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The information trade : how big tech conquers countries, challenges our rights, and transforms our world / by Wichowski, Alexis,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."In this eye-opening, must-read book, a political insider and tech expert explains what's at stake for our tech-enabled lives-and what we can do about it. Neither an industry apologist nor irrational fearmonger, Alexis Wichowski considers the unchecked rise of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla-what she calls "net states"-and their growing and unavoidable influence in our lives. Combining original reporting, extensive research, and interviews with technology and government insiders, including Microsoft president Brad Smith, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and the world's first ambassador to Silicon Valley, Alexis Wichowski explores what happens when we cede our power to tech giants, willingly trading our personal freedom and individual autonomy for an easy, plugged-in existence. Written for the tech-savvy and tech-phobic alike, The Information Trade lays out how net states are conquering countries, challenging our rights, and transforming our future. Most importantly, it shows what we can do to control our relationship with net states before they irreversibly alter how we are governed, how we think, how we act, and how we live"--
Subjects: Freedom of information; Information services industry; Internet industry;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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How Google works / by Schmidt, Eric,1955 April 27-; Eagle, Alan.; Rosenberg, Jonathan.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Google (Firm); Internet industry;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Burn book : a tech love story / by Swisher, Kara,author.;
From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing-but-fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead. 'Burn Book' includes soaring tales of innovation and brilliant entrepreneurs, as well as Silicon Valley's much more complex history of striving, success, and failure. The book details how the commercial internet came into being and how, for all it has given the world, it now sits at the centre of global power, creating a clear and present danger to humanity.
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Internet industry; Technology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Always day one : how the tech titans plan to stay on top forever / by Kantrowitz, Alex,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."An acclaimed tech reporter reveals the inner workings of the most powerful companies in the world, taking you behind the scenes with Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella. At Amazon, "Day One" is code for working inventively and urgently, as if it were the first day of your startup. Day Two is, in Bezos's own words, is "stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death." Amazon and its fellow tech giants are under fire for their size and power, but there's more to their story than anti-competitive practices and tax avoidance. These companies have kept ahead of the competition by embracing a new leadership model, one built for an age where companies can spin up new products and services at record speed. On the inside, these tech giants operate nothing like the corporate giants of the past -- like Exxon and GM -- which built core advantages and did everything they could to defend them. For these new goliaths, it's always day one. They are in a constant state of reinvention despite their massive size, understanding that once you become obsessed with the past, you will miss the future. Always Day One takes you deep inside these companies, revealing the uncommon cultures and leadership practices that have kept them from being picked apart by smaller, nimbler competitors. It details how their CEOs will do away with any obstacle blocking the free flow of ideas within their companies, how they're creating systems to bring the best of these ideas to life, and how they're using advanced workplace technology to make it all possible. Kantrowitz reveals a new model propelling their dominance at a stage when most big companies begin to decline. And he shows the way forward for anyone who wants to compete with -- and beat -- the existing tech giants"--
Subjects: High technology industries; Internet industry;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Extremely hardcore : inside Elon Musk's Twitter / by Schiffer, Zoë,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."When Elon Musk took over Twitter, two versions of reality emerged. In one, he was a free-speech crusader, a fearless visionary who could grab back power from Twitter's entitled workforce, motivate them to get "extremely hardcore," and multiply Twitter's profit and potential by orders of magnitude. In the other reality, there was the truth. Pulled from hundreds of hours of inside interviews with more than sixty employees, thousands of pages of internal documents, Slack messages, presentations, as well as court filings and congressional testimony, Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the world's online public square into his own personal megaphone. Despite having workers with a decade and a half of experience confronting Twitter's most difficult problems--from massive engineering infrastructure challenges to tricky policy decisions that could sway elections--Musk decided there was only one voice that mattered: his own. You'll hear from those employees who witnessed the destruction of their workplace firsthand. There's the machine-learning savant who went all-in on Twitter 2.0 before getting betrayed by his new CEO, the father whose need for healthcare swept him into Musk's inner circle, the trust and safety expert who became the subject of a harassment campaign his former boss incited, and the many other employees who tried to save the company from their new boss's worst instincts, and paid the price. This is the story of Twitter, but it's also a chronicle of the post-pandemic labor movement, a war between reckless executives and a workforce newly awakened to their rights and needs. Juicy, character-driven, and filled with unbelievable revelations, Extremely Hardcore is the definitive, fly-on-the-wall story of how Elon Musk lit $44 billion on fire and burned down Twitter. It's the next best thing to being there, and you won't have to sleep in the Twitter office to get the scoop"--
