In recent months, the audio-based social media app Clubhouse has emerged as Silicon Valley's latest disruptive darling .The app strongly encourages all users to share their address book data so Clubhouse can help you make connections with people you know who are already on the platform.

Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem.To play Alyx, those headsets need to be wired to a high-end gaming PC.

At Google, for example 42 percent of the US workforce is Asian, but only 30 percent of people in leadership roles.“I am not going to sit back and allow companies to make an excuse that the talent is not there,” says Thomas, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO.

Now, the Omidyar Network has a new tool kit, designed to get tech workers talking about the way their products shape society, democracy, and more.Some companies in Silicon Valley have even created internal corporate positions to focus on those issues, like Salesforce’s Office of Ethical and Humane Use.

In its original form, this act would have established a commission tasked with outlining best practices for responding to the global pandemic of the online sexual exploitation of children.

My office life resembled that of any full-time employee: I snacked on charcuterie boards and fresh ahi poke bowls, rejiggered my calendar to accommodate conflicting meetings, and cheered for employees on their work anniversaries (a peculiar Silicon Valley ritual that celebrates equity accruing).Unlike full-time employees, contract workers aren’t entitled to Airbnb’s premium health care, generous 401(k), unlimited paid vacation time, transportation coverage, and stock options.

And this week, when the United States government filed one of most damning indictments in the history of Silicon Valley against eBay’s now-former officers, the company’s only comment was an unsigned four-paragraph statement distancing itself from the acts of its officials.

The tech industry was full of early adopters, but a survey from the Society for Human Resource Management in March found that two-thirds of US companies were “taking steps to allow employees to work from home who don't normally do so.” The mass exodus from the office is likely to change the way teams operate in the long-term.

One story of a suspected Covid-19 opportunist involves Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley technologist whose five minutes of fame arrived in March after he wrote a contrarian essay proposing that evidence didn’t support the “hysteria” over the consequences of the pandemic, that the problem might be sorta bad, but not really, really bad.

This enhanced status would come not only from our gratitude to these companies for stepping up during a tough time, but from the recognition that we have been too slow to incorporate new technologies in our lives.

A blockchain investor named James Todaro tweeted that an 85-year-old malaria drug called chloroquine was a potential treatment and preventative against the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

Elizabeth Warren, who has been criticizing monopolistic corporations for years, trained her fire on Silicon Valley early last year with an audacious plan to break up Big Tech , a call that Bernie Sanders joined.

Yang is the founder and CEO of Gantri, a San Francisco company that designs, fabricates, and sells 3D-printed lamps.The Signal desk light is one of the new lamps in Gantri's collection that was designed by the SF firm Ammunition, which is famous for some of Silicon Valley's most iconic designs.

Then companies like Google came along and reinvented the rat race into something with purpose and, along the way, confused work with the rest of life.Cargill, a major distributor of agricultural products, recently redesigned its offices with an open layout and adopted a more liberal remote-work policy.

Many startup founders, particularly those like Lavingia who specifically aspired to build a billion-dollar company, sell or shutter their startups and move on to their next big idea once they realize their company will never be what Silicon Valley venture capitalists want them to be.

The Commerce Department is, in fact, still weighing further AI software controls, and the Trump administration is increasingly scrutinizing how Silicon Valley interacts with China.“I don’t think any US government official expects to keep China from developing AI—they are doing quite well—but they don’t want companies like Google or Microsoft helping them,” says James Lewis, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington DC think tank.

It’s 7 pm on a Monday night in October , and Andrew Yang, the most idiosyncratic of presidential candidates , is about to storm a stage in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park.If Yang is the candidate of Silicon Valley, he’s the one driving a Humvee up the wrong side of the 101.

Buttigieg connected with his important supporters when he was not quite a teenager, making friends at Harvard with Facebook’s early team and other soon-to-be Silicon Valley figures like Mylavarapu, who volunteered with Buttigieg as part of Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

To Trump and Facebook alike, any attempt to push back, whether from politicians or the press, is treated as an existential threat.

And while machine learning now constitutes its own field of study, because scientists from fields like astrophysicists have been working with those kinds of models for years, they’re natural hires on data science teams.“We were already in Big Data before Big Data became a thing,” says Sudeep Das, an astrophysicist who now works at Netflix.

Since then, tens of thousands of people from around the globe have entered Pioneer’s eponymous tournament—a convoluted, semi-anonymous online competition that uses software and game mechanics like points, quests, and leaderboards to quantify participants’ real-world productivity and incentivize behaviors Gross and his team believe are key to success.

Lambda says enrollment, now 2,700 students, is growing at 10 percent a month; it foresees soon bringing the ISA model to other subjects, like nursing.The challenge, Allred says, is overcoming the stigma of for-profit coding schools, especially among Silicon Valley firms—which is tricky when you’ve been around less than three years.

As the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Warner has long been a vocal proponent of new legislation to strengthen election protections, such as the Honest Ad Act, which would compel Silicon Valley firms to disclose when political ads are paid for by a foreign nation.

Similarly, one might at first worry whether Silicon Valley food apps like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Seamless will survive the public outrage following a recent New York Times exposé of the hamster-wheel existence of the delivery people who use the apps to make a living.

On the surface, it wasn't: Huawei's new $1.4 billion Ox Horn production facility in Dongguan, where workers make smartphones and 5G equipment, looks more like medieval Europe than Silicon Valley. But at its core, the work culture at Huawei seemed the same to Frayer as at any massive tech company.

The business-friendly government was eager to nurture a Silicon Valley in Arizona and quickly paved the way for the company’s “miracle technology,” which purported to perform cheap medical tests from a single drop of blood.

HBO Over the course of 119 minutes in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley , Alex Gibney's new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, very little is made of Holmes' speaking voice.

"I just wish we could have created it without some of the business model characteristics that are causing the harm." Nicola Gell/Getty Images Longtime Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee met Mark Zuckerberg in 2006, when the Facebook CEO was just 22 and his two-year-old company still only catered to university students.

In response, Jeff Bezos told an audience at WIRED's own 25th anniversary conference, “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble.” But who would come and work on AI for the federal government or US military when the perks of Silicon Valley are spectacularly more attractive?

But its many pages make clear that while the Silicon Valley hype around robocars may have cooled, progress toward the day when humans are unshackled from the steering wheel continues: The 48 autonomous vehicle developers that tested their tech on public roads collectively drove 2.05 million miles between December 2017 and November 2018, up from 500,000 the year before.