Silicon States

The Power and Politics Of Big Tech And What It Means For Our Future

A Bracing Look at How Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, And Other Silicon Valley Power Players Are Using Their Influence Across the Globe to Encroach Upon Our Civil Landscape

In an era when faith in government and its institutions is quickly eroding, the businesses of Silicon Valley are stepping in to fill the gap. With outsize supplies of cash, talent, and ambition, a small group of corporations has been gradually seizing leadership—and consumer confidence— around the world.

In Silicon States, renowned futurist and celebrated international think-tank leader Lucie Greene offers an unparalleled look at the players, promises, and potential problems of Big Tech. Through interviews with corporate leaders, influential venture capitalists, scholars, journalists, activists, and more, Greene explores the tension inherent in Silicon Valley’s global influence. If these companies can invent a social network, how might they soon transform our political and health-care systems? If they can revolutionize the cell phone, what might they do for space travel, education, or the housing market? As Silicon Valley faces increased scrutiny over its mistreatment of women, cultural shortcomings, and its role in widespread Russian interference in the elections of other countries, we are learning where its interests truly lie, and about the great power these companies wield over an unsuspecting citizenry.

While the promise of technology is seductive, it is important to understand these corporations’ possible impacts on our political and socioeconomic institutions. Greene emphasizes that before we hand our future over to a rarefied group of companies, we should examine the world they might build and confront its benefits, prejudices, and inherent flaws. Silicon States pushes us to ask if, ultimately, this is the future we really want.

Lucie Greene is the worldwide director of The Innovation Group, J. Walter Thompson’s in-house creative think tank for the future. The Innovation Group’s work is frequently cited in publications including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, WWD, USA Today, and The Times (London). She is a thought leadership columnist for Campaign, writes for the Financial Times on futures, and has spoken at conferences including TNW, WWD Digital Forum, SXSW, Web Summit, Cosmoprof, and Ad Week, discussing future trends across multiple lifestyle sectors. She has appeared on BBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg TV as an expert on the future.

KHOONI VAISAKHI

A Survivor’s Account of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

The great Punjabi writer Nanak Singh was present at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 and twenty-two years old at the time. As the British troops opened fire on the unarmed gathering protesting against the Rowlatt Act, killing hundreds, Nanak Singh fainted and his unconscious body was piled up among the corpses. After going through the traumatic experience, he proceeded to write Khooni Vaisakhi, a long poem that narrates the political events in the run up to the massacre and its immediate aftermath. The poem was a scathing critique of the British Raj and was banned soon after its publication in May 1920.

After sixty long years, the poem was rediscovered; it has now been translated into English by the author’s grandson, Navdeep Suri, for the first time. Featuring the poem in translation and in original, the bilingual edition is accompanied by essays by Navdeep Suri, H.S. Bhatia and by Justin Rowlatt, whose great-grandfather, Sir Sydney Arthur Taylor Rowlatt, who drafted the Rowlatt Act.

Nanak Singh (1897-1971) is widely regarded as the father of the Punjabi novel. With little formal education beyond the fourth grade, he wrote an astounding fifty-nine books and recieved the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962.

Navdeep Suri is an Indian diplomat who is currently India’s Ambassador to the UAE. He has translated into English the classic Punjabi novels Pavitra Paapi and Adh Kidhiya Phool written by his grandfather.

Sail Away

By : Celia Imrie  | Published by : Bloomsbury India

The deliciously witty, irresistibly indulgent new novel from the top ten Sunday Times bestselling author of Not Quite Nice follows the exploits of two retired women on an Atlantic cruise ship The phone hasn’t rung for months. Suzy Marshall is discovering that work can be sluggish for an actress over sixty – even for the former star of a 1980s TV series. So when her agent offers her the plum role of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich, it seems like a godsend. Until, that is, the play is abruptly cancelled in suspicious circumstances, and Suzy is forced to take a job on a cruise ship to get home. Meanwhile Amanda Herbert finds herself homeless in rainy Clapham. Her flat purchase has fallen through, and her children are absorbed in their own dramas. Then she spots an advertisement for an Atlantic cruise, and realises three weeks on-board would tide her over – and save her money – until the crisis is solved.  As the two women set sail on a new adventure, neither can possibly predict the strange characters and dodgy dealings they will encounter – nor the unexpected rewards they will reap. Vividly evoking the old­world glamour of a cruise ship – and the complex politics of its staff quarters – Sail Away is at once a hilarious romp and a thrilling tale of intrigue, from the acclaimed pen of Celia Imrie.

