Steve Jobs non abita più qui

A portait of the Silicon Valley, among the basements where tech giants are born and liberal hopes shattered against the wall of Trump\’s Right Nation.

Many places in the world are like time machines, almost always looking back to the past. Then there are places – very few of them – that lead directly, if not to the future, to our envisioned ideas of the future. One of these places is Michele Masneri\’s California. No matter where Masneri roams, no matter who he talks to: whether he listens to a Uber driver describe in great detail the startup project that is going to make him a billionaire, record the complaints of Mark Zuckerberg\’s neighbors, tormented by his perennial interior renovations, explore how much of the once joyous queer ecosystem survives, or get Jonathan Franzen to explain what the planet should do to save itself.

What Masneri writes here is a long, eventful, exhilarating proof of what Frank Lloyd Wright had foreseen when he claimed that everything on the planet that is not strongly rooted in its place, will – sooner or later -begin to slide towards California. A sharp and ironic account of the West Coast and its endless contradictions.

\’Great writing, sumptuous and funny description not only of the city of San Francisco but of the San Francisco within us: the hippie and liberation movements, the queer scene, startuppers and digital life, all the attempts to realize oneself, the organic food trends and manias. An indispensable book, an ideal reading for our wild August\’. – Camilla Baresani, on Il Messaggero