The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power

In this ponderous debut account, Tulane University business professor Lalka profiles Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley tech moguls who, he contends, have enriched themselves while subjecting ordinary people to constant surveillance and dispossessing them of their own data. His subjects include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whom Lalka criticizes for excluding users from the profits generated by the data they produce while searching the site. Uber founder Travis Kalanick is condemned for defying state labor laws to avoid giving drivers benefits and for letting employees use passenger data to track their one-night stands. Lalka suggests the wrongdoings of Silicon Valley CEOs stem from the philosophies of free-market economist Milton Friedman, who rejected the idea of corporate social responsibility, and capitalist ideologue Ayn Rand, who extolled the selfishness of “superior” men as a virtue. Lalka’s rehash of his subjects’ misdeeds is voluminous but doesn’t add much that hasn’t been covered before, and his message is sometimes hampered by over-the-top dudgeon. (Brooding on Kalanick’s corporate slogan, “Always be hustlin’,” Lalka writes that “the word that best describes such dominance-at-any-cost is neither closing nor hustling,” proposing that “it’s not quite, but it’s nearly... rape.”) The result is a vehement but unfocused jeremiad against the tech sector. (May)