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Tag: Silicon Valley

  • Zachary Loeb — Where We’re Going, We’ll Still Probably Need Roads (Review of Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation)

    Zachary Loeb — Where We’re Going, We’ll Still Probably Need Roads (Review of Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation)

    a review of Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation (Verso, 2022)

    by Zachary Loeb

    You can learn a lot about your society’s relationship to technology by looking at its streets. Are the roads filled with personal automobiles or trolley-cars, bike lanes or occupied parking spaces, are there navigable sidewalks or is this the sort of place where a car is a requirement, does a subway rumble beneath the street or is the only sound the honking of cars stuck in traffic, are the people standing on the corner waiting for the bus or for the car they just booked through an app, or is it some kind of strange combination of many of these things simultaneously? The roadways we traverse on a regular basis can come to seem quite banal in their familiarity, yet they capture a complex tale of past decisions, current priorities, as well as a range of competing visions of the future.

    Our streets not only provide us with a literal path by which to get where we are going, they also represent an essential space in which debates about where we are going as a society play out. All of which is to say, as we hurtle down the road towards the future, it is important to pay attention to the fight for control of the steering wheel, and it’s worth paying attention to the sort of vehicle in which we find ourselves.

    In Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, Paris Marx analyzes the social forces that have been responsible for making our roads (and by extension our cities, towns, and suburbs) function the way they do, while providing particular emphasis on the groups and individuals trying to determine what the roads of the future will look like. It is a cutting assessment that examines the ways in which tech companies are seeking to take over the streets, and sidewalks, as well as the space above and below them: with gig-economy drivers, self-driving cars, new tunnels, delivery robots, and much else. To the extent that technological solutions are frequently touted as the only possible response to complex social/political/economic problems, Marx moves beyond the flashy headlines to consider what those technological solutions actually look like when the proverbial rubber hits the road. In Road to Nowhere the streets and sidewalks appear as sites of political contestation, and Marx delivers an urgent warning against surrendering those spaces to big tech. After all, as Marx documents, the lords of the information superhighway are leaving plenty of flaming debris along the literal highways.

    The primary focus of Road to Nowhere is on the particular vision of mobility being put forth by contemporary tech companies, but Marx takes care to explore the industries and interests that had been enforcing their view of mobility long before anyone had ever held a smartphone. As Marx explains, the street and the city were not always the possession of the personal automobile, indeed the automobile was at one time “the dominant technology that ‘disrupted’ our society” (10). The introduction of the automobile saw these vehicles careening down streets that were once shared by many other groups, and as automobiles left destruction in their wake, the push for safety was one that was won by ostensibly protecting pedestrians by handing the streets over to the automobile. Marx connects the rise of the personal automobile to “a much longer trend of elites remaking the city to serve their interests” (11), and emphasizes how policies favoring automobiles undermined other ways of moving about cities (including walking and streetcars). As the personal automobile grew in popularity, and mass production made it a product available not only to the wealthy, physical spaces were further transformed such that an automobile became less and less of a luxury and more and more of a need. From the interstate highway system to the growth of suburbs to under-investment in public transit to the development of a popular mythos connecting the car to freedom—Marx argues that the auto-oriented society is not the inevitable result flowing from the introduction of the automobile, but the result of policies and priorities that gradually remade streets and cities in the automobile’s image.

    Even as the automobile established its dominance in the mid-twentieth century, a new sort of technology began to appear that promised (and threatened) to further remake society: the computer. Pivoting for a moment away from the automobile, Marx considers the ideological foundations of many tech companies, with their blend of techno-utopian hopefulness and anti-government sentiment wherein “faith was also put in technology itself as the means to address social and economic challenges” (44). While the mythology of Silicon Valley often lauds the rebellious geek, hacking away in a garage, Marx highlights the ways in which Silicon Valley (and the computing industry more generally) owes its early success to a massive influx of government money. Cold War military funding was very good—indeed, essential—for the nascent computing sector. Despite the significance of government backing, Silicon Valley became a hotbed for an ideology that sneered at democratic institutions while elevating the computer (and its advocates) as the bringer(s) of societal change. Thus, the very existence of complex social/political/economic problems became evidence of the failures of democracy and proof of the need for high-tech solutions—this was not only an ahistorical and narrow worldview, but one wherein a group of mostly-wealthy, mostly-white, mostly-cis-male tech lovers saw themselves as the saviors society had been waiting for. And while this worldview was reified in various gadgets, apps, and platforms “as tech companies seek to extend their footprint into the physical world” this same ideology—alongside an agenda that places “growth, profits, and power ahead of the common good”—is what undergirds Silicon Valley’s mobility project (62).

    One of the challenges in wrestling with tech companies’ visions is to not be swept away by the shiny high-tech vision of the future they disseminate. And one area where this can be particularly difficult is when it comes to electric cars. After all, amongst the climate conscious, the electric car appears as an essential solution in the fight against climate change. Yet, beyond the fact that “electric vehicles are not a new invention” (64), the electric car appears as an almost perfect example of the ways in which tech companies attempt to advance a seemingly progressive vision of the future while further entrenching the status quo. Much of the green messaging around electric vehicles “narrowly focuses on tailpipe emissions, ignoring the harms that pervades the supply chain and the unsustainable nature of auto-oriented development” (71). Too often the electric car appears as a way for individuals of means to feel that they are doing their part to “personal responsibility” their way out of climate change, even as the continued focus on the personal automobile blocks the transition towards public transit that is needed. Furthermore, the shift towards electric vehicles does not end destructive extraction, it just shifts the extraction from fossil fuels to minerals like copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and coltan. The electric car risks being a way of preserving auto-centric society, and this “does not solve how the existing transportation system fuels the climate crisis and the destruction of local environments all around the world” (88).

    If personal ownership of a car is such a problem, perhaps the solution is to simply have an app on your phone that lets you summon a vehicle (complete with a driver) when you need one, right? Not so fast. Companies like Uber sold themselves to the public on a promise of making cars available when needed, especially for urban dwellers who did not necessarily have a car of their own. The pitch was one of increased mobility, where those in need of a ride could easily hire one, while cash-strapped car owners could have a new opportunity to earn a few extra bucks driving in the evenings. Far from solving congestion, empowering drivers, and increasing everyone’s mobility, “the Uber model adds vehicles to the road and creates more traffic, especially since the app incentivizes drivers to be active during peak times when traffic is already backed up” (99). Despite claims that their app based services would solve a host of issues, Uber (and its ilk) have added to urban congestion, failed to provide their drivers with a stable income, and have not truly increased the mobility options for underserved communities.

    If gig-drivers wind up being such an issue, why not try to construct a world where drivers are not necessary? And thus, perhaps few ideas related to the future of mobility have as firm a grasp on the popular imagination as the idea of the self-driving car. A fantasy that seems straight out of science fiction. Albeit, with good reason. After all, what a science fiction writer can dream up, and what a special effects team can mock up for a movie, face serious obstacles in the real world. The story of tech companies and autonomous vehicles is one of grandiose hype (that often generates numerous glowing headlines), followed by significantly diminished plans once the challenges of introducing self-driving cars are recognized. While much of the infrastructure we encounter is built with automobiles in mind, autonomous cars require a variety of other sorts of not-currently existing infrastructure. Just as “automobiles required a social reconstruction in addition to a physical reconstruction, so too will autonomous vehicles” (125), and this will entail transforming infrastructure and habits that have been built up over decades. Attempts to introduce autonomous vehicles have revealed the clash between the tech company vision of the world and the complexities of the actually existing world—which is a major reason why many tech companies are quietly backing away from the exuberance with which they once hyped autonomous cars.

    Well, if the already existing roads are such a challenge, why not think abstractly? Instead of looking at the road, look above the road and below the road! Thus, plans such as Boring’s proposed tunnels, and ideas about “flying cars,” seek to get around many of the challenges the tech industry is encountering in the streets by attempting to capitalize on seemingly unused space. At first glance, such ideas may seem like clear examples of the sort of “out of the box thinking” for which tech companies are famed, yet “the span of time between the initial bold claims of prominent tech figures and the general realization that they are fraudulent appears to be shrinking” (159). And once more, in contrast to the original framing that seeks to treat new tunnels and flying cars as emancipatory routes, what becomes clear is that these are just another area in which wealthy tech elites are fantasizing about ways of avoiding getting stuck in traffic with the hoi polloi.

    Much of the history of the automobile that Marx recounts, involves pedestrians being deprived of more and more space, and this is a story that continues as new battles for the sidewalk intensify. As with other tech company interventions in mobility, micromobility solutions that cover sidewalks in scooters and bikes that are rentable via app, present themselves with a veneer of green accessibility. Yet littering cities with cheap bikes and scooters that wear out quickly while clogging the sidewalks, turn out to be just another service “designed to benefit the company” without genuinely assessing the mobility needs of particular communities (166). Besides, all of those sidewalk scooters are also finding that they need to compete for space with swarms of delivery robots that make sidewalks more difficult to use.

    From the electric car to the app summoned chauffeur to the autonomous car to the flying car, tech companies have no shortage of high-tech ideas for the future of mobility. And yet, “the truth is that when we look at the world that is actually being created by the tech industry’s interventions, we find that the bold promises are in fact a cover for a society that is both more unequal and one where that inequality is even more fundamentally built into the infrastructure and services we interact with every single day” (185). While the built environment is filled with genuine mobility issues, the solutions put forward by tech companies ignore the complexity of how these issues came about in favor of techno-fixes designed to favor tech companies’ bottom lines while simultaneously feeding them new data streams to capitalize. The gleaming city envisioned by tech elites and their companies may be broadcast to all, but these cities are playgrounds for the wealthy tech elite, not for the rest of us.

