A People's History of Silicon Valley

by Keith A. Spencer

Along with Terman and his legacy of cultivating private enterprise, most consider William Shockley the other ‘father’ of Silicon Valley. Shockley, the founder of Shockley Transistor Corporation and one of the inventors of the transistor, moved to Palo Alto in 1955 to found a new transistor company. Shockley’s corporation didn’t become a major industry player, though the engineering talent he nurtured had a ripple effect on the region: one of his scions, Robert Noyce, cofounded Intel, while another, Charles Sporck, moved to National Semiconductor in 1967.79 These three corporations were responsible for perfecting the silicon-etched process of mass-produced microprocessors: inexpensive, programmable chips that function as the organs of a personal computer. Indirectly, the technologies developed and perfected at these three companies, who owed their existence to defense and aerospace dollars, inaugurated the era of the personal computer, and by extension, the era of Silicon Valley.

John Markoff, one of the foremost researchers studying how American 1960s counterculture shaped computing, believes that the social and political chaos of the late 1960s corresponded with the development of the computer.

Latinos and other people of color in San Jose were unjustly targeted when the city opted for ‘urban renewal’ programs, conducted under the guise of ‘improving’ the city’s infrastructure while razing lower-income homes. Many of the homes in Sal si Puedes, a Chicano neighborhood in San Jose, were ‘razed as part of an urban renewal program that included construction of a new freeway.’126

As critic Mariana Mazzucato wryly noted, much of Jobs’ success was probably more due to ‘massive amounts of public investment behind the computer and Internet revolutions.’ As Mazzucato wrote: Apple was able to ride the wave of massive State investments in the ‘revolutionary’ technologies that underpinned the iPhone and iPad: the Internet, GPS, touch-screen displays and communication technologies. Without these publicly funded technologies, there would have been no wave to foolishly surf.179

It is odd, indeed, that the US government is not often recognized as the real progenitor of Silicon Valley. ‘Why is the State not rewarded for its direct investments in basic and applied research that lead to successful technologies that underpin revolutionary commercial products, like the iPod, the iPhone?’ asks Mazzucato.181 Though the technology was largely developed using US taxpayer dollars, Internet commerce was, until recently, largely tax-free.

Exploitation of tax loopholes is by no means exclusive to large tech corporations, yet it is particularly egregious in light of the widespread social discord sown by the tech industry in the Bay Area – in that an industry that positions itself as a world-changer with a higher social purpose has fallen into a familiar rut of corporate exploitation of tax loopholes at the expense of the citizen taxpayers who must increasingly subsidize the public goods and services upon which the tech industry relies.

Frighteningly, it is in the interest of social media companies and phone-makers that users become psychologically dependent on their products and devices. Indeed, designing products that manipulate users into interacting with them as much as possible is known as ‘brain hacking’ in the tech industry. ‘There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using the product for as long as possible,’ said Tristan Harris, a former Google employee. He compared modern smartphones to the psychology of gambling:

Harris described the tech industry’s ‘brain hacking’ efforts as a ‘race to the bottom of the brainstem,’ that is, to connect one’s devices with the most primitive and basic emotions. ‘If I go lower on the brainstem to get to you [using] my product, I win.’206 Children and teenagers are particularly susceptible to the psychological manipulations of gadget-makers and social media sites. In 2016, National Public Radio published an article about the depth of smartphone and social media addiction on teens and tweens.

In 2017, Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Research Project released a report, titled ‘Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,’ that collected accounts of propaganda disseminated via social media in 29 different countries. Many of the social media propaganda efforts, the researchers note, are managed explicitly by government programs; for instance, the British Army has a division known as the 77th Brigade that uses Facebook and Twitter as a ‘non-lethal’ battleground to shape narratives and propagandize.

In 2018, a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab published a study of misinformation online. In it, they found that false news spread faster and further online than real news. ‘From 2006 to 2017, about 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people [on Twitter],’ the researchers explain. ‘False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth.’235

Richard D. Wolff, an economics professor at the New School in New York City, describes gig economy companies like Uber as ‘winning the competition’ by taking shortcuts that ‘frequently endanger the public’ – in short, by bypassing regulations created long ago to protect citizens. Regulatory taxi agencies were created in most countries, Wolff said, because taxi companies were historically unsafe. ‘Taxi companies are required now to have insurance, training for drivers, well-inspected cars, and other safeguards to protect the public. The cost of riding in a taxi reflects those safeguards,’ Wolff said, adding: But there’s always the incentive for somebody to come in and operate, once again, inadequately insured, inadequately maintained, inadequately vetted drivers – to come in with a cheaper cab service [that is] unregulated by the taxi commission. That’s all that Uber and Lyft [are]... they undercut the old arrangement and offer cheaper and more competitive services by cutting corners. The PR apparatus of these companies can ‘make the companies sound good and reasonable,’ and smooth out these concerns, Wolff adds.305

Modern technology is no more neutral than medieval cathedrals or The Great Wall of China; it embodies the values of a particular industrial civilization and especially of its elites, which rest their claims to hegemony on technical mastery. – Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology342