First published: 2017.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-246) and index.

Introduction: "To serve man" -- John McCarthy: "Solving today's problems tomorrow" -- Frederick Terman: "Stanford can be a dominating factor in the West" -- Bill Gates: "Most of all you steal your software" -- Marc Andreesen: "By the power vested in me by no one in particular" -- Jeff Bezos: "When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?" -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "It was like, wow, maybe we really should start a company now" -- Peter Theil: "Monopolists lie to protect themselves" -- Reid Hoffman et al.: "My membership in a notable corporate alumni group in Silicon Valley has opened the door ..." -- Jimmy Wales: "Wikipedia is something special" -- Mark Zuckerberg: "Nerds win" -- The future: "Local, small-scale, active."

This book chronicles the rise of Silicon Valley as a political and intellectual force in American life and its libertarian vision of a hypercompetitive society without the protection of unions, government regulations, or social welfare programs. he Beginning: a Stanford University lab embarked on an idealistic quest to create an artificial intelligence that would benefit society, perhaps even profit the makers. There were few women or minorities in the department and its head rejected the very idea of authority, but really what could go wrong? Now: more and more aspects of our lives are being dictated by a tiny, unaccountable elite, a breakaway sect of free-market libertarians who are determined to bypass government and enrich themselves at the expense of society. Pioneers and self-proclaimed geniuses like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg have not only made the Internet what it is today ? their impact on the world has been profound. This is a history of Silicon Valley through its eleven greatest entrepreneurs and a damning indictment of the greed, bias and outright prejudice of an industry that is fracturing America and taking the rest of us with it.