ABSTRACT

So soon after the 2011 magnitude-9 To−hoku earthquake which triggered the tsunami that inundated much of northeast Japan, killing almost 16,000 people, destroying many towns and villages and causing the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant, you might have thought that John L. Hennessey would have chosen his words more carefully. In an interview with the New Yorker in the spring of 2012, the President of Stanford University confidently forecast that ‘there’s a tsunami coming’ (Auletta 2012: n.p.n.). Hennessey – computer scientist and known by some as the ‘godfather of Silicon Valley’ – was not thinking of another unstoppable natural catastrophe, but of an equally irresistible ‘digital tsunami’. And this was to be activated by the very human forces of Stanford itself as the ‘intellectual nexus of the information economy’, joining forces with assorted venture capitalists to transform university teaching and learning through computerization (Auletta 2012: n.p.n.).