Eight books 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:

Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson

A professor friend of mine (hi, Pete!) recommended this book around the time of the Google Walkout, when I was beginning to realize that, as righteous as we felt demanding greater accountability from Google, the company felt no obligation to provide it. It’s a slim, riveting manifesto that permanently changed how I think about work.

Elizabeth Anderson asks a deceptively simple question: Why do we insist on democracy in public life while accepting authoritarian rule at work? Her answer is that corporations aren’t simply voluntary market arrangements. They are private governments, exercising extraordinary power over our speech, movements, relationships, and livelihoods with remarkably little democratic oversight.

I thought about Anderson often as Google began changing its internal rules to restrict speech, discipline organizing, and punish people who spoke out—moves that felt like abuses of power but offered little to no recourse, despite intense internal and public outrage. Once you begin seeing your employer as a private government rather than merely a workplace, it becomes very difficult to unsee. The perils of a society governed so extensively by corporations become impossible to ignore.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue