Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future

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. [em](Aug.) [/em]