Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of ordinary houses and picket fences, clustered in villages notable only for the mega-companies they serve: Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple) or Mountain View (Google). There’s the odd charm, but it’s generally clean, sterile, young, overpriced. Life here, they say, is five years ahead of everywhere else. Well, if that’s the case, I’ve seen the future and it is a bit disturbing.
The surface ordinariness of the Valley hides a deep utopianism. In the late 1960s San Francisco was the home of both hippie counterculture and the early computer communities. Both groups shared an aversion to the existing order. For the early techies, digital technology was a means with which to escape the rules and regulations of overbearing governments and build a better world.
The big-tech firms see themselves as heirs to this emancipating counterculture, despite the fact that they are now among the most powerful and richest companies in the world.
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