*I’ve
been stewing over George
Packer’s New Yorker piece on Silicon Valley and its politics since Friday.
Like Packer, I grew up in the Bay Area, but whereas he lived in Palo Alto in
the 70s (pre-Silicon Valley days), I grew up alongside a burgeoning Silicon
Valley in the 90s and early aughts. My mother started her own company that sold
computer hardware and microchips out of a small office in Sunnyvale (at one
point it was robbed at gunpoint. Believe it or not, there were gangs that
specialized in hardware robberies). My father was an engineer at
Hewlett-Packard for ten years and worked on the inkjet printers there. Because
of the pace that Silicon Valley has developed, their jobs seem antiquated now.
*My
parents sent me to a private school in San Jose that capitalized on technology
early on. Beginning in the fourth grade, we had to take computer classes.
First, we learned rudimentary skills like typing, which we practiced on
Skittle-colored iMac G3s. Later we graduated to
basic graphic design. In sixth grade we used AlphaSmarts to type up essays in
class, beamed them to printers, and turned in our tests, typed and printed.
Computers were a compulsory part of our education; in fact, we were required to
bring laptops to school everyday in high school. My classmates were hackers and
nerds, who helped the less technologically-inclined of us break through
school-sanctioned firewalls so that we could chat on AIM and access Facebook.
These were the same kids who were rigging up their Nintendos in the hallway so
that they could play video games during school hours. In order to graduate, I
reluctantly took AP Computer Science, in which the complexities of the Java
scripting language made me want to punch the teacher in the stomach (he looked
like Luigi but had Mario’s belly). Though I had no concept of “startups,” I
even wrote about Tesla and Pandora for my high school newspaper.
*I
grew up in the Silicon Valley bubble, among kids whose parents were tech execs—the very first of the crop, like SanDisk and Marvell.
These were kids whose families owned private jets and Lamborghinis, and who
always had the latest Apple products before they were even released to the
public. Now, after four years at school on the east coast, I’m back in Silicon
Valley, working at a tech company.
*All
that to say—George Packer’s article was an anthropological criticism of where I
grew up and the world I am currently inhabiting. I’ve traveled quite
extensively, and I lived in Cambridge, MA for four years, but I call Silicon
Valley home. At some level, however, I’ve always felt like an outsider. I was
the poetry-obsessed, literature-loving girl at a high school filled with math
and science geeks; now, I am one of the few people at an engineer-heavy company
who holds a non-technical position. Despite feeling like an outsider, I still
felt incredibly convicted by his article. The libertarian leanings, the “inward
looking places [that] keep tech workers from having even accidental contact
with the surrounding community,” the delusion that technology is changing the
world even as issues social justice and economic inequality go largely ignored,
and the selfish gentrification of once-gritty San Francisco neighborhoods were
not only familiar in sound—they concretely comprise my reality.
*There
are so many strands here, but I’ll begin with politics. Steven Johnson
addressed Packer’s observation about Silicon Valley’s libertarian leanings
with an argument based in partisanship and equity distribution, to which Packer
countered,
“the Valley’s libertarianism is [...] not at all doctrinaire, or
party-dependent [...]; it’s an instinctive aversion to government intruding on
the work being done in its labs and startups [...] It’s about a
particular brand of utopianism that sees solutions for social and political
problems in the industry’s products and attitudes.” I think these statements,
though broad generalizations, are correct. That they are difficult to
substantiate with statistics and concrete figures is besides the point. What
Packer (and so many New Yorker writers) does successfully here is capture the
ethos of an industry—of this tech world.
*It’s
not that every single person is politically unaware or libertarian or passive;
it’s that there is an underlying (or overarching) attitude about what tech can
do for the world, and how these models of efficiency and efficacy are prized
solutions to humanity’s problems ... if only our systems and institutions could
adopt these models. The idea that everyone can benefit from technology is naive
and delusional, especially because most of the people who do benefit from the
newest technology are the ones creating it, the ones who already have both a
lifestyle and infrastructure in place that can support technological enhancements.
The trickle-down effect of technology is slow-going, and I am inspired by the
companies that are using technology for healthcare, or medical advice, or
charitable giving, like Hamish McKenzie mentions in his rebuttal to Packer, but
if we look at the overwhelming focus of the tech industry—in other words, where
money is being invested--it’s largely self-serving and self-gratifying.
