Vaporware, Inc.
How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present
Format:Hardback
Publisher:WW Norton & Co
Publishing:12th Jan '27
£22.00
This title is due to be published on 12th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
For thirty years, techno-optimists have promised dramatic technological innovation as long as we—the public, journalists, regulators, and policymakers—keep out of the way. The results have been great for Silicon Valley but haven’t gone so well for everyone else. They promise to stop climate change while building resource-intensive data centers, evade governmental regulations at our expense, and watch wealth inequality soar as they enjoy a permissive tax code. Venture capitalists and the companies they fund have amassed wealth, status, and political power, but their bold pronouncements have amounted to little more than vaporware. In Vaporware, Inc., political scientist and tech commentator David Karpf looks back at the history of the digital future to understand the ideological project of techno-optimism, and why it has gone so wrong for the rest of us. With sharp wit and keen insight, Karpf debunks the foundational myths of the techno-optimists and traces how tech billionaires amassed power by selling the idea of the future. Eye-opening and essential, Vaporware, Inc. is a critical reappraisal of how Silicon Valley works and how we can make it work better.
"How Silicon Valley's tech leaders conjure a digital future that's always arriving, always at a critical inflection point. Karpf, a professor of media and politics at George Washing University, dismantles that storyline in a brisk, unsparing critique of the techno-optimist and techno-accelerationist narratives and the motives behind them…His sharp-eyed account is a call to action…A skeptic convincingly cautions us to be wary of Silicon Valley's motives." -- Kirkus Reviews
"This razor-sharp treatise by political scientist Karpf aims to dismantle the fallacies of techno-optimism that have dominated Silicon Valley for decades…an urgent reality check." -- Publishers Weekly
"Maybe once-upon-a-time the story that the tech industry told about the future seemed appealing. Maybe…The stories they tell now—particularly stories about 'AI'—are utterly, utterly dystopian. Karpf’s book traces a history of how this 'futurity' came to dominate Silicon Valley’s storytelling…And he quips a lot in the book, which makes it a joy to read, despite the depressing nature of 'techno-optimism.'" -- Audrey Watters - Second Breakfast
"Vaporware, Inc. provides both a decoder ring for understanding the ideology that has constrained and poisoned our future and a blueprint for taking it back. Required reading." -- Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine
"Vaporware, Inc. is a delightfully captivating account of how digital futures are manifested into tech mythologies. Through enchanting tales and snarky prose, David Karpf does an exquisite job of showing how the inevitability rhetoric of the present AI conversation is part of a much bigger continuum." -- danah boyd, author of Data are Made, Not Found
"Bracing and sharply observed, Vaporware, Inc. cuts through the fog produced by the Silicon Valley hype machine, mapping a path toward a hopeful, more equitable high-tech future." -- Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code
"David Karpf nails it. Since 2009, key players in the VC industry have become much like Hollywood studios and entrepreneurs like actors being auditioned for a role in their next blockbuster." -- Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media
"In this crucial book, David Karpf explains how Silicon Valley keeps on producing imaginary futures to attract investors and head off regulation, and explains how we might start building our own for real." -- Henry Farrell, author of Underground Empire
ISBN: 9781324106319
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages