One of New York Magazine's best books on Silicon Valley!
The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon
Valley and shaped Big Tech in America
Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential
historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the
White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the
commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined
Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and
how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's
success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering
research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley
for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of
powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the
Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that
started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way,
and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective
hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating
second-order effects.
Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the
justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of
explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara
has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American
history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all
of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings
through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for
the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural
narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most
impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture
capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that
became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing
technological innovation to market, or not.
The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American
economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and,
increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's
masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic
history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.