    The hope that tech companies will come along and sort everything out with some sort of nifty high-tech program speaks to a lack of faith in societies’ ability to tackle the complex issues they face. Yet, to make mobility work for everyone, what is essential is not to flee from politics, but to truly address politics. The tech companies are working to reshape our streets and cities to better fit their needs, but this demands that people counter by insisting that their streets and cities be made to actually meet people’s needs. Instead of looking to cities with roads clogged with Ubers and sidewalks blocked by broken scooters, we need to be paying attention to the cities that have devoted resources (and space) to pedestrians while improving and expanding public transit. The point is not to reject technology but to reject the tech companies’ narrow definition of what technology is and how it can be used, “we need to utilize technology where it can serve us, while ensuring power remains firmly in the hands of a democratic public” (223).

    After all, “better futures are possible, but they will not be delivered through technological advancement alone” (225). We can no longer sit idle in the passenger seat, we need to take the wheel, and the wheels.

    ***

    Contrary to its somewhat playful title, Road to Nowhere lays out a very clear case that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future of mobility is in fact a road to somewhere—the problem is that it’s not a good somewhere. While the excited pronouncements of tech CEOs (and the oft-uncritical coverage of those pronouncements) may evoke images of gleaming high tech utopias, a more critical and grounded assessment of these pipedreams reveals them to be unrealistic fantasies mixed with ideas that are designed to primarily meet the needs of tech CEOs over the genuine mobility needs of most people. As Paris Marx makes clear throughout the chapters of Road to Nowhere, it is essential to stop taking the plans of tech companies at face value and to instead do the discomforting work of facing up to the realities of these plans. The way our streets and cities have been built certainly present a range of very real problems to solve, but in the choice of which problems to address it makes a difference whether the challenges being considered are those facing a minimum-wage worker or a billionaire mogul furious about sitting in traffic. Or, to put it somewhat differently, there are flying cars in the movie Blade Runner, but that does not mean we should attempt to build that world.

    Road to Nowhere: Silicon Valley and the Future of Mobility provides a thoughtful analysis and impassioned denunciation of Silicon Valley’s mobility efforts up to this point, and pivots from this consideration of the past and the present to cast doubt on Silicon Valley’s future efforts. Throughout the book, Marx writes with the same punchy eloquence that has made Marx such a lively host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. And while Marx has staked out an important space in the world of contemporary tech critique thanks to that podcast, this book makes it clear that Marx is not only a dynamic interviewer of other critics, but a vital critic in their own right. With its wide-ranging analysis, and clear consideration of the route we find ourselves on unless we change course, Road to Nowhere presents an important read for those concerned with where Silicon Valley is driving us.

    The structure of the book provides a clear argument that briskly builds momentum, and even as the chapters focus on certain specific topics they flow seamlessly from one to the next. Having started by providing a quick history of the auto-centric city, and the roots of Silicon Valley’s ideology, Marx’s chapters follow a clear path through mobility issues. If the problem is pollution, why not electric cars? If the problem is individual cars, even electric ones, why not make it easy to summon someone else’s car? If the problem is the treatment of the drivers of those cars, why not cars without drivers? If autonomous vehicles are unrealistic because of already existing infrastructure, why not wholly new infrastructure? If creating wholly new infrastructure (below and above ground) is more difficult than it may seem, what about flooding cities with cheap bikes? Part of what makes Road to Nowhere’s critique of Silicon Valley’s ideas so successful is that Marx does not get bogged down in just one of Silicon Valley’s areas of interest, and instead provides a critique that captures that it is not only a matter of Silicon Valley’s response to this or that problem, but that the issues is the way that Silicon Valley frames problems and envisions solutions. To the extent that the auto-centric world is reflective of a world that was remade in the shape of the automobile, Silicon Valley is currently hard at work attempting to remake the world in its own shape, and as Marx makes clear the needs of Silicon Valley companies and the needs of people trying to get around are not the same.

    At the core of Marx’s analysis is a sense that the worldview of Silicon Valley is one that is no longer so easily confined to certain geographical boundaries in California. As the tech companies have been permitted to present themselves as the shiny saviors of society, that ideology has often overwhelmed faith in democratic solutions. Marx notes that “as the neoliberal political system gave up on bold policies in favor of managing a worsening status quo, they left the door open to techno-utopians to fill the void” (5). When people no longer believe that a democratic society can even maintain the bridges and roads, it opens up a space in which tech companies can drive into town and announce an ambitious project to remake the roads. Marx further argues, “too often, governments stand back and allow the tech industry to roll out whatever ideas its executives and engineers can dream up,” this belief if undergirded by a sense that “whatever tech companies want is inevitable…and that neither governments, traditional companies, nor even the public should stand in their way” (178). Part of the danger of this sense of inevitability is that it cedes the future of mobility to the tech companies, robbing the municipalities both of initiative and of the responsibility to meet the mobility needs of the people who live there. Granted, as the many failures Marx documents show, just  because a tech company says that it will do something does not necessarily mean that it will be able to do it.

    Published by Verso Books and written in a clear comprehensive voice, Road to Nowhere stands as an intervention into broad discussions about the future of mobility, particularly those currently taking place on the political left. Thus, even as many readers are likely to cheer at Marx’s skewering of Musk, it is likely that many of those same readers will chafe at the book’s refusal to treat electric cars as a solution. Sure, it’s one thing to lambast Elon Musk (and by extension Tesla), but to critique electric cars as such? Here Marx makes it very clear that we cannot be taken in by too neat techno-fixes, whether they are touted by a specific company (such as Tesla), or whether they are made about a certain class of technologies (electric cars). As Marx makes clear, all of the minerals in those electric cars come from somewhere, and what’s more the issues that we face (in terms of mobility and environmental ones) are not simply the result of one particular technology (such as the gas-powered car) but the way in which we have built our societies around certain technologies and the infrastructure that those technologies require. Therefore, the matter of mobility is about which questions we are willing to ask, and recognizing that we need to be asking a different set of questions.

    Road to Nowhere is at its best when Marx does this work by moving past the particular tech companies to consider the deeper matters of the underlying technologies. Certainly, readers of the book will find plenty of consideration of Tesla and Uber (alongside their famous leaders), but the strength of Road to Nowhere is that the book does not act as though the problem is simply Tesla or Uber. Rather, Marx considers the way in which the problem forces us to think about automobiles themselves, about the long history of automobiles, and about the ways in which so much physical infrastructure has been built to prioritize the use of automobiles. This is, obviously, not to give Uber or Tesla a pass—but Marx does the essential work of emphasizing that this isn’t just about a handful of tech companies and their bombastic CEOs, this is a question about the ways in which societies orient themselves around particular sets of technologies. And Marx’s response is not a call for a return to some romanticized pastoral landscape, but is instead an argument in favor of placing the needs of people above the needs of technologies (and the people selling those technologies). Much of our built environment has been constructed around the automobile, what if we started building that environment around the needs of the human being?

    The challenge of what it would mean to construct our cities around the needs of people, rather than the needs of profit (or the needs of machines), is not a new question. And while Marx briefly considers some past figures who have wrestled with this matter—such as Jane Jacobs and Murray Bookchin—it might have been worthwhile to spend a little more time engaging more fully with past critics. At risk of becoming too much of a caricature of myself as a reviewer, it does seem like an unfortunate missed opportunity in a book about technology and cities not to engage with the prominent technological critic Lewis Mumford whose oeuvre includes numerous books specifically on the topic of technology and cities (he won the National Book Award for his volume The City in History). And these matters of cities, speed, and vehicles have been topics with which many other critics of technology engaged in the twentieth century. Indeed, the rise of the auto-centric society has had its critics all along the way, and it could have been fascinating to engage with more of those figures. Marx certainly makes a strong case for the ways in which Silicon Valley’s designs on the city are informed by its particular ideology, but engaging more closely with earlier critics of technology could have opened up other spaces for considering broader problems about ideologies surrounding technology that predate Silicon Valley. Of course, it is unfair to criticize an author for the book they did not write, and the intention is not to take away from Marx’s important book—but contemporary criticism of technology has much to gain not just from the history of technology but from the history of technological criticism.

    Road to Nowhere is a challenging book in the best sense of that word, for it discomforts the reader and pushes them to see the world around them in a new light. Marx achieves this particularly well by refusing to be taken in by easy solutions, and by recognizing that even as techno-fixes may be the standard offering from Silicon Valley, that a belief in such fixes permeates beyond just the pitches by tech firms. Nevertheless, Marx is also clear in recognizing that even as many of our problems flow from and have been exacerbated by technology, that technology needs to be seen as part of the solution. And here, Marx is deft at considering the way in which technology represents a much more robust and wide-ranging category than the too simplistic version that it is often reduced to when conversations turn to “tech.” Thus, the matter is nothing so ridiculous as conversations about being “pro-technology” or “anti-technology” but recognizing “that technology is not the primary driver in creating fairer and more equitable cities and transportation systems” what is necessary is “deeper and more fundamental change to give people more power over the decision that are made about their communities” (8). The matter is not just about technology (as such), but about the value systems embedded in particular sorts of technologies, and recognizing that certain sets of technologies are going to be better for achieving particular social goals. After all, “the technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral,” (179) though the same is also very much true of the technologies that were unleashed before Silicon Valley. Constructing a different world thus requires us to consider not only how we can remake that world, but how we can remake our technologies. As Marx wonderfully puts it, “when we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone” (179).

