Noam Cohen - Böcker

What does it mean to be in the world with others? To what degree is sociality a dimension of our experience? This Element explores the social aspects of our experience as shared and common, focusing on Heidegger's thought on this theme in the period surrounding the publication of Being and Time. It begins by situating Heidegger's position in contrast to alternative phenomenological conceptions of the relations between self and others. From there, it continues to address a key challenge to Heidegger's approach: the problem of Dasein's individuation. Finally, in response to this challenge, the work reframes Heidegger's conception of sociality through the prism of part-whole relations. As social, Dasein emerges as a dependent part of an unfolding shared whole, yet as part of a complex social context, it retains its relative wholeness.

What does it mean to be in the world with others? To what degree is sociality a dimension of our experience? This Element explores the social aspects of our experience as shared and common, focusing on Heidegger's thought on this theme in the period surrounding the publication of Being and Time. It begins by situating Heidegger's position in contrast to alternative phenomenological conceptions of the relations between self and others. From there, it continues to address a key challenge to Heidegger's approach: the problem of Dasein's individuation. Finally, in response to this challenge, the work reframes Heidegger's conception of sociality through the prism of part-whole relations. As social, Dasein emerges as a dependent part of an unfolding shared whole, yet as part of a complex social context, it retains its relative wholeness.

In The Know-It-Alls former New York Times technology columnist Noam Cohen chronicles the rise of Silicon Valley as a political and intellectual force in American life. Beginning nearly a century ago and showcasing the role of Stanford University as the incubator of this new class of super geeks, Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet.Donald Trump’s election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing: Facebook and Twitter, eager to entertain their users, turned a blind eye to the fake news and the hateful ideas proliferating there. The Rust Belt states that shifted to Trump are the ones being left behind by a "meritocratic" Silicon Valley ideology that promotes an economy where, in the words of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, each of us is our own start-up. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray. The Know-It-Alls explains how these self-proclaimed geniuses failed this most important test of democracy.

The world’s tech giants are at the centre of controversies over fake news, free speech and hate speech on platforms where influence is bought and sold. Yet, at the outset, almost everyone thought the internet would be a positive, democratic force, a space where knowledge could be freely shared to enable everyone to make better-informed decisions. How did it all go so wrong?Noam Cohen reports on the tech libertarians of Silicon Valley, from the self-proclaimed geniuses Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg to the early pioneers at Stanford University, who have not only made the internet what it is today but reshaped society in the process. It is the story of how the greed, bias and prejudice of one neighbourhood is fracturing the Western world.