Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

by Wendy Liu

Here’s what we have now: a rapidly diminishing natural world, where unfettered resource exploitation is on track to destroy the ecosystems that sustain us; and a broken social order, where some have more resources than they could use in a lifetime while others have almost nothing. And yet, our mode of production tolerates all this because its priority is encouraging corporations to do whatever the hell they want as long as they remain profitable. Things have gotten to the point where the focus of our economic system seems increasingly misaligned with social need — the positives are getting diminishing returns, and the downsides are piling up. Perhaps it’s time to change our priorities and move over to something new.

But what is the market really good at optimising for? Given the current excess of global capital, the market’s most pressing task is finding new investment opportunities. From the point of view of the market, housing is primarily an asset and only secondarily a place to live — exchange value takes priority over use value.20 Buying a house is considered an uncontroversial investment vehicle: you rent it out to pay the mortgage, then flip it to reap that appreciation when you need liquidity again.

Abolishing Silicon Valley means freeing the development of technology from a system that will always relegate it to a subordinate role: that of entrenching existing power relations. It means designing a new system that isn’t deluged in the logic of the market. It means liberating our world from the illegitimate reign of capital.