Silicon Valley, from ‘heart’s delight’ to toxic wasteland

These guys are even more arrogant and self-serving than yout average politician. Just think about that for a minute or two (hundred). It’s a very scary concept.

Silicon Valley, from ‘heart’s delight’ to toxic wasteland
July 11, 2018 7.13am EDT
Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel

There was a time when California’s Santa Clara Valley, bucolic home to orchards and vineyards, was known as “the valley of heart’s delight.” The same area was later dubbed “Silicon Valley,” shorthand for the high-tech combination of creativity, capital and California cool. However, a backlash is now well underway – even from the loyal gadget-reviewing press. Silicon Valley increasingly conjures something very different: exploitation, excess, and elitist detachment.

Today there are 23 active Superfund toxic waste cleanup sites in Santa Clara County, California. Its culture is equally unhealthy: Think of the Gamergate misogynist harassment campaigns, the entitled “tech bros” and rampant sexism and racism in Silicon Valley firms. These same companies demean the online public with privacy breaches and unauthorized sharing of users’ data. Thanks to the companies’ influences, it’s extremely expensive to live in the area. And transportation is so clogged that there are special buses bringing tech-sector workers to and from their jobs. Some critics even perceive threats to democracy itself.

In a word, Silicon Valley has become toxic.

*

Many concluded that its culture set it apart. Boosters and publications like Wired magazine celebrated the combination of the Bay Area hippie legacy with the libertarian individualism embodied by the late Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. The libertarian myth masked some crucial elements of Silicon Valley’s success – especially public funds dispersed through the U.S. Defense Department and Stanford University.

*

In retrospect, perhaps that ever-expanding gap between Californian dreams and American realities led to the undoing of Silicon Valley. Its detachment from the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans can be seen today in the unhinged Twitter rants of automaker Elon Musk, the extreme politics of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and the fatuous dreams of immortality of Google’s vitamin-popping director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil. Silicon Valley’s moral decline has never been clearer, and it now struggles to survive the toxic mess it has created.

https://theconversation.com/silicon-valley-from-hearts-delight-to-toxic-...

NOTE: Zuckerberg is another name that belongs on that list.

THIS is what really chaps my hide about ALL these tech guys. They’ve decided that they should help our government overlords carry out its unconstitutional monitoring of our ‘access’ to information. They will decide for us what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ news.

State Department, DoD partner to counter foreign fake news
By: Jessie Bur  

The Department of State and the Department of Defense have signed a Memorandum of Agreement to transfer $40 million in DoD funds to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center for initiatives countering propaganda and disinformation from foreign nations.

This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley and other partners in this fight,” said Steve Goldstein, under secretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs, in a news release on the partnership. “It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take; we also need to be on the offensive.”

An initial $5 million of the money will go to the creation of an Information Access Fund to support “public and private partners working to expose and counter propaganda and disinformation from foreign nations.”

https://www.federaltimes.com/management/budget/2018/02/26/state-departme...

I think it’s gonna be impossible to get our lives back from these people. If Orwell could come back for five minutes today I think he would spend it being torn between bouts of “I TRIED TO WARN YOU” schadenfreude and a “HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN?” cold fury. He’d probybe glad to leave after his five minutes were up.

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detroitmechworks's picture

Know that all the good things do flow from Silicon Valley!
For it is written in the great book of Jobs,
Blessed be his name,
that indeed thy branding shall be thy salvation

and all shall be held forth as good so long as
it doth flow from that great wellspring free enterprise
and if thou can not afford the pad of the eye
then sell they blood or thy body for the mark of the Apple.

/snark

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

'where seldom is heard a discouraging word
and the skies are not cloudy all day'.

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bygorry

The Aspie Corner's picture

They've completely got this shithole of a country (And the world) by the balls and they know it.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

snoopydawg's picture

When the elites and corporations aren't offshoring factories and jobs, when the banks aren't throwing people out of their homes and repossessing their cars because of higher loan rates because of bad credit or charging excessive fees, when corporations aren't poisoning their lands, water and air, when states aren't increasing gas taxes, property taxes and sales taxes, when congress isn't taking people's money to fund their illegal invasions so that corporations can strip them off their resources or when they are planning to steal people's retirement savings either through excessive fees while managing their accounts, when the money people had to pay into their social security, when congress gives people who don't need it huge tax cuts and then tells us that there isn't enough money to fund social programs, when congress isn't passing legislation that gives $40 billion a year to immoral insurance companies so that they can sell people junk insurance at higher rates every year that have high premiums and ever increasing copays, when our money goes to secret companies that are illegally spying on us, when cops can murder people in cold blood and get away with it, when ... well I'm sure that there are a lot more when's and it's sad to know that we just watched as they did those things.

And instead of telling the government that "No! No you can no longer do that to us we kept voting for them so they could continue to do that. I'm having a hard time coming up with the right word for what we have let them do. But when people did try to express that their actions were unacceptable they released their goon squads on them and many people cheered what they did to people.

Dawgs don't poop where they lie so why are the PTB making this country unlivable for the rest of us? Because they all have bug out places that are pristine, have access to water that is more crucial to them than oil.

I heartily agree with you, Amanda on this:

I think it’s gonna be impossible to get our lives back from these people.

And still some people are relying Mueller to save them from the things that Trump is doing and on the democrats to take back congress to reverse the things that the republicans have done. But instead of them talking about how they will do that if people will give them the chance they are spending their time and our money on Russia Gate.

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But don't worry. The elections are coming up and we will once again have the chance to change the direction of the country. Right?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

thanatokephaloides's picture

@snoopydawg

And instead of telling the government that "No! No you can no longer do that to us we kept voting for them so they could continue to do that. I'm having a hard time coming up with the right word for what we have let them do.

It's called "kakistocracy". Government by the worst possible inhabitants of a country.

Sad

(Same Greek root as the word cacophony.)

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

Pricknick's picture

Bay Area hippie legacy

There is no legacy. Many of us are dead and those that still survive are befuddled by modern versions of hippy.
Peace is long gone. Freedom has left. Willful thinking is given to what channel many watch.
It was a dream.
Now the nightmare begins.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

Amanda Matthews's picture

@Pricknick

album (vinyl) of Surrealistic Pillow and I wondered WTF??? It was right on top of my Donovan record. I quit rooting around in the basement after that. It depressed me.

Were we stupid or just naive?

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

detroitmechworks's picture

@Amanda Matthews when TPTB were honest, you stood up and shouted.

Then they started hiding their evil, and destroying the institutions which would have created the next generation of heroes. And every step on the path to hell was paved with appeals to your better nature.

And so looking back, it's easy to see how we got here. But looking forward, it was probably easy to believe that those first successes were a total victory instead of a temporary ceasefire while the enemy started using partisans.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTuPbJLqFKI]

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

lotlizard's picture

The N.I.C.E. has operations everywhere now — Langley, Virginia, of course, and indeed in Seattle and Fort Meade and Utah and Silicon Valley.

Sorcery, surgery, servers — instead of downloading the transhumanist future into a severed head, now the possessors of secret knowledge intend to upload it into “The Cloud.”

“We can win at Go; are we not Men?” The AI-Land of Dr. Moreau.

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detroitmechworks's picture

@lotlizard was far less "Whack the audience over the head with it" than Narnia.

Some of his criticisms of scientific materialism are dead on. I disagree with his conclusions, of course, but as far as pointing out problems, he NAILS it.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Many years ago, of course, and on the northern edge of what was then called the Santa Clara valley. Cow pastures, big oak trees to climb, streets with no sidewalks (and sometimes no pavement), and good union jobs for most (white) folks - the Black population was mostly consigned to crappy jobs and the other side of the 101, and I ended up spending much of my senior high school year agitating for school desegregation (which we eventually won), and after that for an end to that little bloodbath in Viet Nam. We managed to get rather noisy over that, organizing rather large peace marches in what was basically the suburbs, though the war dragged on for many years after I'd split for the big city at the north end of the peninsula.

What happened to Santa Clara valley is basically just neoliberal, imperialist capitalism, with no coherent opposition. The old family home was eventually bulldozed to make room for McMansions for the new rich, and now there is no room for the working class at all.

Unfortunately I don't see much of anything happening to change this crap, mostly because of that lack of coherent opposition. Too many people now are living isolated and atomized lives, fed bullshit pseudo-news, and disgusted with the only politics that seems to be available to them. The electoral politics of both parties is now entirely neoliberal with no real dissent allowed, and what non-electoral politics that is allowed to exist is only allowed within the narrow boundaries of neoliberalism.

I've long been convinced that real change can only happen with a real break from conventional political forms, organized from the bottom up. How you get there from here is still a mystery that eludes me, so maybe somebody a bit brighter than me will come along and figure it out.

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mimi's picture

@Tak
Amanda Matthews, you can't imagine how much I agree with you and the essay you exerpted and TAK, you wonderfully described what I felt and saw in the hazy fog surrounding us.

I now am confronted with some similar, but somehow still different conditions here in Germany. I can't cope and understand what is going on. How to control corporate overpowering political institutions to become involved in unconstitutional activities. It looks as if in the US the courts are even less capable to control banks and corporations than in Germany, but I wonder if I am just bamboozled and incapable of understanding the underpinning laws that make those corporate influences and power games possible.

Anyhow. Both of you spoke my heart. Thanks.

I will reread in detail later. Hope I understand all of it.

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Raggedy Ann's picture

@Tak
Nothing will change without bottom-up upheaval - IMHO. It’s too far gone.

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"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11

WaterLily's picture

I know some very smart people who run around hailing Musk as some kind of environmental hero/savior/visionary.

We're so screwed.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

@WaterLily

I know the feeling. I put that at the bottom of a lot of my posts.

Our children, grandchildren, etc. (if there is an etc.) will not be pleased with the world we leave them.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

WaterLily's picture

@Amanda Matthews I find myself thanking the stars that I neither have children, nor siblings (and therefore, neither nieces and nephews, nor grand -nieces and -nephews) ... so that I don't lose even more sleep over what things would be like for them.

How sad is that?*

What a shithole country we live in.

*I actually never wanted children, but I did always want siblings!

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thanatokephaloides's picture

@WaterLily

Almost every day,

@Amanda Matthews I find myself thanking the stars that I neither have children, nor siblings (and therefore, neither nieces and nephews, nor grand -nieces and -nephews) ... so that I don't lose even more sleep over what things would be like for them.

How sad is that?*

What a shithole country we live in.

*I actually never wanted children, but I did always want siblings!

I have siblings. Some of these have children.

I thank God every day that I have no children of my own.

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

lotlizard's picture

Yet another case of a web business that goes on and on about “community,” while in practice empowering its secret police to drag people’s virtual presence away in the middle of the night and disappear them without recourse forever.

https://medium.com/@jacksoncunningham/digital-exile-how-i-got-banned-for...

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