Silicon Valley
What do we mean when we talk about freedom?
When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country…
Life among the world’s biggest risk-takers
The billionaires currently driving technology and the global economy are willing to take bets on very long odds, and treat everything as a market to be played
Market apocalypse? No, a welcome correction
A bout of global stock-market turmoil and an outbreak of UK street violence as adjacent news items gave an apocalyptic…
Olympics on steroids: the millionaire behind the Enhanced Games
Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with…
The last battle: The Future, by Naomi Alderman, reviewed
Sinister preparations for the apocalypse by a few Silicon Valley billionaires must be thwarted in this part-thriller, part-Big Tech critique, part-meditation on doomsday
The rise of vampirism in Silicon Valley
The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about…
Violence in the Valley
When a man with a machete infiltrates a local synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the peace of one the ‘greenest, quietest, safest’ places in America is shattered
The end of the Silicon Valley dream
It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and…
Boris is about to give Silicon Valley censors more power than ever
Four years in the making, the Online Safety Bill has now been sent to senior ministers for review — a…
The rise of the new autocracy
Gstaad Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over:…
A brief history of the death of God
A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord,…
Prince Harry gets a job in Silicon Valley
Where does one find freedom these days? A billion dollar Silicon Valley tech company now appears to be the answer. Mr…
Milwaukee is a victory for Silicon Valley’s shadow state
The real venue for the Democratic National Convention will not be Milwaukee, but the online platforms that will facilitate and…
Who will take on the behemoths of Big Tech?
With Britain having gone through its third general election in four years, the halcyon days of Cleggmania in the 2010…
Could AI enslave humanity before it destroys it entirely?
Depending on how you count, we are in the midst of the second or third AI hype-bubble since the 1960s,…
Silicon Valley’s weird ideas on how to improve human life
Which is more diverse: London or Devon? That’s not a trick question. London is much more diverse than Devon. But…
Where’s the internet revolution they promised us?
At the risk of sounding like Jean Baudrillard, I would like to suggest that the internet revolution has not yet…
In The US of A, it’s a woman’s, woman’s, woman’s world!
New York If Albanian television had shown the programme CBS did last week — with a woman who has sex…
A tale of two Valleys
Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of…
We’re swamped with nonsense gizmos and it’s all Steve Job’s fault
I keep being told that the big hot technological gizmo of the moment is a box that sits in the…
The unforeseen dangers of Uber and Airbnb
In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be…
The other side to the division of labour: the concentration of attention
Adam Smith’s theory on the division of labour first appeared in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. The idea was…
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece — they go back at least to the Peloponnesian War
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp,…
The villains of Silicon Valley
David Honigmann 20 May 2023 9:00 am
Malcolm Harris is unsparing in his attack on Palo Alto’s tech giants past and present, including Leland Stanford, Herbert Hoover, William Shockley and Peter Thiel