How long does it take to read Abolish Silicon Valley?
Wendy Liu
Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu takes about 4 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 30 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2020. 245 pages, about 67,375 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 29 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 48 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon warehouse workers or Uber. We're starting to see the cracks in the edifice, as we realise that the wealth that the tech industry is so good at creating is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality and unsubstantiated lies of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that led to Silicon Valley in its current form, and links them to the economy at large. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not merely to enrich a select few.
Subjects: Technology, Social aspects, Moral and ethical aspects, Business ethics, Capitalism, Technology and civilization
