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:

Essay

Defending Democratic Mechanisms and Institutions against Disinformation Attacks – with Bruce Schneier

January 28, 2019 DefusingDis.info with Bruce Schneier
To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain forms of information attacks that autocracies naturally resist. Our model combines ideas from both international security and computer security, avoiding the limitations of both in explaining how influence attacks may ...
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Academic Article

Breaking the Path of Institutional Development: Alternatives to the New Determinism in Political Economy

February 9, 2004 Rationality and Society with Colin Crouch
The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can then be argued that actors will ...
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