Together, these stories tell us that Silicon Valley continues to create hugely popular products that generate fantastic wealth at the top; and that there is no such thing as tech exceptionalism. The technology industry remains another special interest, as intent as the oil and pharmaceutical sectors on maximizing profits and minimizing its obligation to pay taxes. Why is this surprising? Because, as I wrote in the piece, millions of people seem to take technological innovation for a social and political revolution (“Think Different”), a confusion encouraged by many tech leaders. Even Senator John McCain, after chiding Apple’s C.E.O. Tim Cook for doing his best to cheat America out of its share of the company’s patents and intellectual property, gushed to Cook, “You managed to change the world”—thereby echoing a common Silicon Valley mantra, as well as the title of my piece. (By the way, other Senate Republicans, such as Rand Paul, actually praised Apple for starving the public sector of revenue—more evidence of the institutional collapse that’s at the heart of my new book “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.”)
As Alec MacGillis of The New Republic points out, it’s a bit rich for Apple to argue—as Steve Jobs did for years—that the company needs more visas and green cards for foreign engineers, since there aren’t enough qualified Americans to fill tech jobs, while Apple does its damnedest to keep its contribution toward federal education aid as paltry as possible. This is an example, so blatant I couldn’t have dreamt it up, of the self-deception that exists alongside the hard work, idealism, and engineering brilliance of Silicon Valley. It’s the kind of blind spot to which young, self-confident, super-successful industries are especially prone.
In my piece, I wanted to write about Silicon Valley, the place where I grew up, through the eyes of an outsider (which is inevitably what I am, given the enormous changes in the thirty-five years since I went to high school in Palo Alto). That was how I approached writing about the Senate back in 2010. My interest in technology is mostly sociological, maybe even anthropological. Outsiders are bound to miss things, and two tech insiders have pointed that out. Steven Johnson, the author of “Future Perfect” (discussed in my piece) and other books, takes me to task for painting the Valley as a hotbed of Ayn Rand libertarianism, when in fact it votes overwhelmingly Democratic. But the Valley’s libertarianism, as I wrote, is not at all doctrinaire, or party-dependent (I specifically said that it isn’t Randian); it’s an instinctive aversion to government intruding on the work being done in its labs and startups. This aversion, as I also wrote, is now giving way to a more sophisticated involvement in politics on the part of some tech leaders. In any event, Silicon Valley’s social liberalism runs so deep that the Republican Party in its current version could never win more than a small number of votes there. No one could possibly imagine Santa Clara County being red. However, it is possible to imagine more people in Silicon Valley turning to economic conservatism if, as Marc Andreessen predicted to me, the long arm of government regulation starts to reach deep into the tech world.
My analysis of the Valley’s politics isn’t about left-right in the usual sense. It’s about a particular brand of utopianism that sees solutions for social and political problems in the industry’s products and attitudes. There’s an example of this in what Johnson, in “Future Perfect,” calls “peer progressivism” (also mentioned in the piece). I am skeptical that Kickstarter and Airbnb provide models for solving more than superficial problems. I’m even more skeptical after reading Johnson’s argument that Silicon Valley is fighting back against inequality by creating large numbers of millionaires and distributing profits to its workforce in a relatively equitable way. This is pretty much my point: life inside Silicon Valley can be a paradise (for its winners) of opportunity and reward. Meanwhile, life outside falls further and further behind. All those highly paid engineers, with their generous stock options and unheard-of buying power, aren’t making the Valley more equal—they’re making it less so. And their success isn’t extending very far into the rest of the economy. Unless everyone becomes a software engineer—a proposal that was floated to me by several tech people, in one form or another—egalitarian stock plans are not an answer to the deepest structural problems in America.
Hamish McKenzie, of the tech Web site PandoDaily, claims that I overlooked all the startups explicitly involved in social betterment. This is generally true, though I did have an interesting talk with Matt Mahan of Causes, a company that helps nonprofits generate support, and in the piece I discussed the advent of “civic apps” as fixes for what ails government bureaucracies. The main reason I didn’t delve into startups like Causes is that they didn’t seem central to the life and work of Silicon Valley. The many people I interviewed out there seemed more interested in talking about the “sharing economy,” new variations on the social network, and other ways of changing the world through for-profit enterprises.
One last thought: I am grateful to Johnson and McKenzie for taking my piece seriously rather than dismissing it as the irrelevant complaints of a tech non-citizen, and for their civil tone in criticizing it. One of the things I value about Silicon Valley is its ethos of graciousness and niceness—something that hasn’t changed since I was growing up there, in another era.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: George Packer
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