as a means of securing the future itself, as though the last hope for the species was the largesse of billionaires who possessed both the genius and heroism of spirit to save an imperiled humanity.)

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

UBI, which promises an unconditional dollar amount for every adult, has emerged as a popular policy idea in some left-wing circles, among more libertarian scholars such as Milton Friedman and Charles Murray, and with tech billionaires such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Support for the idea is rooted, in part, in the clear inadequacies of the safety net in many countries, including the United States. But it also receives a powerful boost from the narrative that robots and AI are pushing us toward a jobless future. And so, the narrative goes, we need the UBI in order to provide income to most people (and to prevent the pitchfork uprising that some tech billionaires are fearing). UBI is not ideal for bolstering the social safety net, however, because it transfers resources not just to those who need them but to everybody.

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To regain shared prosperity, we must redirect technology, and this means activating a version of the same approach that worked more than a century ago for the Progressives. This can start only by altering the narrative and the norms. The necessary steps are truly fundamental. Society and its powerful gatekeepers need to stop being mesmerized by tech billionaires and their agenda. Debates on new technology ought to center not just on the brilliance of new products and algorithms but also on whether they are working for the people or against the people. Whether digital technologies should be used for automating work and empowering large companies and nondemocratic governments must not be the sole decision of a handful of entrepreneurs and engineers.

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Now with AI, renowned MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson explain in their important and lucid book how the transformation of work could make life even worse for most people, or, possibly, much better––depending on the political and social and technological choices we make starting now. We must ‘stop being mesmerized by tech billionaires,’ they warn, because ‘progress is never automatic.’ With revealing, relevant stories from throughout economic history and sensible ideas for systemic reform, this is an essential guide for this crucial battle in the ‘one-thousand-year struggle’ between the powerful and everyone else.” —Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses “One powerful thread runs through this breathtaking tour of the history and future of technology, from the Neolithic agricultural revolution to the ascent of artificial intelligence: Technology is not destiny, nothing is pre-ordained.

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

The house has multiples of nearly every room, with seven bedrooms, seven full bathrooms, four half-baths, two kitchens, two family rooms, two offices, and three rooftop terraces. There is, however, only one basketball court. An architect who designed custom luxury homes featured in magazines like Architectural Digest told me that nobody lived in those houses anyway. “The people who own them,” he said, “all have five others.” Some tech billionaires even owned five houses in the same place. Down in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg purchased four properties adjacent to his $7 million five-bedroom home for a combined $39 million—more than ten times their assessed value. The purpose of the land grab was to maintain the seclusion of Zuckerberg’s backyard and master bedroom.

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All the same, Thiel said, “You could never disown anything that you’ve written.” * * * The rise of the neoreactionaries was not exclusively a coup orchestrated from above with the help of powerful, well-connected hyperlibertarians like Thiel, Patri Friedman, and Trump’s campaign financier, the tech billionaire Robert Mercer. It was also a movement from below, embraced by thousands—and eventually perhaps by millions—of disaffected young people. While the neoreactionaries expounded at tiresome length about their aims, they revealed their individual motivations only in glimpses. Justine Tunney, the Google engineer–cum–Moldbug booster, provided one such peek inside the neoreactionary mind.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Or will the machines push us out of our jobs and deposit us into a dystopia? We are chewing over the machinery question all over again, in barely updated language. Out of this, the owners of these technologies emerged with almost inconceivable stores of wealth and power. In 2022, seven of the ten richest people in the world were tech billionaires. This newest wave of entrepreneurs consolidated their wealth and influence in much the same way that the nineteenth-century ones did—by using the new tech, or the idea of the tech, to squeeze workers harder and in more creative ways. Take the most infamous two, as of the 2020s. Jeff Bezos drove Amazon to global dominance by promising a cheaper and more efficient alternative to brick-and-mortar retail stores: an online shopping portal paired with hyper-efficient fulfillment centers and distribution nodes.

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The reason Yang argues that this is “not necessarily awesome,” even for the titans who have profited handsomely by all this disruption, is that after years of chalking up the losses to inevitable technological change, the public’s ire has turned toward the owners of the algorithms—and it could tip into violence against them. Yang said that the specter of a world in which a few tech billionaires accelerate the automation and digital degradation of work is not only exceedingly grim, but destined to become reality. Inequality will reach levels even more starkly dramatic than today. “Other people are going to be pushed into deprivation and desperation,” he said, “and that’s going to be multiplied times thousands and hundreds of thousands.”

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As a result, anger is growing at the ultrarich, even in the United States, a nation that has historically admired them. “Why does everybody suddenly hate billionaires? Because they’ve made it easy,” the Washington Post mused in 2019. Beyond a matter of optics, their influence over politics is increasingly considered malign, and that includes the tech billionaires—once the twenty-first century’s most revered businessmen. Polls conducted in 2021 show that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is deeply unpopular, and more people dislike Amazon founder Jeff Bezos than like him. The scorn is increasingly bipartisan; while liberals take them to task for amassing monopoly power and for the poor labor conditions at their companies, conservatives accuse them of political bias and censorship.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Other companies would have filled that niche and other men, arguably, would have made that fortune. That is not to say that individual effort doesn’t matter; it matters tremendously. But the wealth generated by individual effort depends entirely on the society in which that effort is applied. Had Bill Gates been born in and remained in Somalia, he would not be a tech billionaire. Indeed, had a teenaged Bill Gates somehow been taken to Somalia and a teenaged Somali brought to America in his place, Gates would almost certainly be poorer today than the Somali. Somali society does not support an economy that can generate high incomes, while American society does. A makers-and-takers conception of the world is one that neglects the social foundation on which wealth is built.

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The less succour they receive from existing political institutions, the more open individual workers are likely to be to radical political movements that offer the possibility of political expression and economic power. The owners of the factors that are scarce, on the other hand, are busy earning enormous fortunes that will persist for years. Tech billionaires and oil magnates, media barons and finance moguls are able to wield market power to accumulate vast wealth, and they will use this wealth to attempt to shape political developments: by supporting ideological movements or financing their own campaigns or donating to candidates. Because scarcity matters greatly to the distribution of economic rewards, the labour abundance created by the digital revolution cannot help but have significant political consequences. 5 The Firm as an Information-Processing Organism Most people work for big companies.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Department of Commerce, https://www.slideshare.net/AllumBokhari/ntia-hate-crimes-report-january-2021/1 (April 11, 2021). 71 Ibid. 72 Emily Jacobs, “Democrats demand more censorship from Big Tech bosses,” New York Post, November 18, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/democrats-use-big-tech-hearings-to-demand-more-censorship/ (April 11, 2021). 73 “The War on Free Speech,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 26, 2021, https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2021/01/26/The-war-on-free-speech-Parler-Social-Media-technology/stories/202101140041 (April 11, 2021). 74 Krystal Hur, “Big tech employees rally behind Biden campaign,” Opensecrets.org, January 12, 2021, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/big-tech-employees-rally-biden/ (April 11, 2021). 75 Ari Levy, “Here’s the final tally of where tech billionaires donated for the 2020 election,” CNBC, November 2, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html (April 11, 2021). 76 Chuck Ross, “Biden Has Ties to 5 Major Tech Companies,” Daily Caller, January 10, 2021, https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/10/biden-big-tech-apple-facebook-trump-parler/ (April 11, 2021). 77 Ryan Lizza, Daniel Lippman, and Meridith McGraw, “AOC wants to cancel those who worked for Trump.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Business tycoon John D. Rockefeller set up his family office in the nineteenth century. Often families have come into great wealth by building enormously successful companies, sometimes over the span of several generations. Among them are old industrial dynasties, nouveau industrialists, or tech billionaires. Some families consist of fewer than a dozen members, while others encompass hundreds. The priority of family offices is wealth preservation. According to a saying, a fortune lasts for three generations: The first one makes it, the second one lives on it, and the third one squanders it. Most family principals are not financial titans in the classic sense because they have not made their money in the financial services industry.

