A Brief Rebuttal to the Techno-Urban Fantasy that Silicon Valley can be Replicated By all available evidence, Silicon Valley cannot be cloned. This fact, though inconvenient to policy makers and economic development strategists the world over, remains stubbornly true. The Valley’s mystique persists: a mythic land of hoodies and stock…
Category: Uncategorized
Innovation and Technology
Read more
Stop trying to build the next Silicon Valley. It can’t be done (and nor should it).
In contemporary economic development circles, there are few ideas more persistent or more poorly examined than the desire to recreate Silicon Valley. For over two decades, the world has watched a parade of billion-dollar unicorns prance out of Silicon Valley. In economic development circles, it’s now taken as gospel: if…
Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State by David Patrikarakos
The interesting thing was how it genuinely started from nuclear energy.
The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
This is a book about some of the most competitive people in science. It’s a joint biography of Jennifer Doudna (who in 2020 won the Nobel prize together with Emanuelle Charpentier) and the CRISPR method for gene editing. The former is significantly less interesting than the latter. Isaacson does his…
The Expendables by Jeff Rubin
This book remarkably made me wonder if Trump may have had a point on some issues relating to trade.
How to avoid a climate disaster by Bill Gates
The book is not high literature and contains no poetry or rhapsody on the beauty of earth or nature. It is a good practical survey of the climate change problem, paired with an array of plausible technology solutions, very much written by an engineer. I liked the way Gates methodically…
Reviews
Read more
A critical and irreverent exploration of technology’s grand promises, exposing the illusions, anxieties, and power plays behind innovation.
There’s no shortage of good ideas. The significance of a technology is not really in the idea; it’s in the execution. A mere idea will not change the world. Good leadership, good communication and faultless and execution will. I’m interested in big ideas: the bigger the better. The conquest of…