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

Introduction: Blogs, Politics and Power – with Daniel W. Drezner

September 27, 2007 Bloggers Blogs Internet
There is good reason to believe that blogs are changing politics, but we don’t know exactly how. Nor do we know whether the normative consequences of blogs for poli- tics are likely to be good or bad. In this special issue, we and our co-authors undertake the first sustained effort to map the empirical and ...
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Essay

The Twilight of America’s Financial Empire – with Abraham Newman

January 24, 2020 Foreign Affairs (online) with Abraham Newman
When Iraqi lawmakers voted to expel U.S. forces from the country earlier this month, the Trump administration’s response was swift and forceful: it refused to withdraw and, for good measure, threatened financial retaliation, saying it would freeze Iraq’s accounts at the U.S. Federal Reserve. The threat seems to have been effective. Although Iraqi officials still ...
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