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

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

The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The com pany logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios. There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires—or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires—actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted Cold War munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world.

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That’s why the first thing wealthy preppers worry about when fantasizing doomsday bunkers is how to maintain the allegiance of the mercenaries protecting them. A revolt of the masses is not a hypothetical fear. Even without a revolution, the suffering masses are hard to look at and think about. No matter how good they get at repressing it, tech bros can’t help but experience twitches of empathy when witnessing the suffering of others. Digital technology provides the perfect window for keeping an eye on the oppressed without allowing those compassionate instincts to kick in. Under the guise of increased connectivity, social media helps engender an entirely less compelling and experiential form of connection.

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Civilization, markets, and technology give us ways to channel that innate competitiveness toward better outcomes for all. Both narratives are steeped in the ideology of progress and the mythology of some fundamentally different place to which we’re all going—or to which at least some lucky few of us are going. The tech bros and their most ardent antagonists fall into the same mental trap. Whether corporate or counterculture, these conquest narratives all follow what we might call heroic journeys or New Testament architectures. Struggle, progress, climactic apocalypse, and then salvation for those with the right belief, psychedelic experience, computer processor, or selfish genes.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

San Francisco, once a city full of artists and hippies, with a vibrant gay community, has become overrun with dipshit tech bros zipping around on electric scooters, complaining about the growing ranks of homeless people, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they—the tech bros—are the ones who created the housing crisis that has pushed so many people onto the streets. “San Francisco has become unrecognizable,” a sixty-something techie told me, explaining why she had sold her home and fled the city. What didn’t she like? “The greed,” she said. Now those same mercenary, clueless tech bros who have ruined San Francisco are gaining ever more power and wielding influence that reaches beyond the tech industry into the culture at large.

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New York Times, August 15, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html. Lemann, Nicholas. “The Network Man: Reid Hoffman’s Big Idea.” New Yorker, October 12, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/the-network-man. Miller, Michael E. “‘Tech Bro’ Calls San Francisco ‘Shanty Town,’ Decries Homeless ‘Riffraff’ in Open Letter.” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2016. http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-tech-bro-letter-san-francisco-homeless-20160218-story.html. Mims, Christopher. “In Self-Driving-Car Road Test, We Are the Guinea Pigs.” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-self-driving-car-road-test-we-are-the-guinea-pigs-1526212802.

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As outsourcing takes off, manufacturing jobs in the United States plunge. Antidepressant usage climbs, as do suicide rates. Income inequality widens. The top one percent takes ever more of the pie. My sense that there might be a connection between the Internet and worker unhappiness was reinforced by what I saw on the ground in Silicon Valley—the hustlers and tech bros, the greedy VCs, the obscenely rich oligarchs, the new compact with employees, the stress, the insecurity, the suicides and homelessness. It doesn’t seem to make sense that the same idealistic, altruistic wizards who design beautiful products and deliver exquisite user experiences—who create so much delightion, as my colleagues at HubSpot would say—should cause so much misery.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

rape allegations: Jenavieve Hatch, “Bikram Yoga Creator Loses It When Asked About Sexual Assault Allegations,” Huffington Post, October 28, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bikram-choud hury-loses-it-when-asked-about-sexual-assault-allegations_n_58139871e4b0390e69d0014a. Part 6: Follow for Follow i. “Thinking about something”: Be Scofield, “Tech Bro Guru: Inside the Sedona Cult of Bentinho Massaro,” The Guru Magazine, December 26, 2018, https://gurumag.com/tech-bro-guru-inside-the-sedona-cult-of-bentinho-massaro/. “tech bro guru”: Be Scofield, “Tech Bro Guru: Inside the Sedona Cult of Bentinho Massaro,” Integral World, December 26, 2018, http://www.integralworld.net/scofield8.html. quack spiritual consortium: Jesse Hyde, “When Spirituality Goes Viral,” Playboy, February 18, 2019, https://www.playboy.com/read/spirituality-goes-viral.

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The twelve-day New Age boot camp was promised to offer one hundred guests exclusive access to Massaro’s most profound teachings. By then, “cult leader” accusations had already started trickling onto the web. The day before the retreat, a Sedona-based reporter named Be Scofield published an incriminating exposé characterizing Massaro as a “tech bro guru” using growth-hacker marketing to build a quack spiritual consortium: endangering followers’ bodies with ridiculous health advice (like living on nothing but grape juice for weeks—Massaro called this “dry fasting”), manipulating them into cutting off friends and family (“Fuck your relationships.

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

Programmers, designers, developers, and sundry internet Okies fled their own individual dust bowls by the thousands to settle in San Francisco, land of 13 percent postrecession job growth—and freebies! They looked alike, they talked alike, they ate alike, they thought alike. Before long, I had developed a private taxonomy of tech bros—and they were, mostly, guys. There were, I reasoned, three major categories: clowns, drones, and bullies. Not all clowns were so obvious as Mr. Bunny Ears. In an environment suffused with social anxiety, it was enough to be merely outgoing. Another night, while wandering dissolutely through a tech conference pre-party, I found myself drawn to a table where a boisterous, chubby-cheeked young man was holding court.

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Adrian stood out by wearing a bright blue shirt with a garish yellow holster clipped to his belt, which looked like it belonged on a Lego Man. The holster was more than big enough to accommodate Adrian’s ginormous iPhone 6 Plus, which he eagerly demonstrated. His was the stereotypical showmanship of a used car salesman—and it worked! The second category of tech bros genuinely believed that if they hit the big time, it would be on account of their hard work and dedication. These were the drones. Almost all the guys in Hacker Condo were drones. Each had a mysterious “side project”—a startup in the making—that was inevitably too ill-formed to talk about, or far too technically complicated to remember.

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By emulating the performative, coked-up machismo of their overlords in the finance sector, the bullies were determined to avoid the old stigma of the computer nerd as a simpering eunuch. Being fundamentally insecure, bullies were rarely found alone. One day I was sipping tea on a bench near a huddle of corn-fed wannabe tech bros who sat spread-eagled and bragged about their recent job interviews. A beefy dude in a baseball hat said he had just received an offer from a cable TV network to work as a Web developer. But he planned to hold out as long as he could for a better offer from a more exciting company. Another guy had been making the rounds of startups.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Uber already had an aura of arrogance about it in 2015. The pervasive trope of the “tech bro” was the ire of communications representatives across the Valley; young and moneyed, childless, these engineers and salesmen were unburdened by the daily concerns of the baristas, housekeepers, and wait staff they felt existed to serve them. A tech bro’s greatest worry was whether or not he was working at that year’s hottest “unicorn”—a noun coined in 2013 by a venture capitalist who used it to describe companies valued at more than $1 billion. By the fall of 2015, Uber was the unicorn to end all unicorns; every tech bro had to be there. Uber wasn’t alone as a haven for tech bros.

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Uber wasn’t alone as a haven for tech bros. Snapchat, once a darling in the Valley for its innovative approach to social networking, was under fire for emails its founder had sent to fraternity brothers during his college days at Stanford. (“Fuck Bitches Get Leid,” [sic] one read.) A group of Dropbox and Airbnb employees were filmed trying to kick a group of San Francisco kids off a soccer field to make room for their corporate league game. The clip went viral, and the companies were forced to apologize to an outraged public. Whetstone and other communications team staff cringed at the thought of seeing Uber’s Vegas blowout splashed across the pages of Silicon Valley tech blogs—or worse, the Daily Mail.

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This shift in the funding of American technology businesses would change the way a generation of the most successful startup founders would expect to be treated by their backers—the “cult of the founder” meant celebrating the vision of the founder no matter what, a slavish devotion to the CEO of a company simply because he was the CEO. Twelve-hour workdays and a nonexistent social life became things to be celebrated, the markers of a “hustle culture” that the tech bro founders embodied. (Of course, these hardworking bros also played hard, at events like X to the x.) Even when those founders were bending rules and even laws, they were treated as Platonic philosopher kings. Many believed the founders were remaking the world, making it smarter, more logical, meritocratic, efficient, and beautiful—delivering a new and much improved version: an upgrade on life.

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 the years and decades ahead, it gives us a shot to revolutionize institutions the way double-entry bookkeeping did seven hundred years ago. And it might let outsiders like me storm the castle. Now, to the fucking money. My story involves large sums of money. When the boom was on, I felt like Pablo Escobar, with a chirpy attitude and a closet full of dad jeans. But my story is messy and unconventional. I’m not a traditional tech bro who struck it rich by getting in early. I had a lot more to lose when I went down the rabbit hole. I was a forty-four-year-old father of three with a conventional life on the edge of the Silicon Valley bubble. My marriage was still recovering from my past battles with demons. I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between living life to the fullest, and selfish, self- destructive behavior like drinking too much, risking too much, and obsessing too much on any one thing as a way to make me feel different.

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Finally, writing and finding an audience scratched my itch for prominence, and it was also a hell of a lot of fun. While researching one of my blogs, I came across a trove of data about how people are unhappy in corporate America. I started writing blogs about modern work. My first big hit was “Career Transitions: Crafting Your Medium Humble-Brag”—a sendup of the wealthy, entitled tech bros I envied. I was eating dinner the night after I posted it when I looked at my phone, and I suddenly had more than a hundred new Twitter followers. Medium staff had recommended my piece. Thirty-five thousand people had read it, and, for a time, it was the top story on the platform. I’d hit a nerve.

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“No, it’s not,” she said. “Wikipedia is decentralized.” “Nope. Wikipedia is crowdsourced content. It is still run out of centralized services controlled by a few people.” “Listen, Dan, I’ve been working in tech for a long time, and I can tell you, it’s decentralized, and there are others. All of these tech bros getting rich is amazing, though.” I’d heard enough of this bullshit. So many people who’d missed the boat were ready to curse crypto without understanding it. Ethereum was bigger than these people could comprehend. But the fantastical price increase had opened it up for attack. Crypto was suddenly like an overexposed celebrity, and everyone was rooting for it to fail.

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

g EAT g Contents Cheap Eats TAQUERIA CANCUN ROOSTER & RICE PEACHES PATTIES THE ITALIAN HOMEMADE COMPANY BESHARAM THE FLYING FALAFEL BINI’S KITCHEN HOUSE OF NANKING g Cheap Eats g Contents Google Map TAQUERIA CANCUN Map 4; 2288 Mission Street, The Mission; ///spell.ground.fields; 415-252-9560 La Taqueria might have the longest line of the Mission’s hole-in-the-wall eateries, but old-timers and tech bros alike know that the area’s best cheap eats are found behind the red-and-yellow facade of Taqueria Cancun. Skip the hefty “Mission burritos” and go for the fresh-flavored tacos (al pastor and beef tongue are popular), slather it all in house salsa, and wash it down with a proper Mexican Coke. g Cheap Eats g Contents Google Map ROOSTER & RICE Map 1; 2211 Filbert Street, Cow Hollow; ///decide.timing.first; www.roosterandrice.com When not downward-dogging, Cow Hollow’s yoga moms flock to this shoebox-sized counter spot for a fix of $12 khao mun gai – a pile of fragrant rice with steamed chicken, cucumber, and an insanely addictive chili, ginger, and garlic sauce.

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And, of course, there’s nothing to take your mind off your start-up’s IPO – or stock market launch – like a spot of afternoon tai chi. g Alfresco Fitness g Contents Google Map The Great Cable Car Chase Map 5; 3575 Sacramento Street, Presidio Heights; ///arts.design.scales; www.arunnersmind.com It’s a competitive tech bro’s dream. On the last Thursday of every month, fitness shop A Runner’s Mind hosts The Great Cable Car Chase, pitting runners against the Powell/Hyde cable car in a two-block uphill race. Meet at the store at 7pm to join the 2.5-mile (4-km) jog to Bay and Hyde streets, where you wait for the next car. » Don’t leave without running back to the shop afterward (assuming you’re still alive) for the post-race raffle.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Robert Booth, ‘Facebook Reveals News Feed Experiment to Control Emotions’, The Guardian, 30 June 2004 <https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-newsfeeds> (accessed 11 December 2017). Halting Problem,‘Tech Bro Creates Augmented Reality App to Filter Out Homeless People’, Medium, 23 February 2016 <https://medium. com/halting-problem/tech-bro-creates-augmented-reality-app-tofilter-out-homeless-people-3bf8d827b0df> (accessed 7 December 2017). Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society:The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015), 63; Benkler, ‘Degrees of Freedom’, 18.

