Non-fiction review: The Know It Alls

The Know It Alls

Noam Cohen
Oneworld $24.99

Libertarianism is just capitalism after it's had a good joint, and Cohen's dissection of Silicon Valley Inc is a case in point. Nerdy reputations aside, and for all the talk of serving society and the warm and fuzzy libertarian talk on cultural issues, the figure-heads of Silicon Valley emerge from this study as just another bunch of self-serving capitalists, but with a laid-back image. When Instagram was sold to Facebook in 2012 for a billion dollars it employed 13 people. Cohen provides a short history of the industry and how a floundering Stanford rose with it, then gives potted biographies of major players: examining the self-made, individualist rhetoric, the political allegiances – with attention to Trump supporters – and the repercussions of the gathering data on all users under the all-seeing eye of Facebook, Google and Amazon.