When O'Mara worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government, and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. She tells the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation. It is a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects. -- adapted from jacket

"The epic human story of how, out of a small patch of land in Northern California, high tech re-created America in its image, for good and for ill. Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its ow