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Not only is it hard for women to break into the clubby environment, but those who have succeeded are “leaving the industry in droves.”11 As of 2014, only 13 percent of venture-backed companies had at least one female cofounder, and only 4 percent of leading venture capitalists are women, although a study found that female-run startups produce a 31 percent higher return on investment than startups run by men.12 In general, white men hire white men. This “progressive” sector is just as conservative and sexist as the rest of the financial industry, as numerous lawsuits have unearthed; especially when fund-raising, women often face misogynistic and inappropriate behavior. Tech billionaires, the history-making “industrialists” of our time, are exclusively male. In the venture capital industry, deep relationships are of utmost importance to source deals and form productive working relationships with entrepreneurs, who mostly happen to be male. The main reason why so few women make it to the very top of finance is because they are largely excluded from the old boys’ network.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

The particular politics of one country for one fifty-year period will have rewritten the geological history of the earth, and crimped the human game. That’s what leverage looks like. 12 There’s one other spot on Earth with game-changing leverage. And though it’s not that far as the drone flies from the Palm Springs resorts where the Kochs gather their cronies each year, it’s a very different world. The tech billionaires who inhabit Silicon Valley aren’t at all like the fossil fuel moguls and assorted other magnates who celebrated Trump’s rise to power. Instead of aging troglodytes, they’re mostly youthful social progressives. Don’t look for them on the golf course; they’re kite-surfing. No, they’re not. They used to kite-surf, but now they’re hydrofoiling.

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‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ So it was.” Rand would like the current space program even more. President Trump has proposed zeroing out the budget for the International Space Station, meaning that much of America’s reach into space will need to be funded by the band of tech billionaires who have seized the opportunity. On this day, it was Musk’s company SpaceX, but the flare of rocket engines also illuminated the vast hangar of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin project. There are others: the late Paul Allen, with his six-engine space plane; Richard Branson, already taking reservations for a Virgin Galactic spacecraft that will carry passengers and satellites into space.

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

Old Rules in a New World And the result of running the information economy by the old rules of intellectual monopoly rights is spiralling inequality. In 2016, the eight richest people in the world had as much money as the bottom 50 per cent of humanity – that’s three-and-a-half billion people. And of those eight, six were tech billionaires. This is a political timebomb. It is essential we understand the true causes of this unsustainable concentration of wealth and power: the exclusive ownership of digital information in combination with platform effects and costless copying. We must see the cost in stunted growth and lost opportunities.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

“A new social class without room in it for others”? Young wasn’t specifically describing the tech industry, but he nailed it. That the winners in Silicon Valley deserve all the prizes they have won is an argument that one hears, both explicitly and subtextually, across Silicon Valley. Of the many tech billionaires I’ve met, all have seemed to be very smart, creative thinkers and hard workers. Sometimes exceptionally so. But they’ve also been lucky. In some cases, more lucky than good. And in many cases, no more good than many others who were less privileged and less lucky. If Silicon Valley were truly a meritocracy, and opportunities were indeed rewarded according to one’s true skill and ability to do the job, that would be great for all workers, men and women.

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Other researchers have found: Tara Sophia Mohr, “Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified,” Harvard Business Review, Aug. 25, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified. When the first tech bubble burst: Marie Thibault, “The Next Bill Gates,” Forbes, Jan. 19, 2010, https://www.forbes.com/2010/01/19/young-tech-billionaire-gates-google-yahoo-wealth.html#6257bb713333. Given that entitlement: Emily Grijalva et al., “Gender Differences in Narcissism: A Meta-analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin 141, no. 2 (March 2015): 261–310, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038231. prominent role in high finance: Meredith Lepore, “Analysts Say Having More Female Bankers Could Have Prevented the Financial Crisis,” Grindstone, Jan. 26, 2012, http://www.thegrindstone.com/2012/01/26/office-politics/analysts-say-having-more-female-bankers-could-have-prevented-the-financial-crisis-181.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It is in this spirit that Palantir’s Peter Thiel and other powerful tech entrepreneurs and investors have suggested that California secede from the Union; Thiel once funded a plan for a network of floating islands that would operate outside of U.S. government jurisdiction, while he and other tech billionaires maintain hideaways in New Zealand. * * * — IN THE MEANTIME, Big Tech itself—like Big Finance before it—has controlled the narrative, using complexity to obfuscate. I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with fast-talking technologists who try to throw as much jargon against the wall as possible to see what sticks.

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In Seattle, for example, the city council had proposed imposing a modest $500 per employee tax on local businesses to help address the city’s growing homelessness epidemic. But businesses like Starbucks and Amazon complained, and the tax was promptly dropped to $275.31 And in San Francisco, tech billionaires Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, and Zynga founder Mark Pincus fought tooth and nail against a 2018 ballot proposition to tax companies with revenues of over $50 million a mere 0.5 percent in order to fund local housing and homelessness services. (The measure passed, and was subsequently challenged in court.)

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Microsoft was a land of sweatshirts and rumpled khakis; Ballmer was, as Gates put it, “a good suit-type guy.” Gates asked his more presentable colleague to join him at the table for the IBM pitch.3 Ballmer may have had the suit, but Gates ruled the room. The twenty-four-year-old reveled in the technical details, and IBM didn’t awe him. So many of the early tech billionaires had grown up in families without connections or wealth. Gates was different. He was the grandson of a banker and the son of a successful lawyer. His mother, Mary, was currently chair of the board of the national United Way—alongside none other than IBM’s new CEO, John Opel. (When an IBM executive mentioned the Microsoft deal to Opel at a later stage of the negotiations, the CEO responded, “Oh, that’s run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates’s son.”)4 Gates also remained steadfast in the conviction that had propelled him to write his famous letter to the Homebrew Computer Club several years earlier: that computer software should be a stand-alone intellectual and commercial product, as valuable as the hardware itself.

…

Two people provided great inspiration and encouragement but did not live to see this project’s completion. One was Michael B. Katz, my graduate mentor, collaborator, and friend. A historian of social policy and poverty who ably covered his bemusement when one of his advisees ended up specializing in the lives of high-tech billionaires, Michael was bullish on this project from the start. In one of our last e-mail exchanges, I told him about my ideas for this project; he responded with characteristic enthusiasm: “Get writing—we need this book!” Another great champion was David Morgenthaler, who died in June 2016 at the age of 96, and whose appreciation for history’s long arc came from having lived so long and so fruitfully.

…

Davies, “De Gaulle Hailed by San Francisco,” The New York Times, April 28, 1960, 2; John Markoff, correspondence with the author, September 21, 2018; audience conversation with the author, Stanford Historical Society, Stanford, Calif., January 22, 2004. Waverly Street, already famous for the HP garage, later became known for the tech billionaires who lived there: Google’s Larry Page would one day live directly across from the home of the teenage Napoleon; Steve Jobs and his family were down the road. Palo Alto was, and is, a small town. 16. Margaret O’Mara, “Silicon Dreams: States, Markets, and the Transnational High-Tech Suburb,” in Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, ed.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend the rest of their lives in a computer simulation. The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, for ever. Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space – as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars – despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials – the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, David Attenborough, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, sharing economy, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sustainable-tourism, tech billionaire, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, walkable city

Renewable energy initiatives are popping up all over the islands. Wind and wave energy on Maui, geothermal power on the Big Island and solar panels across the archipelago are all signs that the islands are on track to achieve their goal of 70% energy self-sufficiency by 2030. Indeed, with the financial backing of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the small central island of Lana‘i hopes to become a self-sufficient dreamland of electric cars, sustainable agriculture and green energy. Festivals & events Starting on Easter Sunday, Hilo on the Big Island celebrates Hawaiian art and culture for a week with hula competitions at the Merrie Monarch Festival, honouring King David Kalakaua, who was known for his patronage of the arts.

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

It was all the more impressive, then, that Huizenga, a college dropout who started his business with one used garbage truck, was the man standing in front of them. Think of Forbes 400 members5 and what comes to mind are tycoons such as computer titan Michael Dell, America Online’s Steve Case, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, and Qualcomm’s Irwin Jacobs—all former winners of Ernst & Young awards, all high-tech billionaires who made fortunes on flashy, brainy businesses. Then there are the media mavens—Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, David Geffen—whose boldface names appear regularly in the papers. Huizenga’s fortune, by contrast, derives from a patchwork of low-tech, low-visibility, low-prestige ventures: trash hauling, video rentals, auto sales.

…

“They may occur below the general radar, but the possibilities are there.” In the end, what begins as a little niche venture can turn into the next Little Caesars Pizza or 99 Cents Only. And although the odds are formidable, one thing’s for sure: While public taste may prove fickle, and new goods and services continually spring up to challenge old ones, low-tech billionaires will always be around. After all, you can’t eat computer chips or hedge funds, and even media moguls need their trash hauled away. 6 West Coast Money On a September morning in 1980, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur named Bill Gates showed up for the first of a series of business meetings at IBM’s offices in Boca Raton, Florida.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

exceeding 1.5 million for the first time: Joshua Benton, “The Wall Street Journal Joins the New York Times in the 2 Million Digital Subscriber Club,” Nieman Lab, February 10, 2020, https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/the-wall-street-journal-joins-the-new-york-times-in-the-2-million-digital-subscriber-club/ (January 20, 2021). new $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet: Marissa Perino, “The Most Outrageous Splurges of Tech Billionaires, from Richard Branson’s Private Island to Jeff Bezos’ $65 Million Private Jet,” Business Insider, October 15, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-bill-gates-jeff-bezos-tech-billionaire-wildest-purchases-2019-10 (January 20, 2021), and Marc Stiles, “Costco Just Sold a $5.5M Boeing Field Hangar to Jeff Bezos,” Puget Sound Business Journal, October 22, 2015, https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/10/costco-just-sold-a-5-5boeing-field-hangar-to-jeff.html (January 20, 2021).

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Clarke, sci-fi author, inventor and futurist The Russian Space Agency is no longer allowing paying passengers, but billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is currently offering a similar experience, albeit suborbital, for a much more down-to-earth price of $200,000. Other entrepreneurial companies active in this field include Space Adventures and Elon Musk’s SpaceX (Elon Musk is the forty-year-old entrepreneur behind PayPal and Tesla Motors). Rocket man Space is the next frontier for entrepreneurs, especially high-tech billionaires. Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, has announced a plan to build a commercial spaceship that could be space bound before 2020. The craft is powered by six jumbo-jet engines and has a wingspan of 115m (380ft), the largest ever for a plane. The idea is to jet up to 9,100m (30,000ft), then use boosters to go into orbit, either to dispatch commercial cargo or to give thrill seekers a ride they’d never forget.

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

The Sovereign Individual has an appendix offering services – an investment vehicle in Bermuda, membership of an offshore trust, advice on how to ‘secure your own tax-free zone’ and membership of The Sovereign Society, composed of ‘would-be Sovereign Individuals… who have clubbed together to help one another achieve independence’.32 (The desire for self-governing enclaves for the ultra-rich is an active project for the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who wants to create a marine republic for the elite off the coast of California.) Crucial in this dystopian/utopian vision is the idea of exit. Rees-Mogg senior wrote that even in the early stages of this new age ‘many residents of the largest and most powerful Western nation-states, like their counterparts in East Berlin in 1989, will be plotting to find their way out… abandoning the country of their birth is not [an] unthinkable decision’.33 The nation state, for these new gods, is a ‘predatory institution’ from which ‘the individual will want to escape’.34 Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new post-national elite, a ‘domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age’.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

The balance of power between good and bad billionaires can change fast, and globally this balance has shifted three times within the last fifteen years. At the height of the dot-com boom in 2000, tech billionaires outnumbered energy billionaires three to one worldwide. A decade later the rise in prices for oil and other commodities flipped the balance, with energy tycoons outnumbering tech magnates three to one. By 2012, the downturn in commodity prices was shifting the balance again, and tech billionaires outnumbered energy billionaires by about 1.5 to one, or 126 to 78 worldwide. The revival of the good billionaires has continued since and has even spread to economies more closely associated with corruption than tech innovation.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

With the first commercially available operating system for IBM-compatible personal computers, Gates established Microsoft as a major player in the software market. Microsoft became known not only for the Windows operating system but also for its consumer electronics and computers. In 2000, the American tech billionaire established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gate stepped down as CEO of Microsoft in 2008 to dedicate himself to the foundation. Terry Gou b. 1950, Taiwan Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision, Ltd.) Terry Gou has spent his entire career manufacturing name-brand products on behalf of the companies that sell them.

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

In crypto, everyone talks about whales, the ones with the massive number of coins. They are a mythical force, making loads of money by knowing what’s going to happen next. They move their huge stacks for maximum advantage while everyone else is in the dark. I always pictured them as Gordon Gekko or Mr. Robot. A mix of tech billionaires and cold-blooded traders, with maybe a few Russian oligarchs thrown in. I don’t think anyone thought it was a guy like me, sitting in his upstairs bedroom, buying more ETH than most people thought was prudent, then going downstairs and trying like hell to change the water filter in the refrigerator.

