like it or not

thinking about Silicon Valley, unfortunately

I hate to say it, but I have been thinking about Silicon Valley. Something about me that doesn’t come up so often these days: I went to a tech school for college. I studied art, and history (but not art history) at a school much more famous for its computer science and engineering programs. I came in charmed by the nerdiness of the school population– after all, I had been two grades ahead in math, and had gone as Princess Leia for Halloween in the first grade. The charm was short lived, morphing into jadedness and ultimately, revulsion. It was a place where students refused to believe you could be their intellectual peer if you didn’t know multiple programming languages. I found it hilarious that someone could believe their inner world was richer than mine when their entire stated life goal was to design an app that was a combination of to two pre-existing ones. I know this is coming across harsh, but trust that if you had my experience you would feel the same way.

It was, if you can remember, a different era. 2012 was a time when people could tell you that they wanted to be Mark Zuckerberg with full sincerity. A time when Uber was earnestly referred to as part of the sharing economy. Social media was happening and we were certainly all spending many hours scrolling instead of finishing our problem sets, but it didn’t yet feel as insidious as it later would. Monetization hadn’t fully come for the internet yet– it was a place subsisting on angel funding and rosy promises. The dotcom bubble may have already burst, but how could this one? Silicon Valley wasn’t a bubble, it was the future.

It is difficult to untangle my deep skepticism for the tech industry with my skepticism that the computer engineering students I met were as interesting and brilliant as they believed themselves to be, but regardless of its basis– I was wary. 

I was neither a luddite nor prescient. I’ve always been an internet girlie, never too good to use the products I side eyed. I will not claim to have foresaw how dark and devious technology would become; to this day I have a hard time working up the requisite outrage about data mining and the threat of AI. To me, the greatest crime of the tech sector has always been how deeply dull it is. Technology is a tool only as interesting as the input it is given, and unfortunately, the people developing the undeniably world changing software we live with don’t seem to have that many plans for it besides making society a little bit more impersonal and dependent on the products they are creating. 

I’ve never feared the robot takeover, and quite frankly, still don’t– despite the AI fear-mongering media outlets have been churning out for months. The technology is too uninspiring to be threatening. Inundated by the Chat GPT propaganda, I took it out for a spin– feeding it samples of my own writing to give it a voice, outlining a broad argument for it to explore. The output, while perfectly legible, was the most boring, perspectiveless drivel one could imagine. Not only did it fail to come up with a compelling argument, it also failed to capture what I see as my most easily replicable writing tics. Just more noise for the void to absorb.

Most of the tech bros from my college migrated to the Bay after graduation, minus a few that left to taint my hometown. I intentionally did not. The cool counter-culture place I read about in memoirs could not support the influx of insufferable tech entrepreneurs. The queer, punk, activist’s SF had been sandblasted into a smooth backdrop for sans serif app logos.

Having removed myself from a campus that worshiped start-up culture, it is hard to tell whether the cultural shift I feel around the tech industry is societal, or environment. Regardless, it seems safe to say that public perception of the tech sector has shifted dramatically since I graduated from college in 2015.

Silicon Valley has lost a lot of the cultural goodwill it harbored a decade ago. It also seems to have lost some of the financial glutton it once swam in. Their banks are failing and the tech sector is facing round after rounds of layoffs. The sun is setting on the angel funding, the six-figure starting salaries for 22-year old grads, the cereal bars and ping-pong tables and kombucha on tap. We have hit the ten-year mark on the ten-year investments these venture capitalists sunk into gangly 20-year old white boys in hoodies. Now they are 30-year old white men in t-shirts and financiers want a return on their investments.

What was the turning point? Was it the 2015 Wall Street Journal exposé of Elizabeth Holmes that revealed that the innovations we were being sold weren’t what they seemed? Perhaps it was the Cambridge Analytica scandal three years after that, which uncovered the way that even the most innocuous seeming internet fads could be weaponized against us.

Perhaps the truth is more boring: that being a brilliant engineer is an entirely different skillset than being a brilliant businessperson, and the college-dropouts-cum-self-declared-CEOs were not equipped to effectively run the companies they started. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that people with no experience being an employee lacked the skills to manage teams of people. We were told that their raw talent and fresh perspective were the only qualifications they needed– that they were disruptors. However, the ability to receive a large salary does not inherently translate to the ability to develop a profit generating strategy. It was an unsustainable system, and without a steady stream of VC funding, it started to sputter.

None of this is to say goodbye to Silicon Valley. Waning cultural popularity is very different from diminished cultural power. Even as these companies fail, go bankrupt, are roundly mocked– their grasp on the public has only grown stronger. The companies can go through mergers, be sold, parceled off for a pittance, and even then— their user count will barely take a hit. 

Silicon Valley now occupies a similar position as our federal government: corrupt, unpopular, but undeniably powerful in shaping and controlling our everyday lives. Unlike the government, the leaders of Silicon Valley are not publicly elected. Unless you are a majority shareholder, you have very little say over who runs the companies that we spend most of our days interacting with. The irony is not lost on me that our critiques of the industry, including this one, rely on the very technology and platforms that they disparage. What is so insidious about Silicon Valley is the way it exists beyond public pressure, and seemingly even beyond financial solvency. It traded popularity and commercial profits for something more long lasting: institutional power. 

The only option we have is the hollow fake option of opting out– of not using TikTok and Lyft and all of the other app bubbles that populate our phone screens. But it is not truly an option to exist in the world in a real way without using gmail or Google Maps or some kind of cell phone. You can hit “reject” on every cookie pop-up that floats across your screen and still– you will not be liberated from all of the millionaire CEOs that treat San Francisco like a collective Versailles. 

Money and popularity are irrelevant when they have already monopolized our most valuable resources: our attention spans, our habits, our dependency. The options they give us are to be the consumer or to be the product—we have forgotten how to exist outside of those roles. Silicon Valley is certainly not beyond reproach, but it is beyond the point where the reproach has any affect. So we remain, to be sold, to be sold to. It doesn’t matter if we like it or not.

Housekeeping:

I think I’m finally ready to unpause paid subscriptions. It’s my birthday this month, I’m turning 30 and accepting that I will never feel fully prepared for anything and sometimes I just need to hit go. If you had a subscription before (a good… year and a half ago)— billing will resume at wherever your previous cycle was at (if you had 4 months left of your yearly subscription, it will renew 4 months from now).

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