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Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2010. Hajer, Maarten A. and Hendrik Wagenaar, eds. Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Halting Problem. ‘Tech Bro Creates Augmented Reality App to Filter Out Homeless People’. Medium, 23 Feb. 2016 <https://medium.com/ halting-problem/tech-bro-creates-augmented-reality-app-to-filterout-homeless-people-3bf8d827b0df> (accessed 7 Dec. 2017). Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. New York: Penguin, 2012. Hanson, Robin, The Age of EM: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth.

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More than 44 per cent of Bitcoin adopters in 2013, for instance, professed to be ‘libertarian or anarcho-capitalists who favour elimination of the state’.11 As I will argue, we put so much at risk when we delegate matters of political importance to the tiny group that happens to be tasked with developing digital technologies at a given time. That’s true whether you admire the philosophical engineers of Silicon Valley or you think that most ‘tech bros’ have the political sophistication OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Introduction 9 of a transistor. We need an intellectual framework that can help us to think clearly and critically about the political consequences of digital innovation.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Proof that even the most academically-friendly strains of the New Right can act as a pipeline for further radicalization was seen in a 2019 study by five Cornell University researchers who analyzed more than 79 million YouTube comments on alt-right, alt-lite, and IDW channels and concluded that “the three communities increasingly share the same user base; users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and a large percentage of users who consume Alt-right content now consumed Alt-lite and I.D.W. content in the past”.29 These trends will only grow stronger as new media gradually takes over the mainstream. Future Fetish “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” — Peter Thiel Libertarians and the New Right might be the most eager adherents of the progress narrative, but there is another group that finds within itself boundless possibilities for the future: tech bros. The pervasiveness of libertarianism within Silicon Valley has resulted in the ideology having its own subspecies known as technolibertarianism, also called extroprianism. This emerged in the late 1980s through the musings of futurist philosophers such as Tom Bell and Max More who co-founded the now defunct Extropy Institute.

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The possibility that the US could be ruled one of the “benevolent” kings of Silicon Valley should be an almost equally frightening prospect. One could be tempted to discount transhumanism and techno-libertarianism, or even more extreme ideologies like neo-reaction, as the misguided intellectual fantasies of highly narcissistic tech bros and online philosophers. Thankfully, none of the New Optimists fall squarely in these ideological camps (Pinker has publicly expressed skepticism of transhumanism, albeit on efficiency rather than moral grounds37). But still, their benign view of science and technology as solutions to many of our political and economic ills is discomforting in that it fails to ask the question of why these problems require miracle cures in the first place.

…

, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper, 19-41, May 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2612047 21 Schechter, A., “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956”, Pro Market, 9 May 2017, https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-system-1956/ 22 Griswold, A., “Rich Tech Bros are Super Liberal — Except for One Thing”, Quartz, 6 Sep. 2017, https://qz.com/1070813/the-tech-elite-are-extremely-liberal-except-for-when-it-comes-to-one-thing/ 23 Clark, B., “Bro Culture is Poisoning Silicon Valley”, The Next Web, 10 Mar. 2017, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/11/bro-culture-poisoning-silicon-valley/ 24 Data from the Lobbying Database of the Center for Responsive Politics, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ 25 Calculation based on $1,843.7 billion in corporate profits after tax (without IVA and CCAdjin) in 2018.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

The bookstore was full of oversized art books that were easy to imagine sitting on glass-top coffee tables in glass-walled apartments. I couldn’t find anything I wanted to read. Who lives there, I asked. The bookseller shrugged, and straightened a display of unlined notebooks. “Wall Street people, hedge fund types,” he said. “Tech bros.” Tech bros, I thought—here, too. The nature of cities was to change, I knew. I tried not to feel entitled: I was aware that my parents, who had moved to Brooklyn in the early 1980s, had once been the outsiders rewriting the borough, just as I had spent four years contributing to the erosion of Polish and Puerto Rican Greenpoint.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We want it to be self-directed.’ Down in the audience, a journalist from Inc.com thought what he was hearing was ‘astonishingly sexist’. After all, here was a man, he’d later write, chattering about ‘making women’s sex organs more aesthetically pleasing’. It seemed to him that Austen was just another of these ‘tech bros’ who ‘talk endlessly about changing the world with technology while building frivolous things’. After the presentation, he asked some follow-up questions. Gome explained to the reporter that the change in scent wasn’t only there to help customers connect to themselves in a ‘better way’, it was an indicator that the product was actually working.

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Austen had hanged himself. He was thirty-one. Shortly before his death, Austen had stayed with his best friend, Mike Alfred. ‘He felt like the whole world was against him,’ Alfred told me. ‘He took it a lot more personally than I’d advise someone to.’ ‘But it was personal,’ I said. ‘They were calling him a “tech bro” and a sexist.’ ‘Yes, it was personal. And he took it like that. He took it pretty hard. He talked about killing himself every day.’ I asked if there might have been any truth to what they were saying. There was some evidence of sexism in Austen’s past. In 2009 he’d self-published a semi-fictional memoir that contained some unpleasant and juvenile talk of strippers and orgies.

…

Two male entrepreneurs launch probiotic supplement that alters women’s natural scent’, Margot Peppers, Mail Online, 20 November 2014; ‘The Founder Of Sweet Peach Is Actually A Woman And She Doesn’t Want Your Vagina To Smell Like Fruit’, Arabelle Sicardi, BuzzFeed, 20 November 2014; ‘Is the Sweet Peach startup a complete scam?’, Selena Larson, Daily Dot Tech, 21 November 2014; ‘The Vagina Bio-Hack That Wasn’t: How Two “Startup Bros” Twisted the “Sweet Peach” Mission’, Jessica Cussins, Huffington Post, 26 November 2014; ‘These 2 tech bros want to make vaginas smell like peaches’, Selena Larson, Daily Dot Tech, 19 November 2014; ‘These Startup Dudes Want to Make Women’s Private Parts Smell Like Ripe Fruit’, Jeff Bercovici, Inc.com, 19 November 2014; ‘Why We Need to Talk More About Mental Illness in Tech and Business’, Jeff Bercovici, Inc.com, 7 July 2015; Life Without a Windshield, Austen James (Broken Science, 2009).

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Dedication To my children, who deserve to grow up in a country that values the freedoms promised by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by our Constitution Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Introduction Chapter 1: How to Silence a Majority Chapter 2: How the Authoritarian Left Renormalized America Chapter 3: The Creation of a New Ruling Class Chapter 4: How Science™ Defeated Actual Science Chapter 5: Your Authoritarian Boss Chapter 6: The Radicalization of Entertainment Chapter 7: The Fake News Chapter 8: Unfriending Americans The Choice Before Us Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Also by Ben Shapiro Copyright About the Publisher Introduction According to the institutional powers that be, America is under authoritarian threat. That authoritarian threat to America, according to the Democratic Party, establishment media, social media tech bros, Hollywood glitterati, corporate bosses, and university professors, is clear—and it comes directly from the political Right. And that authoritarian threat, according to those who control vast swaths of American life, manifested itself most prominently on January 6, 2021. On that day, hundreds if not thousands of rioters broke away from a far larger group of pro-Trump peaceful protesters and stormed the United States Capitol, many seeking to do violent harm to members of Congress and the vice president of the United States.

…

He then correctly noted, “We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey toward greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”27 That allegiance to free speech principles—principles commonly held by the tech bros at the launch of their companies—didn’t extend to other tech leaders. These tech leaders suggested that the very basis for their companies—free access to speech platforms—had to be reversed. Their companies would no longer be about free speech, but about free speech for the approved members of the New Ruling Class.

How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

I’ve gone through weeks where it felt like the only purpose of my job was to toe the company line and make other women cry. I’ve been gaslit with poor performance reviews and felt pretty abandoned by HR. In addition to my own aforementioned loo-crying I’ve also tried powerposing before stressful meetings (sorry, Amy Cuddy, but it didn’t help) and meditating in designated quiet rooms usually reserved for tech-bro power naps. I’ve also hid from my manager in those same quiet rooms watching episodes of Nashville on my laptop as a way of keeping myself sane. Some of the more recent career drama I’ve dealt with was in early 2019, when only four months into my new role as editor-in-chief of the women’s lifestyle website The Pool, I lost my damn job.

…

And she’s been able to make this important change to her company’s maternity policy because power and economic freedom are both currently on her side, and she has changed the game so that she and the other people who have children on her team can stay within the realm of power and economic freedom that keeps them as insulated as possible from the motherhood penalty. Founding a company, being a CEO, going after funding, building something giant in the world of tech bros and male VCs – it’s not for everyone. But for those of you with enough power, with a foundation that contains a certain amount of privilege – will you use your economic freedom to make big changes for those who can’t? We need you. What if it was you who could help build a future with in-office crèches and proper, family-oriented working systems?

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Our system is broken, our laws don’t work, our regulators are weak, our governments don’t understand what’s happening, and our technology is usurping our democracy. So I had to learn to find my voice in order to speak up about what I saw was happening. I am hopeful, because I have seen what happens when we find our voices. When The Guardian took on this story, many journalists saw it as a series of conspiracy theories. The tech bros of Silicon Valley laughed at the notion that they should be subjected to any scrutiny. Politicos in D.C. and Westminster called the story niche. It took the persistence of a team of women at The Guardian’s Arts & Culture section and its Sunday paper, The Observer, where the blockbuster story appeared.

…

I knew from the moment I met you that you were one of the few people who could tell this story to the world in a way that makes people take note. You woke up the world and shook giants. I may have had the pink hair, but you were the one who wielded the pen. You kept going despite an unrelenting stream of abuse and threats from the alt-right, private intelligence firms, and Silicon Valley tech bros. You took me on for no other reason than a sincere dedication to the greater good and you deserve every accolade for your brilliant journalism. Sarah Donaldson and Emma Graham-Harrison, thank you for your pivotal role in telling this story to the world. Your work alongside Carole’s is largely why I can so confidently claim that I would not be where I am today without the women involved.

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

., Civil Action No. 1:18-cv-6634 (S.D.N.Y. filed July 24, 2018), https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2018/comp-pr2018-141.pdf. 84.Doree Lewak, "The College Dropout Behind NYC’s Most Exclusive Credit Card," New York Post, July 5, 2014, https://nypost.com/2014/07/05/the-22-year-old-dropout-who-created-nycs-most-exclusive-credit-card/. 85.Gregory E. Miller, "Ja Rule Steals Rick Ross’ Fashion Week Show," New York Post, September 6, 2014, https://nypost.com/2014/09/06/ja-rule-steals-rick-ross-fashion-week-show/. 86.Kathianne Boniello, "Tech Bro Sued for Trashing $13K-a-Month West Village Pad," New York Post, June 28, 2015, https://nypost.com/2015/06/28/tech-bro-sued-for-trashing-13k-a-month-west-village-pad/. 87.Rachel Kurzius, "Guess What Happened When Fyre Festival Organizer Promised D.C. A Ja Rule Concert," DCist, May 3, 2017, https://dcist.com/story/17/05/03/fyre-festival-ja-rule-magnises-wale/. 88.Confidential Staff, "Fyre Festival Debacle No Surprise to New York Jet-Setters," New York Daily News, May 2, 2017, https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/confidential/new-york-jet-setters-surprised-fyre-festival-chaos-article-1.3130499. 89."

