On Abolishing Silicon Valley
The following is an edited excerpt from Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism, by Wendy Liu, available for order now from Repeater Books
Silicon Valley is more than a region in northern California that has become synonymous with the high-tech industry. It is a dream.
It is the dream of a world with new rules and new rulers, based on the principles of meritocracy and efficiency and hacking your way to the top. It is the dream of the win-win: innovation that generates profit through frictionless experiences and synergistic efficiencies, not exploitation. It is the dream that a hacker playground with unimaginable wealth and minimal outside supervision is indisputably making the world a better place.
There was a time when I believed in Silicon Valley unquestionably. As a teenager, I poured my free time into honing my programming skills and soaking up hacker culture; my idols were startup founders and open source programmers. Even as I slowly came to terms with the industry’s numerous problems — how toxic it could be for women and minorities, the absurd levels of wealth directed at spurious causes — I still saw it as deserving of its vaunted role. I genuinely believed that the industry was doing good in the world.
In my disillusionment, I sought out answers. I wanted to understand why everything felt like it was falling apart, and why I was only just starting to see it.
Soon, my belief in it had become part of my identity. After university, I plunged myself into a startup in the hope of attaining some nebulous idea of Silicon Valley success. The use cases of our product bored me, but the technical problem was captivating, and I directed all my energy toward dealing with the numerous technical fires. I was confident that we would eventually succeed and then everything would be worth it.
And then one day I was no longer sure. My certainty in my personal trajectory faded, first slowly and then all at once. The fires still raged, but putting them out no longer felt pressing. The startup I had devoted my waking hours to collapsed in a blaze of mediocrity. I watched it burn, smoulder. The remnants of the misguided dream I’d been chasing crumbled into ashes.
In the meantime, the rest of the world was crumbling, too. Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States, and in my shocked dismay I made an effort to catch up on everything I hadn’t noticed while submerged in my failing startup. Everywhere I looked, things seemed dark. One ecological catastrophe after another. A housing crisis in nearly every major city. People in the richest country in the world dying because they couldn’t afford insulin. All of which seemed like the morbid symptoms of a decaying socioeconomic order.
Meanwhile, the tech industry was in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons: a cascade of sexual harassment lawsuits; billion-dollar companies revealed to be built on fraud; founders climbing up the billionaire charts while their precarious workforce sank deeper into poverty. The industry I’d assumed was the solution was clearly part of the problem, and I started to see my past choices in a new light. My startup looked less like an audacious attempt to build something useful and more like an act of myopic self-aggrandisement, one that I found hard to justify once I began paying attention to the rest of the world. Creating derivative software to help brands better understand their customers seemed like a poor use of my limited time on this burning planet.
In my disillusionment, I sought out answers. I wanted to understand why everything felt like it was falling apart, and why I was only just starting to see it. At first, I didn’t really know where to look — all I had were vague doubts about my worldview — but eventually, I stumbled upon an analytical framework that made sense. There were others thinking about the same questions, and their answers helped me connect the dots in a way I had never before considered. Finally I had a coherent analysis which allowed me to situate my burgeoning scepticism of the tech industry within a larger critique of capitalism.
Why had I been such a fervent believer in Silicon Valley in the first place? I could come up with all sorts of justifications, but ultimately it was because I knew Silicon Valley had a comfortable spot in the economic hierarchy. And from this soil of economic reality sprouted an entire tree of self-serving rationalisations about who was deserving and who was not, which I am only now beginning to cut down.
The dominant narrative within Silicon Valley is that technology is inseparable from capitalism, and so innovation requires letting the free market run roughshod over every aspect of our lives. Anyone who suggests otherwise comes off as a Luddite, opposed to much-needed progress due to malice or ignorance. You’re either in favour of the tech industry bulldozing over anyone who stands in its way or you’re against innovation entirely.
This is a convenient narrative for Silicon Valley, which then gets to frame itself as synonymous with progress: Silicon Valley is the harbinger of the future, and anyone who opposes it is stuck in the past. But the choice of being pro-tech industry or anti-tech is a false dilemma. The tech industry in its current form — with billion-dollar corporations, venture capitalists, and a few boy geniuses running the show — is not the only way of developing technology. In fact, the present industrial model is a betrayal of the liberating possibilities of technology, as technology that should serve the public good is instead locked up within corporations for private gain. Whatever progress is represented by Silicon Valley, it’s certainly not the sort we should all be rooting for.
I’m not anti-tech; my critique of the tech industry stems from a place of love. I respect the craft that goes into building the industry’s products, and I’m grateful for what the industry has given me. But I also believe that technology has greater potential than the mundane, profit-seeking ventures to which it has been relegated under the current system. The problem is not technology, per se: the problem is capitalism. Lurking beneath the stories about unethical products, inflated valuations, and toxic work environments are deeper structural forces that constrain the industry’s possibilities, so that even the most well-meaning executives end up making decisions that harm the people they claim to be serving. Within this structure, technology that could have genuinely helped people is instead an accelerant for capitalism’s most destructive tendencies.
Abolishing Silicon Valley doesn’t mean halting the development of technology. It means devising a new way to develop technology which fulfils technology’s transformative potential. It means liberating technology from the clutches of a mindless system whose primary aim is profit. It means creating a world where technology is developed according to different values, for different goals. In short, it means developing technology outside the logic of capital.
