Global power without responsibility?
The last time I was in San Francisco, the city was six months away from the devastating earthquake of 1989. No one saw it coming and yet everyone expected it, as if the ‘big one’ was something to be both anticipated but never experienced. Not that 1989 was the big one in the end, but it was big enough to take dozens of lives and leave the city deeply shaken, the rebuilding effort lasting for decades. Yet in those pre-quake days, the chatter was all about possibility: the feeling that something could happen. Silicon Valley today has that same anticipatory vibe.
The fact that gum trees were everywhere when I visited San Fran in 1989 was of little consequence to the average San Franciscan. Gums were native to California as far as Californian’s cared to think about it. In fact, everything and everyone was native to California. If you once came from somewhere else, this was quickly forgotten. Perhaps it was the amnesic effect of the rolling fog that washed across everything on an almost-daily basis, bringing dew to the coastal inhabitants and removing the possibility of seeing either very far ahead or far behind, actively appropriating everything that wandered into its orbit. The fog was, and is, a collective forgetting of problematic pasts, a blindness to obstacle-filled futures. Exactly what has made this particular story of Eden possible.
In 1989, San Francisco seemed to be directly lifted from big American imagery that I had been consuming all my life in the form of products and productions. I remember on several street corners watching men in baggy silver jumpsuits dance with stiff arms in mimicry (or mockery) of robots, their ghetto blasters pumping out synthesized music. Robots like those dancers had never existed except in the world of movies or video hits, but we tossed dollar bills into hats in gratitude for the ‘lifelike’ performances nonetheless.
I must have been told hundreds of times a day to “have a nice day,” in the same kind of sing-song voice that a Disneyland cast member might be scripted to repeat. Yet, the curated tourist experience that the city put on for us was still as genuinely American as apple pie. Even then, it was a city that demanded to be noticed: an unconscious dance of tightly defined, repeatable loops, where being an impressed visitor on a cable car going no where in particular was a full-time pursuit.
What I didn’t do, was wander into The Castro to discover the boundary pushing LGBTI community, which had already edged its way into the central lane of legal protection, fully invested in the defence of free will. Had I done so, I might have found a microclimate of the same kind of Californian individualism and idealism that spawned the dot com boom and sowed the seed for later iterations of Silicon Valley as it stands today.
Even still, while The Castro was socially progressive, of all the places I might have looked for an innovation revolution, the Bay Area as it presented itself to the world thirty years ago would not have been one of them.
The fact is, the seismic shift of Silicon Valley was much more than a rumble in the distance back then: it was already a tectonic subterranean quake causing tsunamis of silent change. No one saw it coming, though in some ways everyone expected it. In retrospect the whole phenomena might be foggily explained as a natural consequence of big ideas and bold thinking, only that would be wrong. It was instead the emergence of subtlety in a place that wasn’t. Silicon Valley was the emergence of systems of change in a place that venerated individualism. It was as incongruous as it was unlikely.
The USA has never presented itself as a place where nuanced things should or could occur. Most things present themselves as big, bold, and seriously obvious. Nationalism, for example, is something of a required religion: it’s possible to witness the national anthem bring tears to every eye at a local baseball game. Even in California, which mostly defines itself in strong contradiction to the American politick, a state-level version of national pride is thriving. Loyalty ‘to the cause’ is where the USA is at. In California’s case, the cause could just as easily be dirt-bagging in the endless twilight of hippy culture, or dipping into the Silicon Valley slipstream of play-hard. But make no mistake, despite the Valley’s production line of “ta-da” product launches and the many ‘build it and they will come’ success stories, it is an entirely nuanced and subtle phenomenon. Even if the Valley is what it claims to be, a furiously fast religion of experimentation, it is something else too. Something that we don’t yet understand and haven’t the foggiest idea how to handle.
What really brought this home to me, as I arrived in the changed Bay area thirty years after my first visit, was a tour through Tesla. It was a tour in every sense. We were the visitors whose full-time pursuit was to be impressed. It was an easy job: the show was spectacular. The most automated car plant in the world has some very impressive robots and is, after all, making a wow-factor car. True, it doesn’t fly, but it feels like only an upgrade or two away from lift-off. Our tour guide was as Disney as she could be in her enthusiastic, non-stop articulation of the joys and marvels of the technology that we were witnessing. “Just look at that!” she exclaimed. And we did. The place was impressively big, as you’d expect of any mass production car plant. The biggest robots in the plant were almost lifelike, the way they danced on every street corner, lifting cars over their ‘heads’ with gracefully precise muscular movements to the synthesised beat of a computer network. The factory was painted white to inspire a laboratory-like mindset in the few human additions to this giant production machine. Small robots danced between our feet carrying seats and other interior parts for installation. Even without arms or faces, these little bots seemed lifelike: I wanted to tip them a dollar or two for their courtesy, stopping as they did to let us pass by.
