Silicon Valley
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How Silicon Valley Can Reindustrialize America March 13, 2025
Peace through strength has been an enduring doctrine in American foreign policy. From Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick to Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program, successful presidents have understood this instinctively. But the nature of war, as in all things,...
One Woman's Rage against the Machine March 13, 2025
The cultural critic Katherine Dee has long argued that the true division in our culture will prove not to be Right vs. Left but Tech vs. Anti-Tech. One can see this happening now: the relationship between tech and the Democratic party was always stra...
The Reading Life March 10, 2025
We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning is framed in a fundamentally transactional way. What will this do for me?...
The Rise of Yuppiefuturism February 13, 2025
Legions of Patrick Bateman lookalikes, clad in power suits and smoking cigarettes. YMCA plays on repeat. Twenty-five years on from the release of American Psycho, the Yuppies are finally back. And it’s Donald Trump who is responsible....
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
Faces of Transhumanism January 13, 2025
A Critique of Silicon Valley's TranshumanistsA look at the iron age of the last century might teach us that political thought is an exhausted form of radicalism. Great civilizations across the planet clashed, old empires were shattered, and new exper...
The Mystic of Silicon Valley October 17, 2024
What do libertarian Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Republican vice-presidential candidates, staunchly left New York playwrights, writers for HBO prestige dramas, Catholic bishops, and the top academic institutions in France have in common? All have ex...
Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley August 23, 2024
I sometimes have a strange vision, almost dithyrambic, of the late literary critic Harold Bloom descending through the lonely air of Silicon Valley. He would have hated it there, having called the internet the great grey ocean into which we were all ...
Boyle’s War August 14, 2024
GO WEST, YOUNG JOURNALIST.The spring of 2014 was a season of change at the Washington Post. One of the world’s richest men, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had just purchased the paper from the Graham family, which had owned and published it for generatio...
American Vulcan August 14, 2024
The facts of Palmer Luckey’s life are so uniquely bizarre—combining elements of fantasy with lunacy and also world-altering change—that they could be printed on magnetic poetry tiles, rearranged in an endless number of indiscriminate combinations by ...
The Battle of the Billionaires July 31, 2024
Money, fame, goofball venture status games — last week, the industry watched in titillated horror, with little gasps and pearls clutched, as famed investors Paul Graham and David Sacks went to total, scorched earth war. In a lengthy back-and-forth on...
The Oracle of Silicon Valley July 29, 2024
We are all Girardians now—whether we know it or not. The concepts minted in the early 1960s by the late French literary critic and philosopher René Girard explain the pathologies of the smartphone age as elegantly as Freud’s explained bourgeois neuro...
Inside California’s Freedom-Loving Hub of Hard Tech July 23, 2024
For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what th...
Is Silicon Valley Shifting To The Right? June 20, 2024
In May, the New York Times announced “Some Silicon Valley VCs Are Becoming More Conservative,” citing newly outspoken critics of President Biden, such as Marc Andreessen, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Sacks. Earlier this month, Gizmodo (RIP) publis...
The Irresistible Revolution May 17, 2024
“The entire book that you are going to read was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution.” These words were written by Alexis de Tocqueville in the introducti...
The Inventor of the Chatbot Tried to Warn Us May 10, 2024
Technological history may not repeat, but it occasionally rhymes. Last September, ChatGPT, the popular generative A.I. program made by OpenAI, released a voice mode that allowed users to talk to the software. ChatGPT then “talks” back. A few days lat...
Venture Capital’s Space for Sheep May 03, 2024
At Founders Fund, I hear dozens of pitches for new companies every month, and for the past year or so — regardless of who the founders are, or what product they’re pitching — someone will say “artificial intelligence” within the first five minutes of...
When Silicon Valley Stopped Trying to Save the World May 01, 2024
In September 2020, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, did something unthinkable in Silicon Valley: he said there would be no politics at his company....
Tech Strikes Back February 13, 2024
A new tech ideology is ascendant online. “Introducing effective accelerationism,” the pseudonymous user Beff Jezos tweeted, rather grandly, in May 2022. “E/acc” — pronounced ee-ack — “is a direct product [of the] tech Twitter schizosphere,” he wrote....
"Is This Legal?" February 05, 2024
In the wake of the George Floyd protests, tech companies promised to hire more minorities. One company that claims to help them do it is Gem, and although you might not have heard of it, you’ve probably heard of some of its 1,200-plus clients: Reddit...
Ambitious Nihilism January 15, 2024
The Palo Alto suicides started in 2002, when Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto High School class of 2007 and author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, must have been in middle school.I, a year ahead in the class of 2006, was ad...
