These are peculiar times for Silicon Valley. The word “Tech” no longer designates a standalone industry, a cluster of upstart firms in Palo Alto riding the optimism of an earlier era. It now functions as the backbone of almost every other sector. AI, cloud services, logistics, finance, farming, retail, and media: a surprisingly small handful of megacorporations now steer the vast web of systems that organize how we work, how we communicate, how we consume, and, increasingly, how we shape our own ideas (nbd…).
The central tension is clear: public anger toward Big Tech has never been higher, while the AI renaissance has only amplified the backlash. The technologies most people depend on are also the ones they trust the least. For much of my generation’s working life, names like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta were cast as humanity’s best hope rather than as some of its most vexing problems. Today, executives are summoned before Congress. Antitrust actions accumulate. Whistleblower memoirs have become global bestsellers. (Last summer, in a Paris Orly Airport bookshop, Careless People was one of only two English-language titles I could locate—the other being Harry Potter.) And yet, since these firms form the scaffolding of so much of contemporary life, public outrage has done remarkably little to loosen their grip. We have reached a place where AI products have become daily routines even as the public’s faith in the corporations behind them has eroded.
I left Google—or perhaps “was expelled” is the more precise description—in 2019, after helping to organize the Google Walkout. Writing my memoir, Don’t Be Evil, pushed me to search for a broader explanation of how Silicon Valley acquired so much power, why it is so deeply distrusted, and why meaningful challenges to it remain so elusive. These are the books that most shaped my understanding of the place that has become the air we all breathe—and, increasingly, the air we choke on.
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From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner
Fred Turner is my undisputed greatest of all time. No one has done more to explain Silicon Valley’s founding mythology—or to reveal how the industry has rendered the material consequences of its power strangely invisible. Turner highlights that Santa Clara County, the core of Silicon Valley, sits among America’s most polluted places, while roughly a quarter of local families struggle with food insecurity. That stark contrast clashes with the paradise the Valley presents to itself.
At the center of the book is Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a mythic figure in Valley lore (immortalized by Steve Jobs’s “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” commencement speech at Stanford). Turner demonstrates how Brand and his countercultural peers transformed the computer from a symbol of military bureaucracy into an emblem of personal freedom and self-expression.
That moral vocabulary became Silicon Valley’s native tongue: Google didn’t merely organize information; it empowered people. Facebook didn’t harvest attention; it connected humanity. AI startups aren’t simply building products; they’re democratizing intelligence.
The beauty and danger of that worldview lie in its tendency to recast political problems as engineering challenges. Turner gave me a framework for understanding how a deeply anti-institutional ethos took root—one that treated democratic institutions as impediments to be bulldozed on the road to cyber-utopia.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Published in late 2018—the moment the Andy Rubin scandal broke and spurred the Google Walkout—this book gave us language for something many of us had intuited but could not yet name.
Zuboff argued that Google’s real innovation wasn’t search or advertising but a new economic logic: treating human experience itself as raw material to be extracted, predicted, and sold. Whether one agrees with every part of her thesis, it’s hard to overstate its influence. She changed the terms of the conversation. After Zuboff, it became far harder to view Google as just another successful technology company rather than the architect of a novel form of power—and capitalism.
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Half the planet has already read this one, and it deserves a place on the list anyway. (Bonus: a few familiar figures drift between Wynn-Williams’s book and mine—a reminder that Silicon Valley is a remarkably small world.)
Wynn-Williams had extraordinary, almost passenger-on-the-corporate-jet access, and she makes the most of it. What emerges is not merely a portrait of one flawed company, but a study of what extraordinary concentrations of power do to the humans who hold them. Executives become shielded from ordinary life, surrounded by loyalists, rewarded for telling the boss what they want to hear, and increasingly unable to tolerate dissent. Decisions with the potential to affect billions are made by a tiny circle whose incentives drift away from the real-world consequences of their actions. Institutional self-preservation becomes the overriding motive.
Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson
A professor friend of mine (hi, Pete!) recommended this book around the time of the Google Walkout, when I was beginning to realize that, as righteous as we felt demanding greater accountability from Google, the company felt no obligation to provide it. It’s a slim, riveting manifesto that permanently altered how I think about work.
Elizabeth Anderson poses a deceptively simple question: Why insist on democracy in public life while tolerating authoritarian rule at work? Her answer is that corporations aren’t merely voluntary market arrangements; they are private governments, wielding extraordinary power over our speech, movements, relationships, and livelihoods with disturbingly little democratic oversight.
