Hawley¿s substantive critiques of Silicon Valley will be familiar to anyone who has watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix: Smartphones are addictive. Behavioral advertising is manipulative. Social media is bad for children¿s mental health. The biggest tech companies together spend tens of millions of dollars each year to buy influence in Washington. Facebook, Google, and Twitter wield too much power over communication. And they use it, Hawley says, to discriminate against conservatives. (Likewise Simon & Schuster, the book¿s original publisher, which dropped Hawley after the Capitol riot¿evidence, Hawley writes, of corporate America trying to silence him. The book eventually found a home with Regnery Publishing, a conservative imprint.)
Where Hawley¿s book departs from the standard anti-tech treatise is in his attempt to tie the current moment into a grand theory of American political...READ MORE