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It’s clear to everyone that Silicon Valley has to change—except the people who live there

What does it mean that the Valley still thinks of itself an exceptional home to axis-tilting ingenuity?

It’s clear to everyone that Silicon Valley has to change—except the people who live there

[Illustration: Brian Stauffer]

BY Austin Carr7 minute read

Silicon Valley showrunner Alec Berg just wanted to let viewers in on the joke. When he started writing the satirical HBO series five years ago, the Valley seemed to him like a caricature, rife with overhyped tech products and self-aggrandizing corporate mission statements. It was full of “arrogance” masquerading as “altruism,” Berg says—and he and show creator Mike Judge began skewering the startup industry for dressing up dumb social media apps as world-changing innovations, producing self-driving cars that can’t follow directions, and lionizing machinelike engineers who build things without fear of the consequences. “Those people scare the shit out of me,” laughs Berg, who remembers meeting with various developers in the early years of writing the show and being alarmed by how little consideration they gave to the potential dangers of what they were coding. “It was like, ‘Hey shithead! You understand this has massively bad applications, right?’ But they just don’t see it.”

It’s hard to miss these days. Social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are harming democracies; autonomous vehicles from Tesla and Uber have killed people; and Theranos has been charged by the SEC with a massive fraud that put patients at risk due to sham blood-testing science. The Silicon Valley writers’ Slack channel (yes, they use Slack) started out as a place to brainstorm tech-driven absurdities, like an app that leverages AI to identify hot dogs. Now, it’s filled with links to news articles about Cambridge Analytica and Russian election hacking. Meanwhile, the Bay Area has failed to address its lack of diversity, its housing crisis is exacerbating income inequality, and everyone from nepotistic bro-vestors to priggish Valley secessionists are further isolating the industry. Those nearsighted engineers, in other words, remain stuck in their bubble. Even now, Berg says, “I just don’t think anybody has been shocked into realizing that there are negative implications to a lot of this stuff. Unfortunately, I think it will take a metaphorical Chernobyl for [them] to go, ‘Oh wait, this can go horribly wrong.’ ” As if it hasn’t already.

People outside the tech industry’s heartland—Valley expats, international VCs, reporters, politicos on the left and right, consumers—offer similar refrains: that Silicon Valley is too powerful, too insular, too flawed. Meanwhile, along the 101 Freeway stretching from San Francisco to San Jose, not much has changed. Venture funding for unicorns hit an all-time high in 2017, technology stocks are for the most part soaring, and although there’s been chatter about rethinking tech’s core ethos—”growth at all costs”—there’s little evidence of that happening anytime soon. Like Rip Van Winkles of Silicon Valley, some insiders I’ve spoken with in recent months seemed puzzled as to why a reporter would even wonder if this might be a moment of reckoning, from the VCs who told me Travis Kalanick’s long-overdue ouster last summer was actually evidence of the corporate-governance process working (never mind how that system put him in power in the first place) to the slew of executives at social media companies who seemed insulted that anyone would draw a connection between their services and the 2016 election.


Related: Silicon Valley has always had a dark side—here’s a look back

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Austin Carr writes about design and technology for Fast Company magazine. More


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