Eight titles that puncture the myths of Silicon Valley

Claire Stapleton is a writer, communications consultant, and tech labor activist. She began her career at Google, where she spent 12 years in a variety of influential communications, marketing, and executive ghostwriting roles, before co-organizing the Google Walkout in 2018, in which 20,000 employees loudly protested the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment. Stapleton now advises executives and organizations on navigating the complicated communications landscape, speaks and writes frequently about tech worker issues, and publishes an existential advice column for tech workers on Substack.

Her new book is Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech.

At Lit Hub Stapleton tagged the eight "books that most shaped my understanding of [Silicon Valley] that has become the air we all breathe—and, increasingly, choke on." One title on the list:

From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner

Fred Turner is my GOAT. No one has done more to explain Silicon Valley’s founding mythology—or to show how the industry has rendered the material consequences of its power strangely invisible. Turner has pointed out that Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is among the most polluted places in America, while roughly a quarter of local families experience food insecurity. Neither fact squares with the paradise the Valley tells about itself.

At the center of the book is Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a mythological figure in Valley lore (immortalized by Steve Jobs’s “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” Stanford commencement address). Turner shows how Brand and his countercultural contemporaries 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 language: Google didn’t just organize information; it empowered people. Facebook didn’t harvest attention; it connected humanity. AI companies aren’t merely building products; they’re democratizing intelligence.

The genius and danger of that worldview is that it recasts political problems as engineering problems. Turner gave me a framework for understanding how a profoundly anti-institutional ethos took hold, one that treated democratic institutions as obstacles to be bulldozed on the way to cyber-utopia.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue