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:

Academic Article

Interorganizational Cooperation and Intraorganizational Power: Early Agreements under Codecision and Their Impact on the Parliament and the Council – with Adrienne Hèritier

December 9, 2004 Comparative Political Studies 37 with Adrienne Hèritier
The authors argue that closer attention should be paid to the interorganizational rules of decision making and their implications for intraorganizational processes. They claim that exogenous changes in macro-institutional rules, which result in a move from formal and sequential to informal and simultaneous interaction between collective actors, will lead to changes in individual actors’ respective ...
Read Article
Academic Article

AI as Governance

January 9, 2025 Annual Review of Political Science
Henry Farrell, “AI as Governance,” Annual Review of Political Science, forthcoming.
Read Article
Browse the Archives