There Won’t Be Peace In The Valley

“It seemed like a libertarian playground where the best would rise to the top but I quickly realised that environment also means work becomes a blood sport.”

Leaving aside the hilarious image of whatever rococo hellscape a ‘libertarian playground’ may constitute, the previous quote is an Uber employee recounting their last months on what appears to be the Silicon Valley tech startup’s plunge into a terminal nadir. If the reader will allow me a fanciful, morbid leap by way of analogy, I’m vaguely reminded of the famous Donner Party, a group of 19th century American pioneers who set off in wagons all the way from Illinois, had each other’s back through most of the harsh terrain of the American Midwest only to cannibalise each other once they got to Sierra Nevada, California; not too far from the Valley.

“Wolves are about to dig up the dead bodies at her shanty, the nights are too cold to watch them, we hear them howl.”- Diary entry of one of the doomed members of the Donner Party.

Another fanciful analogy we see peddled is that it’s only natural that the collective ambitions of humanity coalesce in the valley, after all California is the home of nature’s most Wagnerian excesses, the largest tree, one of the hottest spots in the world and the world’s heaviest pine cone. However, it’s also useful to keep in mind that the state is named after Calafia, a mythical queen of an Amazonian island first mentioned in a 16th century Spanish romance novel, and in more recent times it gave us both Juicero and Theranos, two enterprises worthy of their own straight to DVD comic caper.

An artist’s impression of Calafia, a mythical Amazonian queen.

An easier question to pose to arrive at an explanation of Silicon Valley’s technocratic hegemony is “Why Silicon Valley?” and why not Beaumont, Texas, or Singapore, or some obscure town in China or even ‘Kammanahattan’ for that matter? To break that down, how did Silicon Valley end up being this epicentre of innovation, influencers and the cog that keeps repackaging buzzwords like the previous two I mentioned in this sentence? As always, the simple answer is THE BLIMP!

The Hindenburg wasn’t a blimp as it had a metal body framework (clearly visible above) but this is a pretty cool, symbolic GIF.

During World War 2, the production of blimps was rife around the Californian coast as a measure of defence against a possible Japanese invasion of California that never happened. What this brought along with it was a host of radio transmission companies setting up shop in what is now Silicon Valley. The war ended, the blimps left, but the radio companies stayed, so it goes. Eventually, a man named William Shockley, who had won a Nobel prize for inventing transistors, trudged along to the Valley with a group of eight highly trained, bright assistants to develop and conduct research on semi-conductors. One of his significant breakthroughs was the use of silicon over germanium in transistors and this lent the valley it’s name, along with him being christened the patriarch of the entire damn place.

Shockley (middle) also invented the Kraftwerk album cover aesthetic.

However, Shockley was by all accounts a ghoulish character who used to loudly berate his assistants and even strap them up to lie detectors to ensure that they weren’t withholding technological secrets. The assistants tired of his Machiavellian methods and left within a year, starting 85 tech companies between them, including Intel and AMD, which formed the bedrock of the valley. Shockley went on to become a professor at Stanford and like any pedestrian curmudgeon, got deeply involved in race science and eugenics, making memorable appearances on late night talk shows to offer arguments for white supremacy.

Shockley’s ‘Traitorous Eight’ who went on to conceive Silicon Valley in it’s modern avatar.

The Valley’s history is quite appropriately obscured, appropriate because it’s self-professed dynamism aims to rewrite history, or just do away with it altogether, leaving it in a cryogenic bunker when we all move to Mars where an immortal Peter Thiel will conduct sermons on Soylent. Here in Bangalore, we have our own fledgling, anaemic tribe that sport black turtlenecks tumescent with dreams of the Uber for soppu saaru. I don’t have much to say to them, maybe I’d didactically point them to this Medium post or maybe I’d just remind them that the only thing we know about the aforementioned libertarian paradise is that it’s overwhelmingly white and male.

Write Leela Write

Branding, Content, and Creative Intelligence in the Indian & Global Market

)
Satyavrat Krishnakumar

Written by

Write Leela Write

Branding, Content, and Creative Intelligence in the Indian & Global Market

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade