Abolish Silicon Valley

How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

By: Wendy Liu

Narrated by: Katherine Fenton

Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanizing argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good.

Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry.

Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable.

Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo.

Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterize the industry today, Wendy Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that gave rise to Silicon Valley as we know it. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not just to enrich a select few.

©2020 Wendy Liu (P)2020 Repeater Books

Loved the book!

Silly Con Valley is just a symptom of a larger issue: Capitalism.

I loved how the book exposes the vapid bullshit circus startup culture actually is.

The industry is just rife with rich vapid men affected by the hubris only wealthy people seem to have, like Paul Graham, marc andriessen, Dangerous vampires like Peter Thiel, and so on. We can do without this ‘class’ of people.

Don’t listen to Mark

Disregard the review by Mark who let his person politics cloud his judgment. He is just a bitter capitalist who can’t stand that the author is a Marxist who might have a salient critique of big tech. He might even be an operative, who knows? Good book, needed to be written.

Put that coffee down! Coffee is for closers Wendy.

Great,  the author tries a startup and it fails and she comes out super bitter. Trashing on capitalism because she moved into a startup naively thinking that you could save the world. 


Book is so filled with gross judgement, unequal measures it's ridiculous. The very thing she trashes, capitalism she partakes in by selling this book. Man I can't tell you how gross and ridiculous this book is and how I wish I never bought it. 


Her startup fails in a years-long Misery after she gives up a great job at Google, and she picks apart everything that's wrong with our society with a lot of parts of the book without a good solution.


Leftist leanings socialist thought is what you're going to get out of this book. I'm not saying capitalism is perfect, but it sure doesn't tell you on the Forefront how anti-capitalism this book is.


Just because you failed at your capitalist endeavor, and you're all bitter about it, don't trash the whole system. Go write a book on Venezuela and how successful that was. Or Marxism.


If you want to listen to a leftist cry about how her start up didn't work after she bought into the height of Silicon Valley, and hear her whine about how capitalism is super horrible and there should be a better way, without actually giving any solid solution, then this book is for you.


On the flip side, if you understand that there's problems and every system, and we're all doing the best that we can, and capitalism you believe is probably better than socialism, then don't buy this book. I'm sorry that I did.


Funny too, because she's making money as a capitalist selling this book. While at the same time saying that everything she does should be so altruistic for the greater good. 

In one of her descriptions, it says Wendy Liu is a former startup founder, and software engineer. would be better explained that Wendy Liu is a former startup failure. and this book reeks from a leftist perspective of someone who tried capitalism, failed and is all super grumpy and bitter about it. trashs the entire system after failing in it.

easy to write the book after you failed, I bet you wouldn't have been writing the book if you would have succeeded.

Put that coffee down! coffee is for closers Wendy.

No coffee for you, and while you keep up the crying, we will all be over here with the long straws drinking your milkshake.

as a prior Californian, I can definitely say skip this

Out of all the books I've ever listened to, this by far is one of the most boring ones. The author is basically explaining towards the end of how silicon valley needs to be revamped. The author believes that capitalism creates a huge disparity between what the owners earn And what workers get. This is no big secret, as we already know that. I just felt that the performance of this book had flaws within it such as audio flaws, which were a distraction in addition to rambling content that could have been made much better. I usually listen to authors that are much older than this one, however, it was interesting to see her perspective on why she thinks capitalism is bad. definitely a very boring book