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Musk paused, looked at the spreadsheets, and conceded the point. “Okay,” he said, “I guess we should figure out how to raise more financing.” Tarpenning says he felt like hugging Kimbal. In Silicon Valley at the time, there was a tight-knit and hard-partying community of young entrepreneurs and tech bros who had become startup millionaires, and Musk had become one of its stars. He enlisted some of his friends to invest, including Antonio Gracias, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Skoll, Nick Pritzker, and Steve Jurvetson. But board members encouraged him to broaden the network and seek financing from one of the major venture capital firms, such as those that gilded Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road.

…

Musk interjected with his idea for giving each user a slider they could manipulate to determine the intensity of tweets they were shown. “Some will want teddy bears and puppies, others will love combat and say ‘Bring it all on.’ ” It wasn’t quite the point San Souci was making, but when he started to follow up, a woman tried to say something and he did a surprising thing for a tech bro: he deferred to her. She asked the question that was hovering in the air: “Are you going to fire seventy-five percent of us?” Musk laughed and paused. “No, that number didn’t come from me,” he answered. “This unnamed sources bullshit has to stop. But we do face a challenge. We are headed to recession, and revenue is below cost, so we have to find ways to bring in more money or reduce costs.”

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She went backstage to say how glad she was that he was trying to buy Twitter, and they chatted for a couple of minutes. When Taibbi was preparing to publish his Twitter Files in early December, Musk realized there was too much material for one journalist to digest. His investor and fellow free speech tech bro Marc Andreessen suggested he call in Weiss, so on the plane flying back from his quick trip to New Orleans to talk to President Macron, he sent the unexpected text that she got on the evening of December 2. She and Bowles, along with their three-month-old baby, rushed to get on a flight to San Francisco two hours later.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

In 2016, it launched an initiative called Community Control Over Police Surveillance, with the goal of helping citizens lobby for local legislation regulating law enforcement’s ability to eavesdrop. A dozen jurisdictions, from the city of Seattle to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, have adopted CCOPS laws. Some thirty other cities have movements to push for these controls. The state that gave us Silicon Valley is also leading the way to regulate what the tech bros wrought. California passed a law, due to take effect this year, allowing consumers to force companies to delete — and not sell — their personal data. In 2018, San Francisco passed the “Stop Secret Surveillance” ordinance, which bans any city agencies from using facial recognition technology. The following year, Oakland adopted a similar ban.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

There was always a new video diary to discover that the algorithm served up, each mom seeming a little younger, a little more performative, a little more extreme. She opened that May newsletter with a GIF from The Handmaid’s Tale, a new symbol of women’s resistance under Trump. Stapleton and her peers knew Silicon Valley’s sexism flowed through Google and workplace dalliances were common. But many at Google believed tech-bro culture was a creature of younger, reckless companies like Uber and that bitter partisan squabbles happened out there in flyover country, far from its solar-paneled campus. This shared illusion shattered that summer. James Damore, a mid-level Google programmer, sent around a ten-page memorandum titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.”

…

Jawed Karim, YouTube’s third co-founder, had become an investor and only commented on his old company when it made changes that irritated him, like removing the number counts on the video “dislike” button. During the pandemic, Chad Hurley, like many accomplished, restless men, took to Twitter. He posted inane jokes and slung insults at Trumpies and tech bros with the gleeful abandon of someone who no longer had a corporate job. Hurley financed companies and basked in the glow of being a father of the creator economy when creators were all the rage. As the Trump era began to fade in 2021, suddenly every company wanted in on the industry YouTube had built.

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

they gamboled in the western Mediterranean Sea: Ben Feuerherd, “Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Get Cozy on Mega Yacht in Italy,” Page Six, August 31, 2019, https://pagesix.com/2019/08/31/jeff-bezos-and-lauren-sanchez-get-cozy-on-mega-yacht-in-italy/ (January 26, 2021). wearing a pair of stylish multicolor swim trunks: Priya Elan, “Dress Like a Tech Bro in Kaftan, Sliders, Gilet… and Jeff Bezos’s Shorts,” The Guardian, November 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/nov/02/jeff-bezos-shorts-tech-bro-fashion (January 26, 2021). one-year anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi: Bill Bostock, “Jeff Bezos Attended a Vigil at the Saudi Consulate Where Washington Post Writer Jamal Khashoggi Was Murdered One Year Ago,” Business Insider, October 2, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-visit-saudi-consulate-istanbul-khashoggi-murder-anniversary-2019-10 (January 26, 2021).

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

Its influence has yet to wane; even today, our most critical and most popular fictions about technology bear the stamp of Frankenstein. And artificial-intelligence-gone-wrong may be the enduring cautionary tale of our biggest blockbuster fictions. Today, Victor Frankenstein is usually a corporation, or a tech bro. In the Terminator franchise, Cyberdyne Systems develops SkyNet, an AI system that takes over military defense. SkyNet becomes self-aware, determines that humans are the greatest threat to its existence, and initiates a nuclear genocide. Cyberdyne is a government contractor that started out as a computer manufacturer based in Sunnyvale, California, a real town, sandwiched between Mountain View and Cupertino, where Google and Apple are headquartered, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

…

Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. 17. In his seminal history Brian Wilson Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York: Doubleday, 1973), 29. 18. Today, Victor Frankenstein Notable recent Dr. Frankensteins include Oscar Isaac’s AI startup founder in Ex Machina, Eric Andre’s tech bro parody in The Mitchells vs. the Machines, James Spader’s Ultron in The Avengers 2, and so many more. 19. In the Terminator franchise Like Cyberdyne Systems’s HQ in the Terminator films, Yahoo! and LinkedIn are both based in Sunnyvale, California, as is a division of Lockheed Martin, one of the nation’s biggest defense contractors. 20.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

In other cases, rent-seeking harms the larger interests of the wealthy themselves. The hypertrophy of patent and copyright law impinges on the interests of many big Internet companies. Sky-high housing prices in the Bay Area also pose real problems for high-tech businesses, including populist backlash against “tech bros” who are blamed for bidding up home values.14 Many sectors would have a better shot at hiring top talent if the rents from financialization weren’t luring away so many of the best and brightest. Throughout corporate America, the challenge of controlling health insurance costs creates incentives to tackle rents in the healthcare sector.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

