Silicon Valley

The last battle: The Future, by Naomi Alderman, reviewed

25 November 2023 9:00 am

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

2 September 2023 9:00 am

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

12 August 2023 9:00 am

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

4 June 2023 5:00 pm

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and…

The villains of Silicon Valley

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

Boris is about to give Silicon Valley censors more power than ever

19 February 2022 4:54 am

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

29 January 2022 9:00 am

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

18 December 2021 9:00 am

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

24 March 2021 2:14 am

Where does one find freedom these days? A billion dollar Silicon Valley tech company now appears to be the answer. Mr…

silicon valley

Milwaukee is a victory for Silicon Valley’s shadow state

18 August 2020 3:23 am

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?

14 December 2019 9:00 am

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?

26 October 2019 9:00 am

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

15 September 2018 9:00 am

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?

14 April 2018 9:00 am

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!

7 April 2018 9:00 am

New York If Albanian television had shown the programme CBS did last week — with a woman who has sex…

A tale of two Valleys

12 August 2017 9:00 am

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

19 March 2016 9:00 am

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

5 March 2016 9:00 am

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

5 December 2015 9:00 am

Adam Smith’s theory on the division of labour first appeared in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. The idea was…

Athenian general Xenophon

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece — they go back at least to the Peloponnesian War

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp,…