Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition

By J.A. English-Lueck

Since the initial publication of Cultures@SiliconValley fourteen years ago, much has changed in Silicon Valley. The corporate landscape of the Valley has shifted, with tech giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter vying for space with a halo of applications that connect people for work, play, romance, and education. Contingent labor has been catalyzed by ubiquitous access to the Internet on smartphones, enabling ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft and space-sharing apps like Airbnb. Entrepreneurs compete for people's attention and screen time.

Alongside these changes, daily life for all but the highest echelon has been altered by new perceptions of scarcity, risk, and shortage. Established workers and those new to the workforce try to adjust. The second edition of Cultures@SiliconValley brings the story of technological saturation and global cultural diversity in this renowned hub of digital innovation up to the present. In this fully updated edition, J. A. English-Lueck provides readers with a host of new ethnographic stories, documenting the latest expansions of Silicon Valley to San Francisco and beyond. The book explores how changes in technology, especially as mobile phones make the Internet accessible everywhere, impact work, family, and community life. The inhabitants of Silicon Valley illustrate in microcosm the social and cultural identity of the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781503602991

Book preview

Prologue

The Morning Report

It is dawn in the Mission District in San Francisco, a city being absorbed, inexorably and reluctantly, into Silicon Valley. Even ten years ago, San Francisco would have denied being part of the technology engine at the south end of the Bay, but over the past decade it has become integrated. The area known as Silicon Valley over the last fifty years has fluxed and expanded from its beginnings in the 1970s. Anchored to a strip of the South San Francisco Bay that contains Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Palo Alto, the Valley has crept north, and east. As the Internet-based economy has gone mobile, shareable and embedded in things, San Francisco has been swept into the mix, with tendrils of technology work stretching out to the East Bay, to Berkeley and Oakland.

Taavi is still asleep in her multiroom apartment that she shares with one of her partners, who is also in technology, affording her the luxury of living close to where she works. Taavi is not a morning person. She is a software engineer, an artist, and she is part of the network of start-ups and new companies in San Francisco that focus on social media and the shareable economy. She wakes around eight o’clock, has some coffee, and takes the twenty-minute bike ride to her job. Traffic in her part of San Francisco is a nightmare, and riding the bike not only wakes her up but helps her avoid the morass of cars fighting for parking. She hoists her bike onto a bike parking space on the wall of her workplace. One of the other bikes decoratively sports houseplants. Taavi begins the day gently, taking the easy jobs first, reading and responding to e-mail. She needs to work her way back into the code that so occupied her mind when last at work. Coding requires intense concentration, an almost out-of-body experience. During lunch and after work Taavi is active in the political discussions of her workplace. Company members are conscious that they both need the materials generated by their users to share and are the stewards of that community. What kind of community do they want to foster? These discussions draw on her background in gender studies, and she contributes a nuanced voice to tough issues of gender, sexuality, and privilege in the high-tech world.

Isabella, like Taavi, is a younger woman. San Francisco attracts a statistically younger workforce than the older companies to the south. Isabella works at an outpost, a worksite intentionally placed in Silicon Valley by a mature brick-and-mortar company in order to learn how to function in a mediated, technologically saturated world in which information networks are used to promote brands. With the assumption that new directions in project development or services are more likely to come to light in small start-ups, rather than staid older models, companies that produce traditional twentieth-century products and services, along with nonprofits and even governments, have set up such outposts to mine Silicon Valley’s innovations. Isabella is part of a multinational organization based in Europe, and her role was to be the pioneer who came to found the outpost and make it a successful venture. Her outpost is now the site of rotating placements, as people from different parts of the global company are sent in to learn how the Valley works. Isabella has to get up very early in the morning, at least 6 a.m., to interact with Europe in real time. Her calls and online interactions might last until 9 a.m. Now, she is ready to bike to her job in a coworking space in the heart of San Francisco. Isabella says, I bike everywhere, that’s my European trait. I couldn’t leave that. Isabella is one of the foreign-born residents who constitute 37 percent of the population of greater Silicon Valley. Her coworking space is a long wide corridor, designed to provoke interactions and serendipitous encounters among the sixty or seventy start-ups that rent space there. Most of Isabella’s work for her mother ship back in Europe consists of networking, so she spends her morning connecting to people on e-mail and going to meetings. She will plan on going to lunch at one of the many cafés around her coworking space to have more intimate face-to-face meetings. The deli in the high-end grocery store nearby is particularly useful. She hopes she won’t have sandwiches. Isabella jokes, Americans eat too many sandwiches! On the street, tourists walk by, taking photographs on their phones of the trendy corporate logos. What is better to tweet than the Twitter sign to those back home?