The plant’s pre-Tesla history was mentioned, but what was left unexplored were the troubled NUMMI joint venture days between GM and Toyota and the even more catastrophic union sabotages before that. Tesla had rolled in like the Bay Area fog to allow us to forget all of the car industry’s messy past, promising a clean green future. GM’s belief that they had understood Toyota’s system after a two-week tour in Japan was a much-needed lesson, for it wasn’t the technology that we should have been looking at on that Tesla tour. The real story were the billions of hours of data fuelling the Tesla innovation machine, and the creation of a factory designed to optimise effectiveness not efficiency. There was a strange truth behind the factory walls: the car was not the thing. Building factories that can build factories was the thing. Reengineering the energy market and making a dent in climate change was the bigger thing. What we couldn’t see on the Tesla floor was Musk’s serial search for ways that businesses can perfect themselves as innovation machines. What we missed was that Tesla isn’t making cars, it’s making ‘real options’. Cars are just the byproduct. In these subtle shifts, obscured by swinging robot arms, is the evidence that this is not a second or third industrial plant, but one that’s reaching into the fourth. The robots matter not a bit.
Using vestiges of old-world leadership, Musk tweets stretch goals that surprise his team, inspiring them to achieve the impossible, as if issuing a contemporary form of Kennedy’s moonshot. He stands in a large auditorium to launch products much like Steve Jobs did and Tim Cook does. It’s a magic show, playing directly into the well-honed American trope of individual heroics and the surprise reveal of the big idea. This is nothing short of misdirection for those who really want to know what’s going on: the secret of the Valley lies deep in its ecosystem-like web: the interconnection of talent, data and ideas, the diversity of thought, small teams collaborating nimbly, subtle reframing capable of quantum leaps, fertilisers of moment-by-moment connections that no one gives credit to, the openness of conversations, the legal system of protected innovation and free movement of people, and fields of failures scattering nutrients far and wide. The fact is, a moonshot is a completely inadequate description for the Valley’s ambition and reality.
What strikes me as odd is that so little of the real ‘products’ of this interconnected system – the data flows, the power shifts, the lifestyle changes, the political canyons – have been designed at all, let alone with human social systems in mind, despite Design Thinking being all the buzz in the Bay Area. Also strange is how little ‘the humans’ in this Gordian knot of a system are the design agents of their own inventions. Who’s driving the car, one might ask? In some ways this contrasts starkly with the promise of curated experiences that Apple, Ideo and Disney trade in. Customers are at the center of such curated design, as long as they play a prescribed role – not so much driving as waving. As soon as you consider the ‘active citizen’ and dynamic socio-economic landscape, linear experiences produced from Silicon Valley products break down. Systematic (or systems) design thinking is the edge-tool of such dynamism, and most of us have not been trained in its use, whether as global citizens or tech denizens. How then will we cope with the consequences of the Valley’s system-bending innovations?
Silicon Valley has now re-spawned in San Francisco and Berkley, giving it three epicentres in the greater Bay Area, with reaches that are nothing short of global. People on every street corner are working in service of data lords they can’t even see: powering AI through security services like captcha, defining capital flows of wealth by giving away their personal data for free. Data flows like water through global political channels of least resistance. Data droughts around the world are as common as floods. Just as clueless as we consumers are most business executives who claim to be leading expeditions to technology gold seams, yet who behave as if their accountability is only to their shareholders (and themselves), missing entirely the question ‘in whose service should innovation act’. Witness agents biasing markets via controlled latency, or CEOs walking their businesses along a tightrope of free speech.
The feeling that something could happen has taken over as the predominant emotion, accompanied by almost none of the concern that should be present ahead of that change actually materialising (or even behind it). We’re not talking about small change here, but rather change that is much more expansive, much more permanent, on a scale we can’t quite wrap our heads around. It is not clear what has been invented yet in Silicon Valley, and the more we look for answers in the big ideas and sets of “products and services”, the more of its world-changing subtleties we’ll miss.
The legal frameworks and happenstances of political history that brought the Valley’s into existence are barely understood by those in the system itself. “If you want money, ask for advice” is the ironically free advice given out at Berkeley. “If you want the wisdom of the crowd, go public.” Sound bites are still traded as truth. But the Valley is not a trolley car ride, it’s the dynamic marriage of capital to innovation at a pace and volume that has never been seen before; systemic social change dressed up as American apple pie and exported at the speed of light. It’s not a closed cable car loop, it’s a journey of no return fraught with ethical, social and economic dilemmas. Somehow, even though we thought we anticipated it, we didn’t count on the reality of a seismic shift like this.
It doesn’t take much examination to see that through the Valley runs a gold river of capital seeking returns fuelled by the paranoia of loss, driving reinvention of industries, business models and completely new ways of living. What’s more important is that this is changing our social fabric. It’s changing our bodies. It’s changing our minds, and quite possibly, it’s changing our humanity. In the Valley, big things of consequence are made anew each day and can’t be unmade. The main stage show makes it all too easy to overlook (or forget) the long-term implication of what is nothing short of pervasive and systemic social change. Sure, there’s wealth creation for some. What else is Silicon Valley making or unmaking? Does anyone really know?