    You can learn a lot about your society’s relationship to technology by looking at its streets. And Road to Nowhere is a powerful reminder, that those streets do not have to look the way they do, and that we have a role to play in determining what future those streets are taking us towards.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.

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  • Tamara Kneese — Our Silicon Valley, Ourselves

    Tamara Kneese — Our Silicon Valley, Ourselves

    a review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley; Joanne McNeil, Lurking; Ellen Ullman, Life in Code; Wendy Liu, Abolish Silicon Valley; Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, eds., Voices from the Valley; Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, Seeing Silicon Valley

    by Tamara Kneese

    “Fuck all that. I have no theory. I’ve only got a story to tell.”
    – Elizabeth Freeman, “Without You, I’m Not Necessarily Nothing”

    ~

    Everyone’s eager to mine Silicon Valley for its hidden stories. In the past several years, women in or adjacent to the tech industry have published memoirs about their time there, ensconcing macrolevel critiques of Big Tech within intimate storytelling. Examples include Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, Joanne McNeil’s Lurking, Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code, Susan Fowler’s Whistleblower, and Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley, to name just a handful.[1] At the same time, recent edited volumes curate workers’ everyday lives in the ideological and geographical space that is Silicon Valley, seeking to expose the deep structural inequalities embedded in the tech industry and its reaches in the surrounding region. Examples of this trend include Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel’s Voices from the Valley and Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner’s Seeing Silicon Valley, along with tech journalists’ reporting on unfair labor practices and subsequent labor organizing efforts. In both cases, personal accounts of the tech industry’s effects constitute their own form of currency.

    What’s interesting about the juxtaposition of women’s first-hand accounts and collected worker interviews is how the first could fit within the much derided and feminized “personal essay” genre while the latter is more explicitly tied to the Marxist tradition of using workers’ perspectives as an organizing catalyst, i.e. through the process of empirical cataloging and self-reflection known as workers’ inquiry.[2] In this review essay, I consider these two seemingly unrelated trends in tandem. What role can personal stories play in sparking collective movements, and does presentation matter?

    *

    Memoirs of life with tech provide a glimpse of the ways that personal experiences—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are mediated by information technologies themselves as well as through their cascading effects on workplaces and social worlds. They provide an antidote to early cyberlibertarian screeds, imbued with dreams of escaping fleshly, earthly drudgery, like John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: “Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.” But in femme accounts of life in code, embodiment is inescapable. As much as the sterile efficiencies of automation would do away with the body’s messiness, the body rears its head with a vengeance. In a short post, one startup co-founder, Tracy Young, recounts attempting to neutralize her feminine coded body with plain clothes and a stoic demeanor, persevering through pregnancy, childbirth, and painful breastfeeding, and eventually hiding her miscarriage from her colleagues. Young reveals these details to point to the need for structural changes within the tech industry, which is still male-dominated, especially in the upper rungs. But for Young, capitalism is not the problem. Tech is redeemable through DEI initiatives that might better accommodate women’s bodies and needs. On the other end of the spectrum, pregnant Amazon warehouse workers suffer miscarriages when their managers refuse to follow doctors’ recommendations and compel pregnant workers to lift heavy boxes or prevent them from taking bathroom and water breaks. These experiences lie on disparate ends of the scale, but reflect the larger problems of patriarchy and racial capitalism in tech and beyond. It is unclear if this sliver of common ground can hope to bridge such a gulf of privilege.

    Sexual harassment, workplace misogyny, pregnancy discrimination: these grievances come up again and again within femme tech memoirs, even the ones that don’t at face value seem political. At first glance, Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User is not at all about labor. Her memoir is to some extent a celebration of the early internet, at times falling into the trap of nostalgia—the pleasure of the internet being “a place,” and the greater degree of flexibility and play afforded by usernames as opposed to real names policies. “Once I spoke freely and shared my dreams with strangers. Then the real world fastened itself to my digital life…My idle youth online largely—thankfully—evaporated in the sun, but more recent-ish old posts breeze along, colliding with and confusing new image of myself that I try to construct” (McNeil 2020, 8-9). Building on earlier feminist critiques of techno-utopian libertarianism, such as Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish (2000), in McNeil’s estimation, the early web allowed people to be lurkers, rather than users, even if the disembodied libertarian imaginaries attached to cyberspace never panned out. With coerced participation and the alignment of actual identities with online profiles, the shift to “the user” reflects the enclosure of the web and the growth of tech corporations, monetization, and ad tech. The beauty of being a lurker was the space to work out the self in relation to communities and to bear witness to these experimental relationships. As McNeil puts it, in her discussion of Friendster, “What happened between <form> and </form> was self-portraiture” (McNeil 2020, 90). McNeil references the many early internet communities, like Echo, LatinoLink, and Café los Negroes, which helped queer, Black, and Latinx relationships flourish in connection with locally situated subcultures.

    In a brief moment, while reflecting on the New York media world built around websites like Gawker, McNeil ties platformization to her experiences as a journalist, a producer of knowledge about the tech industry: “A few years ago, when I was a contractor at a traffic-driven online magazine, I complained to a technologist friend about the pressure I was under to deliver page view above a certain threshold” (McNeil 2020, 138). McNeil, who comes from a working class background, has had in adulthood the kind of work experiences Silicon Valley tends to make invisible, including call center work and work as a receptionist. As a journalist, even as a contractor, she was expected to amass thousands of Twitter followers. Because she lacked a large following, she relied on the publication itself to promote her work. She was eventually let go from the job. “My influence, or lack thereof, impacted my livelihood” (McNeil 2020, 139). This simply stated phrase reveals how McNeil’s critique of Big Tech is ultimately not only about users’ free labor and the extraction of profit from social relationships, but about how platform metrics are making people’s jobs worse.

    Labor practices emerge in McNeil’s narrative at several other points, in reference to Google’s internal caste system and the endemic problem of sexual harassment within the industry. In a discussion of Andrew Norman Wilson’s influential Workers Leaving the Googleplex video (2011), which made clear to viewers the sharp divisions within the Google workforce, McNeil notes that Google still needs these blue-collar workers, like janitors, security guards, and cafeteria staff, even if the company has rendered them largely invisible. But what is the purpose of making these so-called hidden laborers of tech visible, and for whom are they being rendered visible in the first place?[3] If you have ever been on a tech campus, you can’t miss ‘em. They’re right fucking there! If the hierarchies within tech are now more popularly acknowledged, then what? And are McNeil’s experiences as a white-collar tech journalist at all related to these other people’s stories, which often provide the scaffolding for tech reporters’ narratives?

    *

    Other tech memoirs more concretely focus on navigating tech workplaces from a femme perspective. Long-form attention to the matter creates more space for self-reflection and recognition on the part of the reader. In 2016, Anna Wiener’s n+1 essay, “Uncanny Valley,” went viral because it hit a nerve. Wiener presented an overtly gendered story—about body anxiety and tenuous friendship—told through one woman’s time in the world of startups before the majority of the public had caught wind of the downside of digital platforms and their stranglehold on life, work, and politics. Later, Wiener would write a monograph-length version of the story with the same title, detailing her experiences as a “non-technical” woman in tech: “I’d never been in a room with so few women, so much money, and so many people chomping at the bit to get a taste” (Wiener 2020, 61). In conversation with computer science academics and engineers, her skepticism about the feasibility of self-driving cars isn’t taken seriously because she is a woman who works in customer support. Wiener describes herself as being taken in by the promises and material culture of the industry: a certain cashmere sweater and overall look, wellness tinctures, EDM, and Burning Man at the same time she navigates taxicab gropings on work trips and inappropriate comments about “sensual” Jewish women at the office. Given the Protestant Work Ethic-tinged individualism of her workplace, she offers little in the way of solidarity. When her friend Noah is fired after writing a terse memo, she and the rest of the workers at the startup fail to stand up to their boss. She laments, “Maybe we never were a family. We knew we had never been a family,” questioning the common myth that corporations are like kin (Wiener 2020, 113). Near the end of her memoir, Wiener wrestles with the fact that GamerGate, and later the election of Trump, do not bring the reckoning she once thought was coming. The tech industry continues on as before.

    Wiener is in many respects reminiscent of another erudite, Jewish, New York City-to-San Francisco transplant, Ellen Ullman. Ullman published an account of her life as a woman programmer, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, in 1997, amid the dotcom boom, when tech criticism was less fashionable. Ullman writes about “tantric, algorithmic” (1997, 49) sex with a fellow programmer and the erotics of coding itself, flirting with the romance novel genre. She critiques the sexism and user-disregard in tech (she is building a system for AIDS patients and their providers, but the programmers are rarely confronted with the fleshly existence of their end-users). Her background as a communist, along with her guilt about her awkward class position as an owner and landlord of a building in the Wall Street district, also comes through in the memoir: At one point, she quips “And who was Karl Marx but the original technophile?” (Ullman 1997, 29). Ullman presciently sees remote, contracted tech workers, including globally situated call center works, as canaries in the coal mine. As she puts it, “In this sense, we virtual workers are everyone’s future. We wander from job to job, and now it’s hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments are contractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is spreading outward from us” (Ullman 1997, 146). Even for a privileged techie like Ullman, the supposedly hidden global underclass of tech was not so hidden after all.