Celia Imrie is an Olivier award-winning and Screen Actors Guild-nominated actress. She is known for her film roles in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Calendar Girls and Nanny McPhee. Celia has recently starred in the major films Bridget Jones’s Baby, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, Year by the Sea and A Cure for Wellness.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

By : @Stu_Turton |  Published By : Bloomsbury India.

A brilliantly original high concept murder mystery from a fantastic new talent: Gosford Park meets Inception, by way of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express ‘Somebody’s going to be murdered at the ball tonight. It won’t appear to be a murder and so the murderer won’t be caught. Rectify that injustice and I’ll show you the way out.’ It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed. But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden – one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party – can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot. The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath...

Stuart Turton is a freelance travel journalist who has previously worked in Shanghai and Dubai. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is his debut novel. He is the winner of the Brighton and Hove Short Story Prize and was longlisted for the BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines competition. He lives in West London with his wife. 

Folk

By : Zoe Gilbert | Published by : Bloomsbury India.

A captivating, magical and haunting debut novel of breathtaking imagination, from the winner of the 2014 Costa Short Story Award The remote island village of Neverness is a world far from our time and place. The air hangs rich with the coconut-scent of gorse and the salty bite of the sea. Harsh winds scour the rocky coastline. The villagers’ lives are inseparable from nature and its enchantments. Verlyn Webbe, born with a wing for an arm, unfurls his feathers in defiance of past shame; Plum is snatched by a water bull and dragged to his lair; little Crab Skerry takes his first run through the gorse-maze; Madden sleepwalks through violent storms, haunted by horses and her father’s wishes.  As the tales of this island community interweave over the course of a generation, their earthy desires, resentments, idle gossip and painful losses create a staggeringly original world. Crackling with echoes of ancient folklore, but entirely, wonderfully, her own, Zoe Gilbert’s Folk is a dark, beautiful and intoxicating debut.

Zoe Gilbert is the winner of the Costa Short Story Award 2014. Her work has appeared in anthologies from Comma, Cinnamon, Labello, and Pankhearst presses, and has been published in journals including The Stinging Fly, Mechanics’ Institute Review, Bohemyth, Holdfast, Lighthouse, and the British Fantasy Society Journal. In 2015 she appeared at the Beijing Bookworm Festival in China on behalf of the British Council and was commissioned by Microsoft to create a short story book. She is working on a PhD in Fiction and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, focusing on the influence of folk tales on contemporary short stories. 

A Black Fox Running

By : Brian Carter  |  Published by : Bloomsbury India.

A beautiful lost classic of nature writing which sits alongside Tarka the Otter, Watership Down, War Horse and The Story of a Red Deer This is the story of Wulfgar, the dark-furred fox of Dartmoor, and of his nemesis, Scoble the trapper, in the seasons leading up to the pitiless winter of 1947. As breathtaking in its descriptions of the natural world as it is perceptive its portrayal of damaged humanity, it is both a portrait of place and a gripping story of survival. Uniquely straddling the worlds of animals and men, Brian Carter’s A Black Fox Running is a masterpiece: lyrical, unforgiving and unforgettable.

Brian Carter Brian Carter was an artist, poet, columnist, children’s author, naturalist and broadcaster who influenced a generation of nature writers. His six novels all explore man’s relationship with nature, the first of which, A Black Fox Running, was published in 1981.

Melissa Harrison's debut novel Clay won the Portsmouth First Fiction Award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year for 2013. Her second novel At Hawthorn Time was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2015 and longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016. 

DAC Dhaka

By : Adnan Morshed & Nesfun Nahar  |  Published by : Bloomsbury India.

This guidebook focuses on 25 buildings in Dhaka, representing different architectural phases since the Mughal era, beginning in the early 17th century. (The earliest surviving structure in Dhaka is a small pre-Mughal mosque in Old Dhaka.) The list is neither exhaustive, nor necessarily representative of the “best” in town. Rather, the goal is to narrate the stories of the city through the buildings that played transformative roles in its architectural formation. The featured buildings (a) communicate larger ideas about Dhaka’s building tradition, (b) represent an architectural trend, (c) influence the architectural scene, and (d) offer a spatial story in the evolution of this city.

Adnan Morshed received his Doctorate and Master’s in Architecture from MIT. Morshed earned his Bachelor’s in Architecture from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), in Dhaka, where he also taught. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.

Nesfun Nahar is an architect and urbanist. She began her Doctorate degree research on Architectural Modernism at the Bangladeh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), in Dhaka, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture.