Benjamin Shestakofsky's Books

Behind the Startup

How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality

By: Benjamin Shestakofsky

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Behind the Startup

How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality

By: Benjamin Shestakofsky

As dreams of our technological future have turned into nightmares, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs for the negative consequences of innovation. Behind the Startup takes a different approach. Drawing on 19 months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it. Investors push startups to 'scale' as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. I show how these demands created organizational problems that managers could only solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by Silicon Valley companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. Readers will come away from the book with the understanding that if we want to promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, we need to focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it"--

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Page Count

326

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520395026

ISBN 13

9780520395022

Behind the Startup

How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality

By: Benjamin Shestakofsky

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Behind the Startup

How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality

By: Benjamin Shestakofsky

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N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

326

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520395034

ISBN 13

9780520395039

Spy Plane

Inside Baltimore's Surveillance Experiment

By: Benjamin H. Snyder

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Spy Plane

Inside Baltimore's Surveillance Experiment

By: Benjamin H. Snyder

An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at one of America’s most controversial experiments in police surveillance. In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department had an aerial surveillance plane that could supposedly photograph and track every person in public view. Spy Plane reveals what happened with this controversial policing experiment. Drawing from incredible access and direct observations inside the for-profit tech startup that ran the program for Baltimore detectives, sociologist Benjamin H. Snyder recounts real criminal cases as they were worked by police using this untested tool. Deploying aircraft with powerful cameras built by a small company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, the spy plane program promised to help police “solve otherwise unsolvable crimes” by tracking the whereabouts of suspects in violent crime cases. Created for the battlefields of Iraq, it had never been adapted on so large a scale in a U.S. city. This riveting book gives an unprecedented look inside the shadowy world of for-profit law enforcement technology experiments, explaining why police and community leaders place so much faith in unproven technology to fix the problem of urban violence but continually come up short.

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Page Count

304

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520396049

ISBN 13

9780520396043

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Behind the Startup

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