Subjects: Musk, Elon.; Twitter (Firm); Internet industry; Online social networks;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Version zero / by Yoon, David,author.;
"Max, a data whiz at the social media company Wren, has gotten a firsthand glimpse of the dark side of big tech. When he questions what his company does with the data they collect, he's fired ... then black-balled across Silicon Valley. With time on his hands and revenge on his mind, Max and his longtime friend (and secretly the love of his life) Akiko, decide to get even by rebooting the internet. After all, in order to fix things, sometimes you have to break them. But when Max and Akiko join forces with a reclusive tech baron, they learn that breaking things can have unintended--and catastrophic--consequences"--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Internet; Internet industry; Revenge; Social media; Technology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Battle for the bird : Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 billion fight for Twitter's soul / by Wagner, Kurt(Journalist),author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In Battle for the Bird, Bloomberg journalist Kurt Wagner takes the reader inside Twitter's everchanging headquarters, charting its rise from flippant 140-character posts to one of the world's most consequential tech companies. From Jack Dorsey's triumphant return as CEO in 2015 to the rise and fall of @realDonaldTrump to the contentious $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, Battle for the Bird exposes the messy reality and relentless challenges that come with building a global social network. With enthralling minute-by-minute accounts of Musk's controversial takeover from insider employees, Battle for the Bird exposes the real-world impact of the South African billionaire's new role as owner, and employees' growing horror as Dorsey's idealistic promises (and the "Twitter" name) go up in flames before their eyes. Battle for the Bird is the definite, objective, and substantive account of the fight over the world's most influential social media platform. Now, for the first time--through deeply sourced, exclusive interviews--readers will discover how the visionary promises of one iconoclast gave way to the darker, yet-to-be-defined motives of another, upending the virtual status quo and impacting the flow of news and information to the masses"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Dorsey, Jack, 1976-; Musk, Elon.; Twitter (Firm); Internet industry; Online social networks;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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How to turn down a billion dollars : the Snapchat story / by Gallagher, Billy,1992-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.In the tradition of great business narratives, 'How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars' is the improbable and exhilarating story of the rise of Snapchat from a frat boy fantasy to a multi-billion dollar internet unicorn that has dramatically changed the way we communicate.
Subjects: Snap Inc.; Snapchat (Electronic resource); Internet industry; Businesspeople; Entrepreneurship;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Ripe : a novel / by Etter, Sarah Rose,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Startup burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets. Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever-closer as the world around her unravels. When her CEO's demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, Ripe portrays one millennial woman's journey through our late-capitalist hellscape and offers a brilliantly incisive look at the absurdities of modern life"--
Subjects: Magic realist fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Women; Affective disorders; Internet industry;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Traffic : genius, rivalry, and delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral / by Smith, Ben(Journalist),author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The origin story of the Age of Disinformation: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and Buzzfeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale in the first two decades of the 21st century helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society. If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the impact of climate change. The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000's, in that brief moment after the first dotcom crash and before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City rather than Silicon Valley might become tech's center of gravity. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier crew at HuffPost and Buzzfeed were building the foundations of click-bait media. It was tech's age of innocence: the old establishment might have been discredited by the Iraq War, but digital news would facilitate the spread of truth. Progressive activists were first to the scene, and for a while it seemed they were the scene. After all, didn't they get Barack Obama elected? Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, was either there or talked to everyone who was, and in his trademark fashion, he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity scored with dark wit, sparing no one--and certainly not himself. Denton and Gawker were seen at the time as the black hats, but in Smith's hands the story is much more nuanced: yes, Denton's ideology of radical transparency was problematic, but at least he had an ideology. Jonah Peretti survived long after Denton's Gawker perished because his focus on clicks was relentlessly content-agnostic. But as with the proverbial sorcerer's apprentice, unintended consequences began to gain momentum. At the heart of Traffic is one of the great ironies of our time: the internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. As Smith and his colleagues and rivals thought they were inventing digital media, other figures, flickering around the margins of their story, had different designs. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart and Gavin McInnes and Chris Poole, the creator of 4chan, all seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick and Jonah and crew were the stars. By 2020, any reasonable observer might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case. To understand how we got here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Denton, Nicholas.; Peretti, Jonah.; Digital media; Internet industry; News Web sites;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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