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

The Sovereign Individual has an appendix offering services – an investment vehicle in Bermuda, membership of an offshore trust, advice on how to ‘secure your own tax-free zone’ and membership of The Sovereign Society, composed of ‘would-be Sovereign Individuals… who have clubbed together to help one another achieve independence’.32 (The desire for self-governing enclaves for the ultra-rich is an active project for the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who wants to create a marine republic for the elite off the coast of California.) Crucial in this dystopian/utopian vision is the idea of exit. Rees-Mogg senior wrote that even in the early stages of this new age many wealthy citizens of Western democracies were already, like people in East Berlin in 1989, planning their exodus: ‘abandoning the country of their birth is not [an] unthinkable decision’.33 The nation state, for these new gods, is a ‘predatory institution’ from which ‘the individual will want to escape’.34 Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new post-national elite, a ‘domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age’.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

‘Main Street,’ wrote PIMCO’s ‘Bond King’ Bill Gross, ‘has failed to keep up with Wall Street and corporate America in the race to see who can benefit more from lower yields.’122 Ray Dalio, the hedge fund manager whose own fortune in 2018 was estimated at nearly $17 billion, noted that ‘Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and … revolutions of one sort or another.’123 Tech billionaire Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon, penned an alarmist article for Politico entitled ‘The Pitchforks are Coming … for Us Plutocrats’. Hanauer warned that the United States was becoming less capitalist and more feudal, ‘and so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people.

…

They include entrenching instability in the global system, returning to the modern equivalent of the divisive competitive devaluations of the interwar years and, ultimately, triggering an epoch-defining seismic rupture in policy regimes, back to an era of trade and financial protectionism and, possibly, stagnation combined with inflation.44 Maverick tech billionaire Peter Thiel added a sobering thought: all great historic bubbles, from the Mississippi Bubble to the current day, had coincided with advances in globalization. The previous quarter of a century had produced a string of bubbles and busts that ‘represent[ed] different facets of a single Great Boom of unprecedented size and duration’.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Chapter 5. How AI Put Our Jobs in Jeopardy Chapter 6. Can AI Be Creative? Chapter 7. In the Future There Will Be Mindclones Chapter 8. The Future (Risks) of Thinking Machines Conclusion: Rise of the Robots Author Interviews Endnotes Index Acknowledgments Copyright About the Book Tech billionaires, reclusive scientists, dancing vacuum cleaners, voices beyond the grave – how a dream from the 1950s became our modern, super-networked world. Blending amazing stories, interviews, history and science, Luke Dormehl recounts our sixty-year quest for Artificial Intelligence and the incredible pursuit of one of mankind’s greatest projects, the creation of Thinking Machines.

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

He gave me a copy of a book he’d recently self-published called The Transhumanist Wager, an unwieldy novel of ideas about a freelance philosopher named Jethro Knights (a character with certain key biographical particulars in common with his creator) who sails around the world to promote the need for life extension research, and winds up establishing a floating libertarian city-state called Transhumania—a haven for unhampered scientific research into human longevity, a regulation-free utopia of tech billionaires and rationalists—from which he wages an atheist holy war on a theocratic United States. A couple of days later, at a café in San Francisco’s Mission District, he told me of how the novel had not gone over well with any of the 656 agents and publishers he’d sent it out to over the previous year.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Started under Manmohan Singh’s government and embraced fulsomely by Narendra Modi’s, this system provides each Indian with something like a Social Security number, thus tying every ragpicker in Kolkata and billionaire in Mumbai to the federal bureaucracy in Delhi. “What we are creating is as important as a road,” Nandan Nilekani, the tech billionaire who helped shepherd the project into existence, told the New York Times. “It is a road that in some sense connects every individual to the state.” The government really means every individual: as of mid-2017, more than 99 percent of adults were signed up for Aadhaar, with well more than a billion numbers issued.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

DJI’s Phantom drone, introduced in early 2013, was the first minicopter that could be taken out of the box and assembled in one hour for flight, and without falling apart on its first crash. Soon, recreational drones became the latest fad and Wang’s fortunes soared. Wang cracked the Forbes “Richest in Tech” list in 2017, at the age of 37, as Asia’s youngest tech billionaire, worth some $3.2 billion. The publicity-shy Wang, with his circular glasses, tuft of chin stubble, and golf cap became the world’s first drone billionaire. That wealth comes from Wang’s ownership of approximately 45 percent of DJI shares and the company’s profitability. Compared to other Chinese tech companies, DJI has raised relatively small amounts of capital but at a much higher valuation—this is generally a good thing for a startup’s health.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

The rest of us stay on the job for the full forty hours because that’s what we’re paid for and we’ll often stay longer, even if we don’t earn overtime, because that’s what is demanded of us by managers who don’t fully understand how to drive productivity or take advantage of its rewards. So society was already fully committed to the worship of hard work during the 1980s and ’90s, when a revolution occurred that really cemented the dominance of the myth of the self-made man: the rise of the tech billionaire. Microsoft was founded in 1975, Apple one year later. Amazon started in 1994, Yahoo! in 1995, and Google in 1998. Those companies are massive now, but they mostly started with a couple guys working hard on a new kind of software, laboring away in virtual obscurity until their products became big sellers.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

It is humans who are destroying the planet. It is humans who have turned the dream – the reality – of global connectivity into a 24/7 for-profit surveillance state. It is humans humans need to worry about. AI is still a tool. We aren’t at the AGI stage yet – there is no ‘other’ to blame. It’s down to us. * * * Some tech billionaires, men – and it is men, who have made their fortunes out of the most ubiquitous of AI tools, algorithms – are trying to limit the damage to society they now perceive as a real threat. This isn’t because tech is, in and of itself, a threat – but because of how humans are using the powerful AI tool we have invented.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, friendshoring, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

The company that comes up with methods to reduce the thickness of a soda can by just a tenth of a millimetre can earn millions in material costs (something that has reduced its weight from 85 to 13 grams in a century). This means that production is constantly being revolutionized. The one who succeeds in developing more environmentally friendly technology can be the next green tech billionaire. It always looks like the resources we use will soon run out if we ignore human ingenuity and assume that they will be used in the same way and in the same proportions. The nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons – known for his prediction that coal would soon run out – collected tons of writing paper and wrapping paper because he believed there would soon be no trees left.19 But as long as resources are privately owned and priced, myriad innovators and entrepreneurs will constantly come up with new ways to manage them better, find substitutes and recycle – new recipes, in other words.

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

Putting these three elements together and considering them alongside the current trajectory of our capitalist society reveals a different kind of urban future than the one Musk wants us to believe will solve our problems. Without altering the underlying social relations, these technologies are likely to reinforce the trends of growing tech billionaire wealth and their desire to close themselves off from the rest of society. Recall that the first of Musk’s proposed tunnels was designed to make it easier for him to get from home to work and back without getting stuck in traffic with everyone else. Rather than a network of tunnels for the masses, such a system could be redeployed as one designed by and for the wealthy.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

When technology, say broadcasting, raises the reach of such workers, their earnings can potentially rise very sharply. The intangible version of this story is that many superstars have privileged access to very valuable scalable intangibles that reap vast rewards: in some cases this is by outright ownership—for example, the tech billionaires who own significant equity stakes in companies they founded; in others, the superstar has special privileges to create more of a certain type of intangible—only J. K. Rowling can write new Harry Potter books, for example. But, of course, most rich people are not stars or tech entrepreneurs; a significant proportion of the very rich are simply senior managers.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

