{"id":12794,"date":"2018-07-11T02:37:13","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T02:37:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=12794"},"modified":"2018-07-12T02:41:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T02:41:00","slug":"silicon-valley-from-hearts-delight-to-toxic-wasteland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/silicon-valley-from-hearts-delight-to-toxic-wasteland\/","title":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley, from ‘heart\u2019s delight’ to toxic wasteland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew L. Russell<\/a>, SUNY Polytechnic Institute<\/a><\/em> and Lee Vinsel<\/a>, Virginia Tech<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

There was a time when California\u2019s Santa Clara Valley, bucolic home to orchards and vineyards, was known as \u201cthe valley of heart\u2019s delight<\/a>.\u201d The same area was later dubbed \u201cSilicon Valley,\u201d shorthand for the high-tech combination of creativity, capital and California cool. However, a backlash<\/a> is now well underway<\/a> \u2013 even from the loyal gadget-reviewing press<\/a>. Silicon Valley increasingly conjures something very different: exploitation, excess, and elitist detachment<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Today there are 23 active Superfund toxic waste cleanup sites<\/a> in Santa Clara County, California. Its culture is equally unhealthy<\/a>: Think of the Gamergate misogynist harassment campaigns<\/a>, the entitled \u201ctech bros<\/a>\u201d and rampant sexism and racism<\/a> in Silicon Valley firms. These same companies demean the online public with privacy breaches<\/a> and unauthorized<\/a> sharing<\/a> of users\u2019 data<\/a>. Thanks to the companies\u2019 influences, it\u2019s extremely expensive to live in the area<\/a>. And transportation is so clogged that there are special buses bringing tech-sector workers<\/a> to and from their jobs. Some critics even perceive threats<\/a> to democracy<\/a> itself. <\/p>\n

In a word, Silicon Valley has become toxic.<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley\u2019s rise is well documented, but the backlash against its distinctive culture and unscrupulous corporations hints at an imminent twist in its fate. As historians of technology<\/a> and industry<\/a>, we find it helpful to step back from the breathless champions and critics of Silicon Valley and think about the long term. The rise and fall of another American economic powerhouse \u2013 Detroit \u2013 can help explain how regional reputations change over time.<\/p>\n

The rise and fall of Detroit<\/h2>\n

The city of Detroit became a famous node of industrial capitalism thanks to the pioneers of the automotive age. Men such as Henry Ford, Horace and John Dodge, and William Durant cultivated Detroit\u2019s image as a center of technical novelty in the early 20th century. <\/p>\n

The very name \u201cDetroit\u201d soon became a metonym for the industrial might of the American automotive industry and the source of American military power<\/a>. General Motors President Charles E. Wilson\u2019s remark, \u201cFor years I thought what was good for our country<\/a> was good for General Motors, and vice versa,\u201d was an arrogant but accurate account of Detroit\u2019s place at the heart of American prosperity and global leadership.<\/p>\n

The public\u2019s view changed after the 1950s. The auto industry\u2019s leading firms slid into bloated bureaucratic rigidity and lost ground to foreign competitors<\/a>. By the 1980s, Detroit was the image of blown-out, depopulated post-industrialism<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In retrospect \u2013 and perhaps as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley \u2013 the moral decline of Detroit\u2019s elite was evident long before its economic decline<\/a>. Henry Ford became famous in the pre-war era for the cars and trucks that carried his name, but he was also an anti-Semite, proto-fascist and notorious enemy of organized labor<\/a>. Detroit also was the source of defective and deadly products that Ralph Nader criticized in 1965 as \u201cunsafe at any speed<\/a>.\u201d Residents of the region now bear the costs of its amoral industrial past<\/a>, beset with high unemployment and poisonous drinking water<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A new chapter for Silicon Valley<\/h2>\n

If the story of Detroit can be simplified as industrial prowess and national prestige, followed by moral and economic decay, what does that say about Silicon Valley? The term \u201cSilicon Valley<\/a>\u201d first appeared in print in the early 1970s and gained widespread use throughout the decade. It combined both place and activity. The Santa Clara Valley, a relatively small area south of the San Francisco Bay, home to San Jose and a few other small cities, was the base for a computing revolution based on silicon chips<\/a>. Companies and workers flocked to the Bay Area, seeking a pleasant climate, beautiful surroundings and affordable land<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By the 1980s, venture capitalists and companies<\/a> in the Valley had mastered the silicon arts and were getting filthy, stinking rich. This was when \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d became shorthand for an industrial cluster<\/a> where universities, entrepreneurs and capital markets fueled technology-based economic development. Journalists fawned<\/a> over successful companies like Intel, Cisco and Google, and analysts filled shelves with books and reports about how other regions could become the \u201cnext Silicon Valley<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

Many concluded that its culture set it apart. Boosters and publications like Wired magazine celebrated the combination of the Bay Area hippie legacy<\/a> with the libertarian individualism<\/a> embodied by the late Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow<\/a>. The libertarian myth masked some crucial elements of Silicon Valley\u2019s success \u2013 especially public funds<\/a> dispersed through the U.S. Defense Department and Stanford University.<\/p>\n

\"TheIn retrospect, perhaps that ever-expanding gap between Californian dreams and American realities led to the undoing of Silicon Valley. Its detachment from the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans can be seen today in the unhinged Twitter rants<\/a> of automaker Elon Musk, the extreme politics of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel<\/a>, and the fatuous dreams of immortality<\/a> of Google\u2019s vitamin-popping director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil. Silicon Valley\u2019s moral decline has never been clearer, and it now struggles to survive the toxic mess it has created.<\/p>\n

Andrew L. Russell<\/a>, Dean, College of Arts & Sciences; Professor of History, SUNY Polytechnic Institute<\/a><\/em> and Lee Vinsel<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Virginia Tech<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew L. Russell, SUNY Polytechnic Institute and Lee Vinsel, Virginia Tech There was a time when California\u2019s Santa Clara Valley, bucolic home to orchards and vineyards, was known as \u201cthe valley of heart\u2019s delight.\u201d The same area was later dubbed \u201cSilicon Valley,\u201d shorthand for the high-tech combination of creativity, capital and California cool. However, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":12789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3410],"tags":[3426,2894,191,899,3831,4787,420],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12795,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12794\/revisions\/12795"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}