To me, Silicon Valley is a confusing beast. I’m not sure if this is remaining liberalism but there are some things about it (on the surface level) that I find admirable: it’s generally science-positive and is a beacon of intellectualism in the US, even if tech is not your cup of tea I like the idea of some people being in the “problem solving business”, and if I must participate in capitalism then working for a company that helps with sustainability in SV doesn’t sound too bad. Not ideal, but leagues more tolerable than working on an oil field.
However, this facade crumbles at even the quickest glance and it sometimes almost becomes just as nakedly reactionary as the oil and gas industry. Elon Musk is practically the poster child of Silicon Valley and was a lib that just needed one scratch to give up the ghost and go full fash. Silicon Valley is literally acting like an Ayn Rand villain. Silicon Valley has also practically soured my attitudes towards technology and some of that can be blamed on pretty much all new “innovations” just being inventing a new form of landlordism. Even many of the people in the supposed blue city are complete and utter fash, the whole thing feels like it’s permanently an 80s Wall Street movie but with tech.
Is there like any books that can better explain Silicon Valley and what it actually stands for?
Silicon Valley, and really the tech industry as a whole, is living on a historical vision of itself that doesn’t exist anymore. SV used to have a balanced trifecta of sorts between public research dollars, academia, and entrepreneurs. Public research dollars poured into the area’s universities for developing technological advancements, spurred on in no small part by the Cold War, students and staff used the knowledge and developments at said universities to launch startups that turned those developments into consumer-friendly versions.
Then the neoliberal era came, and the public research money started dwindling because ideology, let the free market innovate. So the academia became more focused on churning out entrepreneurs than straight research. The entrepreneurs had to keep up the act though that they were churning out technological leaps and weren’t dependent on the public research dollars. Hence facades of intellectual greatness built over elaborate marketing data dredging with no real innovation.