“The best drug I ever took,” he says, “was philanthropy.” I suspect that opening with a big-name band is also a form of dick measuring. It’s Benioff’s way of saying, “I just spent three hundred thousand dollars to have a band play one song. You know why? Because I can.” The same goes for his philanthropy. Benioff says he’s challenging other tech billionaires to give away as much money as he does. The thing is, a lot of rich tech people do give away a lot of money; they just don’t go around bragging about it. Benioff’s challenge is a form of self-aggrandizement, his way of saying that while others might give away money, Mine is bigger. He wields his philanthropy like a four-foot cock, slapping us all in the face with it.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Payment revenue growth is taken from Oliver Wyman: www.oliverwyman.com/content/dam/oliver-wyman/v2/publications/2020/January/Oliver-Wyman-State-of-the-Financial-Services-Industry-2020.pdf For China’s cap on interest rates paid on deposits, see: www.ft.com/content/997c735c-4482-11e8-803a-295c97e6fd0b Figures on Alipay and Tencent deposits at PBoC are taken from: www.pbc.gov.cn/diaochatongjisi/116219/116319/3750274/3750284/index.html Figures on UK credit card debt are taken from: www.theguardian.com/money/2006/sep/27/debt.creditanddebt Chapter 14 For the story on Ubiquity networks, see: N. Vardi (2016). ‘How a tech billionaire’s company misplaced $46.7 million and did not know it’, Forbes, 8 February. For the story on dating-app fraud, see: https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2021/Investment-fraud-via-dating-apps Chapter 15 For more on early clearing, see: www.frbatlanta.org/-/media/documents/research/publications/economic-review/2008/vol93no4_quinn_roberds.pdf For the Herstatt failure, see: https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/129/540/1129/2769724 Chapter 16 On the Bank of England’s response to the unveiling of CHAPS, see the Gilbart Lecture delivered by Governor, Sir Edward George, ‘Steady Eddie’, organised by the Chartered Institute of Bankers, 22 October 1996: www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/1996/risk-reduction-in-the-payment-and-settlement-systems.pdf Ernst & Young estimate that the capital of the top 200 banks is $5.5 trillion, up from $2 trillion in 2007.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

This event, blessed by Pope Francis, was inspired by the Vatican’s desire to be more progressive, to liven up its historic brand, and to boost its aging “customer base.” As I took my seat in a vast hall, I looked around at the three hundred invited attendees. It was an unusual crowd, to say the least. Black-robed cardinals with bright red sashes and large, dangling crucifixes mingled with well-dressed doctors, tech billionaires, and the occasional celebrity. Over the next three days, we explored fascinating concepts like genetically engineered human beings, stem cell therapy with the potential to rejuvenate the body using its own building blocks, breakthroughs in drug development that may finally win the war on cancer, and the morality of immortality.

Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels by Sara Gibbs

Airbnb, Asperger Syndrome, coronavirus, fake it until you make it, gentrification, Helicobacter pylori, neurotypical, one-state solution, payday loans, Skype, tech billionaire

I used them in long, elaborate fantasies and make-believe worlds, which I would inhabit in such great detail that it sometimes became difficult to distinguish them from reality. The second way I dealt with the chatter was to just say whatever was in my head at all times, whether or not it was appropriate. It is rarely, I’ve learned, appropriate. My words would barge in like tiny unwanted tech billionaires in their mini submarines announcing that they were there to save the day, while getting in the way. They were always there. The nervous fillers of comfortable silences. The blunt deliverers of uncomfortable truths. The valiant diggers of unnecessary holes. My words wouldn’t quit – even when people were screaming at me to stop talking.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

But to me these writers missed a critical point: the importance of an electric car was not in the electronics, or the software, as fancy as these were. The exciting development was the battery – the thousands of cells lying at the bottom of the car, wrapped in an aluminium case. It was improvements in the battery that had made the electric car possible. It meant that I, and not a tech billionaire, could go electric and drive two hundred miles without worrying. It marked a hard-won victory over the internal combustion engine. * In the summer of 1896 Thomas Edison, the man responsible for the first workable lightbulb and the phonograph, was dubbed the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’. Inventions seemed to flow uninhibited from his brain on an almost daily basis.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Never mind whether Gates has any specific expertise in the areas in question, or that many of the Gates Foundation’s silver-bullet fixes have backfired badly. Gates and his fellow world-saving billionaires are part of what has come to be known as “the Davos class,” named for the annual World Economic Summit held at the top of a mountain in Davos, Switzerland. This is the hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are cozy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. At Davos’s 2017 summit, for example, Shakira spoke about her charitable work on education in Colombia, and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver discussed his plan to fight diabetes and obesity.

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies by Nick Frost

Alexander Shulgin, call centre, David Attenborough, hive mind, impulse control, job-hopping, Norman Mailer, Rubik’s Cube, tech billionaire

I soon lost interest in that car and it was eventually pushed into a river and set alight. Don’t judge me, I’m from Essex. I often wondered what happened to Brett. He got a lot of stick but I liked him. He’d always have an angle and was a pretty savvy businessman, buying boxes of Mars bars at trade and selling to the other kids well above market place. I bet he’s some kind of tech billionaire now. Beal High School also had an ice cream van, a kind of mobile tuck shop if you will, that’d come in at lunchtimes for all the eager fatties. Brett worked out a deal where he would essentially do litter patrol at the end of lunch and get free sweets from the ice cream man. Brett was the only kid I knew that had all of the NatWest Piggies.

American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", airport security, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Mason jar, McMansion, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, tech billionaire

It was also time to grow and mature. Time to hire more doctors and staff, create some rules, get serious. The clinic was inhaling $40,000 to $50,000 a day. And Chris believed that $250,000 a week was just scratching the surface. Like the railroad-and-oil tycoons of the nineteenth century, or the tech billionaires of the 1990s, Chris and Derik, of all the random people, had enjoyed perfect, exquisite, history-making timing. They’d stumbled into a Bizarro-world, a window of opportunity in which hard drugs were, for the moment, legal. Because if they weren’t legal, how were Chris and Derik able to conduct their business in broad daylight?

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture by Guy Branum

bitcoin, different worldview, G4S, Google Glasses, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pets.com, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, tech billionaire, telemarketer

I didn’t have time to wait for dick.11 A year later, at the end of my first year in law school, I’d become even more adventuresome with my Interent explorations. As we will discuss later in the book, I regularly went into gay chat rooms on AOL. Yes, I know, I am old and un-tech-savvy. Half the people I went to college with became tech billionaires, and I was using an AOL CD to hit on guys in Australia. Also, I always went into said chat rooms with a fake identity. If I revealed even the smallest fact about myself, someone would clearly piece together my real identity and immediately call my mother to tell her that I wanted to fuck in the poop hole.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

In the year 2000, Eliezer founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Although the Institute has garnered less support than Eliezer believes is justified, the best testament to Eliezer’s credibility comes from the quality of the people who have either contributed to the Institute or have spoken at one of its events. These include: •Peter Thiel—self-made tech billionaire and key financier behind Face-book. Donated $1.1 million to the Institute;91 •Ray Kurzweil—famed investor and Singularity writer; •Justin Rattner—Intel’s chief technology officer; •Eric Drexler—the father of nanotechnology; •Peter Norvig—Director of Research at Google; •Aubrey de Grey—leading longevity researcher; •Stephen Wolfram—developer of the computation platform Mathematica; and •Jaan Tallinn—founding engineer of Skype and self-made tech decamillionaire who donated $100,000.92 I also spoke on the economics of the Singularity at the Institute’s 2008 Summit.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

A Bentley University survey showed that 66 percent of millennials report they want to start their own businesses (of course, only a small fraction of that number actually do, and the rest are the people whose founder-like expectations are upending the traditional workplace). More broadly, even if we don’t dream of becoming a tech billionaire, we are now operating in a world where, across most facets of our lives, we’re having founder-like experiences. As we are more and more the creators of our own myths, leaders of our own communities, stars of our own shows. New power dynamics make the desire for the “founder feeling” much more widespread.

