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1. Genius, yes, but what about context and purpose?
   This book is “genius” on a number of fronts. The first is the writing itself. There isn’t any. With little narrative support the book is entirely made up of individual quotations grouped and stacked around the story of one Silicon Valley venture or another.At first this gives the impression that the author played more the role of researcher and curator than traditional author. And then it hits you. Fisher, in choosing the quotes and stacking them as if they represent the conversations taking place at a group therapy session, is creating the narrative through context. And that is both ground breaking and ingenious—and that makes it a perfect way to tell the story of Silicon Valley.By the end of the book, in fact, the individuality of the speakers begins to fade away and it begins to read like a traditional narrative. Although, journalistic to the end, the citations are never compromised. Brilliant writing, to be sure, on a par with the brilliance he writes about.The stories are fascinating and there is little question that there is an abundance of genius on display here, or that technology really has changed the world. But did the people portrayed here drive the change or were they propelled along by it? The same can be asked of Napoleon, or Thomas Jefferson, or take your pick. The answer, of course, is a little of both, but there is always a tendency to over-personalize larger historical trends that are far more complex than that.And I believe the choice of writing style may have been a tacit recognition of that on Fisher’s part. Individual to history to individual and back again. It’s powerful stuff from a purely literary perspective.The Buddhists refer to “dependent origination”, the idea that nothing exists in isolation. We can understand many aspects of reality but can never know it completely, meaning that all reality must be interpreted in context and is, given the infinite number of variables that define reality, ultimately illusory.During the Enlightenment, science and philosophy were considered two sides of the same coin. One was considered meaningless without the other. The word philosophy actually meant all knowledge, including scientific knowledge.That, of course, isn’t the current thinking among scientists. All sense of philosophical context has been lost and, as a result, we are essentially “dumbing down” knowledge in order to make it fit the scientific paradigm of the day. Which is why so much scientific discovery is ultimately proven to be in error, or at least not complete.Technology, it seems, is suffering a similar fate. Does AI take us to a new world beyond human intelligence or does it dumb down what it means to be human to fit the technological paradigm? Yes, autonomous driving cars will reduce the number of mistakes that human drivers typically make. But that’s within the context of human driving and that context will change. Will there be a whole new range of accidents that are enabled by the context of AI driving that don’t exist today?At the end of the book Fisher asks the geniuses (not used pejoratively at all) of the Valley what the future holds. And to a person there are two themes: 1. We are the masters of technology because we have a culture of disruption and innovation. 2. Technology will change the world.Fair enough. But what about context? A quick browse of any newsfeed suggests the world is imploding. And technology is certainly playing a role in that. Who is asking the larger contextual question about what that role is and how technology can become more than weaponized disruption in search of the next billion dollar payday?If the technologists don’t address the larger issues of social context they won’t have the freedom to create the wonderful technologies they envision. Nothing, not even the Valley, exists in isolation. (And, no, I am not a Luddite. I actually went to the CEO of my first corporate employer to convince him to buy me a 128k Mac, at a cost of $4,500, as I recall, over the strongest possible objections of our corporate IT department, just because I could smell change in the air and thought we should at least understand it.)This really is a brilliant book, brilliantly written, that everyone should read. I only hope that the genius outlined here finds context in the larger issues of social responsibility and progress. Technological progress without philosophical context will be hollow, at best, and destructive at worst.

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2. Fascinating
   So many parallel memories as I worked in the UK in the same space, so the book provided rich context. The style of many voices around the storylines is great and makes for a depth to each story. I’ve read many books around about this time but this one managed to add more detail and depth and makes for a fascinating read.

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3. The real voices of innovation.
   Wow. This is a great book. I grew up in Silicon Valley, and I really appreciate these first hand accounts, which take quite a bit of editing skill to produce. Definitely better to “hear it from the horses’ mouths” than get a reporter’s perspective, which is limited by PoV as well as (often) being far too young to understand the Valley’s evolution and ways. (FYI, I am far more interested in the early chapters, as Zuck’s generation is too money-power-greedy to carry on the Valley’s real tradition of freedom and hacking.)Update [19 Nov] after I read the whole thing…I bought this book for two reasons. First, I went to high school with its author Adam Fisher. Second, I am always interested in learning more about the history of innovation, entrepreneurship and start-ups.I haven’t talked to Adam in 30 years, so my relation with him was more relevant in alerting me to the book’s existence than it was in my decision to buy it. That decision was based on Adam’s unusual method of telling the “uncensored history” through a “mashup” of first person perspectives on various Silicon Valley companies and trends. (Here’s the he-said-she-said excerpt on Facebook.)The book’s 28 chapters are arranged into “waves” that struck Silicon Valley, moving from hardware (70s and 80s), to the internet (90s) and then to social media (00s). These topics overlap and intermingle, but the groupings provide structure in a history book with nearly as many characters as the cast of War and Peace.I found this book to be an exciting read due to its broad coverage of most of the major players in the Valley over the past 50 years and its technique of telling stories using the fresh perspectives of actual participants. In combination, I learned a lot more about the evolving culture in my “home town” and how that culture changed itself before it changed the world.And what do I mean by culture? Try this (Loc 382):”Your basic values are essentially the architecture of the project. Why does it exist? And in Silicon Valley there are two really common sets of values. There are what I call financial values, where the main thing is to make a bunch of money. That’s not a really good spiritual reason to be working on a project, although it’s completely valid. Then there are technical values that dominate lots of places where people care about using the best technique—doing things right. Sometimes that translates to ability or to performance, but it’s really a technical way of looking at things. But then there is a third set of values that are much less common: and they are the values essentially of the art world or the artist. And artistic values are when you want to create something new under the sun. If you want to contribute to art, your technique isn’t what matters. What matters is originality. It’s an emotional value.”This quote captures the main tension that’s explored in the book (and prevalent in Silicon Valley), i.e., the tensions between free and corporate, hippy and troll, community and individual, art and engineering, acid rainbows and beery white dudes.Thus, the Valley’s inhabitants face a struggle between creating “insanely great” improvements in our lives and sacrificing us to their greed, ego and power. The book is full of warnings and wisdom from this struggle:”There was kind of a social policy: “You own your own words” was mostly about people had to get permission if they were going to quote you, but it was also about taking responsibility for your words.Larry Brilliant: And the reason that The Well succeeded was because of those things—not because of the software, not because of the money.”The tension between taking responsibility (and being held accountable) for your actions and denying that responsibility in a quasi-libertarian excuse to screw over others also plays an important role in my research and teaching. In many instances, water policy affects the social distribution of costs and benefits. In many instances, those policies are flawed because some group is able to take benefits for themselves at a cost to others. That’s the tension between a farmer’s consumption of groundwater and the community’s security. That’s the tension between Facebook’s promise to connect the world, and its business of profiting from manipulating those connections.I highly recommend (5-stars) this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the humans who built a Valley of Genius. Is the genius good or evil? The answer depends on who takes responsibility and who is held accountable.

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4. To paraphrase the title , the history of Silicon Valley from the pees that where there

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5. Une narration originale comme un patchwork parfaitement assemblé de citations/interviews pr composer des chapitres captivants sur la naissance de la révolution digitale jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Et arriver à éclairer les échecs et les arbitrages visionnaires qui ont articulé la grande histoire.

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6. Nice book

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7. OK

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8. As close as you’ll get to siiting in the cafe with all the movers and shakers from day one. Clarifies some of the confusions I had about who did what and when, the order some key things happened in (like the Xerox role in things , etc).A very pleasant cruise of a read, and rammed full of gems which on aggregate provide an excellent insight into the revolution after the industrial one.

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