Silicon States

June 4, 2018
In this ominous but shallowly argued volume, Greene, a director at the advertising giant J. Walter Thompson’s Innovation Group, declares that the rapid growth of Silicon Valley—represented by a cluster of digital technology firms including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Tesla—has far-reaching consequences for society. Valley companies’ increasing power and ambition to “disrupt,” she writes, threaten to erode the foundations of democratic governance, put in place a global surveillance regime, and cede power over society to a group of privileged white men who “don’t like paying taxes.” Unfortunately, Greene is hard pressed to make sense of the complexities of big tech. In chapters about Silicon Valley’s impact on government, media, education, healthcare, and other sectors, she combines insufficiently rigorous analysis with a plodding, repetitive style that circles back to the same rhetorical devices in chapter after chapter (“Where creativity, concepts, and culture could be innovative before, somehow technology and data have become the primary things associated with the future”). Moreover, the book portrays the region’s encroachment on national sovereignty as unprecedented, but fails to acknowledge that older brands such as Ford, General Motors, IBM, and Pepsi were political entities long before Silicon Valley’s time. Greene also attempts to shoehorn a year’s worth of headlines into her analysis, touching on #MeToo and Trump-era populism before laying the blame for political breakdown at the feet of millennials too busy “growing mustaches” to vote. The result is a provocative yet often unreadable account.

June 15, 2018
Tech writer and think-tank denizen Greene looks at what may be big tech's greatest disruption of all: the disruption of the political order.Do you want Amazon making health care decisions on your account, if not your behalf? It's not far-fetched, writes the author. In the blink of an eye, even as power has shifted to the ultrawealthy, Silicon Valley's cultural influence now extends far beyond technology as such. "Having taken over our lifestyles," warns Greene, "they are vying for our healthcare, infrastructure, energy, space travel, education, and postal systems." They're not doing so out of altruistic intent, either; while some public good may be realized by education reform, for instance, there's also a lot of money to be made in the game. The political power of tech corporations, more so than other kinds of companies, is amplified, Greene adds, by the fact that the current president seems so weak and hapless. But, as she asks, "is Silicon Valley the right replacement?" Perhaps it is, if in a roundabout way. Though what she calls the "PayPal mafia" is characterized by a profound lack of social engagement, with leaders like Peter Thiel spouting a kind of Ayn Rand-ian me-first-ism. Though the current crop of youngsters in the valley are white males "with a real blind spot towards issues of race and gender," the vast number of young men and women coming along in Generation Z are different. As they enter the electorate and the workforce, this ethnically mixed, tolerant, "radically progressive" cohort is likely to shift politics and the culture leftward, meaning that in the near future, Silicon Valley may become a force for good--"or, at least, better than the current greying bunch burning the planet down." In that light, reinventing government may turn out to be just the thing that's needed.A fascinating exercise in description, prescription, and prognosis that we'll have a chance to field-test in the near future.

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July 1, 2018

Greene (director, futurist, J. Walter Thompson's Innovation Group) looks at the ways in which multinational tech giants, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and others have resisted government regulation while pushing to take over functions traditionally provided by the state. According to the author, while democratic governments have to balance the interests of constituents, not just shareholders, corporations make decisions based on business goals not moral grounds, despite marketing themselves as being for the social good. Even the philanthropy of corporate leaders is tied to business interests. Greene goes on to explore how Silicon Valley aims to disrupt basic infrastructures of transportation, education, health care, and property ownership in America and abroad, building infrastructure in underdeveloped countries where such services could create monopolistic control. With large amounts of capital plus implementation timescales not tied to an election cycle, they can engage in moonshot projects (sometimes literally) beyond the capacities of individual governments. Ultimately, Greene leaves open the question of whether flaws such as hubris and sexism will check these juggernauts. VERDICT An open-eyed analysis of influential technology companies' ambitions of interest to investors, tech users, and media consumers.--Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

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