Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

by Wendy Liu

I’m not anti-tech; my critique of the tech industry stems from a place of love. I respect the craft that goes into building the industry’s products, and I’m grateful for what the industry has given me. But I also believe that technology has greater potential than the mundane, profit-seeking ventures to which it has been relegated under the current system.

Abolishing Silicon Valley doesn’t mean halting the development of technology. It means devising a new way to develop technology which fulfils technology’s transformative potential. It means liberating technology from the clutches of a mindless system whose primary aim is profit. It means creating a world where technology is developed according to different values, for different goals. In short, it means developing technology outside the logic of capital.

Ideology starts as a story but soon hardens into a shield, and only you can decide if you want to let it down.

All I knew was that women were denigrated in this cultural space, which led me to conclude that being visibly female could be a hindrance. I wasn’t sure exactly why this was the case, but my intuition told me that the poor treatment of women was warranted — women simply must have been inferior in some way. For some reason, this conclusion didn’t negatively impact my own self-esteem. Rather than seeing it as a repudiation of myself, I instead saw it as an indictment of those who shared my gender. I didn’t have to be like them; I could transcend the physical impediment of being part of the clearly lesser half of the human population. And if I couldn’t literally escape my body, then at least I could seek refuge in the mind. Through preserving my achievements on the Internet, I could attain a kind of virtual immortality denied to those grounded solely in the flesh.

The more time I spent engrossed in this virtual culture — absorbed through IRC quotes, email archives, and discussion boards with varying levels of anonymity — the more I fell in love with it. Still, I was constantly dogged by the uneasy feeling that I was joining a space that wasn’t meant for me.

When applying to university, I picked my major with gender concerns at the top of my mind; I was swayed towards physics because it was the degree with the lowest female enrolment, which I interpreted as a sign of intellectual rigor and therefore worth. I scorned anything female-dominated, like the humanities, which I saw as a scholastic consolation prize for those not smart enough for STEM. I even applied to one school I had little desire to attend, solely because of its severely skewed gender ratio; somehow I twisted that into a sign of intellectual calibre.

Google’s progressive appearance was another reason to be proud to work there. So convenient that they did politics on my behalf — I could feel virtuous solely through my association with my employer. All I had to do was show up.

But after a few weeks, the thrill of the perks had worn off, and the monotony of the work had crushed my initial enthusiasm for converting to full-time. I couldn’t explain why, but merely the idea of going back there felt soul-crushing. Neither was I inspired by the idea of doing a master’s degree, which I saw as my next-best alternative. Of course, this raised the question of what I would not consider to be soul-crushing, but thinking about that felt like looking down a steep cliff at an unending fall. The main problem was that I no longer knew what I was supposed to be optimising for. I’d spent most of my life trying to succeed at whatever academic challenges were placed in front of me under the unquestioned assumption that it would all eventually pay off. And yet, the life that I saw stretching before me through the windshield of the Google bus did not look especially enticing. I felt like I had done everything right, yet the reward seemed hollow. There had to be more than this.

Developing technology in a bubble seemed like a recipe for disaster when people around the world were depending on Google’s products — especially when Google’s technical workforce was wildly unrepresentative of the wider population.3 And the “Don’t Be Evil” motto served primarily as a reminder that Google did have the power to do evil, and people on the outside — or even on the inside, without the requisite level of security clearance — had to simply trust the insiders to do the right thing. But such trust seemed a little misplaced, given that even minor leaks were treated as career-ending betrayals; I didn’t even want to think about the penalties for whistleblowing or publicly challenging major decisions.

But not everyone working at Google had the right kind of badge. Every office had a large contingent of red-badged contractors: hospitality workers serving food and cleaning the facilities; security staff guarding the cafeteria doors to prevent unbadged outsiders from sneaking in; bus drivers steering the commute to and from all the local offices. As ignorant as I was, with my default assumption of corporate good intent, I wasn’t naive enough to assume that Google’s famed transparency and perks extended to these workers, too.

Part of me wanted to believe that I deserved what I got because I had worked hard, while others simply hadn’t. But looking at the mostly black or Hispanic red-badged employees, I couldn’t escape the possibility that there might be structural reasons for this divide, independent of individual work ethic; not everyone had the same opportunity to have their hard work fall neatly along a path of upward social mobility. These structural inequalities might not be Google’s fault, but Google clearly wasn’t reluctant to make use of them for the purpose of lowering labour costs.

