I’m French. And I’m a sociologist. This book is about Silicon Valley. It’s the one I wanted to read when I started my field work in Northern California in 2015. It didn’t exist back then. Plenty of great books and papers have been written on Silicon Valley, in history, geography, law, business, communication, and so forth. Tech journalists have been busy, too. But there was no real systematic sociology of Silicon Valley as a whole. So even if I was a foreigner and a complete outsider, I said to myself: let’s have a try! At that time, I knew nothing about tech, its industry, history, or products. I know no techie either, their lives, habits, career paths, and mentality. Ten years later, I think the book presents a detailed, fair, and complete portrait of the industry, its organization, economy, culture, and beliefs. The observation at the beginning of this work was this: we are surrounded by tech, Silicon Valley products, stories, ideologies, company valuations, superstar entrepreneurs, some of them even working in or for the Trump 2 administration. It’s part of our life and our world. But Silicon Valley is a world by itself. My point is to say: to really understand it, we had to go beyond the common stereotypes and mainstream narratives about tech. Because if we stay focused on big names, big companies, or the latest trendy piece of tech, we will miss the most important thing, which is me thatin tech the star is not this entrepreneur or that company. The star is the system. Whatever the key compound is: data, people, infrastructure, capital, and so forth. The system is everything. So the book is an attempt to get a holistic view of Silicon Valley as a system. Including its impact. Not only the impact that tech people mention all the time. But also the social outcome and dead end of this system, meaning the way tech is designing the society we live in, without considering some social issues and creating new ones. Because indeed, this industry produces private solutions, but many in the world perceive it today as a public problem.