The Code (Penguin Books)

With the subtitle "Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America", Margaret O'Mara has written a history for our time. It is a story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects.



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