Corporate bike parking sends a message about company values, as well as reflects the reality of Silicon Valley traffic. (Photograph courtesy of J. A. English-Lueck)

Aberto, a native of the Bay Area, is experimenting with coworking on an even more intimate level; his whole house is a coworking space dedicated to interesting people working on blockchain technology. Aberto is an economist, and since blockchain technology underpins bitcoin, a radical experimental currency, he is living there as a participant observer. This publically distributed digital ledger, a virtual and dispersed account book, enables databases to be created that are secure from tampering or revision. Aberto wakes up a little tired. He was up late engaged in a discussion, with just a hint of party, with his housemates about various philosophical ideas related to a future that could unfold with this new technology. At its best, blockchain has the potential to create unbreakable interactions that cannot be changed, tweaked, or unmade. It was a heady night. Of course, it might be just another passing technological craze, subject to frenzied investment followed by more sober consideration. As an economist, and a socially conscious native of the area, he is concerned about the inequality evident around him. While he hopes the technologies being imagined here will provide tools to the disenfranchised, revolutionizing voting, commerce, and even citizenship, he suspects they will be put to much more frivolous uses. Only occasionally is that topic openly discussed. In the meantime, people come from all over the world to stay at the house for different periods of time, exchanging ideas in the living room, sitting side by side with laptops ready, eventually moving on. More permanent housemates might be on the road to Asia or Europe. Aberto is never quite sure who is actually living there at any given time.

Aberto goes out to the porch to watch as the sun comes up, drinking his strong coffee. He is once again amazed at the magnificent view of San Francisco afforded from his group home. As Aberto moves downstairs, he has to be quiet. Jack, an engineer working on artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things has a start-up in the basement. He often sleeps there as well, working unpredictable hours. It’s a good thing Aberto had clean laundry. The washing machine is in the basement as well, and members of the household must insert that mundane task into their own unpredictable work schedules. Unlike many of his housemates he has a day job in Palo Alto and needs to ride his bike to the train station to make his way to his other worksite, taking advantage of the commuter train’s wifi network to do just a bit of his work. Commuting by car between the City and the older heart of Silicon Valley is horrendous. No longer does U.S. Highway 101 have a crowded commute and less populated counter-commute. Both directions overflow with vehicles, unless you depart well before dawn. High housing costs and a high churn rate, the rate at which companies come and go, mean that few people live where they work. Low unemployment and restricted housing availability translate directly into more vehicles on the arterial freeways. Economic busts are sensed vicariously as the highways and freeways empty, as people leave the region or stay at home looking for work, getting another degree, or starting a business. Right now, the traffic is frenetic as the scramble for housing and jobs means that the cultures of Silicon Valley are again in motion.

Part One

A Technological Place

Chapter 1

Culture Version 2.x

An Amplified Community

Why Silicon Valley Matters

When California’s Santa Clara County was labeled Silicon Valley in the 1970s, the region was transformed in the public imagination. But much of the mythic characterization of the region as a brave new world is hyperbole. Although the Valley is home and showcase for the latest in high-technology innovation, its denizens do not live lives radically different from those of their urban American counterparts. There are distinct social and economic classes. The institutions of the community—schools, hospitals, mayoral offices—are not so different from those in Sacramento or San Diego. People eat, sleep, work, and play in patterns familiar to many Americans.

Yet the region experiences forces that will significantly shape the future elsewhere in America and the world. Technological devices from e-mail servers to telephones make it possible—even easy—for people to form dense interconnections in local networks, as well as in wider global affiliations. Technology suffuses daily life, the economy, and even the very language of Silicon Valley. Like the belled sheep at the fore of the flock, Silicon Valley is a bellwether beast, pursuing the newest technologies on the drawing board and in the hand. Its specialized economic history, once based on fruit agriculture and now built around high-technology production, has drawn people from around the world.

Since the first edition of this book was published at the beginning of the millennium, the corporate landscape of the Valley has changed. Web 2.0, which imagined that user-generated content would be the object of commerce, evolved into corporate giants such as Google, Facebook, and eBay. The spread of smartphone and tablet mobile technologies is rewriting commercial entertainment, gaming, and even fitness and food sectors, and revitalizing older computer companies, such as Apple, even as other businesses have faded (650Labs 2013). From Netflix to Fitbit, purveyors of new services and devices have become Silicon Valley players. Plumbing and storage companies, such as Cisco, are eclipsed by security and encryption firms. Social networking stopped being a technical term about social relationships in sociology and anthropology and now refers to communication and connection applications embedded in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a halo of other services that connect people for work, play, romance, and education. The Internet of Things promises to be the frontier of the 2010s and the 2020s, as miniaturization and improved integration link everyday objects, especially in cars and homes, to people. Pockets of people are already experiencing the twentieth-century dream of ubiquitous computing; they nestle in constant wraparound access to information processing. The drift toward an ecosystem of core permanent workers buttressed by contract workers has intensified. Contingent, or gig labor was catalyzed by ubiquitous access to the Internet on smartphones, enabling ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft and space-sharing applications such as Airbnb. Entrepreneurs compete for people’s attention and screen time. Established workers and those people new to the workforce try to adjust to these changes. Workers old and new are increasingly connected to the rest of the world.

The community’s cultural complexity makes it an illustration of postmodern life. The heterogeneity of classes, ethnicities, national cultures, self-identified subcultures, and organizational cultures makes it difficult to assign individuals to any particular category or to assume that anyone shares another’s cultural premises. Artifacts and behaviors may derive from Midwestern homeliness, Californian counterculture, or any number of sources from around the Pacific Rim and beyond. Europeans find the Valley European, while South Asians have reproduced bits of Indian life. Midwestern Americans find it both familiar and alien. Cultural interactions are inherently ambiguous; being certain of one’s own cultural identity or that of others is illusory.

The things that make Silicon Valley distinctive—its technological saturation and complex range of identities—are not merely interesting cultural artifacts in themselves. They are significant because both the pervasiveness of technology and identity diversity are coming to define the emerging global culture. By studying the nature of the bellwether sheep, we may understand the consequences of technological saturation and cultural complexity for the rest of the flock. With this in mind, I have deliberately identified Silicon Valley as a natural experimental laboratory.

Silicon Valley is not the only place where either technological saturation or cultural complexity are dominant factors in defining culture. Indeed, if it were the unique repository of those features, it would be irrelevant to our understanding of any other culture. But silicon places, whose economies are increasingly dominated by high-technology industries, are replicating around the globe, from Austin to Bangalore, while places such as Manhattan, Chicago, and London are home to wide-ranging cultural diversity. Beyond these dramatic examples, even smaller communities feel the exponential growth of consumer technologies and the increasing opportunity to encounter people different from themselves. These people are also subject to the forces that so obviously shape culture in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has enthusiastically embraced technology and cultural complexity, making it a prime location for the anthropological study of what happens in any technologically saturated community. We can learn from its experiences.

Silicon Valley is self-consciously and continuously in the process of creating and branding itself. Many of the industrial techniques used in business and technology work are being applied to social engineering. Social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, and humanitarian design are manifestations of intentional social change. Actors in this realm are more deliberately changing the world by applying the processes of design thinking, rapid deployment, and careful monitoring and reinvention to social issues ranging from poverty to housing. The application of industrial processes to social aspirations bears noting.

The passion for collecting data on people, as users, consumers, and citizens, serves companies that provide a better service or create a device that can be more intuitive. The mass collection of data includes the wholesale recording of Internet-based actions and transactions, producing big data to be harvested. At the other end of the spectrum, user-experience research minutely gazes at individual interactions with technologies and services. Both macroscopic and microscopic data produce a mass of information that has stimulated a lively debate on privacy and transparency. Transparency is valued as a tool for greater accuracy and imagined to be a route to democratization. At the same time, transparency is at odds with a several-hundred-year-old experiment in individual privacy. Silicon Valley is a place that contains anti-privacy advocates who hold that aggregated data produces more accurate information, and presumably more social good, than jealously hoarded individual protection.

