Silicon Valley and the Future of Innovation

Over the last decade, Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" innovation ethos has come under increasing fire as the broader social impact of companies like Facebook and Amazon have become more widely debated. How can and should technological innovation look as we enter the 2020s? This session will explore the past and present of innovation. In doing so, we'll explore the concept of "innovation" itself, and how it came to play such a central role in debates about the economy and technology.

Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher, currently the general counsel at Substack. He  lives in Maplewood, and is the author of Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about the online advertising bubble. He’s a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is on the board of the tech nonprofit Meedan, and is an investor in Temescal Brewing.

Hwang will be in conversation with Jon Gertner, fellow Maplewoodian and author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future. Gertner is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post.