Navigating Silicon Valley's Contradictions (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
In the last three decades, Silicon Valley has become one of the world's most watched and imitated communities. Daily news reporters, long-form journalists, cinema and television-programming producers have crafted a public image, but it represents nothing of the lives of hundreds of thousands of Valley residents. These fabrications obscure and diminish our complex human profile and reduce our uniquely beautiful geography to a place to generate financial profits, with all the damaging disregard such attitudes foster. The essays of A Silicon Valley Life: A Silicon Valley Love Story seek to show our true self: our rich mix of people drawn from all regions of Earth seeking a better life in a veritable Eden, which, even in the face of violent ecological degradation, remains beautiful and worthy of our greatest care. Home and homelessness are major themes of A Silicon Valley Life. The research relies on the fundamental tools of all great nonfiction writing: honest and prolonged observation of human action and self expression combined with deep reading and reporting of statistical fact and historic record to render insightful analysis and conclusions within a meaningful context. The essays and introduction should be read holistically, not unlike an impressionist or pointillist painting. The result renders a portrait of the people and place of Silicon Valley far closer to the real images and experiences that constitute our actual lives. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A Silicon Valley Life: A Silicon Valley Love Story reflects the efforts and thoughtful observations of many people over multiple years. My first thanks extend to the outstanding professors in the San José State University English and Comparative Literature Department and to my fellow SJSU English students. They are dedicated and inspiring teachers and learners all. Special thanks must go to Professor emeritus Cathleen Miller, who enriched and helped me to build upon my already long reporting and writing career even as she guided the conception, research, and writing of these essays.
Silicon Valley reinvents the company town
2000
California's Silicon Valley, famous for its innovative high-technology corporations, makes an ideal laboratory for exploring certain cultural inventions. It is a bellwether for a particular kind of social order-one dominated by work. In anthropology we encounter many frameworks through which life is organized-kinship, religion, and politics. Work is another lens through which life can be filtered. People may move to California for the weather, but they go to Silicon Valley to work. High-technology work draws on a global pool of talent and shifting skills that creates a culturally complex community. Migrants to Silicon Valley bring and enact an image of a place to do cutting-edge work. Leaders and pundits in the region consciously market the idea that the Valley can reinvent itself to continue to dominate its distinctive economic niche. Out of this reinvention a novel version of the company town has emerged, a twenty-first century reworking of a community where work penetrates and dominates the lives of its inhabitants.
Margaret O’Mara, The Code. Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America reviewed by Antti Tarvainen
Prometheus
Silicon Valley has emerged as the key metaphor of the innovation-led economic development in the 21st century. As the Valley’s technology monopolies and utopias expand, there is a growing need for critical histories that help to ground and contextualize the futures that are spreading from San Francisco Bay. In this review essay, I suggest that a settler-colonial approach offers interesting possibilities for the creation of such histories. To demonstrate how such an approach works, I develop a settler-colonial reading of Margaret O’Mara’s recent book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019). By critically analysing the key metaphors in O’Mara’s celebrated book, the global and violent face of the Valley becomes visible. The settler-colonial approach, I conclude, offers one possible analytical approach to breaking the stranglehold of America-centred understanding typical of the histories of Valley.
The Silicon Valley Ethos: Tech Industry Products, Discourses, and Practices
This special issue of Television and New Media critically examines the ethos of Silicon Valley, imagined broadly, by analyzing its products, discourses, and practices. We argue that, as a technology industry and a cultural force, Silicon Valley's practices and discourses reflect and produce particular social and economic investments in technology as a tool of empowerment and social change. Overall, the issue argues that the ethos of Silicon Valley privileges disruption over sustainability, sharing economies over union labor, personalized access over public health, data over meaning, and security over freedom. We analyze the ways this ethos extends beyond Silicon Valley itself and shapes the way we think about and act toward labor, security, sexuality, and health. As such, Silicon Valley's technology products—as well as the way we think about them—affect the social, political, and economic conditions of everyday life.
Silicon Valley: An Elusive Utopia?
Academia Letters, 2021
Silicon Valley's development history is adumbrated as a background for suggesting the need to develop a strategy for dealing with contemporary problems emanating from overweening success. Earlier development strategies emphasized private over public objectives, despite some notable exceptions. It is timely to recall and build upon some of those anomalies, like the movement to save the bay and especially the unique brainstorming process that formulated and implemented a strategy to address the 1990's recession. Silicon Valley, built through the collaborative pursuit of innovation, needs to extend its capabilities from the private to the public sphere.
Cluster Genesis, 2006
This chapter considers the world's most iconic cluster: Silicon Valley. The emergence of Silicon Valley shares some features with the motion picture industry; both places experienced an inflow of entrepreneurs from other parts of the country and also saw a novel business model emerge. The environment that existed in the late 1950s, later known as Silicon Valley, was not unique; similar conditions existed in Boston and New York, for example. Both places were also influenced by policies — institutions in the motion picture case and governmental spending on defence in the Silicon Valley case. The partially random nature of the process is evidenced by the fact that William Shockley, one of the co-inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey and the founder of the first semiconductor firm, wanted to be near his mother.
Unravelling Silicon Valley's Innovation System from a Southern Perspective
In book: Higher Education in the World 7. Humanities and Higher Education: Synergies between Science, Technology and HumanitiesPublisher: Global University Network of Innovation, 2019
The paper explores the profound restructuring of the system of scientific and technological innovation over the last two-and-a-half decades, where the concentration and private appropriation of the means of knowledge creation and scientific and technological innovation has reached major proportions. This trend has engendered a regressive path in the advancement of knowledge, exacerbating the propensity of the world system towards crisis, putting the very material bedrock of life, work and nature at risk. The aim of this chapter is to analyse some of the fundamental features of this restructuring and capitalist development process and unravel what can be regarded as the cutting-edge capitalist innovation system with its epicentre in Silicon Valley and with increasingly important corporate subsidiaries in peripheral countries. The analysis is based on what the authors conceive to be a Southern perspective. Rather than a simple negation of the dominant, northern perspective, it implies a negation of the negation in dialectical terms, with the aim of building a comprehensive, inclusive, emancipatory and libertarian approach to the development of society's productive forces. From this alternative standpoint, Silicon Valley's innovation system is portrayed as a patenting machine, aimed at accelerating and appropriating the products of the general intellect with the overarching aim of concentrating and centralising human capital in the form of brain power, knowledge and skills.