What the Propaganda for Silicon Valley is Really All About

Today one would have to be very old to remember a time when Silicon Valley and the "tech" industry for which the term "Silicon Valley" is often used as a shorthand did not receive a share of the attention of the news media and popular culture far out of proportion to its actual share in economic life, as measured by the capitalization and revenues and profits of its major firms, the number of people who work in it, the place of its products in daily life, or anything else.

Those who attend to the image may also note that depiction of Silicon Valley presents it as an entrepreneur-driven scene where the gale of creative destruction is always blowing, laying low the big and clearing the way for the small to emerge and grow (as against a scene in which the visible hand of oligopolistic corporate technostructures have largely sheltered themselves from market forces, leaving small business, consumers, workers, to twist in the wind as they reap the benefits of a privileged position). Where "disruptive" innovation is always "bringing good things to life" (as against it being a scene of minor, trivial, "sustaining" or even nonexistent technological change depending on the case, or worse, the "enshittification" of yesteryear's technological achievements). Where the big fortunes are generally New, and Self-Made, and the product of individual technological genius of world-historical caliber befitting a Great Man theory of economy history (as against Old Money, inherited privilege and billions made from rent-seeking and speculation rather than "real" productive activities, as against individuals reaping the personal benefits of public research and an innovative machine irreducible to single institutions, never mind individuals). And which because of all of the foregoing is, within its line, a center of excellence unparalleled anywhere else in a world which can only envy it (as against an increasingly hollow economy in relative and perhaps absolute decline).

In short, the image of Silicon Valley reflects and reinforces the image of capitalism and especially of the U.S. economy that the orthodox and especially the neoliberal ardently promotes--and the opposite of what those of other economics views, from the conservative economic nationalist to the thoroughgoing leftist, have long analyzed it as being. At best Silicon Valley has resembled their ideal a bit more than the rest of the economy--such that presenting it this way has always entailed a good deal of violence to the facts--and as time has gone on (as the upstart startups turned into Big Tech, for example) it has resembled that ideal less and less. Still, even as the law may be beginning to catch up to what everyone has known for decades (like the fact that Facebook does not sit well with the principles of "antitrust"), the propaganda goes on as movies and TV continue to shower us with flattering images of tech billionaires that remind me of what Upton Sinclair wrote a century ago in Mammonart: that the artist "feels a real awe for authority," "thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in making him bigger in body" believes themselves "acting as a seer and philosopher, bringing out an inner truth," with the irony that "the smaller . . . in reality" the sovereign is "the more rigid the art convention that he is big."

As it goes with the lords of old, so it goes with those latterday lords of capital, all part of the "snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition . . . bragging and strutting and beating of tom-toms" that makes pop culture the idiocy that it is--and the slaves of conventional wisdom snarl at anyone who points to any of the facts calling into question the truthiness of the Establishment-sanctioned view.