A Year of Controversy in Silicon Valley

In 2017, the Valley's do-gooder attitude was called into question.

December 30, 2017 5:00 am
Maureen Sherry on Uber's Travis Kalanick Scandal, Bro Culture, and Its Fallout
Travis Kalanick, co-founder and chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., listens during a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong, China, on Thursday, July 17, 2014. As Uber disrupts the transportation market around the world, Kalanick said he sees a huge amount of growth for the car-booking service in Hong Kong. (Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The  MIT Technology Review today wrote the narrative of Silicon Valley in 2017. For the Valley, 2017 was another banner year for tech development and a new low in the public’s perception of the industry. On the tech side, Google, Facebook, and Nvidia made major strides in AI, while Waymo, Uber, and Lyft began experimenting more seriously with self-driving cars. All that was obscured by multiple stories of the Valley’s anti-woman culture, most notably one at Uber that led to the end of Travis Kalanick’s tenure as CEO. And perhaps most famously, 2017 was the year Mark Zuckerberg came under fire, ultimately admitting he was wrong, over Facebook’s role in allowing “fake news” to flourish.

 

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