The Mexicans who worked good jobs in construction, farming, they have become the underclass. And San Jose became this weird core of Middle America in California—people from Dust Bowl geography with Dust Bowl mentality—surrounded by educated people of color. “Normal” people did not start getting into tech until 2.0. People talk about the “tech bros,” but they wouldn’t have had anything to do with the first tech boom. They understand tech as a business, We wanna grow. We want to make X amount of dollars. We wanna scale. We wanna do this, we wanna do that. They are billionaires wearing hoodies. My parents came when they were children, and there was opportunity here.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

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

Fewer than one in ten venture-funded startups in Silicon Valley are led by women, with only 3% of that venture money going to all-female teams.42 An estimated 2–4% of engineers at tech companies are women,43 and, according to Measure of America, these Silicon Valley women earn less than half of what Silicon Valley men do.44 Equally troubling, there is a persistent sexist culture among many of the young male programmers, the so-called tech bros, who openly treat women as sexual objects and unashamedly develop pornographic products such as the “Titshare” app introduced at the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt show in San Francisco,45 designed to humiliate their female colleagues. This misogynistic culture extends throughout the Valley, with bias claims surging in 2013 against the male-dominated tech industry46 and even a blue-chip venture capital firm like John Doerr and Tom Perkins’s KPCB becoming embroiled in a discrimination suit with a former female investment partner.47 The Internet hasn’t really benefited most San Franciscans, either.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

They already do. In an infamous (and since deleted) blog post from 2012, entitled “Rides of Glory,” Uber analyzed its riders’ behavior to identify the cities and dates with the highest prevalence of one-night stands, for example. The post caused a furor and was seen as symptomatic of the unrestrained “tech bro” culture that prevailed at Uber at the time. But it highlights a broader point. Shared bikes and e-scooters also track who went where, and when, for billing purposes. The companies that operate mobility services are keen to keep this data to themselves: it helps them predict future demand, can be useful when preparing to launch new services, and can also be used to profile riders and target advertising.

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel by Josh Riedel

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, invisible hand, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Menlo Park, messenger bag, off-the-grid, Port of Oakland, pre–internet, risk/return, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, tech bro, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

I wore my old work pants, in hopes of blending in at Yarbo, but in my rush out of the apartment I’d slid on my brand-new three-hundred-dollar Allen Edmonds wingtip oxfords, which I’d purchased the day we hit a million users, building my wardrobe for a future in which DateDate was a large startup and I managed a team. “Where do you work?” she asked. There was no good way to answer the question. I could say, “In tech,” but that always led to follow-up questions. “DateDate,” I said, adding that I was the first employee, hoping to clarify that I wasn’t another bandwagon tech bro. “Damn,” she said. “Everyone is on that app now.” “Yeah,” I said, feigning laughter. “Are you?” “No, I can’t deal with apps like that. Too overwhelming.” I searched for a way to pivot the conversation. “Where do you work?” “You know the pizza place at the MacArthur stop? I work at the tattoo parlor next door.”

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

Benioff and his philanthropy, the dry ice and fog machines, the concerts and comedians: None of this has anything to do with software or technology. It’s a show, created to entertain people, boost sales, and fluff a stock price. I roam the show floor, gazing at middle-aged salespeople in suits who sit on beanbag chairs staring at their phones, and tech bros in T-shirts and man buns playing Ping-Pong. I sit in the Tesla that’s on display outside the auditorium, dreaming that my HubSpot options might someday be worth enough that I can buy a car like this. I figured Cranium would be setting up dinners for the HubSpot gang. But… nothing. No email from Cranium, no invitations to get together.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

The majority of the nation’s 3,143 counties are not urban, of course; they are rural or low-density suburban. Yet in the public mind, the housing crisis is still a distinctly urban phenomenon, a predicament especially of top-tier cities where so many aspire to live. This perception is shaped by countless articles about tech bros, investment bankers, or gentrifying hipsters displacing working people of color from New York and San Francisco neighborhoods, and by images of sprawling homeless encampments on downtown streets in Los Angeles and Seattle. We know that “the rent is too damn high” for big-city dwellers because the lion’s share of media commentary focuses on their plight, typically framed as a story about the runaway cost of living in the superstar metropolises.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

He described bullshit as what people create when they try to impress you or persuade you, without any concern for whether what they are saying is true or false, correct or incorrect. Think about a high school English essay you wrote without actually reading the book, a wannabe modernist painter’s description of his artistic vision, or a Silicon Valley tech bro co-opting a TED Talk invitation to launch his latest startup venue. The intention may be to mislead, but it need not be. Sometimes we are put on the spot and yet have nothing to say. The bullshit we produce under those circumstances is little more than the “filling of space with the inconsequential.”

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

It had people living on the streets. It had upper-middle-class people and really poor people. It had teleworkers and construction workers. It had four churches, a street of retail shops, and a park. It held a big working-class Latino population, and among them, like chips in a cookie, were lots of hipsters and tech bros. It was as if someone had thrown the pieces to seven different puzzles into one box. It wasn’t clear that the pieces were happy about this. The lower-floor windows of almost every building were barred. Signs everywhere told strangers to keep out, and murals and graffiti had unkind words for the ICE police.

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

In the beginning, however, Page and Brin put effort into hiring a diverse team and gave real power to a number of notably strong, smart women. The co-founders embodied the epitome of what venture capitalists and later public shareholders believed made the greatest tech entrepreneurs: they were “all nerd” with big visions, yet their interest in hiring women, explicitly, set them apart from the tech bros and PayPal Mafia. Whether Google would have achieved the same level of success without hiring these key early women is impossible to know. But what is clear is that several women executives were critical, in those early days, to creating that rarest of technological start-ups: one that turned an actual profit within just a few years.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Ireland’s low tax rates and permissive corporate laws have made it something of a mecca for American technology companies looking to expand their presence across the Atlantic. Google’s glassy European headquarters (where Google Ireland Limited is based) ranks among the tallest buildings in Dublin, towering over the city’s Grand Canal. The surrounding neighborhood, a former industrial yard turned tech-bro hot spot, is also home to the European headquarters of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Airbnb. Apple set up shop in Cork, where it is the city’s largest private employer. According to the most recent data, American companies booked more revenue in Ireland than in the sixteen largest European countries, combined.