    Ullman’s Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, a collection of essays published twenty years later in 2017, reflects a growing desire to view the world of startups, major tech companies, and life in the Bay Area through the lens of women’s unique experiences. A 1998 essay included in Life in Code reveals Ullman’s distrust of what the internet might become: “I fear for the world the internet is creating. Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses” (Ullman 2017, 89). Ullman at various points refers to the toxic dynamics of technoculture, the way that engineers make offhand sexist, racist remarks during their workplace interactions. In other words, critics like Ullman had been around for decades, but  her voice, and voices like hers, carried more weight in 2017 than in 1997. Following in Ullman’s footsteps, Wiener’s contribution came at just the right time.

    I appreciate Sharrona Pearl’s excellent review of Wiener’s Uncanny Valley in this publication, and her critique of the book’s political intentions (or lack thereof) and privileged perspective. When it comes to accounts of the self as political forces, Emma Goldman’s Living My Life it is not. But some larger questions remain: why did so many readers find Wiener’s personal narrative compelling, and how might we relate its popularity to a larger cultural shift in how stories about technology are told?

    Another woman’s memoir of a life in tech offers one possible answer. Wendy Liu started as a computer science major at a prestigious university, worked as a Google intern, and co-founded a startup, not an uncommon trajectory for a particular class of tech worker. Her candid memoir of her transformation from tech evangelist to socialist tech critic, Abolish Silicon Valley, references Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” essay. Wiener’s account resonated with Liu, even as a software engineer who viewed herself as separate from the non-technical women around her— the marketers, program managers, and technical writers. Liu is open about the ways that ideologies around meritocracy and individual success color her trajectory: she viewed Gamergate as an opportunity to test out her company’s tech capabilities and idolized men like Elon Musk and Paul Graham. Hard work always pays off and working 80 hours a week is a means to an end. Sometimes you have to dance with the devil: for example, Liu’s startup at one point considers working for the Republican Party. Despite her seeming belief in the tech industry’s alignment with the social good, Liu has doubts. When Liu first encounters Wiener’s essay, she wryly notes that she thought n+1 might be a tech magazine, given its math-y name. Once she reads it, “The words cut like a knife through my gradually waning hopes, and I wanted to sink into an ocean of this writing” (Liu 2020, 111). Liu goes on to read hundreds of leftist books and undergo a political awakening in London. While Wiener’s memoir is intensely personal, not overtly about a collective politics, it still ignites something in Liu’s consciousness, becoming enfolded into her own account of her disillusionment with the tech industry and capitalism as a whole. Liu also refers to Tech Against Trump, published by Logic Magazine in 2017, which featured “stories from fellow tech workers who were startled into caring about politics because of Trump” (Liu 2020, 150). Liu was not alone in her awakening, and it was first-hand accounts by fellow tech workers who got her and many others to question their relationship to the system.

    Indeed, before Liu published her abolitionist memoir, she published a short essay for a UK-based Marxist publication, Notes from Below, titled “Silicon Inquiry,” applying the time-honored Marxist practice of workers’ inquiry to her own experiences as a white-collar coder. She writes, “I’ve lost my faith in the industry, and with it, any desire to remain within it. All the perks in the world can’t make up for what tech has become: morally destitute, mired in egotism and self-delusion, an aborted promise of what it could have been. Now that I realise this, I can’t go back.” She describes her trajectory from 12-year-old tinkerer, to computer science major, to Google intern, where she begins to sense that something is wrong and unfulfilling about her work: “In Marxist terms, I was alienated from my labour: forced to think about a problem I didn’t personally have a stake in, in a very typically corporate environment that drained all the motivation out of me.” When she turns away from Google to enter the world of startups, she is trapped by the ideology of faking it until you make it. They work long hours, technically for themselves, but without achieving anything tangible. Liu begins to notice the marginalized workers who comprise a major part of the tech industry, not only ride-hail drivers and delivery workers, but the cafeteria staff and janitors who work on tech campuses. The bifurcated workforce makes it difficult for workers to organize; the ones at the top are loyal to management, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy are afraid of losing their jobs if they speak out.

    Towards the end of her memoir, Liu describes joining a picket line of largely Chinese-American women who are cleaners for Marriott Hotels. This action is happening at the same time as the 2018 Google Walkout, during which white-collar tech workers organized against sexual harassment and subsequent retaliation at the company. Liu draws a connection between both kinds of workers, protesting in the same general place: “On the surface, you would think Google engineers and Marriott hotel cleaners couldn’t be more different. And yet, one key component of the hotel workers’ union dispute was the prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace…The specifics might be different, but the same underlying problems existed at both companies” (Liu 2020, 158). She sees that TVCs (temps, vendors, and contractors) share grievances with their full-time counterparts, especially when it comes to issues over visas, sexual harassment, and entrenched racism. The trick for organizers is to inspire a sense of solidarity and connection among workers who, on the surface, have little in common. Liu explicitly connects the experiences of more white-collar tech workers like herself and marginalized workers within the tech industry and beyond. Her memoir is not merely a personal reflection, but a call to action–individual refusal, like deleting Facebook or Uber, is not sufficient, and transforming the tech industry is necessarily a collective endeavor. Her abolitionist memoir connects tech journalism’s use of workplace grievances and a first-hand account from the coder class, finding common ground in the hopes of sparking structural change. Memoirs like these may act as a kind of connective tissue, bridging disparate experiences of life in and through technology.

    *

    Another approach to personal accounts of tech takes a different tack: Rather than one long-form, first-hand account, cobble together many perspectives to get a sense of contrasts and potential spaces of overlap. Collections of workers’ perspectives have a long leftist history. For decades, anarchists, socialists, and other social reformers have gathered oral histories and published these personal accounts as part of a larger political project (see: Avrich 1995; Buhle and Kelley 1989; Kaplan and Shapiro 1998; Lynd and Lynd 1973). Two new edited collections focus on aggregated workers’ stories to highlight the diversity of people who live and work in Silicon Valley, from Iranian-American Google engineers to Mexican-American food truck owners. The concept of “Silicon Valley,” like “tech industry,” tends to obscure the lived experiences of ordinary individuals, reflecting more of a fantasy than a real place.

    Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner’s Seeing Silicon Valley follows the leftist photography tradition (think Lewis Hine or Dorothea Lange) of capturing working class people in their everyday struggles. Based on a six-week Airbnb stay in the area, Meehan’s images are arresting, spotlighting the disparity within Santa Clara Valley through a humanistic lens, while Turner’s historically-informed introduction and short essays provide a narrative through which to read the images. Silicon Valley is “a mirror of America itself. In that sense, it really is a city on a hill for our time” (Meehan and Turner 2021, 8). Through their presentation of life and work in Silicon Valley, Turner and Meehan push back against stereotypical, ahistorical visions of what Silicon Valley is. As Turner puts it, “The workers of Silicon Valley rarely look like the men idealized in its lore” (Meehan and Turner 2021, 7). Turner’s introduction critiques the rampant economic and racial inequality that exists in the Valley, and the United States as a whole, which bears out in the later vignettes. Unhoused people, some of whom work for major tech companies in Mountain View, live in vans despite having degrees from Stanford. People are living with the repercussions of superfund sites, hazardous jobs, and displacement. Several interviewees reference union campaigns, such as organizing around workplace injuries at the Tesla plant or contract security guards unionizing at Facebook, and their stories are accompanied by images of Silicon Valley Rising protest signs from an action in San Jose. Aside from an occasional direct quote, the narratives about the workers are truncated and editorialized. As the title would indicate, the book is above all a visual representation of life in Silicon Valley as a window into contemporary life in the US. Saturated colors and glossy pages make for a perfect coffee table object and one can imagine the images and text at home in a gallery space. To some degree, it is a stealth operation, and the book’s aesthetic qualities bely the sometimes difficult stories contained within, but the book’s intended audience is more academic than revolutionary. Who at this point doesn’t believe that there are poor people in “Silicon Valley,” or that “tech labor” obscures what is more often than not racialized, gendered, embodied, and precarious forms of work?

    A second volume takes a different approach, focusing instead on the stories of individual tech workers. Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, co-founders of Logic Magazine, co-edited Voices from the Valley as part of their larger Logic brand’s partnership series with FSG Originals. The sharply packaged volume includes anonymous accounts from venture capitalist bros as well as from subcontracted massage workers, rendering visible the “people behind the platform” in a secretive industry full of NDAs (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 3). As the book’s title suggests, the interviews are edited back-and-forths with a wide range of workers within the industry, emphasizing their unique perspectives. The subtitle promises “Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It.” This is a clear nod to Studs Terkel’s 1974 epic collection of over one hundred workers’ stories, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, in which he similarly categorizes them according to job description, from gravedigger to flight attendant. Terkel frames each interview and provides a description of their living conditions or other personal details, but for the most part, the workers speak on their own terms. In Tarnoff and Weigel’s contribution, we as readers hear from workers directly, although we do catch a glimpse of the interview prompts that drove the conversations. The editors also provide short essays introducing each “voice,” contextualizing their position. Workers’ voices are there, to be sure, but they are also trimmed to match Logic’s aesthetic. Reviews of the book, even in leftist magazines like Jacobin, tend to focus as much on the (admittedly formidable) husband and wife editor duo as they do on the stories of the workers themselves. Even so, Tarnoff and Weigel emphasize the political salience of their project in their introduction, arguing that “Silicon Valley is now everywhere” (2020, 7) as “tech is a layer of every industry” (2020, 8). They end their introduction with a call to the reader to “Speak, whoever you are. Your voice is in the Valley, too” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 8).