I thought about Anderson often as Google began changing its internal rules to curb speech, discipline organizing, and punish people who spoke out—moves that felt like abuses of power but offered little recourse, despite intense internal and public outcry. Once you start seeing your employer as a private government rather than just a workplace, it becomes nearly impossible to unseen. The risks of a society governed so extensively by corporations become impossible to ignore.
Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu
Catherine Liu isn’t writing strictly about Silicon Valley, but few books have helped me interpret my years at Google as deeply as hers. Her focus is the professional-managerial class: educated workers pushed to channel political energy into symbolic virtue rather than confronting power, ownership, and class head-on. It’s a formidable explanation for why elite institutions can look progressive while their power structures remain intact.
Google excelled at this dynamic. I worked in marketing, crafting campaigns for International Women’s Day, Black History Month, World Refugee Day, and YouTube’s endless “For Good” initiatives, spending vast budgets to broadcast the company’s values. Sometimes it felt as if we were marketing those values to ourselves. Yet the questions Liu argues matter most—who holds power and equity, whose labor underpins the system, who pays the price, and who ultimately makes the calls—were often off-limits. Looking back, the Google Walkout feels like a lucid break with that worldview—a moment when thousands of us still believed the company would choose its stated ideals over its own institutional interests.
Virtue Hoarders helped me understand how the performances of virtue can shield an ever-more-powerful institution, growing more centralized, more managerial, and less accountable to its workers. If Fred Turner helped me grasp how Silicon Valley built its mythology, Catherine Liu helped me understand why so many of us “PMC”-minded people wanted to believe it—and why stepping away from that worldview felt less like quitting a job than leaving a cult.
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
The n+1 essay that eventually became Uncanny Valley landed on my desk while I was still in the thick of Google life, and it struck me with a jaw-drop moment.
Wiener became the first writer I’d encountered who conveyed Silicon Valley’s interior psychological atmosphere—from the startup jargon and the free gourmet lunches to the almost religious conviction that every facet of life, from sheet music to the rhythm method, is ripe for disruption. She is an elegant observer of the valley’s most absurd, alienating, and atomizing tendencies—and of how those tendencies accumulate into a genuine psychological toll.
In reflecting on the everyday frictions that Silicon Valley promised to eliminate, she writes: “Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus… they made me feel human.” She reframes Silicon Valley’s core premise: what the industry treats as inefficiency, she recognizes as the texture of being alive. It’s a quiet but radical proposition. Few works have so precisely diagnosed what it felt like to exist under that spell— or why so many of us long to break free.
Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis
Written by Greece’s former finance minister, Technofeudalism contends that capitalism has not merely become monopolistic; it has been displaced by an entirely new order of economics.
Varoufakis argues that giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple no longer win by competing in markets or by producing goods. Instead, they own the digital infrastructure that everyone else relies on. These platforms operate less as classic capitalist firms than as feudal estates, extracting rent from businesses, creators, and users who have little alternative but to operate on their terrain.
Reading Technofeudalism helped me make sense of the transformation I witnessed firsthand at Google. The company I joined sold search; the company I left increasingly governed the underlying infrastructure through which billions of people locate information, connect, work, and now, with AI, even think. My story is about what it felt like inside that transition. Varoufakis lays out the economic logic that underpins it.
Empire of AI by Karen Hao
I came to Karen Hao’s gripping Empire of AI as a latecomer. I had departed Google before AI fully swamped Silicon Valley, and for years I had little appetite for catching up with its newer cast of characters. Hao changed that.
Although AI is sold as humanity’s next great leap, Hao demonstrates that it rests on the same foundations as the last tech boom: labor exploitation, resource extraction, and the concentration of corporate power. AI doesn’t replace Silicon Valley’s business model; it accelerates it.
I’ve been distant from day-to-day tech work for some time, but the vocabulary appears almost unchanged. Firms racing to build AI are simultaneously laying the groundwork for the infrastructures that hospitals, schools, militaries, and governments increasingly depend on, all while wrapping themselves in the same messianic rhetoric about “benefiting humanity” that I heard daily at Google. The stakes have grown, yet the ideology remains strikingly familiar.
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Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech by Claire Stapleton. Copyright © 2026. Available from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
