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.

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Academic Article

Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity – with Cosma Shalizi

March 15, 2024 Communications of the ACM with Cosma Shalizi
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi (2024), “Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity,” Communications of the ACM, preprint, 67,4:25-28. U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its owndistorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize“engagement” — serving up content that keeps YouTube or ...
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Academic Article

The Power and Politics of Blogs

September 9, 2007 Bloggers Blogs Internet
The rise of bloggers raises the vexing question of why blogs have any influence at all, given their relatively low readership and lack of central organization. We argue that to answer this question we need to focus on two key factors—the unequal distribution of readers across weblogs, and the relatively high readership of blogs among ...
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