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

Whether outfitting prospectors during the Alaskan gold rush or looking for some kind of cred from the music scene, it’s always boom or bust. Now it’s a new kind of boom: Microsoft, Expedia, and Amazon are the big dogs in town. A flood of them; tech industry workers, mostly male, derisively referred to as ‘tech boys’ or ‘tech bros’ are rapidly changing the DNA of the city.” ARRIVAL AND GETTING AROUND * * * Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA), also known as SeaTac, serves a large number of domestic and international flights; it’s the main West Coast hub for Delta’s trans-Pacific flights and for Alaska Airlines.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Home prices in the city were skyrocketing as a result, and gentrification was rapidly changing beloved neighborhoods, such as the predominantly Latino Mission District. It all produced a kind of poorly articulated rage. The convenient culprits included the street-clogging double-decker company buses that ferried employees to the offices of Google, Facebook, and Apple; the tech companies themselves; and the so-called tech bros, vaguely defined stereotypical males who could be relied on to regularly Tweet or blog something racist, sexist, or generally insensitive, thereby indicting the entire tech industry. “Number 5: the 49ers,” wrote a startup founder named Peter Shih in a much reviled blog post titled “Ten Things I Hate About You, San Francisco Edition.”

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

The idea that online abuse is something harmless that happens in a separate bubble that can’t touch your real life is one that you can only really subscribe to if you haven’t experienced such abuse. Unfortunately, that means that it’s an idea that makes sense to the straight, white, male, middle-class majority of journalists who are reporting on the problem, the tech bros who are responsible for building and policing the platforms where it occurs, and the male politicians and lawmakers legislating (or not) against online abuse. A fundamental part of the problem is that those whose lives are deeply, endlessly affected by it are not, by and large, those with the power to stop it.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

Rather, they sought out a handful of caviar projects worthy of how Apple viewed its premium consumer brand. Though the pair had spent the bulk of their careers as sellers, not the buyers they would be at Apple, they were well known to Hollywood’s creative community and dealmakers. The consensus view was that they seemed capable of overcoming the industry’s reflexive wariness of tech bros blowing into town from Silicon Valley, flashing cash and bragging about reinventing entertainment. Over two years, the duo struck deals with a who’s who of Hollywood, among them filmmaker Steven Spielberg, talk show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey, and Academy Award–winning actress Octavia Spencer.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Its founder, Craig Newmark, rejected advertising from the very beginning in favor of small fees on employers posting job ads in some cities. The company has focused on giving customers what they want, rather than sucking them dry for the value of their attention. This approach has long baffled the tech bros who were surfing their way to billionaire status alongside it, including StubHub cofounder Eric Baker. He estimated that in 2005 alone Craigslist could have had revenues of over half a billion dollars had it been willing to fully monetize its user base (though this guess has since been criticized as being wildly overblown).

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Even when, in the early twentieth century, influential Swiss architect Le Corbusier was devising a standard human model for use in architecture, the female body was ‘only belatedly considered and rejected as a source of proportional harmony’,9 with humanity instead represented by a six-foot man with his arm raised (to reach that top shelf I can never reach). The consensus is clear: women are abnormal, atypical, just plain wrong. Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Well, apologies on behalf of the female sex for being so mysterious, but no, we aren’t and no we can’t. And that is a reality that scientists, politicians and tech bros just need to face up to. Yes, simple is easier. Simple is cheaper. But simple doesn’t reflect reality. Back in 2008, Chris Anderson, then editor of tech magazine Wired, penned an article headlined ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Model Obsolete’.10 We can ‘stop looking for models’, Anderson claimed.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

There’s no confetti parade, but there’s the placard, the champagne and the photo opportunity of the executives ringing the bell in a function room behind the screens where members of the public can drop in and see the market’s equity prices. If the listing of Afterpay was the beginning of something new and exciting, there were no clues. Molnar and Eisen broke with so-called tech bro tradition, too. They opted against bright T-shirts, posing for photographs at the ASX satellite office in Melbourne in conservative dark suits. The pair struck a slightly awkward pose as Eisen, who kept one hand in his pocket, gestured to Molnar to pull the rope of the bell. Nick yanked it with a sheepish grin before Eisen put out his hand to shake Molnar’s—only for him to lift it up so he rang the bell, too.

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

Citywide bans increased 60 percent between 2011 and 2014.12 In 2016, a start-up founder in San Francisco sparked outrage after he published an open letter where he called the homeless “riff-raff,” lamented that he shouldn’t have to see the homeless on his way to work each day, and demanded San Francisco’s leaders do something about it.13 His letter attracted attention from the international news media. “In an open letter to the city’s mayor Ed Lee,” wrote the Guardian, “entrepreneur Justin Keller said he is ‘outraged’ that wealthy workers have to see people in pain and despair.” The reporter referred disparagingly to the man as a “tech bro.”14 For about forty years, from 1930 to 1970, black families were denied loans and channeled into renting rooms, whereas white families were encouraged to buy homes.15 The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a federal agency, designated some neighborhoods as “hazardous” for lenders before the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the segregation caused by this policy is still measurable today in many cities.16 And exclusionary housing policies didn’t come to an end, scholars argue; they simply took the form of opposition to new homes and apartment buildings for “quality of life” and environmental reasons.17 Racism contributes to homelessness, addiction, and overdose, argue progressives.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Progressives thought that was bullshit, but some voters seemed sick of the ideological tug-of-war: by November, he was first place in Iowa, positioning himself as the younger, more coherent alternative to seventy-seven-year-old Joe Biden. I even met voters in Iowa who had supported Bernie in 2016 and now planned to vote for Pete. Still, his campaign would run into some serious problems. Although he was a favorite among Silicon Valley tech bros and moderate midwesterners, he struggled to make inroads with the activist Democratic base: many of the young progressives who might have been excited about generational change thought he was too moderate for their tastes. More important, he failed to attract meaningful support from black and Hispanic voters, not a good place to be in Democratic primaries.

