tech culture

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

A new history examines Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, the West Coast's settler ideology, and recent turbulence in the world of tech.

From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech’s gospel of data and control.

Joy Lisi Rankin’s book on the history of personal computing looks at the technology’s forgotten democratic promise.

Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies built a corporate proto-culture that continues to influence the company today.

A brief history of the textfile, and the production of conspiracy theories on the internet.

A new history dispenses with the sentimental lore and examines how Palo Alto has long been the seedbed for exploitation, chaos, and ecological degradation.

A new book offers a picture of an early Internet defined by community, experimentation, and lack of privacy. 

Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today's regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

What did the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog stand for?

Markoff’s biography of Stewart Brand notes that Brand’s ability to recognize and cleave to power explains a great deal of his career.

A review of three new books that in various ways track the rise of the "Professional Managerial Class."

How one video game tells the story of an industry.

Decades before 'Zoom fatigue' broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind.

What the troubled history of telecommuting tells us about its future.

When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned, governments blamed the 60-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed?

Tech was meant to help us transcend our most intractable problems. What went wrong?

It’s time to move past the tech sector’s creator myths.

The function of the "innovation" buzzword is to sustain the myth that business genius creates society’s wealth.

Silicon Valley veteran Mike Monteiro explains how designers destroyed the world.