*To
support this point, I looked at the top 10 deals that VCs invested
across all sectors in 2012 (a grand total of $5.86 billion). They were Genband
($343.5 million), Air Watch ($200 million), Pinterest ($200 million),
LivingSocial ($110 million), NestLabs ($80 million), AppNexus ($75 million),
Intrexon ($64.4 million), Domo ($60 million), PTC Therapeutics ($60 million),
and SevOne ($60 million). Of these ten, only two make obvious positive
contributions to our society (others you could possibly argue in a convoluted
way). Half of these are software companies that serve business interests:
GenBand provides “smart networking solutions for service providers and
enterprises,” AirWatch provides Mobile Device, Application, and Content
Management solutions; SevOne provides IT management and reporting platforms;
AppNexus is an advertising technology platform; and Domo is a business
intelligence dashboard for the cloud. Pinterest (which I use) indulges women
who have the time and luxury of collecting online images. Nest is a $250 luxury
object--a sleek thermostat which gives owners more control over their home
thermostats, and LivingSocial is a daily deals website. Besides the
energy-saving potential of Nest, it’s difficult to argue that any of these companies—the
ones that VCs are investing the most money in—are doing even slight good—tangibly,
concretely—for \ our society. It was relieving to find that two of these
companies, at least—PTC Therapeutics and Intrexon—are biotech companies working
in RNA and DNA biology to make some contribution to healthcare and cell
therapy.
*But
what was very clear to me in this survey of the top ten deals are the tech
industry’s values (and these are the very keywords splashed on many of these
companies’ homepages): efficiency, elegance, profitability, and scalability.
I’ll add entertainment to that list, seeing how 42%
of VC deals in mobile in Q1 of 2013 was in gaming. Aren’t these values all
ultimately narcissistic and egotistical? George Packer’s criticism of the tech
industry isn’t that it is morally obligated to improve society; he points out the
subversive hypocrisy that results from the discrepancy between the claims the
tech industry makes (about how it is changing the world for the better) and
what it actually values. The mandate that I’ve taken from this is that the tech
industry needs to look outside of its bubble and into the community that has
fostered its existence instead of deluding itself into thinking that it can
make positive changes without real engagement. And here’s the thing about
issues like social justice, homelessness, and poverty: there are no elegant and
efficient solutions.
*(I
will concede though, that it’s possible for a tech company to have extremely
positive and suprising benefits on society without those benefits being
intended from the outset. Take Twitter, for example, and how life-saving
(literally) it’s been in the wake of natural disasters, current events, and
rapid-fire journalism.)
*For
someone like me, who is a part of the tech industry but lacks buying power,
authority, or much voice, what all of this comes down to is where my energy is
invested on a day-to-day basis: the places, people, and communities I am a part
of, what I give my thought and our attention to, the services that I buy into,
and the causes I support. I am very guilty of selectively supporting local
establishments (e.g. (read: Bi-Rite, Tartine, the bourgeois establishments of
Valencia Street) and “sharing” economies (e.g. Lyft, Sidecar, Taskrabbit—which aren’t
truly sharing economies, as they really only benefit the wealthy in a way that
might be to the detriment of the poor) while shirking, or at least shying away
from, civic responsibility. It’s not that I don’t care about the community
around me; it’s that I am selective about both the community and social issues
I actually invest my money, time and energy in, and that largely excludes many
of the issues that Packer mentions.
*I’m
don't blame my childhood in Silicon Valley for my attitude towards
politics, but my own political beliefs, up until recently, are either a
confirmation or a symptom of the problem that Packer describes. I’ve spent most
of my life with an indifference to politics, claiming that the system is too
corrupt a bureacracy, too helpless and imperfect to afford my participation—or my
care. I haven’t taken the time to learn about governance, and I didn’t vote in
the last election. Yet my recognition of institutional flaws, without any
action on my part, is merely denigration and resignation. The man who has
changed my own view on politics, as of late, has been (another New Yorker
writer) Hendrick Hertzberg. In the introduction to his compendium of essays Politics,
he writes about Dwight MacDonald, saying that in MacDonald’s conception of
politics, like his own, “what counted were the ideas, the ethics, the values—even
the aesthetics. He seldom lingered over such trivialities as Democrats,
Republicans, and elections.” The way Hertzberg writes about politics is humanizing,
and I no longer see myself as apart from the system but as a part of it. This
means that my daily choices, no matter how small, become larger life principles
over time. These principles reflect my own values as a person, and my values
are shaping the ethos of this community.
*I don’t have any answers for the problems that George Packer points out, but I do think that this discussion about the state of the tech industry—what it values, where it places its money, and how it is or can be (more) involved in our political system—is an important one. After all, with the amount of buying power it has, it has the potential and the intellect to be a game-changer. Instead of going about our daily lives mindlessly devoted to our algorithms, luxury objects, and iPhone apps, maybe we can begin taking action, even if just small ones, to better understand what San Francisco needs and how we can, with our time, energy, and money, address those needs as our own.
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