Mayer was one of a small number of high-profile women in the tech industry, going from Stanford to Google to CEO of Yahoo; Vogue estimated her net worth at $300m. I felt like I was supposed to find her arc inspiring, and yet whatever women-in-tech solidarity I might have had was overshadowed by our $300m difference in net worth. That seemed like an unfathomable amount of money to me, regardless of how hard she might have worked, and it also didn’t feel right from the perspective of overall economic efficiency.

The other non-white guy was picked to go first. He had recently moved here from East Asia, and his English was pretty elementary. Nobody seemed to fully understand what his startup did, and he wasn’t fluent enough in the cultural norms to answer the audience’s questions in a way they found satisfactory. Soon the vibe turned cruel, and there was an unrestrained glee in the audience when the pitcher stumbled over words or missed the subtext of a question. Nick was drunk and didn’t seem to notice, but I was even more uncomfortable than when I first clocked the party’s gender ratio,

(Never did we ask ourselves if our vision of dominance over the ecosystem was good for anyone else. Societal good was never our framework. All we cared about was how we could dominate, with our technology being a means to the end of extracting rent from every transaction.)

#gamergate campaign was in full swing, and we’d followed it avidly, less as a cultural phenomenon and more as an occasion to test our technology. Forget the potential implications of an army of disaffected men building a movement around harassing women — we just wanted to capitalise on it with a viral product.

Was this constant pivoting a sign of being outmanoeuvred by bigger companies wanting to outsource grunt work to a naive startup? Or was it a principled, “Lean Startup”-approved strategy for inching towards product-market fit? What was the difference?

All we really had was a burning conviction that we would succeed, coupled with the willingness to do impossibly stupid things to prove it. Our business model was still stuck in the product equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall, guided by whichever latest marketing trend had caught Nick’s attention.

(Believe it or not, this was before Cambridge Analytica — the industry was rife with companies of that nature, and few ever batted an eye. If we had known about Cambridge Analytica’s strategy at the time, rather than being horrified, we probably would have been jealous that we didn’t come up with it first.)

I was itching to get real feedback, the sort that I didn’t want to hear but needed to: that our idea was meaningless, that this whole startup dream was folly, that I did not need to be throwing away my twenties in pursuit of this thoughtless venture.

After all, Musk’s first startup had a business model that sounded kind of boring, but it got acquired in an exit that made him an instant multi-millionaire, and now he was single-handedly saving the planet with Tesla and SpaceX. We could get there too, if only Tim would start coming in on Sundays.

One afternoon, I came up with an idea for linking Twitter and Instagram profiles together and making that part of our data offering. It was ethically a little iffy, as it wasn’t data that anyone had exactly consented to give us, but still, the data was already out there, just itching to be used. (In those pre-Cambridge Analytica days, user privacy wasn’t really a big concern in our sector.) After a week of frenzied prototyping, I hit the jackpot: we could link people by looking at their friends. Once I got that up and running, the number of links we could identify exploded, and all the charts started to go up and to the right.

He said he didn’t think this was sustainable, us working this hard. He thought we were over-exerting ourselves for no real reason. How to explain. Overworking, work for work’s sake, crafting an entire identity around work: this was not a temporary anomaly, but rather my entire worldview. Working hard was an end in itself, and even those who chose not to do it had to realise that they were in the wrong, that their inability to work hard was a personal failing. The ability to achieve things through hard work was fundamental to my self-image, and this belief was buried so deeply in my psyche that I couldn’t even identify it, much less relinquish it.

was twenty-three years old at this point, with a bottomless well of energy and drive, and the concept of ageing was a dim possibility on the distant horizon that rarely flitted into my peripheral vision. I could not conceive of a world where I no longer had the desire to pull all-nighters doing grunt work for a company whose mission I did not believe in, hankering after success as defined through a bricolage of authoritative words by wealthy men.

most of our work lay abandoned in the form of half-finished proofs of concept from various pivots. Our broken team spirit was the elephant in the room, a festering open wound we didn’t know how to treat.

Unbidden, a statistic came to mind — something I had read recently about many Americans not being able to come up with $400 in an emergency.2 The realities of economic hardship for the average person felt distant from where I was, hurtling through the rarefied tropospheric air, and at first glance seemed unrelated to the million-dollar acquisition we thought was coming our way. And yet, at the end of the day, it was the same system of money. It was a system that functioned both as a gatekeeper for ensuring survival, and as a means for people like me to demonstrate value. It briefly occurred to me that it might be unreasonable to expect it to do both.

had believed that I could escape. I set out for this startup in the hopes that it would be a chance to be my own boss: to work on my schedule and on my own terms, rather than being shackled to a 9-5 with OKRs and a manager. And yet whatever freedom I thought I would have turned out to be illusory — my startup was still governed by the same market forces, and it was starting to look like there was no real freedom to be found within this system. The lights were blinking back on, and for the first time I noticed that the doors around us all had padlocks on them.

