The Know-It-Alls

The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball

De: Noam Cohen

Narrado por: Adam Grupper

Beginning nearly a century ago and showcasing the role of Stanford University as the incubator of this new class of super geeks, Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet.

Donald Trump's election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing: Facebook and Twitter, eager to entertain their users, turned a blind eye to the fake news and the hateful ideas proliferating there. The Rust Belt states that shifted to Trump are the ones being left behind by a "meritocratic" Silicon Valley ideology that promotes an economy where, in the words of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, each of us is our own start-up. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray. The Know-It-Alls explains how these self-proclaimed geniuses failed this most important test of democracy.

©2017 Noam Cohen (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Impressive

This is the book we need at this time of the dominance on the Internet by five companies to help us plan our resistance.

Very anti-intellectual

This is not a book. It's an aggregation of the last 2 years' Huffington Post and Washington Post articles. If you're looking for any sort of insight or analysis, look elsewhere. The only things here are adjectives.

The author's general thesis is basically that everyone in the bay area is a conservative and are misogynists, xenophobes, racists. The tech companies overvalued freedom of speech, didn't vendor Trump supporters fast enough and are responsible for everything bad the corporate media calls our attention to these days.

There, I just saved you a few hours of your life.