The most shocking revelation of Secrets of Silicon Valley is not that many temporary workers who make $6.50 an hour assembling Hewlett-Packard printers drive 100 miles to work each day because they can't find affordable housing in the valley. Nor is it that a conference center and hotel have displaced dozens of locally owned stores and uprooted a vulnerable minority community in the Whisky Gulch of East Palo Alto, the Bay Area's poorest town.

The most appalling thing about Secrets of Silicon Valley is that these revelations still alarm and outrage people living and working in the new economy.

Temporary workers do not constitute a hidden workforce, an underground army shielded from the public view. Who do you think packs Highway 680 South to San Jose each morning at 7 AM? Who do you think packaged the brand-new PC that Santa left under the tree? And who do you think used to live south of Market before all the dotcoms barged in?

Likewise, the disintegration of ethnic communities in Silicon Valley has been neither sudden nor unforeseen. The arrival of Home Depot on East Bayshore Road followed countless chain-store encroachments before it. The minority communities of East Palo Alto, East San Jose, and Milpitas have faced certain devastation for more than a decade; now those neighborhoods resemble little more than Silicon Valley parking lots. And anyone who drove down Highway 101 between 1990 and 2000 could see that transformation plain as day.

So why are so many members of the Information Age -- inside and outside Silicon Valley -- stunned when they hear the stories of Magda Escobar and Raj Jayadev, the two community activists featured in Secrets of Silicon Valley? The struggles of Escobar and Jayadev -- to close the digital divide and to earn greater rights for temporary workers -- raged through Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Route 128, and countless other technology hubs through the 1990s. Every major news organization has covered this story, yet we still gasp when we learn that graduates of Silicon Valley high schools can't read, write, or operate a computer. We still shake our heads in disbelief to hear that a majority of temporary employees suffer from workplace injuries that go undiagnosed and uncured.

"It's interesting that people see, feel, and buy all these computers, printers, hardware, and software, but they do not think that real people make those things, that human beings physically construct them," Jayadev says. "They must think our technology is sent down by some divine presence. It's phenomenal to think there could be such a massive public misconception."

When will we stop chastising and begin changing? That is the question posed by filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman, who produced and directed the award-winning film Blacks and Jews before making Secrets of Silicon Valley. In their latest documentary, Snitow and Kaufman capture a year in the lives of Escobar and Jayadev -- change agents working in separate, but related, sectors of northern California's new economy.