A whole generation has grown up in the demographic mélange of the Greater Silicon Valley. The generation coined the Millennials are now in the workforce. They grew up deeply diverse, expecting cultural differences and navigating them with differing degrees of ability. Deep diversity—complex, unpredictable, and malleable—is an established reality for those who grew up in the region and a continuing challenge for those coming to it for the first time (English-Lueck 2011). The policies on immigration that fueled the Bay Area’s diversity of the late twentieth century have been influenced by more than a decade of war, including the War on Terror. South and East Asia continue to export technical talent to the region, but they are being layered on top of decades-old immigrant patterns to the area. Ethnic diversity continues to be a political challenge, as Latino and African American communities remain on the margins. Even as Silicon Valley’s geographic boundaries extended into surrounding areas, the prosperity did not extend to the East Bay’s African American population or south Santa Clara County’s Latinos. The region remains a laboratory for understanding the impact of culture, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in the high-tech economy and culture.

The Anthropological Eye

This book is an anthropological foray into an emerging global landscape. The production of technology dominates the region and is attracting people from around the world, reshaping cultural identities. Silicon Valley has been studied by economists, urban planners, sociologists, business theorists, and historians. They examine their own particular slices of social reality, such as the structure of networked global business practices or the struggle of the underclass in the showcase region of late capitalism. Journalists capture the story of the day, often highlighting the rich, the famous, and the exotica of Silicon Valley, and academics puzzle out its complex culture.¹ The representation of Silicon Valley has gone viral. HBO’s award-winning ironic and satirical Silicon Valley mocks start-up culture, and although the series captures only a narrow slice of life in the region, it joins the many popular cultural portrayals that inform, and misinform, the iconic image of the region.

Anthropology is concerned with mundanity—the details of daily life and what the small actions and interactions teach us about the human condition. The sites for that exploration and the tools for uncovering behavior differ widely. In the United States, anthropologists have been trained in a particularly broad disciplinary worldview, adding insights from biological anthropology and archaeology to direct observations of cultural life. This provides an interesting lens through which any time or place can be viewed. In addition to classical ethnographic inquiry—that is, observing and listening to living people in their own environments—there are additional conceptual tools. From biological anthropologists we learn to think about the processes leading to human variation and evolution that can be broadly defined as change through time. We are, in the end, animals—but animals who manipulate our own environments and organize ourselves to adapt to the world around us using the ideas and artifacts shaped by our cultures. Archaeologists have taught us that sweeping cultural changes show a pattern when viewed over time, and that the tiniest objects we use reveal much about our behavior. Our words and actions tell stories, but so do our artifacts. A fragment of porcelain fired in Asia can tell a tale of international migration and trade, and illuminate the daily routine of a person who might have lived and died in obscurity, under the historical radar screen that tends to register only the prominent. These perspectives force cultural anthropologists to ask questions about the smallest details of daily life and then link them to ever-changing larger forces. Hence, this anthropological consideration of Silicon Valley focuses on ordinary people, living lives filled with the minutiae of daily activity, surrounded by material objects and cultural ideas. Evidenced in those small objects and behavioral impulses are larger evolutionary forces, vast historic changes that drive us to re-create our cultures, often without even knowing it.

Social anthropology, a once-British tradition now practiced around the English-speaking world, teaches us that how we organize ourselves into groups and how we support those organizational forms with beliefs are vital clues in unraveling human behavior. Silicon Valley people organize their lives around networks, family, and work organizations. These organizing principles are part of the distinctive culture that defines the region. As an anthropologist, I must explore those aspects of social life.

I am primarily a cultural anthropologist, and so I focus my attention on the role of culture as I find it in its natural setting, in the field (Lindholm 2001: 12). The idea of culture is one of anthropology’s greatest gifts to social philosophy. It refers to everything that human beings have created and transmitted socially across time and space (van der Elst and Bohannan 1999: 32). Anthropologists are used to employing the term culture in its broadest sense, as in Human beings adapt to their environment using culture. In the past, the term also referred to the social entities that were presumed to share the same creations and socially transmitted ideas. We continue to refer, rather imprecisely, to the Navajo culture, or the American culture, a practice that tends to make us ignore the important contextual differences between Navajos in Window Rock and Navajos in Los Angeles.

