![]() ![]() In 2011 Peter Thiel had already created controversy by launching his "20 Under 20" fellowship that pays bright students under the age of 20 a generous amount of money ($100,000) to drop out of college and go work.ĭespite all the hoopla about the inclusive multi-ethnic community of Silicon Valley, the facts spoke otherwise: Silicon Valley had been and still was very much dominated by the white male culture. The most popular blogs of Silicon Valley (Techcrunch to name one) were as acritical of and as servile towards Silicon Valley celebrities and businesses as the Russian newspapers were of Putin. And there was no doubt in anyone's mind that all Wikipedia articles on Silicon Valley celebrities and corporations were being carefully edited by hired guns, not by independent Wikipedians. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla commented that journalists need "to be taught lessons". Thiel's new venture, Palantir, was a secretive arm of the CIA developing technologies to "search and analyze data" (in other words, to spy on citizens). Gawker filed bankruptcy in 2016, sending a chill through the media world: Thiel had just warned the entire industry of the financial risk displeasing a Silicon Valley billionaire. In 2016 Paypal's cofounder Peter Thiel admitted that he had spent 10 years secretly financing a lawsuit against Gawker Media, a media company guilty of exposing his homosexuality in 2007. Its billionaires had little patience for journalists analyzing their lifestyle and their speculative investments, especially when those reports revealed paranoid personalities and dubious business practices, if not outright scams. No other region of the USA was applying the "Putin doctrine" more diligently and fervently than Silicon Valley. Russian president Vladimir Putin was widely considered to be behind the persecution (and sometimes murder) of dissident journalists in Russia. Basically, Denmark admitted that tech behemoths like Google and Facebook had acquired as much power as many governments of the world, and perhaps even more power than most governments.īut this disproportionate political power came with a price, an increasingly dysfunctional and unethical (and unregulated) system. In 2017 Denmark became the first nation to formally create a diplomatic post to represent its interests in Silicon Valley and Casper Klynge became, de facto, the world's first foreign ambassador to Silicon Valley. 9 from the tiny Bay Area (more in the Bay Area than in all other continents combined). In 2016 the MIT Technology Review compiled a list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world: in the top 25 there were 5 from China, 2 from Europe, 1 from Japan and. San Francisco didn't even have one million, and Palo Alto was a tiny town of only 50,000 people. The other cities all had more than 8 million people. Palo Alto came out 7th and San Francisco 10th. In 2016 Forbes compiled a ranking of cities based on the combined net worth of their billionaires. The San Francisco Bay Area would rank fifth behind the USA, Britain, Germany and France in Nobel Prize winners. If it declared independence, the Bay Area alone (not the whole of California) would rank 22nd in the world for GDP and third in GDP per capita. The Bay Area boasted the number-one companies in social media (Facebook), semiconductors (Intel) and business software (Oracle). The top most valued companies in the world (by market evaluation) were in the Bay Area: Alphabet/Google and Apple. By 2015 the Bay Area dwarfed any other region of the world for technology and science. Gone were the days when Boston thought it could compete easily with those eccentrics of the Far West. Gone were the days when Europeans looked down on Silicon Valley as a childish and doomed experiment. The influence of Silicon Valley over the rest of world was increasing, as was increasing the gap between Silicon Valley and any other region of the world. The Selfies (2011-16) click here for the other sections of this chapter The Empire Continued Purchase the book These are excerpts from Piero Scaruffi's book A History of Silicon Valley Table of Contents ![]()
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