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

As the tech monopolies have become the biggest companies in history, their executives are living in another world. Today, the suburb of Atherton in Silicon Valley is now the most expensive postcode in the United States. The homes and estates of the tech titans are rarely visible from the road. The most expensive homes sell for around $30 million while an average home costs over $9 million. Tech billionaires Eric Schmidt, Meg Whitman, and Sheryl Sandberg all have homes here.6 For over a century, California was the embodiment of technological and economic progress. Today, the Golden State suffers the highest level of poverty in the country, even surpassing Mississippi and Alabama. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation's welfare recipients, roughly three times its share as a percentage of the population.7 In the old days, the state's tech sector produced industrial jobs that sparked prosperity not only in Silicon Valley, but also in working class towns like San Jose.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

Facebook has been on Capitol Hill answering to legislators with increasing skepticism. Apple and Google are both facing challenges of operating in a global economy, where the rules are often different and the playing field hardly fair. And there is broad distrust of this new generation of success. Tech billionaires rank down with used car salesmen as related to public trust, and those perceptions will impact government policy for a generation. Industrials have seen this movie already. We could have changed the names above and gone back 20, 40, even 60 years and made the same statements. In nearly every case, there is an industrial company that either solved for one of these problems or failed trying.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

Critical or ‘snarky’ coverage of the tech world was deemed ‘uncurious’ (their word), as our metrics showed that our Musk-loving readers responded better to positive stories about big tech.” Crosbie, who was laid off from the site in 2017, eventually ended up at Splinter, part of the Gawker network of websites that tech billionaire Peter Thiel semi-successfully sued out of existence in 2016, the culmination of a Count of Monte Cristo–style revenge plan that apparently stemmed from his deep-seated grudge over the site’s critical coverage of his business ventures. After Splinter finally folded in 2019, Crosbie and his coworkers launched Discourse, which is entirely worker-owned and currently thriving on Substack.

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

So I don’t want to get in trouble.’ President Obama wrote her an absentee note on White House stationery. It says, ‘Please excuse Emily from school today, she was with me.’” Farther down the hall of fame was a picture of an older Emily Whitehead, this time with Lady Gaga during a party at the home of Sean Parker, the tech billionaire who was supporting this experimental work. These success stories were part of what gave the Recombinant Advisory Committee confidence in Penn Medicine’s proposal to forge ahead with new gene therapies in humans. With a fresh influx of capital from Sean Parker and a license to use CRISPR, it seemed like a cure for cancer was within reach.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

The CPB has zero editorial input to the hundreds of local PBS and NPR stations in terms of their programming. It’s possible to provide public financing to local news organizations from afar and let them manage programming independently. In the last decade, another trend in the media has emerged. Big legacy media organizations have been getting gobbled up by tech billionaires. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Marc Benioff owns Time magazine. Laurene Powell Jobs effectively owns The Atlantic through her foundation. Major legacy publications have become trophy acquisitions for technology titans who don’t like sports. Media ownership is changing whether the public likes it or not; it is better to understand and address it than to pretend that nothing has changed.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Large banks like Goldman Sachs will make markets in those SDR bonds and write derivative contracts in SDRs for hedging. SDR bank deposits will expand in the same way that eurodollar deposits expanded in the 1960s. Imperceptibly, the dollar will become just another local currency. Important transactions will be counted in SDRs. World money will arrive on tiptoe. Hedge fund and high-tech billionaires will discover they are billionaires in dollars only. The dollar itself will be devalued against SDRs, controlled by a small clique of countries beyond the reach of the billionaires and their bankers. World money means the dollar is worth what the G20 and IMF decide. Only gold is immune. World Taxation For a decade at the start of my career, I was international tax counsel to Citibank, then the world’s most powerful private bank.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

Instead, the Bransons huddled around the newest member of their family, Eva-Deia, an innocent cherub with bright eyes and blond hair, and baptized the spaceship with the baby’s milk bottle. IN THE MONTHS that followed, Musk and Bezos started to play nice, at least in public. Their Twitter spat had touched off an irresistible media frenzy that pitted the pair against each other—a pair of tech billionaires fighting for cosmic domination—a made-for-large-font headline neither wanted. For someone who cultivated his image as meticulously as Bezos, it wasn’t dignified even to be perceived as feuding with Musk. When competitors came after Amazon, it only drove him to want to succeed even more. That was as true in the world of online retail as it was in space.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Many commentators delighted in echoes of today’s Saudi Arabia in the film’s story: It’s about a young king who must decide whether to hide his jungle kingdom from, or engage with, the outside world. That was one side of a frenzied 2018 for Mohammed, a year in which he would push through social and economic transformation plans at a dizzying pace and in full public view. In the coming months he would meet with presidents, CEOs, and tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Bill Gates, publicly proclaiming an open and innovative future for Saudi Arabia. He would make massive commitments to virtual reality and solar power and cutting-edge urban planning. “The most influential Arab leader. Transforming the world at 32,” blared the cover of an unfamiliar magazine titled The New Kingdom (priced at $13.99) that showed up on newsstands across the United States just ahead of the prince’s visit.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

But there are also reasons to be, if not quite cheerful, then at least hopeful. Anger at the intrusive role of tech companies in our everyday lives is growing. In September 2019, activists with loudhailers and hi-vis jackets targeted Palantir, a data-mining defence contractor co-founded by a controversial Trump-supporting tech billionaire.6 Two months later, roughly 200 Google employees and their supporters demonstrated outside of their own company’s San Francisco offices after the tech giant dismissed two employees – ironically, for organising protests against the tech giant’s own behaviour including its work on a project to build a censored search engine for China and cloud services for the fossil fuel industry.7 And after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, a group of ‘Raging Grannies’ demonstrated outside Facebook’s sprawling, Frank Gehry-designed head office in Silicon Valley, declaring that “privacy should be the default setting”.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

He points out that in 1982, 38 percent of the wealthiest Americans in the Forbes 400 came out of the oil industry and related manufacturing industries, while only 12 percent came out of technology and finance. By 2006, the tables had turned, with 36 percent of the richest Americans coming out of tech and finance, and only 12 percent from oil and related manufacturing.16 Many of the high-tech billionaires, like the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are transforming their facilities into low-carbon emission operations, and investing millions of dollars in the new distributed renewable energy technologies of the Third Industrial Revolution. While still the most powerful lobbying force in Washington, the old energy lobby—and the Second Industrial Revolution industries surrounding it—may be on its last legs.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

