Silicon Valley Eats the World
Silicon Valley is more than a place. It’s an idea. What does that idea mean?
Wall Street. Hollywood. Washington. Silicon Valley. These four places are not only geographic locations, they represent entire industries. “Wall Street” is shorthand for the financial services industry. “Hollywood” is a stand-in for the entire American film and television business. “Washington” is the federal government. “Silicon Valley” is the entire technology and startup world.
Each of these four also carry ideological freight — symbolizing a system of values. Wall Street is invoked, mostly by liberals, to represent the bottom-line oriented conservatism of bankers and traders in opposition to “Main Street”. Hollywood is used, mostly by conservatives, as a catch-all title for the frequently liberal values of the artistic elite. And Washington is invoked, most frequently by politicians running for office, as the bureaucratic enemy of true democracy.
But what of Silicon Valley? What does Silicon Valley mean? Does it represent an “idea” as well? I believe it does. And given the disproportionate influence of that small peninsula on all of society, I think it’s terribly important to understand. Here’s a few perspectives.
THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY
In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.
Twenty years ago British media theorists, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, wrote an essay called “The Californian Ideology” to describe what they saw as a new philosophy emerging from America’s west coast. They claimed, “a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age.” And it was like nothing before it.
This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.
Not everyone liked Barbrook and Cameron’s essay. The editor of Wired Magazine, Louis Rosetto, wrote that it represented “a profound ignorance of economics” and “ anal retentive attachment to failed 19th century social and economic analysis and bromides.” Other than that, I think he loved it.
The thesis has stuck, especially the selection I pulled, which recognized the Valley’s strange combination of liberal viewpoints and libertarian impulses.
Perhaps no one better illustrates Barbrook and Cameron’s thesis than Apple founder Steve Jobs. He was, after all, both hip and rich. He drew inspiration from taking LSD but also built the most valuable company in the world. Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson quotes U2 frontman Bono in describing how Jobs was a product of the unique counter-culture around the San Francisco Bay:
“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”
Jobs was the embodiment of an idea: Think Different. And for many he was more than a business leader. He was an icon of a way of life. Jobs’ death was a profound moment. I remember exactly where I was when I read the news (on one of the mobile devices he had designed). The next day I walked by the Apple store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and saw dozens of candles and flowers laid by the front door. I recall thinking “I bet this is what is feels like when you learn that the President has been shot.”
Jobs’ death provoked a remarkable worldwide display of reverent mourning because he represented a set of ideas and values bigger than himself or the products he created. He was the prophet of thinking different, and the one who could make us all feel cool through elegant design. And he represented a bigger philosophy of empowering freedom, described in the Californian Ideology:
Information technologies, so the argument goes, empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.
Jobs, who upended technology with the Mac and then upended media with Pixar and iTunes, was in many ways the personification of the California that education critic Audrey Watters describes as including “both Hollywood and Silicon Valley. California is media plus technology, both of which readily export their products (and narratives and ideologies) globally…California is always already the future; California rejects and rewrites the past.” Jobs knew the emotive future-oriented power of California. Though his products were built in China, he stamped on each one “Designed in California.”
California is always already the future; California rejects and rewrites the past.
THE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE
The strange brew of counter-cultural libertarianism one finds in Silicon Valley is well summarized in a strange 846 word manifesto from the 1990s called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” written by John Perry Barlow. The Washington Post had this to say about Barlow: “Perhaps more than any other, it’s his philosophy — a marriage of countercultural utopianism, a rancher’s skepticism toward government and a futurist’s faith in the virtual world — that shaped the industry.” Indeed Barlow was regularly quoted by other Silicon Valley luminaries like Kevin Kelly and Jaron Lanier.
Here’s the opening graph from his essay:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” He then explains how cyberspace is a place of ultimate freedom, where conventional laws don’t apply. At the end, he exhorts the Internet to “be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” — A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
According to the Jacob Silverman, Barlow “wrote songs for the Grateful Dead, tended to his parents’ Wyoming ranch in the waning days of family farms and eventually helped co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organization.” He viewed the internet with the eyes of a rancher, seeing it as a vast unsettled frontier. In fact he saw it as an upgrade from the government-dominated real-world. Silverman writes, that adherents of the Barlow’s philosophy, “many of them survivors of the ‘Me’ decade, weaned on sci-fi novels, self-help and New Age spiritualism…forsook the civil actions of an earlier generation. They thought freedom would be found not in the streets but in an ‘electronic agora,’ an open digital marketplace where individuality would be allowed its fullest expression, away from the encumbrances of government and even of the physical world.”
Silverman goes on to argue that “Silicon Valley…has left people like Barlow behind. Its utopian visions long ago lost their countercultural, communitarian impulses.” Instead we have “a tech economy in which fantastic profits come by monitoring our every click and heartbeat…Barlow once wrote that ‘trusting the government with your privacy is like having a Peeping Tom install your window blinds.’ But the Barlovian focus on government overreach leaves its author and other libertarians blind to the same encroachments on our autonomy from the private sector.”
I happen to think Silverman has a point about the erosion of our privacy at the hands not only of the state but of Big Tech. However, I believe that most of the leaders of Big Tech believe that though they are putting our private lives at risk, they are ultimately doing a good thing in the world.
SILICON VALLEY IS A LAND OF PHILOSOPHER-KINGS
Real artists ship. — Steve Jobs
In The Republic,Plato argued that the best leaders would be philosopher-kings. “Philosophers [must] become kings…or those now called kings [must]…genuinely and adequately philosophize” (The Republic, 5.473d). Philosopher-kings would be educated, rational, and think deeply about the world. For this reason I think Plato might have liked Silicon Valley. At a concrete level nowhere else will you find such a preponderance of company leaders who studied philosophy or who fancy themselves philosophers.
Some of the most legendary leaders of Silicon Valley actually have degrees in philosophy. SY Combinator founder Paul Graham was a philosophy major at Cornell. Flickr and Slack founder Stewart Butterfield earned a PhD in philosophy at Cambridge. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman got a Masters degree in philosophy from Oxford. His Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel majored in philosophy at Stanford. Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina studied philosophy and medieval history at Stanford.
And many Silicon Valley leaders who didn’t formally earn degrees in philosophy are deeply philosophical in their approach, from Jobs to the Larry Page and Sergey Brin who famously wrote the philosophical guiding maxim of Google: “Don’t Be Evil.” The Tech Street Journal describes how that training shaped many of Silicon Valley’s leading thinkers:
Next time you’re struggling to figure out how to make a big dent in the universe with your own startup, maybe the answer is to take time out to “read the Tempest and talk about its implication in life”. While such discussions obviously didn’t lead Thiel and Hoffman directly to their billions, it is reasonable to suggest that it was practice for thinking about the possible implications their own ideas would have on the world…these guys wrap the usual nuts-and-bolts business thinking in a meta layer of thought that asks not merely how to achieve product/market fit, but what would a particular idea mean for the world if brought to fruition? The dollars made are a side-effect of having created something that moves the world in a positive direction.
If there are two phrases that sum up the ethos of Silicon Valley, they are “make the world a better place” and “move fast and break things.” The first phrase is Silicon Valley’s why the second is it’s how. The first sums up beyond-the-bottom-line thinking that has motivated so many of the Valley’s founders since the first days of the Home Brew Computing Club. The second is Mark Zuckerberg’s motto at Facebook. It captures the hacker spirit of experimentation and speed. I be surprised if there were a single company in the Valley that didn’t have some version of these two statements among their guiding values.
DO THE MOST IMPORTANT PHILOSOPHERS OF OUR TIME RESIDE IN SILICON VALLEY?
“If you think it’s too early to think about something, it’s probably slightly too late.” — Nate Soares, executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute
Silicon Valley both is a philosophy and it is a place stacked with philosophers thinking about the ethics of things you may not yet have dreamed are possible. “Whether you like their thinking or not,” says Sanjena Sathian in Ozy, “today’s techno-philosophers are incarnating the next generation of big ideas, intentionally tackling fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness and what constitutes the good life, questions that once lived mainly in philosophy departments…[and] perhaps the most seemingly dreamy-eyed of the bunch are using their epistemological, ontological and ethical muscles on giant, sometimes scary, positively cinematic issues of artificial intelligence. Meet the futurists.”
Sathian’s article reports on, among other things, the Peter Thiel-funded Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Researchers there are studying how to ensure AI is friendly to humans and thinking through whether it is possible to program a super-smart computer to be “good.” MIRI isn’t the only such group. YCombinator is leading a billion dollar OpenAI research effort funded partly by Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk to tackle some of the same questions. Why are venture capitalists funding this research on tech ethics? The answer is in part because, according to Clark Glymour, alumni professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, “Few ‘professional’ philosophers are studying the future with urgency”
“Philosophers,” says Glymour “are ‘a community with sinecures. We don’t really have to pay much attention. Nor are philosophers trained, with some exceptions, to deal with contemporary issues.’ If the professionals won’t do the thinking, it’s inevitable that technologists will pull double duty as ethicists and developers alike.”
This is an idea I’ve been wrestling with for the past two years. Why aren’t more philosophers and theologians thinking about and working on these problems? Why aren’t they more concerned about applying their metaphysics and ethics to the world-shifting technologies that are being developed along the San Francisco bay? It may be because technological change is shifting so rapidly.
THE RELIGION OF SILICON VALLEY
The German news outlet Der Spiegel two years ago had a terrific analysis of Silicon Valley written by Thomas Schulz. In it Shulz describes the hard-to-believe rapidity of change brought on by Silicon Valley:
The iPhone only made its appearance seven years ago, but most of us no longer remember what the world was like before. Driverless cars were considered to be a crazy fantasy not long ago, but today nobody is particularly amazed by them. All the world’s knowledge condensed into a digital map and easily accessible? Normal. The fact that algorithms in the US control some 70 percent of all trading on the stock market? Crazy, to be sure. But normal craziness.
We are witnessing nothing less than a societal transformation that ultimately nobody will be able to avoid. It is the kind of sea change that can only be compared with 19th century industrialization, but it is happening much faster this time. Just as the change from hand work to mass production dramatically changed our society over 100 years ago, the digital revolution isn’t just altering specific sectors of the economy, it is changing the way we think and live.
This time, though, the transformation is different. This time, it is being driven by just a few hundred people.
Think of the scores of industries that are being fundamentally transformed by just four companies: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Add in just a couple more, like Uber and AirBnB, and you being to realize that nothing will be untouched by the technologies emerging from Silicon Valley. Globalization combined with digitalization is changing the world as we know it. And change, argues Schulz is exactly what Silicon Valley believes in most.
The new “masters of the universe”…are fundamentally different from their predecessors: Their primary focus isn’t on money. They don’t want to just determine what we consume, but how we consume it and how we live. They aren’t trying to capture just one economic sector, but all of them. They aren’t stumbling haphazardly into the future, rather they are ideologues with a clear agenda. Indeed, aside from their astounding success, it is that ideology that makes them unique. The religion of Wall Street is money. But the religion of Silicon Valley goes much deeper. It is driven by substance; it is the unfailing belief in a message.
That message holds that technology can change humanity for the better. The people from the valley who hope to reshape the world fundamentally believe that their high-tech solutions will create a better future for all of mankind just as pious Hindus believe in reincarnation.
It is telling that Schulz compares the Valley’s belief in technology to a Hindu belief in reincarnation because some, including the famous tech investor Brad Feld, have begun calling the Silicon Valley philosophy a religion. Similarly, the author of “Bubble and Blunder” says he used to think of Silicon Valley as an ecosystem, but now sees it as a religion.
Religions have a Book, or books, and lots of books about the Book. Silicon Valley has always had books, from Crossing the Chasm to the Four Steps to the Epiphany and Lean Startup. These books guide the way…Religions have deacons and disciples. Silicon Valley has mentors and entrepreneurs…Religions have churches and meeting houses. Silicon Valley has accelerators, incubators, co-work spaces…Religions have sin, forgiveness and redemption.Silicon Valley has failure, pivots, and serial entrepreneurs.
The best short piece I’ve read on this idea is by Samuel Loncar in Marginalia called “The Vibrant Religious Life of Silicon Valley, and Why It’s Killing the Economy.” It is a brilliant review of Jaron Lanier’s book “Who Own’s the Future.”
There exists a massive though rarely discussed division between the technological elites and the conventional elites in politics, journalism, and academia. The biggest division is that the former have a vibrant, motivating, visionary eschatology, which is a core part of the religion of Silicon Valley…it is a vision of increasing dematerialization, a concomitant emphasis on the technological alteration and eventual transcendence of our embodied condition, and the rise of a friction-less world in which autonomy and choice extend toward infinity (an Ayn Randian utopia).
Jaron Lanier, who is credited with inventing virtual reality, is a Silicon Valley prophet. In the tradition of Old Testament prophets, which he resembles, Lanier both foresees the future and critiques the present. He focuses on the idea of the Singularity, which not many people outside the Valley are aware of but which dominates the thinking of some of the most powerful business and tech leaders of the world. The Singularity is the idea that at some point computers will become so advanced that people and machines will merge into one being or that artificial intelligence will one day far outstrip human consciousness. Lanier writes: “these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists … All thoughts about consciousness, souls, and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.”
What is Silicon Valley? It is a location. It is an industry. And it is an ideology. It is the spirit of anti-establishment hippies and profit-seeking yuppies. It is home to a hacker entrepreneurial spirit that wants to make the world a better place by disobeying the rules and moving fast. It is an unblinking religious belief in the inevitability that technology will improve the world.
In the next issue, I’ll explore the roots of these beliefs more directly to understand how Libertarianism, Liberalism, Objectivism, Stoicism, and Pragmatism have shaped the peculiar ethos of Silicon Valley and how that ethos plays out politically.
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
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