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Tag: Silicon Valley

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Noo in Town
August 10, 2016
The biggest economic advances often arise not from boom industries garnering big VC paydays, but from the support businesses that sprout along the periphery to exploit the boom. They fasten on to major economic trendlines the way that fungi, moss, and lichen exploit trees. Take ...

Q & A with Geert Lovink
August 09, 2016
Presently holed up at the Amsterdam School of Applied Sciences, 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley, tech critic Geert Lovink has held it down in different forms of European bohemia since the eighties, asking, over a series of five books: How can we use technology to actually make ...

Q & A with Evgeny Morozov and Dan Davies
December 07, 2015
A little while ago, director Dan Davies of Banyak Films in London materialized in The Baffler’s editorial HQ in Harvard Square with contributing editor Evgeny Morozov in tow, steered him to our admittedly tacky blue sectional couch, and, before a midday audience munching on ...

The Unbearable Emptiness of Politics as Code
June 30, 2015
Nothing inspires nihilism quite like physical proximity to a U.S. presidential campaign. Having attended my first pseudo-event of the 2016 election cycle in San Francisco, I must now banish the encroaching numbness by speaking its name. Evil, thy name is campaign ...

Google: Too Big to Derail
March 25, 2015
It seems handily coincidental that one week after we learned that Google survived an FTC anti-trust investigation without much consequence, the search company announced the hiring of a new CFO, this one plucked from Morgan Stanley. The finance industry, after all, is the ...

Silicon Valley’s Cult of Nothing
February 17, 2015
If Silicon Valley worships anything, it worships nothing. It excels in the manufacture of the immaterial and the incorporeal. It creates ideas to fill Thought Leader columns, TED talks, and conference circuits. It creates stock market flotations based on shareholder belief, and ...

Where Are Silicon Valley’s Surveillance Whistleblowers?
January 22, 2015
Last week, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, British Prime Minister David Cameron said—surprise!—that his government needed more power to monitor online communications. He went so far as to imply that encryption itself was a problem, and later said that American tech ...

I, Start-up
December 04, 2014
Listen and you’ll hear it humming along quietly in the background of your life. It’s the sound of other people’s labor. Alfred, yet another start-up in the on-demand service economy, promises to make it easy and affordable for you to finally tune that sound out. Offering ...

Musk on Mars: Silicon Valley Disrupts the Universe
October 29, 2014
It only took the mega-entrepreneur and fume-drunk Delphic Oracle of innovation Elon Musk six years to win the favor of the federal government and use it to get into space. The turnaround is so fast one wonders if he didn’t just call an Uber. Musk’s galactic start-up SpaceX ...

Silicon Valley’s Futuristic Mega-Zen Brain Machine
October 06, 2014
Biohacking, the hacking of biology, is a broad label that, in its most extreme form, can include DIY plant gene sequencing and the installation of magnets into your fingertips. But the term is also used to describe the habit of obsessively manipulating your diet and gobbling ...

Silicon Valley’s Office Politic
June 06, 2014
The workplace has played a fraught role in America’s pop cultural life as of late, particularly as refracted through the lens of popular television. We’ve had the banal cubicle hilarity of The Office and Workaholics contrasted with the austere eros and thanatos of ...