Always pivoting just in time to avoid the raw emptiness at the edges of this ambition.

The people on whom we counted for advice or money or connections never raised an ethical objection to our flagrant disregard for other people’s privacy. Why would they? We had seen a niche in the market, and we tried to fill it. The market was the ultimate arbiter. Questions of ethics were beside the point. Whatever doubts might have lurked in the back of my mind always paled in comparison to the solidity of the larger ecosystem. After all, we were a tiny cog in a much larger machine. Everyone we dealt with knew exactly what we were doing and still dealt with us anyway. Respectable companies and individuals wanted to invest in us, acquire us, trot us out to promote their cloud computing services; how could we not have seen that as validation? The whole system had felt so sturdy. I couldn’t have doubts about my startup without the whole thread unravelling, threatening the foundation of my entire belief system. But now the thread was starting to unravel, and the larger tech industry wasn’t doing much to settle my doubts.

What happened when you got bigger? Eventually, the profit motive kicked in; shareholders — public or increasingly private — needed you to think about their needs. Labour costs would be the first thing up for review. Stock options for non-essential personnel? Expensive perks? Health insurance and sick pay for roles where market research determined them unnecessary? Gone, if you even offered them to begin with. If your workers were compensated with piece rates — as was common in the gig economy — lower the price as much as the market could bear. You had to keep headcount low to appease Wall Street analysts carefully watching the profit-per-head figures, even if that meant overworked employees, impossible deadlines, and an army of frustrated contract workers lured in by the stillborn promise of a permanent role.

Could there be a way to build software that people wanted, without having to resort to business models that subjected users to endless distracting advertisements they would rather not see? Could there be a way to develop technology as a public good, shorn of the idea that it must make money in order for investors to recoup their investment? Now that I was thinking about it, yes, that sounded great. I would love the freedom to work on something that I could wholeheartedly believe in, with the reward being not a huge payout but rather an average standard of living and the joy of being part of a society that catered to the collective good rather than individual greed. Of course, that seemed like a far cry from the world we lived in, and I had a feeling that getting there would require larger changes than me personally deciding to take a different career path. Focusing on individual optimisation just wasn’t going to cut it for me anymore.

So much of my self-worth was built on top of the idea that I deserved what I got because I worked hard. The flip side of this belief was that those who were less successful were less deserving, precisely because they didn’t work hard enough. And yet it would be naive to think that meritocracy worked for everybody just because it worked for me. Not everybody had the opportunity to climb the ladder, and in any case the terms of that climb were arbitrary, based on what was most advantageous to the people in charge. How appalling to find self-assurance through the perceived inferiority of others.

Now I was seeing the other side of the analysis: that some people were workers because they had nothing to sell but their labour. There was no neutral analysis of the “right” salary someone should be paid; there was only relative bargaining power, and a skewed balance of power would spring up all sorts of excuses to justify that imbalance. And capital, in its strength, had no compunction about taking everything it could from its workers in exchange for the means of bare existence. Workers who unionised were doing the only thing they could to protect themselves from a much more powerful force, because capital’s prerogative was to treat them as worthless in order to extract as much profit as possible.

What was it like for founders? Your investors could choose to give you some degree of autonomy, but ultimately it was their choice; your life’s work was not truly your own. All that time you could never get back, spent in the pursuit of a foolish cause, governed by forces out of your control. Your hopes and dreams over-determined by a system requiring you to sacrifice your time for the goal of getting your investors a return on their investment. Not to say that founders deserved more sympathy — even the failed entrepreneurs would probably be fine; the industry was tolerant of failure to a fault. But it did feel a little pointless all the same. All the exertion, the sleepless nights, the incessant disruption— for what?

By the end of the millennium, capital is effervescent, sloshing around the system thanks to a friendly regulatory environment, the rise of financial engineering, an intensification of natural resource extraction, and wage concessions exacted from a defeated labour movement. It then floods into the tech sector, buoying up valuations beyond what can be sustained even by a market this irrational. When the bubble bursts in the form of the dot-com crash, leaving behind job losses and half-baked promises in its wake, the money simply sidles over to more promising ventures, like inflating real estate assets.3 And when that collapses in the form of the subprime mortgage crisis, the money slowly trickles back into tech, in thrall to a collective amnesia about the causes of the last bubble. That surely wasn’t the moribund gasp of a diseased economic system — it was simply too early. This time is different; this time the tech industry will be worthy of its valuations.