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

As Wolfe described it, it sounded almost as if the purpose of Tinder was to serve up women to men—and men in frat houses, no less, which have become all but synonymous with rape culture (an extensive body of research on the problem of rape in fraternity houses goes back to the 1990s. Fraternity men are significantly more likely to commit rape, according to studies). So, seen from a certain angle, you could almost say that Tinder was invented by a couple of misogynistic tech bros and marketed by a foot soldier for the patriarchy, all of whom the media made into stars. As Tinder caught fire, registering “a billion swipes a day” by its own account, its founders became giddy with their success. In 2014, Rad and Mateen posted on their Instagram feeds screenshots of a new Urban Dictionary term: “Tinder slut.”

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

That imperative certainly explains a lot about the kinds of doubling discussed so far. The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimize our selves, our bodies, and our kids. That same imperative set the rules (or lack thereof) that allowed a group of profoundly underwhelming tech bros to take over our entire information ecology and build a new economy off our attention and outrage. It’s also the logic behind the offloading of Covid response onto the individual (wear your mask, get your jab), to the exclusion of those bigger-ticket investments in strengthening public schools, hospitals, and transit systems.

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

; and Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard, there are few highly placed female executives in Silicon Valley. In the digital revolution, which has provided so many job opportunities and seen the start of so many businesses and empires, men have reaped most of the profits. And the culture of Silicon Valley is a male-dominated culture, some say a “frat boy” culture, populated by “brogrammers” and “tech bros.” “In inverse ratio to the forward-looking technology the community produces, it is stunningly backward when it comes to gender relations,” wrote Nina Burleigh in a 2015 Newsweek piece, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women.” “Google ‘Silicon Valley’ and ‘frat boy culture’ and you’ll find dozens of pages of articles and links to mainstream news articles, blogs, screeds, letters, videos and tweets about threats of violence, sexist jokes and casual misogyny, plus reports of gender-based hiring and firing, major-league sexual harassment lawsuits and a financing system that rewards young men and shortchanges women.”

Fodor's Oregon by Fodor's Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, off-the-grid, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, tech bro, tech worker, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Invigorated start-up and culinary scenes add fresh energy to the urban core, while active families fleeing California’s high cost of living are, in turn, pushing up the cost of real estate here. Even as Oregon’s biggest city east of the Cascades grows more cosmopolitan, it remains a monoculture—demographically, it’s overwhelmingly white and at times, it seems everybody is an athlete, a tech bro, or a brewer. But thankfully, everyone strives to make a good first impression. Bend’s heart is a handsome area of about four square blocks, centered on Wall and Bond Streets. Here you’ll find boutique stores, galleries, independent coffee shops, brewpubs, creative restaurants, and historic landmarks such as the Tower Theatre, built in 1940.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

The discussion of their market dominance in the literature focuses on the product market side. However, it would also be possible for them to become dominant in certain geographic labour markets.’69 To be sure, the notion that the digital-platform space might be the locus of rapidly escalating inequalities between capital and labour clashes with the popular image of ‘tech bros’ setting up platform companies, taking them to IPO (initial public offering), and earning vast financial rewards in the process. But to imagine that all workers employed by Facebook, Google and the like are on six-figure salaries is to neglect various critical dimensions – temporal, geographical and structural – of labour relations at such companies.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

West, Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust (Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2014), p. 126 3 Peter Thiel, with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (London, Virgin Books, 2014) 4 Julia Carrie Wong and Matthew Cantor, ‘How to Speak Silicon Valley: 53 Essential Tech-Bro Terms Explained’, Guardian, 27 June 2019 5 Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: The Tyranny of Just Deserts (New York, Penguin Press, 2019), p. 114 6 Emma Duncan, ‘Special Report: Private Education’, Economist, 13 April 2019, p. 3 7 The Sutton Trust, ‘Elitist Britain 2019: The Educational Backgrounds of Britain’s Leading People’, p. 5 8 Ibid., p. 12 9 Francis Green and David Kynaston, Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem (London, Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 96 10 ‘America’s New Aristocracy’, Economist, 22 January 2015; ‘How the Internet Has Changed Dating’, Economist, 18 August 2018 11 Jeremy Greenwood et al., ‘Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality’ (NBER Working Paper No. 1989) 12 A.

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

Best we can do is eat, drink, fuck, and did I mention drink? Cheers, everyone. @TheCompiler01 4 replies 7 RTs 12 likes OCTOBER 15 Las Vegas, Nevada THIS WAS NOT BENJI’S FIRST rodeo, as the saying went—he had been to Vegas many times before, because inevitably, year after year, some tech-bro or pharma-jerk scheduled a conference in this city. Yes, the city was ultimately convention-friendly, and made every effort to accommodate the needs of every industry that came here. But the reality was, people wanted an excuse to come to Vegas. They wanted to gamble. They wanted to drink. They wanted the pool, the miles-long buffets, the occasional tawdry dalliance with a cocktail waitress, flight attendant, or high-dollar independent escort.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

This becomes infinitely more effective if we can say, ‘And look, our dude C was on the ground in Moab before sundown, personally establishing the ground truth.’” Laurynas was a Lithuanian basketball prodigy who had attended Michigan on a scholarship and then wrong-footed everyone by turning out to be actually smart. He would answer to “Lawrence.” He had picked up American tech-bro speech pretty accurately, but his accent broke the surface when he was envisioning something that he thought would be awesome. “Before sundown?” Corvallis repeated. “That would be preferable. Darkness, video, not a good fit.” Laurynas was laughing as he hung up. He had the big man’s joviality when it came to the doings of small people.