Beware the Big Five

Tamsin Shaw   

April 5, 2018 Issue


The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace    
by Alexander Klimburg
Penguin, 420 pp., $30.00

The big Silicon Valley technology companies have long been viewed by much of the American public as astonishingly successful capitalist enterprises operated by maverick geniuses. The largest among them—Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google (the so-called Big Five)—were founded by youthful and charismatic male visionaries with signature casual wardrobes: the open-necked blue shirt, the black polo-neck, the marled gray T-shirt and hoodie. These founders have won immense public trust in their emergent technologies, from home computing to social media to the new frontier, artificial intelligence. Their companies have seemed to grow organically within the flourishing ecology of the open Internet.

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continua qui: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/05/silicon-valley-beware-big-five/