Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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Silicon Valley, and really the tech industry as a whole, is living on a historical vision of itself that doesn’t exist anymore. SV used to have a balanced trifecta of sorts between public research dollars, academia, and entrepreneurs. Public research dollars poured into the area’s universities for developing technological advancements, spurred on in no small part by the Cold War, students and staff used the knowledge and developments at said universities to launch startups that turned those developments into consumer-friendly versions.
Then the neoliberal era came, and the public research money started dwindling because ideology, let the free market innovate. So the academia became more focused on churning out entrepreneurs than straight research. The entrepreneurs had to keep up the act though that they were churning out technological leaps and weren’t dependent on the public research dollars. Hence facades of intellectual greatness built over elaborate marketing data dredging with no real innovation.
Who owns the Future by Jaron Lanier and Listen, Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People by Thomas Frank which references Who Owns The Future and puts it in the context of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party kind of a 1, 2 punch.
Lanier is an anti-socialist nerd, but he understands Silicon Valley thinking, being one of the original of them. His solution that he posits in this book is laughable to any of us, but is the thought behind things like NFTs and the drive to tokenize all our data on to the Blockchain.
evil nazis destroying the only sentient life bearing planet in the galaxy
All under pretenses of making a super awesome better in everyway fantasic space utopia on an already dead planet, and by better a feudal fiefdom with even less rules. 
CW SA reference
"Silicon Valley" and "sexual violence" are both abbreviated as SV. Coincidence? I think not.
Essay: The Californian Ideology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
This essay is mandatory for understanding Silicon Valley. It was also written in 1995, meaning there were already people back then who saw the bullshit for what it really is.
Book: Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
This book goes into detail on the origins of the Internet as a tool of counterinsurgency. It goes over Silicon Valley stuff in the latter chapters.
It was also written in 1995, meaning there were already people back then who saw the bullshit for what it really is.
That far back, many of the trust fund creeps that would become the billionaire vampires of our present day called themselves "extropians." They had this quaint idea that they would defeat the two old-saying inevitabilities of death and taxes. They were already coming up with bullshit ideas for internet funny money and of course wanted to live forever as space overlords.
Not much changed decades later, except they're older, richer, more powerful, and more afraid.