Whither the Promise of Silicon Valley?

The '90s, as I find myself saying again and again, were a period of profound delusion. Many of the delusions had to do with the New Economy, in which a certain conception of "Silicon Valley" was central. For the information age-singing neoliberal Silicon Valley represented everything good and great about America (such that when its boosters speak of it they seem to be imagining heavenly choirs raising their voices them). Its people were--in line with their obsessive compulsive disorder-like propensity for invidious comparison--the country's "best and brightest" (which was to say that if you were not one of them, you were not best and brightest--you were worse and dumber). It embodied what they regarded as the finest American values ("entrepreneurship," "innovation," and many, many other buzzwords), which they held to be more strongly present here than anywhere else in the country or the world. (It may well be that the origins of the "If Cars Were Like Computers . . ." joke are not what we are told they are, but even so one could easily picture the executives in Detroit getting sick of hearing their counterparts in the Bay Area get talked up so much as to concoct something of the kind.)

Delusional, too, were the populist fantasies that the cheerleaders tried spinning around it. The market populists portrayed the tech billionaires as young upstarts, vaguely progressive and even countercultural--hippie techies out of the West Coast "Ecotopia" who wanted to make the world a better place. ("It's like, freedom, man!") Such people were supposed to be the redeemers on Earth of the neoliberalism that tore the guts out of the industrial base that was the foundation of American economic might--with an unceasing stream of INNOVATION! from which wealth would trickle down to all in ways from "good jobs" to day trading that would make every adult a rentier. And even as they made for a more productive capitalism than ever before they would make for a kinder and gentler one, too, greening our production and making our lives easier not only with their products and the income with which to buy them but their management style as our workplaces became kindergartens for grown-ups, full of beanbag chairs and toys contributing to a gentle, soothing, creativity-nurturing atmosphere.

Of course, it did not work that way. At all. Anyone who imagined that Silicon Valley by itself would make everything wrong with the American economy right found out otherwise in short order as Silicon Valley hype actually tanked the economy with dot-com bubble and bust--while the same old problems just went on getting worse through and after it, as Silicon Valley's INNOVATION! engine all but sputtered compared with the promises of the '90s. (The prospect of genuine advances like self-driving cars came to nothing, as they pushed things no one asked for and most people refused when offered them, like that Internet of Things they never shut up about.)

The populist fantasies looked especially ridiculous. Those supposed upstarts (rarely of such obscure origin as their PR people would have folks believe), who were supposed to have challenged the club of Old Men ruling the economy became a club of Old Men in their turn. And they, and the corporate empires they built, have become monuments to extreme and ever-more established wealth, and the inseparability and ultimate indistinguishability of the newest money from the oldest in connections, style, tone and even possessions (the onetime icon of tech wealth since become the biggest private landowner in the country). Monument to Wall Street paper profiteering and offshore banking and race-to-the-labor-standards bottom offshoring and sweatshop exploitation; to monopoly power and Orwellian surveillance and censorship; to hyper-elitism and contempt for the have-nots, in ways from the Josiah Bounderby pretenses and Ebenezer Scrooge callousness to the ideologies to which those to whom so much is given so easily incline, desperately trying to persuade the world that they are the supermen of Ayn Rand's inverted proletarian lit stories (with the media a very willing accessory as it promulgates their images of themselves as chess-playing math whiz child prodigies all growns up who will personally unlock the secret to immortality as Prometheus stole fire from the gods!).

It is increasingly difficult, and perhaps not even possible, to regard the Silicon Valley people were promised, always a delusion that one had to be truly gullible to be taken in by, as anything but that delusion now--and indeed there seems a certain symbolism in the Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group being bankrupt, just like the hucksterism that may prove to be the place's single greatest cultural legacy.