On January 26, 2008, Joseph Weizenbaum, a famed and dissident computer scientist in his eighties, ascended the dais in Davos for what would be one of his last public appearances. Onstage with the founders of Second Life and LinkedIn, Weizenbaum sulked through his fellow panelists’ talks about the promise of social networks, which at the time were still somewhat novel. “These people coming together,” said Philip Rosedale of Second Life, “are building essentially a new society in cyberspace.” Weizenbaum was not convinced. What effects might that virtual society have on the real world? In his long career, he had met many people who earnestly believed technology would soon alleviate humanity’s problems, and yet salvation always proved to be farther down the road.

This skepticism—which Noam Cohen highlights in his new book, The Know-It-Alls—is rare in Silicon Valley today, where large tech companies operate on the premise that they can both change the world and make a lot of money in the process. Facebook promises to make us more connected, Google to organize the world’s information, Twitter to democratize free speech and the public sphere, and Amazon to make retail an almost frictionless experience. Together with Microsoft and Apple, these companies are worth over $3 trillion. Their top executives are rewarded with millions in compensation and have acquired the power to shape culture and politics. Google was, for instance, a leading spender on lobbyists in the Obama years, and since the 2016 election, a delegation including Apple’s Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has attended tech summits at Trump Tower and the White House, where they have discussed jobs, immigration, and infrastructure projects.

Tech leaders, Cohen writes, tend to “travel in Democratic Party circles but oppose unions, hate-speech codes, or expanded income redistribution.” Their companies sock away billions in offshore havens and funnel their European operations through tax-friendly Ireland. While preaching the values of freedom and independence, these firms collect vast amounts of information on their users, using this welter of data to form detailed dossiers and influence our behavior. Their products are organized less around improving lives than around occupying as much of their users’ attention as possible. Styling themselves as both pro-corporate and vaguely rebellious, “the Know-It-Alls” represent “a merger of a hacker’s radical individualism and an entrepreneur’s greed.”

Silicon Valley has not always nurtured these attitudes, nor do they inevitably result from the forward march of technology. “At crucial moments,” Cohen argues, “a relatively few well-positioned people made decisions to steer the web in its current individualistic, centralized, commercialized direction.” The Know-It-Alls is an attempt to trace the origins of Silicon Valley’s values, by examining some familiar figures—Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, and Bill Gates—along with a few lesser-known personalities and their private motivations. How, Cohen asks, did we get to a point where a handful of companies and their executives rule our digital world?

In the early 1960s, the Santa Clara Valley was a prosperous region, best known for hosting a few big chip manufacturers that relied on government contracts. Computers were the domain of universities, big business, and the occasional well-heeled hobbyist. There was no software industry to speak of, and some room-sized machines still ran on punch cards. Not until 1971 did the area gain the name Silicon Valley, which the journalist Don Hoefler coined in an Electronic News article. The Valley itself was relatively bucolic, honeycombed with orchards and farms.