It had moved its staff of 150 into the old headquarters of B’nai B’rith in the heart of Washington, D.C., midway between Dupont Circle and the White House. In a neighborhood where any major lobbying firm might consider it a status symbol to rent a floor, the Human Rights Campaign owned an entire nine-story, two-wing building. The investors George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, tech billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, entertainers David Geffen and Brad Pitt, Republican financiers Paul Singer and Seth Klarman—all backed gay marriage with millions in donations. Support for gay marriage in Silicon Valley was almost unanimous. Google’s employees gave 96 percent of their campaign contributions, and Apple’s 94 percent, to oppose California’s anti–gay marriage Proposition 8.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

$8.5 trillion in assets: Data aggregated from this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund, by way of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute database at https://www.swfinstitute.org. forty-two SWF deals valued at around $16.2 billion: Claire Milhench, “Sovereign Investors Hunt for ‘Unicorns’ in Silicon Valley,” Reuters, May 11, 2017. “I totally believe [in] this concept,”: Sam Shead, “The Japanese Tech Billionaire Behind Softbank Thinks the ‘Singularity’ Will Occur Within 30 Years,” Business Insider, February 27, 2017. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/softbank-ceo-masayoshi-son-thinks-singularity-will-occur-within-30-years-2017-2. The Vision Fund got started: “Masayoshi Son Prepares to Unleash His Second $100bn Tech Fund,” Economist, March 23, 2019.

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

Promoting itself as a model for America, it is self-evidently impossible for all the other forty-seven contiguous states to import one-third of their electricity from each other. California also led the way in being the crucible of America’s Climate Industrial Complex. In the 1940s, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that cultural and sociological factors would lead to the demise of capitalism. The fruits of capitalism harvested by tech billionaires, hedge fund managers, and foundation executives were poured into the 2010 fight to defeat Proposition 23, which had attempted to limit the economic damage of California’s renewable targets. With the nation’s largest number of billionaires and its highest poverty rate (taking into account housing and other benefits), postindustrial California began to resemble a precapitalist society (Chapter 18).

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Innovation and disruption were the buzzwords on campus, and our students broadcasted an almost utopian view that the old ways of doing things were broken and technology was the all-powerful solution: it could end poverty, fix racism, equalize opportunity, strengthen democracy, and even help topple authoritarian regimes. “Every year at new-student orientation,” one of our students told us enthusiastically, “we bring in some tech billionaire who is held up as the paragon of what you can achieve and that that’s the life you should want.” The former president of the university was heard to say that government was incompetent and the idea of encouraging any student to go into government service in order to make a difference was “ridiculous.”

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

“You’re welcome for the industrial revolution,” he said. Once a reader accused me of prejudice against entrepreneurs. Wondering about this, I looked for counternarratives to the stories I’d been pursuing. I wanted to find someone who’d gotten rich by innovating. I wouldn’t find this person in beer. Brazil’s only tech billionaire is Eduardo Saverin, who got rich because of his lucky decision to put money into Facebook before anyone else. As far as I could tell, the only Brazilian billionaire who ever created anything new was Walther Moreira Salles. Already rich as a banker in the sixties, he backed an American venture to extract a rare element known as niobium from a deposit in Minas Gerais.

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Many township tours also start at the museum, where the history of the apartheid-era Pass laws, which regulated where people were allowed to live based on their race, are explained. 1Sights District Six Museum Cape Town Science CentreMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %021-300 3200; www.ctsc.org.za; 370B Main Rd, Observatory; admission R40; h9am-4.30pm Mon-Sat, 10am-4.30pm Sun; p; dObservatory) Occupying a rare example of the work of modernist architect Max Policansky, this is a great place to bring kids for attractions such as the giant gyroscope (R5 extra) and tons of Lego. There's also a replica of the Soyuz capsule that returned South African tech billionaire Mark Shuttleworth to earth after his trip to the International Space Station. Heart of Cape Town MuseumMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %021-404 1967; www.heartofcapetown.co.za; Old Main Bldg, Groote Schuur Hospital, Main Rd, Observatory; overseas visitors R200, South African adult/student R100/50; hguided tours 9am, 11am, 1pm & 3pm; p; dObservatory) Booking a tour is the only way you can see the very theatre in Groote Schuur Hospital where history was made in 1967 when Dr Christiaan Barnard and his team carried out the world's first successful heart transplant operation (sadly, the recipient died a few days later).

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Broadly speaking, that narrative counterpoises the inclusiveness, quickness, and sophistication of online social processes against the sluggish, exclusive club of old-fashioned government or corporate power. It’s a narrative that unites activists in the Arab Spring with Chinese and Iranian online dissidents, and with tweeters in the United States, Pirate Parties in Europe, nouveau high-tech billionaires, and “folk hero” rogue outfits like WikiLeaks. That particular idea of revolution misses the point about how power in human affairs really works. It cedes the future of economics and places the entire burden on politics. In our digital revolution, we might depose an old sort of dysfunctional center of power only to erect a new one that is equally dysfunctional.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

Phil Matier and Andy Ross, “SF Voters All in Favor of New Tax to Help Homeless—Until They See the Cost,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 2018, www.sfchronicle.com. 22. Andy Bosselman, “Proposition C: Is It the Right Move for Homelessness Now?” SF Curbed, October 25, 2018, www.sf.curbed.com. 23. Shirin Ghaffary, “Here’s Why Tech Billionaires Are Fighting over San Francisco’s Prop C Ballot Measure,” Vox, October 27, 2018, www.vox.com. 24. Jennifer Friedenbach, interview by the author, January 13, 2021. 25. Trisha Thadani, “A Ticket out of Town,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 29, 2019, www.sfchronicle.com. 26. “For SF homeless residents ‘rapid rehousing’ means leaving the city (Via SF Public Press),” Mission Local, March 6, 2018, www.missionlocal.org. 27.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Yet thinking of those users—ourselves—as workers would require us to understand the “social” part of social media as requiring valuable skills as well, something that tech companies resolutely refuse to do. And, of course, it’s in their interest not to—if they had to pay for the value we create for them, those tech billionaires wouldn’t be billionaires. 26 THE CREATIVE WORK OF THE TECHIES, THEIR MUCH-VAUNTED “INNOVATION ,” is the thing that is celebrated in these flexible, toy-filled workplaces, but this emphasis belies the fact that most programming work is, frankly, boring. It’s grueling, repetitive, requiring focus and patience—and often plenty of cutting and pasting or working from pre-prepared kits.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.9 So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched.10 Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.11 But then came the studies of twins.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

This stringing together of speculations is obviously intended to make solar geoengineering look like a somewhat attractive possibility. What, though, of the beads on this string? Considered in isolation, independent of the way that they are strung together, are they plausible? To a large extent, I think they are. Would it be feasible for a few small states with airfields in the tropics and a tech-billionaire benefactor to try and put together a small aerosol geoengineering effort? Yes. The Aurora study discussed in Chapter Four argues that a much larger effort could be undertaken for about $2 billion a year. A first-generation system scaled to lift only tens of thousands of tonnes in its early years could be a lot cheaper.

