Ben Tarnoff's Books

Internet for the People

The Fight for Our Digital Future

By: Ben Tarnoff

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Internet for the People

The Fight for Our Digital Future

By: Ben Tarnoff

Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone’s behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

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Page Count

273

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1839762047

ISBN 13

9781839762048

Voices from the Valley

Tech Workers Talk About What They Do--and How They Do It

By: Ben Tarnoff,Moira Weigel

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Voices from the Valley

Tech Workers Talk About What They Do--and How They Do It

By: Ben Tarnoff,Moira Weigel

From FSGO x Logic: anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, providing a bird's-eye view of the industry In Voices from the Valley, the celebrated writers and Logic cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unprecedented dive into the tech industry, conducting unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

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FSG Originals

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374721262

ISBN 13

9780374721268

The Bohemians

Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

By: Ben Tarnoff

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The Bohemians

Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

By: Ben Tarnoff

An extraordinary portrait of a fast-changing America—and the Western writers who gave voice to its emerging identity At once an intimate portrait of an unforgettable group of writers and a history of a cultural revolution in America, The Bohemians reveals how a brief moment on the far western frontier changed our culture forever. Beginning with Mark Twain’s arrival in San Francisco in 1863, this group biography introduces readers to the other young eccentric writers seeking to create a new American voice at the country’s edge—literary golden boy Bret Harte; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and beautiful, haunted Ina Coolbrith, poet and protector of the group. Ben Tarnoff’s elegant, atmospheric history reveals how these four pioneering writers helped spread the Bohemian movement throughout the world, transforming American literature along the way. “Tarnoff’s book sings with the humor and expansiveness of his subjects’ prose, capturing the intoxicating atmosphere of possibility that defined, for a time, America’s frontier.” -- The New Yorker “Rich hauls of historical research, deeply excavated but lightly borne.... Mr. Tarnoff’s ultimate thesis is a strong one, strongly expressed: that together these writers ‘helped pry American literature away from its provincial origins in New England and push it into a broader current’.” -- Wall Street Journal

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338

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0143126962

ISBN 13

9780143126966

Internet for the People

The Fight for Our Digital Future

By: Ben Tarnoff

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Internet for the People

The Fight for Our Digital Future

By: Ben Tarnoff

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

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Page Count

245

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1839762039

ISBN 13

9781839762031

Voices from the Valley

Tech Workers Talk About What They Do--and How They Do It

By: Ben Tarnoff,Moira Weigel

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Voices from the Valley

Tech Workers Talk About What They Do--and How They Do It

By: Ben Tarnoff,Moira Weigel

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FSG Originals

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374721262

ISBN 13

9780374721268

A Counterfeiter's Paradise

The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers

By: Ben Tarnoff

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A Counterfeiter's Paradise

The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers

By: Ben Tarnoff

This tale of counterfeiting is a treat for everyone...a delightful history lesson...Admirable and altogether charming." -The Washington Post As Ben Tarnoff reminds us in this entertaining narrative history, get-rich-quick schemes are as old as America itself. Indeed, the speculative ethos that pervades Wall Street today, Tarnoff suggests, has its origins in the counterfeiters who first took advantage of America's turbulent economy. In A Counterfeiter's Paradise, Tarnoff chronicles the lives of three colorful counterfeiters who flourished in early America, from the colonial period to the Civil War. Driven by desire for fortune and fame, each counterfeiter cunningly manipulated the political and economic realities of his day. Through the tales of these three memorable hustlers, Tarnoff tells the larger tale of America's financial coming-of-age, from a patchwork of colonies to a powerful nation with a single currency.

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459

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1101574836

ISBN 13

9781101574836

The New Fire

War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI

By: Ben Buchanan,Andrew Imbrie

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The New Fire

War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI

By: Ben Buchanan,Andrew Imbrie

AI is revolutionizing the world. Here’s how democracies can come out on top. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose. The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once seemed like science fiction. To autocrats, AI offers the prospect of centralized control at home and asymmetric advantages in combat. It is easy to assume that democracies, bound by ethical constraints and disjointed in their approach, will be unable to keep up. But such a dystopia is hardly preordained. Combining an incisive understanding of technology with shrewd geopolitical analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy. With the right approach, technology need not favor tyranny.

