Remarkable Reading # 24: CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life By Nato Thompson and VALLEY OF THE GODS: A Silicon Valley Story by by Alexandra Wolfe

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.

Recently finished reading CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life By Nato Thompson  and VALLEY OF THE GODS: A Silicon Valley Story by by Alexandra Wolfe. Both are highly influential books in terms of understanding culture.

Nato Thompson’s CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life is a intense, sincere and acute book about the formations of culture, what culture is, the history of culture, how it’s impacted mass media and communications, and how culture can be used as an act of terrorism.

Nato Thompson's writing style is scathing and hard-hitting. He leaves no stones unturned in terms of providing a multi-layered understanding of culture.

Two trends I wanted to touch on are:

1. Culture in Silicon Valley that sets it apart from other technology havens and what makes it successful
2. A brief history of the impact of mass media communications on human culture

Thompson has a factual and instructive writing style that is firm in tone and articulates the right sentiment. The book is high in vitality and hits you like a jolt of Red Bull.

Some of the key takeouts are;

Introduction: V11- “The United States is a consumer society awash in the products of culture.,   I consider movies, online programming, video games, advertisements, sports retail outlets, music, art museums, and social networking all a part of the arts, as they all influence our emotions, actions, and our very understanding of ourselves as citizens”

Page 23 - “What took place in the late 1980s and early 90’s wasn’t merely a war between two cultures but a broader realignment.  A number of forces were learning to utilize the power of culture to push forward their own agendas, and their successes would be grander and more pronounced than before”

Page 24 - “Culture is a vast dynamic imposing itself on everything from politics to media to advertising warfare”

Page 41 - “The early days of consumer culture marked an unprecedented fusion of aesthetics and industry, and naturally, the arts were not impervious to the influences of advertising - and vice versa.  The prevailing art movements of the time reveled in wealth, glitz and glamour”

Page 41 - “Radio was different.  Radio really was radical - a new technology that quickly transformed not only the way Americans encountered all kinds of culture, but also increased the scale on which that culture could be used to disseminate commercial messages”

Pager 41 - “Radio was the next great mass medium after newspapers, and indeed, it may have really been the first - the number of people reached by radio far exceeded the circulation figures of even the most successful newspapers of the time.  By 1933 , two-thirds of American households would own at least one radio”

Page 61 - “Music stirred the hearts of not only the United States youth, but would also become an essential element of how America look at itself in the mirror.  Publicly, billboard charts could reflect the hit songs of the era, and privately, one could close one’s eyes and hear it”

Page 62 -”The 1960’s and 70’s watched this massive population of baby boomers become fascinated, hypnotized, and of course, purchasing, the images, music, and clothes that could come to define them,.  Entertainment spending already by 1960 was at a massive $85 billion.  It was the dawn of what could come to be described as the “service and information economy:”  Consumer goods were clearly no longer material things, but instead intangible immaterial cultural things”

Page 63 - “And then there was TV.  Between 1949 and 1969, the number of households with a television rose from less than 1 million to 44 million.  The family that once gathered around the radio in the living room switched to the big box without hesitation.  Throughout the 1960’s, the most dominant, efficient, and pervasive culture-distributing technology yet invented muscled its way into every household.  TV was king”

Silicon Valley has become a yardstick for technological innovation, entrepreneurialism, start-up culture, business and commerce. There is only one of it, and it remains one of the most powerful business hubs in the world right now.  It is every entrepreneur's dream to work in Silicon Valley (including my own)

VALLEY OF THE GODS: A Silicon Valley Story by Alexandra Wolfe is a entertaining, insightful and brisk-paced book about the startup and entrepreneur culture in Silicon Valley.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book for the insights it provides us about what makes Silicon Valley so special, and what we can learn from it.

Alexandra Wolfe has a exact and specific writing style and manages to encapsulate the style of Silicon Valley with panache.  She has a humorous tone and is comical, cheeky and hilarious at the same time as being factual and informative.

Her observations of Silicon Valley and the business folk she connects with ensures that VALLEY OF THE GODS: A Silicon Valley Story  is a sharply-observed and pragmatic  book for 2017, and a must-read for any entrepreneurs interested in start-up culture and innovation.

Page 15 - “All of them are trying to come up with the next Facebook and honestly think they can.  It’s a place where risk aversion does not exist; what Silicon Valley lacks in nightlife excitement it makes up for with its day jobs’ thrills, most of which entail gambling everyday on what the next big idea will be”

Page 39 - “The idea of creating something that took over an industry or influenced the future was something that some of the guests in the room, such as Luke Nosek, who’d helped cofound PayPal, or Sean Parker, who’d founded Napster, had done.  For them, it wasn’t a stretch to talk about it in literal terms”

Page 54 - “Thiel’s idea was that the bus trip would exhort American youth to “stop out”, drop out of the comatose American education system and get smart turn, turn on their powers of invention, tune in to billions of dollars before age thirty- ideally before age twenty - and renew America's position as the world center of innovation”

Page 101 - “With the introduction of the first Web browsers in the early 1990s, the Internet had Silicon Valley booming.  And it was two Stanford computer science grad students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who developed one of the most successful and significant companies of the Internet era: Google”

Page 104 - “But in a place where entrepreneurship is encouraged and failure is accepted, many students asked instead, what would have been the worst thing that could’ve happened if they’d left school to start a company that flopped?  They would have come back and graduated, that’s what”

Page 168 - “The cool thing about Silicon Valley is that, though people might be skeptical of youth,  they don’t actually know that you’re not smart enough or capable enough to make it work”

Page 198 - “Like anything else in life, if you’re not as smart or talented, or as ambitious or as creative, you're probably not going to make it as far,” said Trina Spear, A Harvard business school graduate”

Page 225 - “Silicon Valley, he said, had given him a new perspective on the world.  A different breed of person fueled technological innovation, he discovered.  It as a single-mindedness that he wasn't so sure he had”

Page 226 - “I think there’s a real attitude in the tech industry that they know better than the rest of the world, or the government, or, let’s say, other industries,” he said.  Those in the startup world thought everyone else didn’t do anything as efficiently as they did. Sometimes they were right”

Both books are contemporary, timely, topical and modern - a must-read for business people.

You can follow Nato Thompson on Twitter here, follow Creative Time on Twitter here, and purchase a copy of CULTURE AS A WEAPON: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life here.

You can follow Alexandra Wolfe on Twitter here and purchase a copy of VALLEY OF THE GODS: A Silicon Valley Story here.