Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

Summary

Google, the Silicon Valley company par excellence, proclaimed to “organise the world’s information” and adopted “don’t be evil” as its corporate motto. And what could possibly be wrong with such aspirations? Indeed, most company leaders and high-tech workers, in the Valley, genuinely believe they are “making the world a better place” while also making money. Silicon Valley is the progressive face of capitalism. We’ve experienced it, intimately. Billions of people, across the globe, enjoy real benefits from searching the world’s information, connecting with people across time and space, and carrying a supercomputers in their pockets. Silicon Valley doesn’t obviously throw workers into factories and mines for endless hours on low pay; such images are hidden, rendered distant by the supply chain . Instead, the Valley, in our imaginations, is populated by knowledge workers, a diverse and smart workforce that designs, solves, and codes in humane office spaces, with above average wages, ping pong, cafeterias, flexible working hours, sleeping cubicles. What’s not to like? We could consider the Valley’s hidden workers, those who clean, wait tables, wash cars, nanny, deliver packages, tend gardens, fix infrastructure for poverty wages; we could explore the trailer parks down the road from Google HQ, or document the shootings in the streets, the homeless that push shopping trolleys up and down the El Camino, their world a bundle of rags; or the gun shops that sell semi-automatics, the out-of-control, over-staffed police, armed with military-grade cast-me-downs, that regularly gun down the poor; the families crowded into small apartments, the father who spends his days scouring trash bins for recyclable bottles to trade for cash, the human trafficking of women, the prostitution, coerced to serve a predominately male workforce; or the disciplining and harassment of the undocumented, the deportations, the splitting up and destruction of families; or the local charities that coll...