Silicon Valley’s Identity Crisis
Photo by Aaron Lau on Unsplash
One of the great appeals of moving to Silicon Valley in 1996 to pursue a career in tech, as I did, was the disruptive vision of changing the world for the better. That allure has long been core to Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation. From the semiconductor era that gave the area its name, to the birth of the personal computer, to the internet dot-com boom, to the web 2.0 wave of cloud/social/mobile, “making the world a better place” has been the mantra of multiple generations of technology companies and the founders, investors, and employees who built them.
Of course, there was also the making money part. But, if all you cared about was making money, you could do that other ways—as an investment banker or management consultant. Only in tech could you combine an ambitious, wealth-creating profession with the altruistic knowledge that you were doing something good. It was core to our identity. Invent, create, and innovate in service of a higher purpose and be justly rewarded for those world-changing ideas. At least, that was the promise, and it attracted many of the best and brightest talent from around the world. This was our mission, our purpose, our why.
Today, with that why diminished, Silicon Valley is facing an identity crisis.
Perhaps this was the inevitable backlash after decades of prosperity concentrated in a very small area and an even smaller socio-economic class, and it was certainly accelerated by the global COVID pandemic that seems to have permanently altered how and where we work, but something about the Silicon Valley promise seems lost. Much has been made, perhaps most vocally by New York-based media outlets, of the mass tech “exodus” from the Bay Area—both residents (down -8% in San Francisco since the pandemic) and companies, including Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, and even the most iconic company on the San Francisco skyline, Salesforce, that have downsized their Silicon Valley presence. The motivation for this massive shift, according to most media coverage, includes the “why not” liberation of remote work, the high cost of living in the Bay Area, and the avoidance of California’s onerous tax burden in favor of places like Texas, Washington, and Florida with no state income tax.
Although general happiness is at its nadir nationwide, something more foundational seems to be happening within the Bay Area tech community. My diagnosis: we’ve lost our sense of purpose. In fact, we’ve gone from “making the world a better place” to taking responsibility, or blame, for many of society’s worst problems. The tech industry, for all the innovation and prosperity it has generated in the last 50 years, now seems to be casting a wake of devastation—causing increased income inequality and spiraling housing costs that have resulted in a distressing spike in homelessness, drug overdoses, and protests over urban “Techsploitation”; exploiting gig workers, relentlessly thwarting unionization efforts, and obsoleting millions of blue-collar jobs through AI; triggering a social media-induced mental health crisis that has caused tech addiction, teen depression, and suicide; fostering widespread distrust over data collection practices, compromising personal privacy, and permitting massive data breaches; fostering toxic work environments fraught with sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and blatant corporate fraud; spreading misinformation, enabling foreign interference, and increasing political and social polarization. Basically, just an overall ominous sense that Big Tech has too much power.
It’s hard to feel good about that list—particularly for a Bay Area tech workforce that is largely left-leaning and progressive in our political views. Far from “making the world a better place,” the current narrative of the Silicon Valley tech industry is that it is fucking things up for almost everyone. We are the villain. Making the world better only for the elite few. The sentiment has swung so significantly against the tech industry that it is difficult to find positive stories about Silicon Valley in the media. And, in fact, what are those world-improving technologies that are being brought to market right now? Even more addictive social apps? The 10,000th cryptocurrency? Financial trading apps that create gambling addiction? Another billionaire developing self-driving cars or spaceships? The cringy metaverse? The dubious egalitarian vision of web3? Despite the breathless hype, these things don’t feel like grandiose missions to improve humanity. They feel like an opiate for the masses, trying awkwardly to revive outdated utopian rhetoric. A next generation of exploitative constructs to make rich people even richer. As Scott Galloway described it, the “re-centralization of power into the hands of fewer.”
This sense of lost mission, purpose, and meaning—the motivating (or, maybe, rationalizing) force that has fueled the Valley for the last 50 years—is what is now missing. In her excellent book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, University of Washington Professor Margaret O'Mara describes how integral that sense of higher purpose has been since the origin of Silicon Valley. It is core to our collective ethos. Without that sense of mission, the relentless demands of hard-driving tech jobs can seem pointless—or worse, destructive. This sensibility is the exact subject of my upcoming novel, Bit Flip. For many hyper-achieving type-A tech workers in Silicon Valley, our jobs are our identity. Our hard work, technical expertise, and innovative thinking are a badge of pride—not a resource to be mined and hoarded. There is a sense among many that the most visible leaders of the tech industry don’t share our values or worldview. That our personal sacrifice is being used to elevate people, political views, and social constructs that we don’t believe in, even abhor. If our entire sense of self-esteem is capitalistic altruism, what happens when the altruism part is gone? Replaced instead with exploitation.
This is the root of our current collective identity crisis. The “what-the-hell-am-I-doing” question that so many seem to be asking themselves.
The good news is no community is better at self-rejuvenation than Silicon Valley. I’ve lived through other ebbs and flows in the tech industry—the dot-com crash of 2000 and the “R.I.P. good times” implosion of 2008. Precarious downturns occurred in the semiconductor, defense, and personal computer industries before that. Each time, Silicon Valley’s unique blend of innovation, risk-taking, skillsets, and access to capital has enabled rapid resurgence. New blood, new ideas, and new enthusiasm rush in.
The further good news is that there are still plenty of real problems left to solve. We need to re-focus our attention on those opportunities to actually make the world a better place. In my opinion, I see five main opportunities to do that:
Healthcare—Technical innovations in medical devices, genetics, biotech, and other health-related fields hold the genuine promise to radically increase life expectancy and quality, directly making the world a better place for millions. As long as affordability and access are considered basic human rights.
Environment—The pressing need to reduce and reverse the damage we’ve done to our planet presents the tech industry with a massive market for innovative new technologies. The chance to make our planet a better place.
Automation—One of the worst monikers the tech industry has embraced is “artificial intelligence.” The real opportunity of these technologies is not to replace humans, but to augment and automate much of what humans do. Improving the quality, productivity, and safety of work, in a much more fair, just, and practical way.
Education—Elevating the skills of the global workforce is an imperative investment to pair with increased automation. Access to high-quality, affordable education at scale is now not only achievable, it is a moral obligation.
Democracy—Technology has been exploited by too many authoritarian governments as a weapon of control. A similar investment needs to happen in technologies that foster democracy, through better communication, equal access to infrastructure, a more socially just legal system, more efficient government, and many other ways that technology can make government work for the people.
To be sure, investments in all these areas are happening at large scale. Hundreds of start-ups have been founded to solve these problems, and dozens of venture capital firms are specifically targeting these exact opportunities. But we need to do more in two specific ways. First, venture and private equity investors should shift money away from soul-sucking businesses that just happen to have “gone viral.” Stop chasing hits-driven fads, inflated by hype to the point of resembling Ponzi schemes, and return to real technology investment with real world-changing potential.
Second, we must increase in government investment in these sectors. To-date, private investments in the above industries have floundered, partly because they are problems at a global scale without the deep-pocketed buyers of federal governments. While many tech leaders loathe “big government,” the reality is the entire tech industry arguably owes its very existence to decades of massive government defense spending. Semiconductors, computer networks, communications infrastructure, the internet, cloud computing, and many other tech innovations originated and grew thanks to enormous infusions of government cash. Unless we want these new sectors of innovation to be controlled by private interests and available only to the few, government investment is a necessity.
With a renewed mission, I believe Silicon Valley can reclaim its sense of purpose. What today feels like a permanent change may just be another cycle. With concerted investment, both private and public, in these areas, the tech industry can get out of this collective identity crisis and really can “make the world a better place” again.