Silicon Valley is Failing At Geography
Every time I arrive in California, my facial muscles relax. It’s like magic. Without having to leave the country, I feel far from the problems in the rest of the U.S., and even farther from the world’s problems. Dare I say I’m jealous that this special land concentrates so many good things in one place. Even the traffic can’t get me down.
But California’s detachment is also its Achilles heel, and is a major factor in why the state’s most important companies are under global scrutiny for their role in distorting elections, crowding locals out of their own neighborhoods, and supporting erosions of labor rights. Despite all its grand promises of connecting the world, more and more it looks like California’s companies are tearing it apart.
Silicon Valley needs an International Relations degree
Silicon Valley is not filled with evil billionaires scheming to monetize humanity’s most intimate details. It’s filled with well-meaning smart people who believe so much in what they’re doing that they can’t understand why anyone would want to stop them.
Companies like Facebook and Google have a noble mission to connect the world, but in doing so assume that every individual that can sign up for an account has the same attitudes towards free speech, individual equality, and that they all live in places where there aren’t serious consequences for speaking out. Companies like Airbnb and Uber have an economically sound mission to open access to unused supply in lodging and transportation, assuming that every person in the world has the same views of ownership and community, and assuming that every global jurisdiction has a system to adjudicate disputes as functional as America’s.
The physical and emotional distance of Silicon Valley from the rest of the world plays a big part in creating this detachment, matched with a sunny belief that better algorithms or more powerful artificial intelligence can bridge the world’s messy differences. As companies as different as Uber and Twitter are confronted by a growing global backlash to their products, they have only treated the symptoms rather than being introspective about the cause of the malaise.
Facebook’s Intern Diplomats
When I interned on Facebook’s Washington-based public policy team in 2012, I was the only person in the entire company that was fully responsible for preparing for and monitoring public policy issues in Latin America and Canada, a region of 550 million people spread across 35 different countries. Nobody else on the DC-based team spoke Spanish or Portuguese and, aside from 27-year-old me, nobody on the team had lived or worked anywhere south of the Rio Grande.
During my time at Facebook, I had to convince very intelligent people, freaking out about a request to testify in Ottawa, that Canada’s Senate didn’t do the same thing as America’s Senate. I had to convince these same people that Brazil had, indeed, the sovereign power to shut down their platform for electoral law violations.
Nobody on my team (or broadly in the company) was dismissive or belittling of this foreign scrutiny, but they were truly perplexed as to why so much heat was bearing down on little old Facebook. I learned, in that short period of time, that there was a serious disconnect between how the world viewed Silicon Valley and how Silicon Valley viewed the world.
Ever since, working for organizations as diverse as the Clinton Global Initiative and McKinsey’s venture-backed startup practice, I have observed the missteps of American tech companies abroad through the lens of this experience at Facebook. This lens has yet to prove me wrong, and as the recriminations pile up from Barcelona to Bangalore, I see a group of companies that is unwilling to place the different realities of their billions of global users at the heart of their products.
American Values meet Global Realities
At Silicon Valley’s core is an honorable faith in these American values of innovation, combined with platforms hardwired with the American values of free speech, political pluralism, fierce private sector competition, and limited government. These are societal values that Americans have built up over the course of 250 years, and values that allow Silicon Valley companies to work so successfully within the United States.
Also at Silicon Valley’s core is a dangerous belief that their products, which incorporate many of these American traits in their own value proposition, can be globally applied without taking the world’s panorama of value structures into account.
I love California, and I’m proud that it’s part of a larger country that relentlessly innovates, pushes the boundaries of what is possible, and drives the world forward. But I fear that California companies are so accustomed to having the world come to them, and adapting to their ways, that they are unable to understand why others might not like the way they do things.
The world’s offline differences are obvious, and the time when we could pretend that the Internet erased them rather than magnified them is quickly ending. If Silicon Valley companies cannot adapt to this changing global reality, there are plenty of governments eager to bid them farewell, and local competitors ready to step into the void. And California will suddenly feel even further away from reality than it already does.
