Silicon Valley’s Hidden Voices
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/silicon-valleys-hidden-voices
Très belle critique de la version anglaise « Seeing Silicon Valley » qui va paraître en avril aux Presses de l’université de Chicago.
Rappel : la première édition de ce livre est parue en France :
Visages de la Silicon Valley
25 € - ISBN 978-2-915825-86-2 - nov. 2018
►https://cfeditions.com/visages
Two new books — Seeing Silicon Valley and Voices from the Valley — reveal, if not the future I thought I would find, a critical part of Silicon Valley that most people never look for or think about, let alone see. These two books’ goal is the same: to reveal the Valley’s forgotten but essential communities — obscured more often than not by hyperbolic press releases, lawyers waving non-disclosure agreements, and journalists’ myopic view of what “working in tech” means. In some cases, these are the “people behind the platforms” — the unheralded engineers and programmers who, despite being paid far above the median salary still find themselves living precariously in houses they can’t afford to furnish. In other cases, they are the nannies, cooks, and gardeners whose hidden labor keeps the Valley’s financial, familial, and social circuits humming. That newly minted billionaire you read about might drive a McLaren but someone has to wash and wax it.
After a brief essay from Fred Turner, a communications scholar at Stanford, Seeing Silicon Valley deploys an array of pictures captured in 2017 by Mary Beth Meehan, a photographer known for her “community-based portraiture.” For six weeks, Meehan rented an Airbnb in Menlo Park, introduced herself to strangers, and took photographs. She kept the statement “Invisible Community, Invisible Relationships, Invisible Human Beings” written on a sticky note above her desk.
Meehan’s color photographs are accompanied by short but powerful life histories of her subjects. Along the way we meet, for example, Justnya, a Polish-born engineer who shares a mansion in Cupertino with other technologists, and Victor, an elderly man originally from El Salvador who lives in a small trailer a few miles from Google’s campus. Each photograph tells a story, and it’s rarely the one you might imagine. There’s a photo, for example, of “Mark,” a young white man. On closer inspection, you sense something wrong with his body position and facial expression. You learn that Mark’s mother worked for years in an electronics plant making lasers for supermarket checkout scanners. Every night she came home with “green gunk” on her face and hands. Only years later, after Mark was born with extreme developmental issues, mental and physical, did she learn this gunk was a mixture of chemicals, primarily lead. What was once billed as “the Valley of Heart’s Delight” became the eventual home of nearly two dozen Superfund sites created by now-defunct electronics companies. The non-defunct ones have taken their manufacturing, their jobs, and their gunk overseas.
Meehan’s photos and captions sometimes reveal human warmth transcending the tragedy and unfairness. In another photograph, Abraham and Brenda are captured hugging each other in that special golden glow one sees near sunset in coastal California. But that glow can only do so much. They are in front of their dilapidated RV, which they have lived in since they lost their house in 2008. Normally, they parked on the edge of Stanford University’s land holdings along El Camino Real. But not on game days when the university forces them to move. On those days, like Steinbeck’s Okies, they drive their aged vehicle over the Santa Cruz Mountains to Half Moon Bay and look at the ocean together.
The aforementioned essay by Stanford professor Fred Turner, which heads the Meehan collection of photographs, is titled “The Valley on the Hill.” It compares Silicon Valley’s present to the worldview of 17th-century Pilgrims recently arrived in the New World and seeking to build a “City Upon a Hill.” Technologists, many from outside the United States, flock to the Bay Area with “their sense of mission and their search for profits,” and — like their Puritan ancestors — they are motivated by deep, almost compulsive work ethics, argues Turner. He doesn’t say quite enough to give the analogy the depth it deserves — in part because his essay is a mere six pages, a disappointment given his oft-cited expertise on the topic. Still, in his erudite yet truncated telling, the idea of a “New Jerusalem,” a.k.a. Silicon Valley, goes back some 50 years to when Santa Clara County became a hotbed of innovation, albeit one eventually strewn with oozing Superfund sites.
Turner’s comparison to the Puritans perfunctorily cuts in a couple of other ways. As a religious sect, the Puritans were notoriously dogmatic, and eager to sacrifice heretics. Some programmers share their belief in eschatology and denial of the body, he suggests. It thus makes a kind of sense that Soylent — a start-up company based on marketing a meal-replacement product named after a creepy post-apocalyptic movie — was developed there. But Turner sees present-day “denials of the body” primarily in people’s eager atomization into digital data to be “aggregated and repurposed.” He could go further. Believers in a coming technological Singularity imagine dispensing with the body altogether by uploading their minds. A hundred years ago, the mirage factory of Los Angeles produced the evangelist-huckster Aimee Semple McPherson. Today we have engineer and self-confessed felon Anthony Levandowski and his scheme for a religion based around worship of artificial intelligence. Long live the new flesh. Or, if another variant of Silicon Valley’s fixations is to be believed, long live the old flesh, rejuvenated by steroids and blood transfusions from the young.
Eventually fruit and vegetable production in the Valley became the dominant crop. The number of workers needed — then and now — exceeded the local population. And so the labor-intensive work of picking and preserving the fruit fell largely to invisible Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Filipino, and Mexican workers. Much of it was performed by women employed as seasonal contractors and segregated by race and ethnicity, and they were the first to be let go when hard times came. The xenophobia, discrimination, and misogyny that runs throughout both books thus goes back a lot farther than when William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and committed racist, arrived in the Valley in 1956 and started an electronics company.
Shockley Semiconductor begat Fairchild Semiconductor begat Intel and scores of other companies, large and small. Engineers accordingly multiplied. They flocked to the region and in general came to represent the second largest segment of American professionals — behind school teachers. Engineering was the most common occupation pursued by white-collar men.
Along with their readers, the people who cover “tech” — whatever that term even means these days — too often portray Silicon Valley as a place apart from America. But, as Seeing Silicon Valley and Voices from the Valley reveal, with its racism, casual misogyny, economic inequality, and environmental devastation concentrated among poor communities, Silicon Valley is America. Given its innumerable sins, venal and moral alike, punching at Silicon Valley is as easy as ordering an Uber. Critiques of it take many forms, and the best of these are informed by an understanding of the region’s long and fraught history. These two books don’t fully take that history into account but they do point to the heart of what makes the region run: people, many of them hidden or invisible. Making them visible is a start to creating a more praiseworthy place. Silicon Valley may never be the Puritan’s “City Upon a Hill.” But in its pursuit of the future, it can and must do better.
#Fred_Turner #Mary-Beth_meehan #Visages_silicon_valley