When we think of the tech industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the quirks of the individuals involved. The mind conjures images of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg robotically testifying in front of Congress, or Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick lecturing an Uber driver about personal responsibility. We associate Google with its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Apple with founder Steve Jobs and current CEO Tim Cook; Microsoft with founder Bill Gates. As a result, we’re tempted to believe that the problems of the industry originate with the specific individuals at the helm, who are somehow uniquely bad, and that if we simply swapped in some people with better ethical codes, everything would be fixed.
Of course, this instinct isn’t entirely misguided; more ethical founders would certainly be better than the status quo. But the problems go deeper than the idiosyncrasies of individuals. There’s a cold underlying rationality which corrupts the motives of even the most well-meaning, and in the absence of strong accountability mechanisms, individual ethics can only go so far. Ultimately the problem is structural, and the solutions will need to be structural, too.
To understand why Silicon Valley has become the way it is, we need to investigate the structural factors that explain its inner workings. We need to see Silicon Valley not as a unique aberration, but instead as the logical expression of technological development under capitalism: technology as a means to further capitalist ends. We need to consider the culture, the incentives, and the forces that explain why people behave the way they do, and why certain people are elevated over others. That means understanding the historical factors that laid the groundwork for Silicon Valley in the first place. Ultimately, the story of Silicon Valley is inherently entwined with the mechanics of contemporary capitalism.
“Capitalism” is one of those words with a highly contested definition: how you define it is a function of your stance toward it. So even venturing a definition requires navigating tricky political terrain. I take as a starting point a straightforward definition: a mode of production in which actors are driven by the accumulation of capital, which is made possible through private ownership of the means of production.
Of course, that definition is very incomplete; capitalism wasn’t formed in a vacuum. The system we have now has developed over the course of history, sprouting over a field already littered with other systems of governance. The inception of capitalism is interlaced with various historical systems of social control, and so it’s useful to understand capitalism as more than simply an economic system. My personal favourite definition of capitalism comes from critical theorist Nancy Fraser, who describes it as an “institutionalised social order” that governs not only the accumulation of capital itself, but also the noneconomic background conditions which make capital accumulation possible. Capitalism requires a particular social arrangement which takes advantage of divisions that predate capitalism, including those based on race, gender, geography, and other accidents of birth.
On top of these social divisions, capitalism’s very axioms lead to an overarching economic division. Capitalism is fundamentally a system of distinct classes: those who own capital, and those who own nothing except their ability to work; those with power, and those who live under the power of others. After all, owning the means of production doesn’t mean much unless there are people willing to work for those owners — even if the profit they produce accrues to the owners, not themselves. In practice this divide is usually fuzzy, but as the gulf of wealth inequality widens, the split between owners and workers sharpens.
This fissure sheds light on how technology is used in a capitalist system. In the production process, technology is a means to improve efficiency by increasing the output per worker. As long as capital has the upper hand, that means technology will predominantly be used to increase profits while minimising labour costs. Whether it’s used in the process of creating other products or a product in its own right, the technology still belongs to capital, and it will be designed and deployed according to capitalist aims.
The more advanced the technology, and the more money behind it, the more it begins to seep into everyday life. Soon every single interaction is at risk of being controlled by whichever tech company happens to own the relevant technology. The result is a societal fissure. On one side are the people benefiting from technology’s creeping advancement — the ones developing it, managing it, investing in it — and on the other side are those whose lives are increasingly dictated by privately-owned algorithms. And the more technological development is entwined with capital, the deeper the divide between the ruling class and those who serve them, and the more threadbare the avenues of upward mobility — all because that benefits the ruling class.
What this means is that there is no universal subject when it comes to understanding Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is often referred to as a dystopia, but dystopia is a subjective descriptor; what is dystopia for some may well be another’s utopia. A society where most people are subject to the whims of unimaginably powerful technology corporations isn’t so bad if you’re an executive at one of those corporations. No diagnosis of Silicon Valley can be written without this fundamental divide in mind.
The golden ages of Silicon Valley are over; there’s a dawning suspicion that the story the industry spins about itself is a one-sided tale of the sort told by the victors. If you’ve rationalised away all the bad press because of some myths you’ve internalised about progress or efficiency, there’s only so much I can say to convince you otherwise. Ideology starts as a story but soon hardens into a shield, and only you can decide if you want to let it down.
The industry I want to see will require massive systemic changes, some outside the scope of what most of us can imagine today. But that’s precisely the point: to conjure a world that we can’t even imagine right now because we’re trapped in our current dead end. It’s a call for a paradigm shift, in order to envision a radically better world than what we have now.
Abolition, after all, means more than mere destruction. The point of abolishing Silicon Valley is to build something better in its place.
Those who will rally in defence of the status quo will say that this is the best we can do. They’ll argue that the system works fine and that major changes might actually make things worse. But that seems eerily similar to what large companies always say right before they get disrupted.
If there’s one good thing about Silicon Valley as it stands today, it lies in the industry’s seemingly boundless desire to question assumptions. Unfortunately, this desire is predominantly being captured by the monotonous pursuit of profit, which results in disruption for the wrong reasons. Maybe this desire needs to be turned in a different direction — toward the socioeconomic system that gave Silicon Valley so much power in the first place, in order to disrupt those who assumed that they would always be the ones doing the disrupting. Time to aim the cleansing fires of disruption toward Silicon Valley itself.
Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism, by Wendy Liu, is available for order now from Repeater Books