    As in Meehan and Turner’s visually oriented book, Tarnoff and Weigel’s interviews point to the ways that badge color as class marker, along with gender, immigration status, disability, and race, affect people’s experiences on the job. Much like Meehan and Turner’s intervention, the book gives equal space to the most elite voices as it does to those on the margins, spanning the entire breadth of the tech industry. There are scattered examples of activism, like white collar organizing campaigns against Google’s Dragonfly and other #TechWontBuiltIt manifestations. At one point, the individual known as “The Cook” names Tech Workers Coalition. TWC volunteers were “computer techie hacker cool” and showed up to meetings or even union negotiations in solidarity with their subcontracted coworkers. The Cook notes that TWC thinks “everybody working for a tech company should be part of that company, in one sense or another” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 68). There is an asterisk with a shorthand description of TWC, which has become something of a floating signifier of the tech workers’ movement. The international tech workers labor movement encompasses not only white collar coders, but gig and warehouse workers, who are absent here. With only seven interviews included, the volume cannot address every perspective. Because the interviews with workers are abbreviated and punctuated by punchy subheadings, it can be hard to tell whose voices are really being heard. Is it the workers of Silicon Valley, or is it the editors? As with Meehan and Turner’s effort, the end result is largely a view from above, not within. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a place for this kind of aggregation, or that it can’t connect to organizing efforts, but is this volume more of a political work than Wiener’s or Ullman’s memoirs?

    In other interviews, workers reveal gendered workplace discrimination and other grievances that might prompt collective action. The person identified as “The Technical Writer” describes being terminated from her job after her boss suspects her pregnancy. (He eliminates the position instead of directly firing her, making it harder for her to prove pregnancy discrimination). She decides not to pursue a lawsuit because, as she puts it, “Tech is actually kind of a small industry. You don’t want to be the woman who’s not easy to work with” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 46). After being terminated, she finds work as a remote contractor, which allows her to earn an income while caring for her newborn and other young child. She describes the systemic misogyny in tech that leads to women in non-technical roles being seen as less valuable and maternity leave factoring into women’s lower salaries. But she laments the way that tech journalism tends to portray women as the objects, not the subjects of stories, turning them into victims and focusing narratives on bad actors like James Damore, who penned the infamous Google memo against diversity in tech. Sensationalized stories of harassment and discrimination are meant to tug at the heartstrings, but workers’ agency is often missing in these narratives. In another striking interview, “The Massage Therapist,” who is a subcontracted worker within a large tech campus environment, says that despite beleaguered cafeteria workers needing massages more than coders, she was prohibited from treating anyone who wasn’t a full-time employee. The young women working there seemed sad and too stressed to make time for their massages.

    These personal but minor insights are often missing from popular narratives or journalistic accounts and so their value is readily apparent. The question then becomes, how do both personal memoirs and these shorter, aggregated collections of stories translate into changing collective class consciousness? What happens after the hidden stories of Silicon Valley are revealed? Is an awareness of mutual fuckedness enough to form a coalition?[4]

    *

    A first step might be to recognize the political power of the personal essay or memoir, rather than discounting the genre as a whole. Critiques of the personal essay are certainly not new; Virginia Woolf herself decried the genre’s “unclothed egoism.” Writing for The New Yorker in 2017, Jia Tolentino marked the death of the personal essay. For a time, the personal essay was everywhere: sites like The Awl, Jezebel, The Hairpin, and The Toast centered women’s stories of body horror, sex, work, pain, adversity, and, sometimes, rape. In an instant, the personal essay was apparently over, just as white supremacy and misogyny seemed to be on the rise. With the rise of Trumpism and the related techlash, personal stories were replaced with more concretely political takes. Personal essays are despised largely because they are written by and for women. Tolentino traces some of the anti-personal essay discourse to Emily Gould’s big personal reveal in The New York Times Magazine, foregrounding her perspective as a woman on the internet in the age of Gawker. In 2020 essay in The Cut revisiting her Gawker shame and fame, Gould writes, “What the job did have, and what made me blind to everything it didn’t, was exposure. Every person who read the site knew my name, and in 2007, that was a lot of people. They emailed me and chatted with me and commented at me. Overnight, I had thousands of new friends and enemies, and at first that felt exhilarating, like being at a party all the time.” Gould describes her humiliation when a video of her fellating a plastic dildo at work goes viral on YouTube, likely uploaded by her boss, Nick Denton. After watching the infamous 2016 Presidential Debate, when Donald Trump creepily hovered behind Hillary Clinton, Gould’s body registers recognition, prompting a visit to her gynecologist, who tells her that her body is responding to past trauma:

    I once believed that the truth would set us free — specifically, that women’s first-person writing would “create more truth” around itself. This is what I believed when I published my first book, a memoir. And I must have still believed it when I began publishing other women’s books, too. I believed that I would become free from shame by normalizing what happened to me, by naming it and encouraging others to name it too. How, then, to explain why, at the exact same moment when first-person art by women is more culturally ascendant and embraced than it has ever been in my lifetime, the most rapacious, damaging forms of structural sexism are also on the rise?

    Gould has understandably lost her faith in women’s stories, no matter how much attention they receive, overturning structural sexism. But what if the personal essay is, in fact, a site of praxis? Wiener, McNeil, Liu, and Ullman’s contributions are, to various extents, political works because they highlight experiences that are so often missing from mainstream tech narratives. Their power derives from their long-form personal accounts, which touch not only on work but on relationships, family, personal histories. Just as much as the more overtly political edited volumes or oral histories, individual perspectives also align with the Marxist practice of workers’ inquiry. Liu’s memoir, in particular, brings this connection to light. What stories are seen as true workers’ inquiry, part of leftist praxis, and which are deemed too personal, or too femme, to be truly political? When it comes to gathering and publishing workers’ stories, who is doing the collecting and for what purpose? As theorists like Nancy Fraser (2013) caution, too often feminist storytelling under the guise of empowerment, even in cases like the Google Walkout, can be enfolded back into neoliberalism. For instance, the cries of “This is what Googley looks like!” heard during the protest reinforced the company’s hallmark metric of belonging even as it reinterpreted it.

    As Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi note in their detailed history of workers’ inquiry for Viewpoint Magazine, Marx’s original vision for worker’s inquiry was never quite executed. His was a very empirical project, involving 101 questions about shop conditions, descriptions of fellow workers, and strikes or other organizing activities. Marx’s point was that organizers must look to the working class itself to change their own working conditions. Workers’ inquiry is a process of recognition, whereby reading someone else’s account of their grievances leads to a kind of mutual understanding. Over time and in different geographic contexts, from France and Italy to the United States, workers’ inquiry has entailed different approaches and end goals. Beyond the industrial factory worker, Black feminist socialists like Selma James gathered women’s experiences: “A Woman’s Place discussed the role of housework, the value of reproductive labor, and the organizations autonomously invented by women in the course of their struggle.” The politics of attribution were tricky, and there were often tensions between academic research and political action. James published her account under a pen name. At other times, multi-authored and co-edited works were portrayed as one person’s memoir. But the point was to take the singular experience and to have it extend outward into the collective. As Haider and Mohandesi put it,

    If, however, the objective is to build class consciousness, then the distortions of the narrative form are not problems at all. They might actually be quite necessary. With these narratives, the tension in Marx’s workers’ inquiry – between a research tool on the one hand, and a form of agitation on the other – is largely resolved by subordinating the former to the latter, transforming inquiry into a means to the end of consciousness-building.

    The personal has always been political. Few would argue that Audre Lorde’s deeply personal Cancer Journals is not also a political work. And Peter Kropotkin’s memoir accounting for his revolutionary life begins with his memory of his mother’s death. The consciousness raising and knowledge-sharing of 1970s feminist projects like Our Bodies, Ourselves, the queer liberation movement, disability activism, and the Black Power movement related individual experiences to broader social justice struggles. Oral histories accounting for the individual lives of ethnic minority leftists in the US, like Paul Avrich’s Anarchist Voices, Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro’s Red Diapers, and Michael Keith Honey’s Black Workers Remember, perform a similar kind of work. If Voices from the Valley and Seeing Silicon Valley are potentially valuable as political tools, then first person accounts of life in tech should be seen as another fist in the same fight. There is an undeniable power attached to hearing workers’ stories in their own words and movements can emerge from the unlikeliest sources.

    EDIT (8/6/2021): a sentence was added to correctly describe Joanne McNeil’s background and work history.
    _____

    Tamara Kneese is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her first book on digital death care practices, Death Glitch, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. She is also the co-editor of The New Death (forthcoming Spring 2022, School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press).

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] I would include Kate Losse’s early, biting critique The Boy Kings, published in 2012, in this category. Losse was Facebook employee #51 and exposed the ways that nontechnical women, even those with PhDs, were marginalized by Zuckerberg and others in the company.

    [2] Workers’ inquiry combines research with organizing, constituting a process by which workers themselves produce knowledge about their own circumstances and use that knowledge as part of their labor organizing.

