Silicon Valley’s PRISM Problem
There is a road through all of Silicon Valley. Far into it is the satellite bowl in the Stanford foothills, ribbed and dilating in the sky. The only reservoir is eerie, still, aquamarine. The fat black dots of cows. The pastoral charm over it all. Hawks hunting on the rising heat of a hundred, thousand beemers. Towns that swell around the highway alternating between class ghettos and boring, bleached, classist utopian enclaves themselves giving way to their own class ghettos, themselves rolling into the bay. Up the road is San Francisco, in the fog, corner stores, rats and needles in the gutters, by-the-hour hotels, by-the-day apartments, huge blue skyscrapers. Office buildings, Victorian houses, parks and sidewalks, bikes and cars. Some days it all smells like weed and piss. Shining city on a hill.
Along this road are over half a dozen companies named in the broadest civilian surveillance initiative in public memory.
PRISM is not something we acknowledge and feel deeply to be our problem, even though the majority of the data, technology and access it runs on comes straight from us. PRISM asks us to examine our contact and contract with larger social systems, yet our public response migrates between distraction, denial and disinterest. While there have been compelling works around our recourse and responsibility, there is also an alternate dialogue in which we are by turns apologist and absurd. Laborious meat-headed critiques of NSA Powerpoints. Hands wrung on the inevitability of mass surveillance. Morbid fantasies of Steve Jobs as the last vanguard of resistance against government intervention in Paradise. We even fawn with renewed vigor over ever flamboyant, impotent “hacktivism”.
This discourse marks an industry refusing to meaningfully engage in problems that are, at least in part, of its own making. Similar patterns can be observed in our arms-length treatment of Silicon Valley’s obscene wealth gap, ghettoization of cities, overt racism and sexual harassment, burgeoning monopolies on social data, and refusal to find meaningful ways for users to control that data.
Turns out Silicon Valley is uniquely capable of navigating the tenuous moral ground of PRISM without self-condemnation. Silicon Valley mythology, fermented internally and exported broadly, is one of rugged individualism and proud isolation from the tired corruption of bread-and-butter American capital. Our story is of founding companies in the rich firmament of SV innovation and culture, building empires from its dust. The story is part nerd pornography, part imperialist reality. It can be read - simultaneously, opportunistically - as capitalist, libertarian and socialist.
The triumph of the individual in the market, achieving wildly disproportionate wealth through merit, is a capitalist fantasy. Yet the text around escaping bland conformist American corporatism for a separatist, Galt-ish paradise of unregulated opportunity is decidedly libertarian. Then there’s the cultural narrative designed to assuage the entire labor/capital tension inherent in an economic system that relies on enormous gaps in wealth and power - a narrative of worker’s rights and enlightenment, of fitter, better, happier employees, working on hard and interesting problems. Together, these mythologies form a malleable, escapist lens from which we view in safety and comfort the varied moral and political crises of our industry without claiming them as our own.
The myopic focus on individual achievement as the core unit of economic and social value leaves us struggling to address the systemic. We can relate to tech giants through the lens of individual triumph while rejecting their roles as behemoth forces in politics and the market as “from-us-but-not-of-us.” Our view of such titans as the mere end-state of geek revenge fantasy makes us both disinterested in, and alienated from, their moral failings... despite the hundreds of thousands of us they employ. In our ongoing “pretend”, we imagine ourselves operating outside of traditional wealth, power and social structures, then find ourselves unable to either locate or examine our role in them.
Of course, the very publics whose privacy is most impacted by PRISM are the publics we have most isolated ourselves from. We are separated from them by access to education and skills, by wealth, by class, by ethnic profile. We have been protected from the rest of the country’s deep recession in a self-made retreat of upward mobility.We slowly gentrify the cities and the towns we touch, living in both economic and physical seclusion from other groups. Ultimately, when we are implicated in crisis which affects other communities, we are unable to relate to those problems or feel responsible for solving them.
And so Silicon Valley leaves its golden childhood, marked by economic crisis, for a far darker adolescence, marked by moral crisis.
It is a sign of maturity in some ways, as no moral crisis is possible without moral consequence. And certainly, PRISM isn’t the only touchstone for moral conflict in the golden Valley. We begin to contend with the realization that our beloved meritocracy was a lie all along… a realization in part precipitated by unprecedented levels of feminist organization in our field. There, too, are the first signs of a more encompassing form of activism within technology that is inclusive of race, gender identity, and disability. At the same time there is a growing backlash against the mythologies of startup culture, now openly caricatured and critically examined. Perhaps the timing of PRISM is auspicious as we finally become capable of intersectional critique. But first we must find a way to relate to moral crisis as our problem, even as our own mythologies let us see ourselves more in Edward Snowden than in the Silicon Valley he named… the one we work in.