It is unfortunate that this concept was first conceptualized as kultur, a noun, rather than a verb, as that is misleading.² Culture is the operating system that shapes our cognitive and behavioral processes, the ‘conceptual structures’ that create the central reality of a people (D’Andrade 1984: 115). However, defining the scope of the people that create culture is problematic, since culture acts at many levels of social organization. Creations and social transmissions take place within the family, the network, the community, the region, and the nation. Culture manifests across national boundaries at a global level in McDonald’s restaurants, airports, and cubicles around the world. Yet all the people in a single family, or a single nation, share behaviors only in the most general way—demonstrating patterns but not absolute uniformity. In studying culture it is important to look for the patterns—the footprints of commonality—while also documenting the variation within the patterns. Silicon Valley does not have a single uniform culture—although patterns do emerge—but it contains practices from many cultural variants in endless combinations, creating something altogether singular. This book lays out some of the cultural patterns that have been teased out of peoples’ words, artifacts, actions, and interactions.

By looking at cultural processes at the community level, this study joins the many case studies of complex communities, from Hong Kong (Evans and Tam 1997) to Pittsfield, Massachusetts (Nash 1989). Specifically, I use Silicon Valley as a case study to reveal the experiences and consequences of technological saturation. This information has a special relevance to people who are connected with such silicon communities, both ordinary citizens and policy makers. Silicon Valley is also a natural laboratory for cultural complexity, containing a diverse array of interacting identities and producing tensions, blends, and new possibilities. Thus, while this study focuses specifically on Silicon Valley, it has wider implications for understanding the more general processes of living with digital technology and intense cultural diversity.

As a cultural anthropologist, I am prey to a lifelong fascination with the details of daily life and a predilection to see any culture as but one among many. I have been trained to look for ethnocentrism in myself, to constantly question my tendency to think of my home culture as the natural one. Tempocentrism—viewing my own time as the default setting for normality—can also lead me into error. I did not grow up in a reality dominated by hyperactive electronic activity. I must resist the temptation to assume that any culture, including any in Silicon Valley, is inherently flawed or favored, particularly while I am in the process of trying to understand it. That does not mean I cannot detect bigotries and contradictions, or note particularly creative cultural solutions to dilemmas, but my training inhibits me from ranting either in praise or condemnation. Yet I too am thoroughly enmeshed in the Silicon Valley system. I live and teach in Silicon Valley. My children think of it as home. I grumble at the traffic and grimace at the inequalities, just as other Silicon Valley workers do. I am subject to occasional bouts of technolust and look forward to reading technical reviews before every purchase, as well as mining peers and millennials for technical advice. These are sure signs of my having gone native. Yet my experiences in different cultures and decades of exposure to the study of diverse cultures help me place Silicon Valley in perspective. Hence, throughout the book, I draw parallels with, and distinctions from, other cultures.

Anthropological work can be very grounded in time and space. While our disciplinary writ may be to understand all human behavior in general, I have never met a general human. People are located in particular times and places. That very truth drives this new edition. Different times draw out different social realities. People are entangled in the landscapes, artifacts, and social environments that surround them. So in my particular kind of sociocultural anthropology, I need to take note of spaces, objects, and the webs of relationships that encompass people. Proximity to the space in life—schools, houses, parks, and workplaces—shapes peoples’ experiences of their region. A bike commute is very different from two hours on the freeway. When I walk into a home office, the presence of guitars in the corner matters. When a new cell phone comes into the family, what happens to the old one? Who helps troubleshoot the new device? Which contacts are essential, and which ones need to be quietly weeded out?

Silicon Valley also provides us with a mirror in which we can look at ourselves and examine our own choices. Some communities actively seek to duplicate Silicon Valley’s apparent success, or at least those features that they believe will lead to prosperity, making political decisions that encourage industry, create private-public partnerships, and aggressively promote technical and infrastructural progress. Corporate and public organizations enact policies less visible than acts of Congress but perhaps not less profound in their effect. Individuals also embrace technologies for many purposes and results, reinforcing existing values and shaping new ones. Understanding the social life of Silicon Valley people allows all of us to reflect on the choices we make—both inside and outside