The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball
October 16, 2017
Arrogant tech moguls are making the world into a hypercompetitive, misogynistic free-market hellhole argues this scattershot jeremiad. New York Times tech columnist Cohen profiles computer and internet pioneers including Stanford provost Frederick Terman, whose program for commercializing projects from the university’s computer-science department spawned Silicon Valley, and Valley icons such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Cohen’s caustic profiles attack these men for promoting a masculinist hacker culture that celebrates maverick entrepreneurs and unfettered markets while disparaging government regulation and social solidarity. Cohen’s critique is weak on specifics and is seldom telling. PayPal founder and Trump endorser Peter Thiel is the only libertarian ideologue here; the rest are tarred mainly for making money and thus sullying the web’s potential for noncommercial participatory creativity, as exemplified by Wikipedia. Even generous initiatives, such as Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg’s offer of free (though limited) internet service in India, strike the author as sinister power grabs: “Zuckerberg was conceiving a new online civilization before our eyes.” Cohen’s undiscriminating, ham-fisted polemic is provocative but overblown.