Henry Farrell

Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions

In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto.

Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.”

Read the full article in Bloomberg Weekend.

Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Transnational Actors and the Transatlantic Relationship in E-Commerce” in The Negotiation of the Safe Harbor Arrangement, Creating a Transatlantic Marketplace – ed. Michelle Egan

July 22, 2005 ed. Michelle Egan Manchester University Press: 2005
In the recent past, scholars have sought better to understand the evolving EU-US relationship, both in its own right, and as an important example of emerging forms of international governance.1 Particular attention has been paid to the important role that transnational actors have begun to play in this relationship. Business, consumer, labour and environmental interests ...
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Academic Article

Codecision and Institutional Change

March 15, 2007 West European Politics 30 with Adrienne Hèritier
This article examines the sources and processes of institutional change in one important aspect of EU politics – the legislative procedure of codecision – and shows how interstitial change of institutions that emerges between formal Treaty revisions and under specific conditions may be formalised in subsequent formal Treaty reforms. We develop two related models of ...
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