    [3] Noopur Raval (2021) questions the “invisibility” narratives within popular tech criticism, including Voices from the Valley and Seeing Silicon Valley, arguing that ghost laborers are not so ghostly to those living in the Global South.

    [4] With apologies to Fred Moton. See The Undercommons (2013).
    _____

    Works Cited

    • Paul Avrich. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
    • Paulina Borsook. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech. New York: Public Affairs, 2000.
    • Paul Buhle and Robin D. G. Kelley. “The Oral History of the Left in the United States: A Survey and Interpretation.” The Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (1989): 537-50. doi:10.2307/1907991.
    • Susan Fowler, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
    • Nancy Fraser. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. New York: Verso, 2013.
    • Emma Goldman. Living My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.
    • Emily Gould. “Exposed.” The New York Times Magazine, May 25, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html.
    • Emily Gould. “Replaying My Shame.” The Cut, February 26, 2020. https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/emily-gould-gawker-shame.html
    • Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi. “Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy.” Viewpoint Magazine, September 27, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy/.
    • Michael Keith Honey. Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. Oakland: University of California Press, 2002.
    • Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro. Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
    • Peter Kropotkin. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
    • Wendy Liu. Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
    • Wendy Liu. “Silicon Inquiry.” Notes From Below, January 29, 2018, https://notesfrombelow.org/article/silicon-inquiry.
    • Audre Lorde. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
    • Katherine Losse. The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
    • Alice Lynd and Robert Staughton Lynd. Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.
      Joanne McNeil. Lurking: How a Person Became a User. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
    • Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner. Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
    • Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
    • Noopur Raval. “Interrupting Invisbility in a Global World.” ACM Interactions. July/August, 2021, https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2021/interrupting-invisibility-in-a-global-world.
    • Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel. Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do—and How They Do It. New York: FSG Originals x Logic, 2020.
    • Studs Terkel. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
    • Jia Tolentino. “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.” The New Yorker, May 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over.
    • Ellen Ullman. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents.  New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
    • Ellen Ullman. Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
    • Anna Wiener. “Uncanny Valley.” n+1, Spring 2016: Slow Burn, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/.
    • Anna Wiener. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
  • Sharrona Pearl — In the Shadow of the Valley (Review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley)

    Sharrona Pearl — In the Shadow of the Valley (Review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley)

    a review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (Macmillan, 2020)

    by Sharrona Pearl

    ~

    Uncanny Valley, the latest, very well-publicized memoir of Silicon Valley apostasy, is, for sure, a great read.  Anna Wiener writes beautiful words that become sentences that become beautiful paragraphs and beautiful chapters.  The descriptions are finely wrought, and if not quite cinematic than very, very visceral.  While it is a wry and tense and sometimes stressful story, it’s also exactly what it says it is: a memoir.  It’s the story of her experiences.  It captures a zeitgeist – beautifully, and with nuance and verve and life. It highlights contradictions and complications and confusions: hers, but also of Silicon Valley culture itself.  It muses upon them, and worries them, and worries over them.  But it doesn’t analyze them and it certainly doesn’t solve them, even if you get the sense that Wiener would quite like to do so.  That’s okay.  Solving the problems exposed by Silicon Valley tech culture and tech capitalism is quite a big ask.

    Wiener’s memoir tells the story of her accidental immersion into, and gradual (too gradual?) estrangement from, essentially, Big Tech.  A newly minted graduate from a prestigious small liberal arts college (of course), Wiener was living in Brooklyn (of course) while working as an underpaid assistant in a small literary agency (of course.) “Privileged and downwardly mobile,” as she puts it, Wiener was just about getting by with some extra help from her parents, embracing being perpetually broke as she party-hopped and engaged in some light drug use while rolling her eyes at all the IKEA furniture.  In as clear a portrait of Brooklyn as anything could be, Wiener’s friends spent 2013 making sourdough bread near artisan chocolate shops while talking on their ironic flip phones.  World-weary at 24, Wiener decides to shake things up and applies for a job at a Manhattan-based ebook startup.  It’s still about books, she rationalizes, so the startup part is almost beside the point.  Or maybe, because it’s still about books, the tech itself can be used for good.  Of course, neither of these things turn out to be true for either this startup, or tech itself.  Wiener quickly discovers (and so do her bosses) that she’s just not the right fit.  So she applies for another tech job instead.  This time in the Bay Area.  Why not?  She’d gotten a heady dose of the optimism and opportunity of startup culture, and they offered her a great salary.  It was a good decision, a smart and responsible and exciting decision, even as she was sad to leave the books behind.  But honestly, she’d done that the second she joined the first startup.  And in a way, the entire memoir is Wiener figuring that out.

    Maybe Wiener’s privilege (alongside generational resources and whiteness) is living in a world where you don’t have to worry about Silicon Valley even as it permeates everything.  She and her friends were being willfully ignorant in Brooklyn; it turns out, as Wiener deftly shows us, you can be willfully ignorant from the heart of Silicon Valley too.  Wiener lands a job at one startup and then, at some point, takes a pay cut to work at another whose culture is a better fit.  “Culture” does a lot of work here to elide sexism, harassment, surveillance, and violation of privacy.  To put it another way: bad stuff is going on around Wiener, at the very companies she works for, and she doesn’t really notice or pay attention…so we shouldn’t either.  Even though she narrates these numerous and terrible violations clearly and explicitly, we don’t exactly clock them because they aren’t a surprise.  We already knew.  We don’t care.  Or we already did the caring part and we’ve moved on.

    If 2013 feels both too early and too late for sourdough (weren’t people making bread in the 1950s because they had to?  And in 2020 because of COVID?) that’s a bit like the book itself.  Surely the moment for Silicon Valley Seduction and Cessation was the early 2000s?  And surely our disillusionment from the surveillance of Big Tech and the loss of privacy didn’t happen until after 2016? (Well, if you pay attention to the timeline in the book, that’s when it happened for Wiener too).  I was there for the bubble in the early aughts.  How could anyone not know what to expect?  Which isn’t to say that this memoir isn’t a gripping and illustrative mise-en-scène.  It’s just that in the era of Coded Bias and Virginia Eubanks and Safiya Noble and Meredith Broussard and Ruha Benjamin and Shoshana Zuboff… didn’t we already know that Big Tech was Bad?  When Wiener has her big reveal in learning from her partner Noah that “we worked in a surveillance company,” it’s more like: well, duh.  (Does it count as whistleblowing if it isn’t a secret?)

    But maybe that wasn’t actually the big reveal of the book.  Maybe the point was that Wiener did already know, she just didn’t quite realize how seductive power is, how pervasive an all-encompassing a culture can be, and how easy distinctions between good and bad don’t do much for us in the totalizing world of tech.  She wants to break that all down for us.  The memoir is kind of Tech Tales for Lit Critics, which is distinct from Tech for Dummies ™ because maybe the critics are the smart ones in the end.  The story is for “us;” Wiener’s tribe of smart and idealistic and disaffected humanists.  (Truly us, right dear readers?)  She makes it clear that even as she works alongside and with an army of engineers, there is always an us and them.  (Maybe partly because really, she works for the engineers, and no matter what the company says everyone knows what the hierarchy is.)  The “us” are the skeptics and the “them” are the cult believers except that, as her weird affectation of never naming any tech firms (“an online superstore; a ride-hailing app; a home-sharing platform; the social network everyone loves to hate,”) we are all in the cult in some way, even if we (“we”) – in Wiener’s Brooklyn tribe forever no matter where we live – half-heartedly protest. (For context: I’m not on Facebook and I don’t own a cell phone but PLEASE follow me on twitter @sharronapearl).

    Wiener uses this “NDA language” throughout the memoir.  At first it’s endearing – imagine a world in which we aren’t constantly name-checking Amazon and AirBnB.  Then its addicting – when I was grocery shopping I began to think of my local Sprouts as “a West-Coast transplant fresh produce store.”  Finally, it’s annoying – just say Uber, for heaven’s sake!  But maybe there’s a method to it: these labels makes the ubiquity of these platforms all the more clear, and forces us to confront just how very integrated into our lives they all are.  We are no different from Wiener; we all benefit from surveillance.

    Sometimes the memoir feels a bit like stunt journalism, the tech take on The Year of Living Biblically or Running the Books.  There’s a sense from the outset that Wiener is thinking “I’ll take the job, and if I hate it I can always write about it.”  And indeed she did, and indeed she does, now working as the tech and start-up correspondent for The New Yorker.  (Read her articles: they’re terrific.)  But that’s not at all a bad thing: she tells her story well, with self-awareness and liveliness and a lot of patience in her sometimes ironic and snarky tone.  It’s exactly what it we imagine it to be when we see how the sausage is made: a little gross, a lot upsetting, and still really quite interesting.

    If Wiener feels a bit old before her time (she’s in her mid-twenties during her time in tech, and constantly lamenting how much younger all her bosses are) it’s both a function of Silicon Valley culture and its veneration of young male cowboys, and her own affectations.  Is any Brooklyn millennial ever really young?  Only when it’s too late.  As a non-engineer and a woman, Wiener is quite clear that for Silicon Valley, her time has passed.  Here is when she is at her most relatable in some ways: we have all been outsiders, and certainly many of would be in that setting.  At the same time, at 44 with three kids, I feel a bit like telling this sweet summer child to take her time.  And that much more will happen to her than already has.  Is that condescending?  The tone brings it out in me.  And maybe I’m also a little jealous: I could do with having made a lot of money in my 20s on the road to disillusionment with power and sexism and privilege and surveillance.  It’s better – maybe – than going down that road without making a lot of money and getting to live in San Francisco.  If, in the end, I’m not quite sure what the point of her big questions are, it’s still a hell of a good story.  I’m waiting for the movie version on “the streaming app that produces original content and doesn’t release its data.”