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Alongside a handful of other big IT businesses, it helped to craft a new image of India as a land of pioneering start-ups and vast call centers. Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, the company’s best-known cofounders, were admired as models of social mobility and ethical practice, as well as being among India’s first tech billionaires. It was a throwaway phrase by Nilekani—“Tom, the playing field is being levelled”—that inspired American journalist Thomas Friedman to write The World Is Flat, his breathless 2005 opus hailing a new era of global capitalism.20 Infosys’s successes encouraged a new generation too. “To be successful in commerce here, when I was growing up, you really had to be born into an industrial family,” Meera Sanyal, the former India head of Royal Bank of Scotland, once told me.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, has given $8 billion to charities, and his eponymous foundation focuses primarily on improving rural education. Tencent cofounder Charles Chen left the company in 2013 to devote himself full-time to a $320 million fund for transformational ideas in education and gave $300 million to upgrade the liberal-arts-focused Wuhan College. This new vanguard of Chinese tech billionaires also has the advantage of deploying the very technologies that created their wealth. Both Alibaba’s and Tencent’s foundations have set up websites for the donation of discarded mobile phones and desktop computers, together raising hundreds of millions of dollars for local technology distribution programs.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

The story succeeded in being a love letter to Rad, even though it included an exclusive report on how he had just been fired as CEO of his own company, in part due to a sexual harassment lawsuit concerning his best friend, then Tinder chief marketing officer Justin Mateen, and his former vice president of marketing, Whitney Wolfe. The Forbes piece mentioned Rad’s “military-grade $115,000 Mercedes G Class wagon” and his socialite girlfriend, whom he had allegedly met on Tinder: “In case you’re wondering about the caliber of Tinder users, yes, Rad met [tech billionaire Michael] Dell’s daughter Alexa on Tinder.” It made much of Tinder’s estimated worth, allegedly “somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion.” But it didn’t talk about the sexual harassment women were experiencing on the app, or the graphic images they were receiving, or the stories which had already come out about Warriena Wright, the New Zealand woman who fell to her death on a Tinder date that same year.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Horowitz credited the strategy to his hero Andy Grove, the former Intel chief. He’d adapted the term “wartime CEO” from a line in The Godfather (Tom Hagen: “Mike, why am I out?” Michael Corleone: “You’re not a wartime consigliere”), which he reproduced in his post alongside a rap lyric, part of his campaign to rebrand tech billionaires as the new counterculture: hard-edged badasses in V-neck sweaters. He drew his cachet from Andreessen Horowitz, an investment firm he and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen had started in 2009. (Andreessen’s mentor, John Doerr, had himself been mentored by Grove—one more example of the Valley’s distorting insularity.)

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Everywhere he looks there is a maze of shifting opportunities, hazards, mean-spirited “brogrammers,” and greediness masquerading as virtue. It’s a world in which his fate—and everybody else’s—is at the whim of a few very rich, megalomaniacal, inscrutable men. “Fucking billionaires,” says Bighetti. While critics were generally delighted, not every American tech billionaire was amused by the needling. As part of the show’s rollout, HBO held a premiere at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, in the cradle of Silicon Valley. Under dimmed lights, a passel of prominent venture capitalists, cast members, and masters of the tech universe watched the first two episodes.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

“There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology,” she said, adding, rather chillingly, “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.” This was during that first devastating wave—before we could get good masks, let alone vaccines, back when staying away from one another was pretty much the only tool we had to stop the spread of a virus we barely understood. But the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other tech billionaires seized on those stop-gap emergency measures to push for more permanent changes that would represent huge profit-making opportunities for their sector—everything from moving large parts of education permanently online to creating so-called smart cities, which would radically increase the surveillance of daily life.

Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

On Maui, Kauaʻi, Hawai‘i the Big Island and Molokaʻi, infrequent public buses primarily serve commuters and residents. Bicycle Not practical for island-wide travel due to narrow highways, heavy traffic, high winds and changeable weather. What’s New Lanaʻi On this ex-pineapple-plantation island, tech billionaire Larry Ellison has been keeping construction workers busy with upgrades to everything from the luxury Four Seasons resorts to the local supermarket. Even Lanaʻi City’s historic movie theater has been transformed into a state-of-the-art media center. Pie-in-the-sky plans to spur 'green growth' include solar energy, a desalination plant and small farms.

…

Meanwhile, ongoing construction often uncovers and disturbs archaeological sites such as heiau (temples), petroglyphs and burial grounds. Protecting these important Hawaiian cultural sites and repatriating iwi kupuna (human remains) can delay road building and construction for years. Mainland tech billionaire Larry Ellison, who bought 98% of the island of Lanaʻi in 2012, has announced plans to turn that island into a 'laboratory for sustainability.' But so far ambitious plans for solar energy, ocean water desalination and organic farms have gone nowhere, while improving infrastructure for affluent tourists has been a priority.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Charles Murray proposed a full-on UBI fifteen years ago in a book published by the American Enterprise Institute, and now that “we are going to be carving out millions of white-collar jobs, because artificial intelligence, after years of being overhyped, has finally come of age,” he recently started pushing it hard once again. “Yes,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2016, “some people will idle away their lives under my UBI plan. The question isn’t whether a UBI will discourage work, but whether it will make the existing problem significantly worse.” The approval of people on the right, and of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, does not make universal basic income a better idea, just a somewhat more politically plausible one. *1 During the panel discussion, Norm Pearlstine of Time Inc.—who now runs the freshly unionized Los Angeles Times—said he wasn’t too worried by the Internet: “I don’t think long-form journalism is much threatened,” he said

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

While there are always activist groups on both the right and the left fighting over candidates and election rules, the battles over electioneering in the 2020 election were substantially different. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were allowed to hire and train their own family members to serve as referees and then got angry the losing team didn’t publicly accept a narrow loss with several controversial calls. In 2020, liberal organizations, corporate interests, and a tech billionaire spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting access to the levers of government power in key states with the goal of ousting Donald Trump. This privatization of election administration tainted the entire election. There was no concern about this outrageous arrangement from the media and other watchdogs.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Microsoft can charge monopolistic prices, and engage in other anti- competitive practices, because it knows that most users are locked into its product. Frank and Cook argued that Winner Take All markets exacerbate inequalities. When only a few winners get the lion’s share, the rest fight over the scraps. It is worth noting that of the ten richest people in the world, six are tech billionaires, and two (Bill Gates and Larry Ellison) are founders of operating system companies (Microsoft and Oracle), with a combined wealth of $250 billion. Winner Take All markets for technology exhibit other pathologies. Because they tend to be sticky and non-ergodic, the technologies that win may not be the best-performing ones.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

The implications of vested interests mainstreaming the idea of geoengineering by discussing it as if it were a viable option may be as dangerous as the impacts of actually deploying geoengineering. Suggesting that geoengineering is a ‘plan B’ provides convenient excuses for the fossil fuel industry, tech billionaires and other promoters of these ideas to delay and derail the fundamental societal transformations that are urgently needed. Geoengineering is not an option. Intensified climate disruptions and injustices call for something very different: a focus on sufficiency and well-being, curbing emissions at the source and rapidly phasing out fossil fuel production, while prioritizing principles of equity, local livelihood and ecological integrity. / 4.9 Drawdown Technologies Rob Jackson The need for ‘drawdown’, defined here as removing carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere after their release, arises from failure.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic