book: Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism, Wendy Liu
"Silicon Valley" , like "Wall Street" , is a place you can point to on a map, but it is so much more ... the nature of software, of the internet, of international trade and communication speed, coupled with the fact that the Silicon Valley outputs are heavyweights (Google, Apple, Facebook/Meta, OpenAI, Tesla, ... ) strong-arming the rest of the world to working the way they want it to, means that a huge amount of us have been infected.
so I guess part of why I am reading about Silicon Valley is a morbid fascination, and part of it is to define the symptoms for my own diagnosis (having my childhood tangled up in the Silicon Valley Era), and also to root out the Silicon Valley outgrowths that've spread to far.
Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley is, for the most part, an autobiography, one written by a author who feels a degree of disgust towards who she is writing about: her past self. I knew it was somewhat autobiographical, or at least motivated by personal experience, before going in. I knew Liu was a woman of color as well. I didn't know initially that Liu is an ex-startup-founder, and not born in the USA, and a daughter of a "self made" family (her father grew up in rural poverty). She picks apart her experiences.
She was raised, in a way, by Silicon Valley, despite being Canadian ... a "nerdy" kid whose community was found online. She retreated from the messy offline world into the online world, and the world of software, where she could exert her will on something, and where she felt powerful and capable of fixing the world -- with no understanding of the problems she was trying to fix. She knew the online world was not welcoming to women, which she internalized as reasonable (because the online community that raised her said so, and that was Her Community), and also as a challenge. She would prove that she is smart and capable, unlike other women, by overcoming her gender-derived incompetence with hard work and unique intellect ... she chose her undergraduate place-of-study and degree by virtue of having the fewest women, which she viewed as a sign of its high intellectual rigor. If you studied humanities and then couldn't find a job, that's your fault, you should have studied something useful (computer science). If you wanted the system to change, you were just too lazy to work hard and do something productive. And Liu likes to solve challenging puzzles, which mutated into self-image derived from not being lazy and therefore accepting inhumane conditions. &, when tech work gave her a better wage and job security than other jobs, inhumane conditions became the penance for these benefits, asking for more would be selfish. & admitting all of this was fucked up would mean admitting that she had killed years on years on years of her own life on ... nothing meaningful, nothing that made the world a better place. & that she had harmed people in the process, that she was the bad guy in many cases, demanding her friend-colleagues work 80+ hours a week, live amongst mold and ant infestations, barely sleep , which a few did enthusiastically. The whole thing feels like a person regretfully recounting their behavior during a manic psychosis, or when intoxicated, so on ...
the book is written for people who are immersed in Silicon Valley and know something is wrong, but they're not sure what, and they don't have the knowledge+vocab to describe it well. Liu lays out her experience, which feels eerily similar to the experiences I have witnessed, and points out:
when this culture outputs a horror onto the world, a grift, a scam, a human rights violation, that horror is considered a fluke on the individual level. [CEO] was uniquely bad, so on. When this culture outputs a success onto the world, it praises both the individual (as a genius or whatever), and also the system that allowed this person to become successful. only the successes are attributed to the system (neoliberal capitalism run amok) , while failures/disasters are not , either "bad apples" or mistakes or people "doing it wrong" , PEBKAC. It is inverted with regards to alternatives, exemplar failures always being systemic, exemplar successes being a non-representative outlier case.
What a shame it is that tinkering, inventing, creating, is constrained by the demands of a for-profit system, says Liu, turning the idea of capitalism-fostering-innovation on its head. You need a certain amount of time and money to even try to make anything new, and thousands of work-hours of research and creation is locked behind intellectual property law, unable to be used as a springboard for new ideas. and, if you do end up making a new thing, you will usually only get the finances to make More of the thing for people to have when you accept investment -- after which you must satisfy their demands. Useless shit gets invented and re-invented to try and make money, while so many useful and amazing things fall apart since they don't make a profit or the "wrong" kind of person came up with them.
the Silicon Valley meritocracy is a myth that cements old injustices ... smooths over ugly histories and truths with the assertion that people will ultimately land in the position of the hierarchy that they deserve. Placates the lower class: just work harder & you'll get rich too. & if you don't get rich, that's your fault ... don't worry about the homeless folks living on the doorstep of the richest people in the world, both of them deserve their positions. if your workplace is brutal, then that's just because we're not going to give out pay to just anyone, only people who are willing to endure. And for those on the very top, it is a survival-lie, because to admit that the story is fabricated is to admit that the world very well may have been a better place if they had never been born.
so, then, what might we do to dispel the myth?
Liu's book, again, is written for an audience of disillusioned, but aimless, tech folks, which I am not. So the mechanics of abolishing Silicon Valley begin at the very basics, at pointing out issues, clearing the fog, and speaking of unionizing, class consciousness, so on. Begin to see yourself as a worker, find solidarity, and start doing this now while some tech jobs still carry some degree of financial power. She says, in a way: touch grass. The tech sphere is a place of arrogant introversion, of thinking the world is a screwed-up place and that it's viable to reject it and also fix it at the same time, as if you individually somehow have the knowledge and experience necessary. She says: leave the tech bubble. read books. read humanities books. learn about things that feel "irrelevant." speak to protestors and picketers who work in customer service, city hygiene, fast food, slaughterhouses, as artists and gig-economy contractors. You may know a lot about computers but the world is much more than computers.
she does provide some more concrete examples, couched in her admitted inexperience, and, as I would in the same situation, primarily signposts to other groups that have put forward their ideas already. The Lucas Plan, with some adjustments proposed over the decades since its initial proposal. Hiring halls, which must be non-profit, as the for-profit hiring hall looks like Uber. Online spaces as commons, as per the British Digital Cooperative. Pretty cool stuff, I'll be reading more into these examples.
solid book, even if the title & subtitle feel a bit ... off-the-mark, over-promising. Liu herself admits this, saying the title rose out of a kind of joke that began to mean something to a lot of people. It's nice to see some examples (the ones above) that I haven't seen before. It's also brave, and welcome, to have an author write something that fundamentally means they are admitting to have believed in a harmful thing, that they have harmed people, and that they are a product of this belief even if they don't believe in it anymore. more people should be willing to admit that ... things like Silicon Valley careen forward into disaster by the momentum of people refusing to admit they've been traveling in the wrong direction entirely.
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thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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