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Page Count

341

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262548488

ISBN 13

9780262548489

Fantasies of Virtual Reality

Untangling Fiction, Fact, and Threat

By: Marcus Carter,Ben Egliston

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Fantasies of Virtual Reality

Untangling Fiction, Fact, and Threat

By: Marcus Carter,Ben Egliston

The fantasies that underpin common perceptions of Virtual Reality—and what we need to know about VR’s potential risks as well as its opportunities. Virtual reality is the next new frontier for Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, who has overseen Meta’s investment of billions into VR, pitches it as the next dominant computing paradigm. More than just a gaming technology, VR is top of mind for academics, tech reportage, and industry evangelists who all see the potential for VR to revolutionize fields such as education and health, as well as the way we work and communicate. But will VR achieve all this? In Fantasies of Virtual Reality, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston strip bare the tech industry’s vision of a future dominated by immersive VR experiences, challenging the utopian promises of this technology’s potential. Carter and Egliston offer a critical account of VR in a variety of contexts, from gaming to human resources to policing and the military. They argue that while VR does hold significant potential, the overhyped expectations surrounding it, from achieving true empathetic understanding to transforming traditional education and office work, are often overstated and fraught with issues of privacy, control, and exclusion. What’s more, there is nothing truly virtual about virtual reality: VR is deeply entrenched in the material world, driven by tangible technological, economic, and social logics. An accessible introduction to this emerging technology, Fantasies of Virtual Reality is essential reading for anyone interested in what VR can really do—and what is just plain fantasy.

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Page Count

180

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262549166

ISBN 13

9780262549165

Team Building

A Memoir about Family and the Fight for Workers' Rights

By: Ben Gwin

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Team Building

A Memoir about Family and the Fight for Workers' Rights

By: Ben Gwin

From the author of Clean Time comes a firsthand account of the organizing effort inside one of the world's largest tech companies and its impact on one Pittsburgh family. In 2019, Ben Gwin played an integral role in organi

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Page Count

178

Publisher

Arcadia Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1953368344

ISBN 13

9781953368348

The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism

Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power

By: Ben Little,Alison Winch

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The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism

Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power

By: Ben Little,Alison Winch

This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism. Interrogating not only the founders’ political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism’s mode of command. The ‘New Patriarchs’ examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Peter Thiel. We also include Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these (mostly) men legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but ‘visionary’ masculinity to exotic forms of shareholding. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity, and postfeminism, locating the power of the founders as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of oppression tied to imaginaries of the American frontier, the patriarchal household, and settler colonialism. This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, and Gender and Cultural Studies.

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180

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000397637

ISBN 13

9781000397635

The Bohemians

Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

By: Ben Tarnoff

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The Bohemians

Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

By: Ben Tarnoff

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Page Count

338

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0143126962

ISBN 13

9780143126966

Moneymakers

The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters

By: Ben Tarnoff

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Moneymakers

The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters

By: Ben Tarnoff

Chronicles the lives of three colorful counterfeiters whose schemes reflected the culture of early America, describing their backgrounds and how they exploited period politics, economics and law enforcement to promote their operations.

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Page Count

369

Publisher

Penguin Press HC

Published Date

ISBN 10

1594202877

ISBN 13

9781594202872

Book's by Ben Tarnoff

Internet for the People

Internet for the People

Voices from the Valley

Voices from the Valley

The Bohemians

The Bohemians

Internet for the People

Internet for the People

Voices from the Valley

Voices from the Valley

A Counterfeiter's Paradise

A Counterfeiter's Paradise

The New Fire

The New Fire

Fantasies of Virtual Reality

Fantasies of Virtual Reality

Team Building

Team Building

The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism

The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism

The Bohemians

The Bohemians

Moneymakers

Moneymakers

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