You don’t need to be profitable to raise billions of dollars in this economy, as long as you have a plan to eventually control a sector of the economy in a way that convincingly reminds your investors of Amazon. You don’t even need software margins to be valued as a tech company: you just need an elegant logo, overinflated executive compensation, and Kombucha on tap, wrapped up in a feel-good corporate mantra proclaimed in a tasteful sans-serif. Is this just the morose fate of technology, to be a signifier for the most profitable outlets for capital? Are we doomed to remain in this bubble of irrational exuberance, with startup valuations perpetually soaring beyond the realm of known price/earnings ratios?

This is the heart of the chief economic imperative driving the tech industry, whose real product isn’t smartphone apps, or even smartphones — its chief product is return on investment.

That’s not to say that these products shouldn’t exist, or that they should only be built outside the tech industry. It’s to say that the implicit profit motive that directs the industry’s operation is a bad fit for technological development.

The problem isn’t merely the individuals who make decisions that end up hurting others; the problem is the system where ill intent is not required in order to do harm.

The reasoning behind market logic seems to be that if people will pay for a product, then the product is good. This is myopic at best: at most it means that the product is useful in our current suboptimal environment. Of course customers will pay for VC-subsidised rideshares in cities with underfunded public transit; of course people will resort to payday loan apps when their boss doesn’t pay them enough to survive. The ostensible success of private enterprise does not imply that private enterprise is the best way to address the underlying problems.

Discussions of our current economic climate tend to evoke a PEBKAC-like response from capitalism’s apologists. Any reported problems, when they are even acknowledged as such, are clearly user errors. Millennials drowning in an ocean of student debt? Workers being paid unliveable wages and forced to work under gruelling conditions? People getting priced out of their hometowns? Clearly all these people are just doing capitalism wrong. They should have hustled more, stopped buying lattes, learned to code.

What if the system forces those from the bottom of the economic pyramid to jump through cruel hoops for even the barest whisper of success, making them whittle any trace of excess joy from their lives until they become the ideal efficient worker? Meanwhile, those on top are showered with luxuries and second chances. For those who meet Silicon Valley’s definition of merit, there’s no shortage of opportunity to continually fail upward.

What this means is that those who have managed to accumulate resources in the current system are not necessarily the best ones to make decisions about where to allocate them. As much as they would like to believe otherwise, their view is tinged with their own self-interest.

Without criticism, how could the system be held to account? Should the powerful be the sole arbiter of the validity of their power?

The problem is the structure in which decision-making power rests with such a small group of people, with such a small window for accountability. Capitalism as usual won’t fix the problems, because the internal feedback mechanism is inadequate by design — those who are served poorly by the system are dispossessed of their capacity for political contestation.

It feels odd to be here again after my whiplash-inducing personal transformation. I don’t see things the same way anymore, and I don’t want the things I used to want. I walk past the offices of venture capital firms and where I might have once responded with reverence, I now only feel disgust. The constant startup billboards for cryptocurrency exchanges or marijuana delivery apps are sickening. Parks and transit centres that would otherwise be perfectly lovely are emblazoned with the logos of tech giants, serving as constant reminders of a system that prioritises corporate greed over public good. And most of all, that all this is shot through with flashes of staggering poverty is infuriating.

The pro-developer argument goes something like this: if developers are permitted to build enough new units to meet demand, then supply and demand will equalise, and prices will stabilise; eventually, the housing crisis will fix itself. In the meantime, it’s sad that people are being priced out of their homes, but the best way to fix it is to allow the market to do what it does best. 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.

After all, housing can’t be simultaneously an asset and a human right; safeguarding capital’s right to a return requires the ability to evict people if they don’t comply with capital’s demands for a tithe of their income.

According to their S-1 filing, the company has over 20,000 full-time employees and almost four million active drivers. Of the money raised from the IPO, only 3% is set aside for drivers — significantly less than the amount reserved for the company’s erstwhile CEO.

The fact that companies like Uber can lay off full-time employees with impunity is not unrelated to Uber’s ability to raise so much money for an app whose primary innovation is a new way to exploit workers. In an atmosphere where capital is powerful and labour is weak, all workers are vulnerable, even if some are currently more vulnerable than others.

It’s a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but some days when I’m circling a five-block radius looking for a place to dock my damn bike, I fantasise about working on a problem like this. It would be nice to work on something that solves a real need — a fun technical problem that could actually improve people’s lives. A little piece of uncomplicated good in this messy world.