Silicon Valley's Crisis of Conscience

I read an article with this same title, Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience, in the New Yorker today (leave it to the New Yorker to provide insightful commentary on the culture of Silicon Valley). The piece by Andrew Marantz put its finger on a massive cultural shift that is happening now in Silicon Valley, and is the premise of the fictional book I’m writing, Bit Flip. Brought to the forefront by the 2016 election debacle, but really a growing undercurrent for several years, the technology industry is losing the overwhelmingly positive, “we’re making the world a better place” image that it has held for the last 40 years. Instead, “Big Tech”, as we are now characterized in the spirit of “Big Oil” or “Big Pharma”, has become the villain.

This shift from tech as savior to tech as evil was bound to happen. There’s only so many smug twenty-something billionaires in hoodies that the world can stand before that becomes a negative meme. But it seems to be really shaking something foundational in Silicon Valley. “We’re not the bad guys!” “We’re progressive!” “We vote Democrat!” The reaction to this new portrayal is striking many in the tech world as unfair. Yet, that reaction underscores just how out-of-touch many people, particularly here in the San Francisco Bay Area, have become.

See, for all our liberal politics and nominally progressive values, the core belief that has fueled so much of the tech boom is essentially the Gordon Gekko quote that “Greed is Good.” If we’re honest with ourselves, the tacit goal of pretty much everyone in the Valley is to found/join a startup, get it to a liquidity event, and make a shitload of money. That is the currency, both literal and figurative, of the tech economy.

And while we (myself certainly included) have blissfully moved from startup to startup in search of the ever-more-lucrative exit, we become more and more out of touch with the rest of the country. Our morals and values have taken a back seat to the pursuit of wealth. We’ve exploited “users” to get them ever more addicted to our sites and apps.

This realization is the reckoning that is happening in the Valley. The increasing understanding that our values and our behaviors are misaligned. This New Yorker article is a must-read for anyone in the tech industry who may feel untethered from what got many of us into tech in the first place — to make the world a better place.