The Real Trouble With Silicon Valley
How should we tell the story of the digital century, now two decades old? We could focus, as journalists tend to do, on the depredations of the connected life. As Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have devoured the online world, they have undermined traditional media, empowered propagandists, and widened America’s political divides. The smartphone, for all its wonder and utility, has also proved to be a narcotizing agent.
But what if, instead of focusing on Big Tech’s sins of commission, we paid equal attention to its sins of omission—the failures, the busts, the promises unfulfilled? The past year has offered several lurid examples. WeWork, the office-sharing company that claimed it would reinvent the workplace, imploded on the brink of a public offering. Uber, once seen as an unstoppable force that would transform urban transit as radically as the subway had, has likewise seen its public valuation plummet. From January to October, the two firms together lost $10 billion.
While these companies might seem like outliers, their struggles hold a message, not just for investors but for all of us. Big Tech continues to find new and profitable ways to sell ads and cloud space, but it has failed, often spectacularly, to remake the world of flesh and steel.
For decades, we’ve turned to Silicon Valley to show us the that heralded the promise of the computer chip. In the ’80s and ’90s, Democrats such as Al Gore made up a new generation of liberals—named “Atari Democrats,” after the early video-game company—who believed computer technology would provide opportunity on the scale of the New Deal. The internet age was hailed as a third industrial revolution—a spur for individual ingenuity and an engine of employment.
