Week 3 - Silicon Valley

The Internet increasingly pervades our lives, delivering information to us no matter where we are. It takes a complex system of cables, servers, towers, and other infrastructure, developed over decades, to allow us to stay in touch with our friends and family so effortlessly. It allows us to buy, sell and work online.

It has changed the very nature of the way we do research, how we work, how we connect with other people. image: http-//census2012.sourceforge.net/

With the apparent ‘immateriality’ of the Internet and online technology, it is easy to forget that there is in fact, a huge amount of infrastructure, material and labour behind Internet technology. For example we store our information in the ‘Cloud’ - a word that leads us to think of something nebulous, external and groundless – we have to remind ourselves that the cloud exists on earth. The cloud is of course made up of huge data centres, located in isolated places where security can be maintained.

Image: https-//www.eurocloud.org.uk/cloud-computing

Images: Left: The Cloud https-//s27389.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/ predictions-for-cloud-in-2020-1024x440 below: A data Centre in Oklahoma USA http-//clui.org/ludb/site/google-mayes-county-data-center

So when we hear of Silicon Valley, the place seems like a sort of Utopia, a non-place which represents the future of technology and innovation.

Images: Left: Martin Vargic-internet map Next page: Silicon Valley, 1991.

Reddit/Imgur via Business Insider

Silicon Valley, near San Francisco in California, can be thought of in terms of a global imaginary. It is a place that is as much symbolic of capitalist ambition as it is a real location, where companies buy or rent real estate to establish centres for their business which often don’t rely on the need for physical locations to operate.

In the late 1990s, hundreds of new companies sprouted up to take advantage of these opportunities. Many of them were clustered in Silicon Valley, a strip of land on the peninsula south of San Francisco. In the mid-1990s, Silicon Valley was already home to established technology companies like Intel, Apple, Adobe, and Cisco. The dot-com boom brought a new crop of companies, including Yahoo, eBay, and Google.

What has made a place, like Silicon Valley, a global centre for technology?

What are the particular social, cultural, technical and economic conditions that made a phenomena like Silicon Valley possible?

Is the ‘success’ of somewhere like Silicon Valley reproducible? And if so, why would other places aim to attempt to create their own versions of Silicon Valley?

Technology now is inextricably connected to the Internet. Looking at maps that illustrate Internet usage around globe we can clearly see that while there is a huge amount of Internet activity in the United States, there are several regions which have huge amounts of Internet activity such as Europe, India and of course China and throughout South East Asia.

This map reveals that China has more Internet users than any other country in the world, in fact the US is third after India. https://www.mapsofworld.com/answers/world/what-are-the-top-10countries-with-most-internet-users/

S.No.

Country

Internet Users (JULY 2020)

1

China

854,000,000

2

India

560,000,000

3

The United States

312,322,257

4

Indonesia

171,260,000

5

Brazil

149,057,635

6

Nigeria

126,078,999

7

Japan

118,626,672

8

Russia

116,353,942

9

Bangladesh

96,199,000

10

Mexico

85,000,000

https://www.mapsofworld.com/answers/world/what-are-the-top-10-countries-with-most-internet-users/

Technology is distributed but there are obviously factors that determine what places in the world have more power or influence over technology. One of these factors is language.

While we are familiar with technology coming our of Silicon Valley, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, YouTube and Google. How many of us have heard of, or ever used some of the technology that has emerged from China?

Google has grown to become much more than just a search engine. Users rely on it not only to find information but also as a powerful language translating platform, a highly accurate and detailed navigation tool as well as a popular email provider.

But in China, there is no Google… there is, however, Baidu.

Image: blog-baidu-01

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world’s largest standalone mobile app in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users.

These maps of online communities are a playful way of thinking about the distribution of technology and the relative scale of different technology companies globally.

While new online technology is not confined to being developed from Silicon Valley, it is undeniable that some of the most popular sites and wealthiest companies in the world are operating from there.

Images: http-//imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities_2_large

Silicon Valley breads a type of work ethic and approach to business and technology which has become known as ‘The Californian Ideology’. This libertarian way of thinking and working promotes the idea that an increase in computer technologies brings positive social consequences.

This graph reveals that the world’s most popular websites are connected to companies which are based in Silicon Valley.

And the following pages reveal which countries host the most popular sites, take note of how many of these companies are based in Silicon Valley.

Images: https-//www.visualcapitalist.com/the-50most-visited-websites-in-the-world/

So what is it about the States, and particular Silicon Valley that has produced such a dominance on the Internet and digital technologies?

“Northern Californian software development, specifically its libertariancounter-cultural bent known as the ‘Californian Ideology,’ [...] This ideology has remained more-or-less constant through 60 years of boom-and-bust cycles, from transistors and microcomputers through to the dot-com boom and Web 2.0.”

Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, Thomas Poell. Silicon Valley and the Social Media Industry. In: The SAGE Handbook of Social Media. SAGE Publications Ltd; 2018

The Californian Ideology is promoted and manifested in other cities around the world, some of the ways this occurs is through networking events such as Startup conferences, ‘hackathons’ and technology accelerators. These events often attract huge crowds of participants and often represent precursor to civic development connected to the technology industry.

There are examples of critique and resistance to these events – the New York based ‘Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon’ is a tongue-in-cheek web archive and seminar that critically reflects on the hackathon model while also presenting projects which are critical of the ideology that technology is the cure for all social problems. http://www.stupidhackathon.com/

As you can see from the interactive map below in this week’s module, there are other centres for technology around the world. Cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, Taipei, Tel Aviv and Mumbai are just a few examples of places where new technologies are being developed.

What makes Silicon Valley unique however, is the particular context which is perhaps impossible to replicate.

The entrepreneurial infrastructure of Silicon Valley is characterized by ‘incubators, spin-offs, informal networks, formal networks, physical infrastructure, and culture’.

For an alternative view on the ‘benefits’ of replicating Silicon Valley read: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/ article/20180208-why-we-shouldnt-replicatesilicon-valley-evolution

Could you imagine a technological nirvana like the US$5 billion ‘Apple Park’ being built anywhere else in the world?

This mega-structure, which somehow echoes the architectural logic of the Pentagon, with its unusual circular form creating a world closed in to itself, is more than just a space for Apple employees to work. The Apple Park is a sort of techno-dome which contains everything the Apple employees need to stay long hours, protects the secrecy of new technology developed there and establishes an environment where everything is Apple branded.

Deeper than the specific conditions that bred silicon valley is a deep rooted American belief in capitalism. A country built through migration where the common myth is that everyone gets a chance to realise their dreams and full potential. This myth, is extended even further within the technology industry:

The tech industry is governed by a series of myths that function to justify the political economy of the technology industry: openness, meritocracy, and entrepreneurialism.

As I outline below, they are rooted in a particularly American, and even more specifically Northern Californian, set of presumptions; they do not always function seamlessly when ported to another context… Meritocracy in its modern usage refers to the idea that people will be judged not on their gender, race, or background, but solely on their intelligence and talents. In other words, you get out of the system what you put into it. Meritocracy is the underlying ideology of the American dream, which holds that each person can advance professionally and economically according to his or her merit.”

Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, Thomas Poell. Silicon Valley and the Social Media Industry. In: The SAGE Handbook of Social Media. SAGE Publications Ltd; 2018

We must, then, consider the impact of Silicon Valley on the development of technology: where Silicon Valley is understood not just as a physical place but as a set of practices, ideologies, and beliefs. If these ideologies are uneasily compatible with social equality, yet are plugged as solutions to economic difficulties, what happens to them in other contexts?