The Myth of Silicon Valley--and the Very Different Reality

If you are even slightly attentive to economic reality then you will have likely noticed how much more attention the "tech" sector and its more prominent figures get than do their counterparts across the rest of the vast and highly diversified U.S. economy--exceedingly disproportionate attention. This has much to do with the development of an image of "Silicon Valley" that corresponds to how neoliberals want the public to picture capitalism generally and American capitalism particularly that associates it with

"entrepreneurship" of the founder-run "startup" form and "creative destruction," technological dynamism, worldwide American technological leadership and [the] recently self-made fortunes of inventor-entrepreneurs

all as against, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith's "technostructure"-centered vision of a corporate planning system extremely remote from both the free market dynamics of orthodox economic theory, and the real-world experience of the rest of the public; a reality of technological stagnation that has made a joke of talk of an "information age" that can seem to have always been an attempt to deflect attention from an economy already traveled far down a path of not just relative decline but actual deindustrialization; and, contrary to the "market populist" line, not only the fact that a handful of people becoming "billionaires" say absolutely nothing of the real life chances of the many, but no reasonable person would imagine that New Money behaves any differently from Old Money in any way that counts in the lives of actual working people.

However, compounding the distortion is the fact that this image of tech is itself a matter of myth rather than reality--a fact so marginalized in contemporary discussion that one has to step outside the "entrepreneur"-singing, startup barking, tech-hyping courtiers to business of the media mainstream and look to, for example, the journalism of Cory Doctorow over at Pluralistic. The past month has seen Mr. Doctorow deliver a characteristically robust series of reports updating the interested on just how big is the gap between the hype and the reality which has ranged from the "scalesplaining" of social media companies, to the vileness that is "surveillance pricing," to the subject of dealer management software and its susceptibility to breaches whose disruptiveness has only grown over time (as Doctorow shows through the histories of such events at Equifax, Change Healthcare, and the crisis at CDK that recently disrupted car dealing in the United States)--each and every one of said pieces, per usual with Doctorow, worth not a skim but a proper word-for-word read from anyone even slightly interested in this subject (as anyone whose life is affected by this stuff, which is pretty much everyone who has not gone to such extremes to completely avoid anything and everything to do with the digital age that they are almost certainly not reading these words now).

Still, if you are new to this more critical perspective, or are not so new but have only time to look at just one item, I would particularly recommend Doctorow's piece about Microsoft's address of its products' security--precisely because here Doctorow presents of the story of the rise of Bill Gates and Microsoft in a way that is greatly and importantly different from the one with which Americans have been beaten over the head for as long as they can remember (Gates the inventor of genius, Gates the self-made man who rose from humble origins without any help whatsoever to be the richest man on Earth for most of a generation, Gates the embodiment of American meritocracy and the American Dream, Gates the humanitarian "philanthropist" leading the way on issues like climate change, Gates the model for all of the rest of us, etc., etc. ad nauseam).

Indeed, the facts would seem the extreme opposite of the endlessly promulgated "legend" in the way of so many Josiah Bounderbys past and present, so much so that even those who do not read journalists like Doctorow may well have encountered some of this in the past. Still, even if one has heard every bit before and remembers it still, the fact remains that given the endless reiteration of the "legend" intended to bury any other perception in avalanche-like fashion mere repetition of the truth has value, while there is what Doctorow does with it here--draw the bits and pieces normally presented in isolated fashion and easily ignored as the conventional picture endures to create a coherent, and more truthful, image that helps us understand the world better than before. As the critical sneers that have so often met the work of historians like Clive Ponting show, this important service is too little appreciated by even those who ought to know better.