    _____

    Sharrona Pearl (@SharronaPearl) is a historian and theorist of the body and face.  She has written many articles and two monographs: About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (University of Chicago Press, 2017). She is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Drexel University.

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  • Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan — Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

    Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan — Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

    Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    “You know, I hear all these rich guys, for some reason they love space. So they’re rich. I said, ‘let them send the rockets up. What the hell do we have to do it, right?’”

    — US President Donald Trump, Aug 15 2019 campaign rally,
    Manchester NH (quoted in FOXBusiness 2019)

    1. Preppers, the Rapture and on Being “Left Behind”

    At the turn of the millennium, an unexpected success took the mainstream publishing industry completely off-guard. A series of science fiction novels published by a tiny Christian press and depicting the end of the world from a distinctly Christian fundamentalist perspective became a massive, best-selling hit (McAlister 2003). Its themes of survival following a catastrophic global event were not foreign to the universe of science fiction literature; doomsday scenarios resulting in flight from one’s home planet to a celestial otherworld via space travel have served as plot devices in countless books, films and video games. Yet something about the Left Behind series (LaHaye and Jenkins 1995) was distinct.

    That novelty in this case hinged upon the fact that the dystopian doomsday scenario in question was taken directly from an evangelical Christian Biblical interpretation of the Rapture, the New Testament prophecy that says that believers of Christ would be delivered en masse to Heaven while non-believers would be left to fend for themselves in a ravaged, evil-infected world. Despite, or perhaps because of, its overt Christian Evangelical bent, the series was both a massive commercial success and a cultural phenomenon. Drawing on its Evangelical underpinnings, the series located evil at a point of origin true to its theology and politics: as reported by SF Gate at the height of the its popularity, in 2006, “in [the Left Behind series], set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine ‘Sexiest Man Alive’” (Lelchuk and Writer 2006).

    The series went on to spawn a popular, albeit technically flawed, video game (and sequels), in which the conceit is to convert as many non-believers as possible and save them from post-Armageddon eternal terrestrial doom. It also led to the production of several films, the first batch starring former sitcom actor and Evangelical Christian Kirk Cameron, followed by an attempted 2014 reboot featuring Nicolas Cage. Whatever the medium, the heroes of the franchise were no Luddites; indeed, as American Studies scholar Melani McAlister remarked in her expansive essay on the cultural meaning of Left Behind:

    LaHaye and Jenkins establish their characters as more modern than modern. Making the most of the fact that the events they describe must necessarily be the future (though a rather near-term future, in their view), the novels present a world in which our Tribulation Force members are unfailingly knowledgeable about, and outfitted with, an impressive array of the best possible equipment, from guns to high-end SUVs, from Gulfstream jets to the ‘computer without limitations’ ordered by the Tribulation Force from an underground dealer. (McAlister 2003, 783)

    The Rapture is a religious event, key to understanding Evangelical Christian theology and practice. But in the Left Behind series, it is also a secular global disaster, which requires skill, determination, tech and ideological dedication to survive. Those who remain on Earth wait for their own opportunity to be spirited away, newly transformed into fully committed believers, to a Christian heaven.

    Figure 1. Box art for the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game, depicting the Christian Rapture over New York City.
    Figure 1. Box art for the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game, depicting the Christian Rapture over New York City.

    While the Left Behind franchise reflects a profoundly sectarian Evangelical Christian eschatology, preoccupation with the coming of end times, whether Christian or secular versions, has become more commonplace and concomitantly more socially acceptable in 21st century American culture—on the rise, however, since the mid-20th century’s preoccupation with escape from nuclear annihilation by a paradoxical technological arms race. This new social acceptability has been enhanced by worsening economic, environmental and social conditions, and bolstered by technological developments designed to accommodate a dystopian, resource-poor future marked by global war, environmental chaos, famine, and/or the end of sustainable human life.

    What Left Behind did to prepare the Evangelical American psyche for coming horror has been replicated in material form: to prepare for a variety of nightmarish end-times eventualities, people have built bunkers, stockpiled food, hoarded weapons and created structures (many in the form below-ground bunkers, but also silos, geodesic domes and other improbable architectural masterworks) intended to offer the latest technological innovations that can support inhabitants in a variety of post-apocalyptic scenarios.[1] Many are elaborate and spare no innovation or expense to provide for the inhabitants’ creature comforts and well-being as the world above disintegrates into chaos and ruin.

    There is historical precedence for this new end-of-days prepping, grounded in the mid-20th century Cold War nuclear fallout shelters. A recent article in The Atlantic on the new luxury prepping phenomenon begins with this historical observation: “On July 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the American people of a need ‘new to our shores’ for emergency preparedness, including fallout shelters. The bunkers of that era—Brutalist, cement, with foldout beds and stockpiled food—were designed to protect families in the event that the Cold War turned hot” (Rowen 2017). Decades on, these early escape rooms, and the anxieties that had provoked them, had largely melted away, their remnants anachronistic oddities of another time.

    One of this article’s authors recalls childhood afternoons in the 1980s playing in a bomb shelter built off a friend’s basement, which had fallen into disuse, never having been deployed in the context of the man-made disaster scenario of post-nuclear holocaust survival. It was a physically and emotionally uncomfortable reminder from another era, lined in cold concrete cinder blocks and plywood bunks. Nonetheless, its builders had gone to pains to decorate and had painted on the cement walls, cheerily but ominously, a wooded nature landscape scene that, aboveground, would have been all but assuredly vaporized, were its builders actually ensconced inside it for the long haul and using it for its intended purpose.

    Figure 2. A friendly cartoon turtle provides advice to the American public during the Cold War era in a film for school-aged children, “Duck and Cover” (Rizzo 1951)
    Figure 2. A friendly cartoon turtle provides advice to the American public during the Cold War era in a film for school-aged children, “Duck and Cover” (Archer Productions 1951)

    In the post-9/11, economically depressed and socially divided America, disaster preparedness has been experiencing a comeback. A new prepper phenomenon has even become the fodder of media empires: Doomsday Preppers, a reality program, airing on cable’s National Geographic Channel from 2011 through 2014, was a ratings hit (National Geographic Channel 2014), which subsequently spawned a number of lookalikes on other networks (Genzlinger 2012). As depicted on these programs, the preppers of the paranoid post-millennium come in all orientations and political persuasions, but lean toward the right of the political spectrum, with strains of individualism and lack of faith in government the predominating common threads among them. A fondness for weaponry of all kinds—but particularly for guns— and means of self-defense are often at the center of the preparations and infrastructure, so that the prepared may defend themselves not only against an enemy, but also against those who were not so well prepared for calamity and unwisely attempt to seek material support or other assistance from their neighbors.

    Indeed, it is the very preparation involving the arming of one’s self and family in the face of impending disaster that serves as a culture of its own; the gun culture prevalent in the United States is frequently overlaid with prepper culture and, itself, serves as a focal point of strong community formations. The group known as “America’s Largest Right-Wing Militia,” the Georgia III% Security Force, is depicted intimately in VICE’s “Guns in America” series (III% Security Force nd). As explained by VICE, this group “is inspired by the unfounded claim that only three percent of colonists fought against the British in the American Revolution” (VICE 2017). The Georgia Three Percenters fight against what they perceive as attacks on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, protecting the people’s right to bear arms. To prepare for what they believe is an imminent war, they gather monthly to train and discuss strategies. This group, led by White, rural working-class people, was especially active in the months leading up to the 2016 US elections, convinced that Hillary Clinton was “plotting to take them [their guns] away” (Zucchino 2016), a likelihood that had no basis in demonstrable fact.

    Despite its overwhelming association with White culture and people, the group has complicated racial politics, as often eluded to by the militia’s leader Chris Hill in the VICE profile. On camera, Hill explains: “we’re not racist, we’re against racism… we’re against supremacy of all kind—fuck it all—we’re all created equal, but until people can get that fucking message we must be prepared to defend ourselves and each other” (VICE 2017). Who the enemy is remains forever ideological, conceptual, and a perfect opportunity to play with guns to protect a future imaginary of their own making.

    The hoarding of guns and a lust to use them are the organizing principles of Mel Bernstein’s life; he is described in numerous media accounts (and also self-styled) as the “most armed man in America” (Koenigs 2017). Bernstein collects, rents and sells military-style vehicles and weapons from his 260-acre compound (called “Dragonland”) in Colorado Springs. He also runs a paintball park, motocross park, military museum, gun shop and shooting ranges.

    One of the 3 percent of Americans who own half the country’s guns (Ingraham 2016). ABC News recently aired a short profile on Bernstein (Koenigs 2017), focusing on his extreme nostalgia and sense of loneliness: five years ago, his wife was killed by a smoke bomb on their property during the filming of reality-TV pilot for the Discovery Channel. He now lives with four human-sized dolls, all of which he has named (Jennifer, Betty, Jill, and one unnamed in the clip), dressed in feminine attire, and posed in the nostalgic 1950s-style diner that is his kitchen. Bernstein legally owns more than 4000 weapons; his bedroom is lined with M16s and assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns, and handguns—but it is the mannequins that push people to question his sanity.

