The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

Scott Galloway Portfolio: 2017 978-0735213654 978-0593077894

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

Franklin Foer Penguin: 2017. 978-1101981115

The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball

Noam Cohen The New Press: 2017. 978-1620972106 978-1786073679

Credit: Illustrations by Kouzou Sakai

The phrase “Making the world a better place” famously sums up the stated aim of Silicon Valley. Three books on California's digital kingdom and its 'four horsemen' (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google) see that as at best self-delusional. Their authors characterize the 'valley boys', their companies and, by extension, the technology industry and all of computer science as destroying the United States by eliminating jobs and polluting people's minds — even enabling Donald Trump's presidency. Is Silicon Valley guilty as charged?

The Four, by marketing scholar Scott Galloway, is full of sharp insights and unconventional views. (Colourful asides include an account of his stint on the board of The New York Times as an activist shareholder, and a no-holds-barred career guide.) Instead of the usual rehash of product innovations or the personal peculiarities of valley players, Galloway analyses the big four's business context and competitive landscape, and clinically pinpoints differentiators of success that may surprise many. Apple stores, not the iPhone, transformed the company into a luxury brand — even as it enjoys a spectacular sales margin by maintaining its low-cost production base. Galloway's own proposals for success include a “T-algorithm” of eight factors (such as geographical location) for evaluating a company's prospects of becoming a trillion-dollar enterprise.

Galloway's main criticism of the tech industry is its impact on non-tech jobs. He suspects that Amazon head Jeff Bezos supports a guaranteed income in the United States because he looks at the future and does not see many humans in jobs. Amazon's warehouses and data centres are exhibit A in a robotics heaven. Galloway brusquely calls on “Jeff” to show some real vision.

In World Without Mind, journalist Franklin Foer argues that the tech industry has had a negative impact on knowledge and democracy, by controlling information flow. He sees tech as an existential threat. He focuses on its role in the decline of journalism and creative writing, drawing on his stint as editor-in-chief of New Republic. In 2012, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought the magazine to rebrand it as a digital-media company, prompting a staff exodus. Foer was given a monthly dashboard showing each writer's cost, production output and associated ad revenue. He hid it, fearing a demoralizing effect.

The industry manufactures 'junk information' that poisons our thinking.

Foer thinks that Silicon Valley's view of creativity is out of the middle ages, a time when it was held that “God alone creates” (in the words of thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas) and writers were manual labourers. He argues that the tech industry's assault on copyright laws, championed by the likes of legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, have resulted in large-scale collateral damage. Moreover, the industry manufactures 'junk information' that poisons our thinking just as much as processed foods erode our health, he asserts. Ultimately, he blames computer science. He sometimes finds a smoking gun — such as a Google engineer who explains that the company's book-scanning project is aimed at machine-readers, not people. More often, his evidence is unconvincing. Mathematician Alan Turing's work did not determine the path of the digital revolution, although Turing and others, from philosopher Gottfried Leibniz to writer Stewart Brand, made major technological impacts. No single person fomented the change. Much of Silicon Valley might still be orchards if the Second World War had not extended to the Pacific, drawing defence industries, money and labour forces to California.

Foer argues that the US faith in technology is no longer consistent with its belief in liberty. His call for resistance includes a raft of measures, from government regulation of digital monopolies' behaviour to the rigorous application of anti-trust laws.

Like Foer, journalist Noam Cohen investigates computer and tech pioneers to shed light on the evolution of Silicon Valley's ideology of radical individualism and relentless disruption. His The Know-It-Alls examines highly influential figures such as the often-neglected computer pioneers John McCarthy and Frederick Terman, who helped to transform Stanford, California, and its valley into a digital powerhouse — McCarthy as the father of artificial intelligence, Terman as a catalyst for local entrepreneurialism. These finely researched portraits are a joy. Terman's father, for instance, a Stanford University psychologist, devised the first US IQ test to identify the best and brightest for selective assistance. Local boy William Shockley failed to make the cut — only to go on to invent the transistor and win a Nobel Prize.

Cohen's arguments get contentious in the passages on what he sees as Silicon Valley's belief system. He is right that those who purport to serve others without their consent necessarily exploit. Yet his claim of a “natural affinity” between the values of Silicon Valley and Trump is shocking. The pillars of the Trump campaign, such as its anti-immigration stance, are the polar opposite of valley values. What Cohen sees is that digital disruptions caused by Silicon Valley businesses and their founders' libertarian principles have undermined forces that might have held Trump back, from mainstream media to labour unions. Hacker arrogance and entrepreneurial greed, he avers, have led to a loss of civility and empathy. He calls instead for a “just society” with “a commitment to the local, the plural, the small scale and the active”.

Is the future, or even the present, as bleak as these books deem it? I don't think so. Technological revolutions always squeeze parts of the old economy: players come and go. Intel, Microsoft and IBM could be called the original big three. The fabulous four of 'Web 1.0' were Cisco, Oracle, Sun Microsystems (submerged into Oracle) and EMC (eaten up by Dell). As Galloway puts it, “business mimics biology and, thus far, the mortality rate is 100 percent”.

Moreover, looking beyond the United States reveals a very different picture. Consider China. The early dominance of Baidu's search engine and Sina's Weibo social-media platform has not made them the sole arbiter of news. They have been mostly upended by Tencent's WeChat — itself now challenged by five-year-old upstart Toutiao. Something besides technology must be at work; government control over media does not usually benefit new entrants. As a long-time Silicon Valley resident, I often wonder which companies truly represent its spirit. To me that is, simply, and apolitically, innovation and entrepreneurship. Perhaps those who have made it symbolize only the past, and we need not pay much attention to their spiel. We'll have to wait to see what's around the bend.