Steve Jobs non abita più qui

Michele Masneri is an Italian journalist who writes for Il Foglio, IL and Rivista Studio, mostly about money, houses and manners, which in his hands turn out to be the same subject. He had already published a novel, Addio, Monti, about a Rome sliding gently downhill, when in 2016 he moved to California as Il Foglio's correspondent, in what he himself called an Erasmus for forty-year-olds.

Steve Jobs non abita più qui collects the pieces he wrote out there over the following years: San Francisco and Silicon Valley seen by someone who never quite bought the story and therefore saw it more clearly. Uber drivers, start-ups, a property market that has slipped its moorings, the corporate vocabulary that quietly eats the language it is spoken in. It reads like a comic novel, and underneath the comedy sits a serious question: if that is the future, do we want it?