A summer beach read about Silicon Valley ruining things
There are plenty of great hype men in Silicon Valley, but that hype loses its power if people start laughing at it. I suspect that Silicon Valley hype is effective in part because people want to believe that the world is better than this – that techno-solutionist bullshit couldn’t possibly be perpetuated at such scale in such a cynical way, so there must be some germ of promise in it. Accepting…
Because all this legal largesse just kept on coming, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Silicon Valley elite came to feel entitled to it – that as it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be, amen. But whether you consider the United States’ legal accommodation of Silicon Valley a good choice or a bad choice, it’s important to recognize that it was a choice – and one that has proved…
I’m trying (and failing) to resist the urge to engage in some armchair psychology here: my pet theory is that insecurity (in the sense of not feeling comfortable in one’s own skin) is at the root of all the world’s problems. I’m sure that, like the rest of us, members of the Silicon Valley elite sometimes have the creeping sensation that they’re not good enough. If they won’t acknowledge that…
It seems safe to say that the common usage of “disruptive innovation” has morphed into a more all-purpose description for “Silicon Valley technology being deployed in new domains to take market share from incumbents.” But despite this evolution, the messianic connotations that Jill Lepore identified remain: this kind of disruptive innovation is still seen as a panacea that can fix just about…
AI hype continues unabated in 2025, but lurking beneath the surface there’s a palpable sense of desperation about low AI adoption. You can see that desperation in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan when it says “the bottleneck to harnessing AI’s full potential is not necessarily the availability of models, tools, or applications. Rather, it is the limited and slow adoption of AI,…
Just like beauty, efficiency, competition, and security are all in the eye of the beholder. For example, one person’s “efficiency” may be another person’s “dismantling critical government infrastructure.” And yet technological solutions designed to make things more efficient, more competitive, or more secure are often presented by Silicon Valley as neutral and universally desirable. That veneer of…
In short, the predominant legal use of stablecoins is not for payments, but for speculative trading. They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts. Stablecoins are…
Let me put it more bluntly: we are kidding ourselves if we expect the private sector to solve the long-standing and structural problem of economic precarity, and we shouldn’t be surprised when businesses seek to profit from that economic precarity instead – that’s capitalism, baby! But some fintech businesses do claim to be so much more than profit-making enterprises, and then trade on those…
The answer to the question “can this technology actually do this thing?” is “no” when the technology can’t solve the problem at hand; the answer is also “no” if there’s not actually an identified “thing” for the technology to do. In the early days of the internet, it was abundantly clear to people that it was useful, even though the pathways to commercializing the internet weren’t necessarily…
To state the bleeding obvious, a lot of things in our society need to be fixed. But our experience with crypto – and with many of the other business models we’ll explore in this book – makes it clear that many over-hyped technological solutions are at best a crutch and distraction, and at worst downright harmful. Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to…