    Figure 3. Bernstein in his home with one of four doll companions (clip from Koenigs 2017)
    Figure 3. Bernstein in his home with one of four doll companions (clip from Koenigs 2017)

    The appeal of groups and individuals like the III% militia, Bernstein, and reality TV preppers as the subjects of programs—and their shared overlapping interest in and certainty of near-future impending global calamity—is due in part to the ingenuity with which they conceive and execute their survival goals. Enjoyment, however, often comes with that dose of schadenfreude or superiority endemic to reality TV, undergirded by a tacit mocking of its subjects at all times (Papacharissi & Mendelson 2007; Reiss & Wiltz 2004). In aggregate, a great deal of the appeal lies in looking in on crazy zealots, ridiculous obsessives, and eccentrics who spend their families’ life savings and all of their time burrowing in their backyards or hoarding non-perishables. The unresolved issue at the root of the entire enterprise, as the New York Times preppers TV article points out, is the question of who would even want to survive the disasters for which the preppers are prepping (Genzlinger 2012). For many of the preppers, it is the singular focus on prepping itself from which they derive the satisfaction that blurs so easily into religious fervor. The TV preppers’ solutions to anxieties for the future must always be counterbalanced for viewers by a sense of ridicule and unease provoked by the necessary obsessiveness it takes to plan for disasters that may never come—a global electromagnetic pulse, alien invasion, total environmental collapse, or the need to survive until the rapturous wave arrives to call them to the next stage of existence.

    While these eccentric, yet mostly unheralded (prior to their profiles on TV) people are easily made the object of humor or scorn through programs like Ultimate Preppers or ABC’s feature on Bernstein, stories about social and financial elites’ machinations in these directions are offered up without the same sort of skepticism. From Steve Bannon to Elon Musk, or from Biosphere 2 to SpaceX, the elite can afford passion projects of immense scale unavailable to even the most ingenious TV prepper. Rather than resolve issues on earth, they look to the stars and into our cells. Perhaps they know something others do not. Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti offers a diagnosis:

    The new necro-technologies operate in a social climate dominated by a political economy of nostalgia and paranoia on the one hand, and euphoria or exaltation on the other. This manic-depressive condition enacts a number of variations: from the fear of the imminent disaster, the catastrophe just waiting to happen, to hurricane Katrina or the next environmental accident. (Braidotti 2012, 9-10)

    Braidotti draws our attention to the contexts of disaster and how they shape lived experiences in imagined geographies and temporalities—tangible, but made-up; real, but fabricated. For Braidotti, and for philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, ecological crises induce a cold panic that can be harnessed by technologically and economically élite “Guardians” (Stengers 2015, 27) to offer up a series of seemingly viable non-choices as choices and non-solutions as solutions. Technocratic problem-solving continues to adhere foremost to free-market ideology, which endeavors to maintain or deepen status quo power dynamics, unequal global economies, and to allow for social collapse, all due to a pathological resistance to state- or community-imposed regulation and limits. Because American culture equates money and power with morality and leadership, Stengers suggests that the outcome is a no-choice choice ultimately “between barbarism and barbarism” (Wark 2015), with people and planet held hostage to corporations and those who benefit from them.

    Whether Earth’s collapse will come due resource extraction, environmental destruction, or war (or a combination thereof), the technocratic élite are not only both predisposed and poised to start anew somehow and somewhere else well beyond the backyard bunker but may even welcome or initiate it by way of inaction in the face of destruction on Earth. The outcome of any such cataclysmic, Earth-destroying catastrophes would yield a Rapture of its own, with the secular believers delivered to a futuristic beyond, and the rest who did not believe, or could not afford to, left behind.

    2. The Worse the Better: Accelerationism and Nihilism

    Accelerationism (from the right) is a theoretical counter-proposal to resistance (from the left); a destabilizing force for fighting the ills of capitalism. As Benjamin Noys summarizes it in his Malign Velocities (2014):

    Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production [proponents] argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. We haven’t seen anything yet as regards what speed can do. Such a counsel seems to be one of cynicism, suggesting we come to terms with capitalism as a dynamic of increasing value by actively becoming hyper-capitalist subjects. What interests me is a further turn of the screw of this narrative: the only way out of capitalism is to take it further, to follow its lines of flight or deterritorialization to the absolute end, to speed-up beyond the limits of production and so to rupture the limit of capital itself. (Noys 2014, i)

    Accelerationism proposes that we collectively let things unravel to their full extent – socially, politically, economically, environmentally–by stoking, rather than seeking to mitigate–the forces that drive us toward devastation. In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame of the totalizing undoing of capitalism by capitalism.

    Accelerationism locates resistance to capitalism as a byproduct of capitalism itself that by its nature reproduces it, and that such resistance can never fully stand outside of it to fight it, or really even be complete. It also suggests a foregone and nihilist conclusion to the contemporary status of global humanity, which, it asserts, was completely and inextricably captured within the capitalist orbit. It is thus an ideology offering no new ideas or no possibility for meaningful change beyond the total, inevitable collapse of the global system. In its early instantiations, accelerationism was a declaration about capitalism as a kind of alien invader from the future (Mackay 2012). It sees the outcome of late-stage capitalism as pushed by growth and profit to the point of spectacular self-destruction, an outcome that it welcomes.

    Accelerationism as a political philosophy, with its goal of bringing about the end of the status quo (capitalism) by accelerating the world into full-blown crisis, has adherents on the left. Some leftists identify with the anti-capitalist endgame and see accelerationism as a means to implement a radical call for anti-work, full automation, and so on (Terranova 2014).[2] Yet, more significantly, it seems to have been taken up by the right, the outcome of a certain nihilism rooted in a sense of inevitability about the end of the world as we know it—due to environmental failures, natural (man-made) disasters and global warming, and so on—and a science fiction-influenced, technologically-driven fascination with concepts of spaceward expansionism, extraction and conquest. This right-wing strain is most commonly identified with Nick Land, once of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or Ccru, at the University of Warwick (UK).

    As his editor and onetime student Robin Mackay explains in the introduction to a collection of Land’s writings, “Marxists in particular were outraged by Land’s aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ‘ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’—[hence] the acceleration, rather than the critique, of Capitalism’s disintegration of society” (Land 2017, 3).

    Capitalism demands competition, which, in turn, relies on technological deployments, which, in turn, rely on the exploitation of cheap nature and labor, and reliable but unequal global flows (Moore 2014). Humans are not at the center, they merely serve toward the rendering of a technofuture, and then become superfluous. According to Alex Williams, in Nick Land’s envisioning of a post-capitalist future, “the human can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilisations” (Williams 2013, 2). As for Land, he left his university post and has retreated to Shanghai to ruminate and produce paranoid speculative fiction with an accelerationist bent, his erstwhile right-curious politics having fully morphed into open and unabashed fascism.

    In sum, what accelerationism as a political philosophy offers its adherents is a profoundly nihilistic view that suspends any hope in the ability of humans to intercede meaningfully in the world as it is. Instead, it hangs its hopes on an End Times of its own, awaiting a sort of secular Rapture that compels acolytes to not only await, but celebrate, the inevitable unravelling of the social order and collapse of the world as we know it For many, its proponents would claim, the worse things get, the better. Sound familiar?

    When viewed through the dual lens of prepperdom and nihilistic accelerationism—both of which hold out for global disaster with a certain amount of titillation and glee—the large-scale projects for which techno-élites like Musk have become famous can be seen in another light entirely: as dismal, fatalistic projects that have given up any faith (pun intended) in the ability to resolve the human condition or life on Earth, in general, or perhaps, even more specifically, that there would be inherent value in such an effort at all. Indeed, the projects promoted by this technocratic élite do not scope into something favorable for a majority of the world’s inhabitants or life as we now know it; instead, they are so narrowly aimed as to solve very little about the ruinous conditions for vast swaths of the world’s population and, in many cases, quite literally seek to abandon Earth entirely.

    Examples such Musk’s investments in SpaceX, his ruminations that we are all likely living in a computer simulation, or the desire to colonize Mars, all point toward his belief that life on Earth is largely unsalvageable; his billions of dollars of wealth and his unfettered access to resources therefore follow suit. In this regard, a recent musing from him on Twitter takes on an ominous undertone; his idle, passive musing about migrant children placed in cages in detention centers by the Trump Administration proposes no solution, no alternative, no call to act. Perhaps, in accordance with his world view, he sees no reason to. The game has already been lost and those in the know have moved on.

    Figure 4. Elon Musk makes non-committal remarks on the situation of migrant children placed in detention, removed from parents and, in some cases, housed in cages and pens, under Trump Administration policy. In subsequent tweets, he defends his tweet by stating that he is one of the ACLU’s top donors (Musk, 2018)
    Figure 4. Elon Musk makes non-committal remarks on the situation of migrant children placed in detention, removed from parents and, in some cases, housed in cages and pens, under Trump Administration policy. In subsequent tweets, he defends his tweet by stating that he is one of the ACLU’s top donors (Musk, 2018)

    3. Dreaming of Post-Earth

    In the billionaire kingmaker class, Musk is not alone in his post-Earth predilection. Indeed, he is one of several of his echelon looking cynically to science fiction and the après-apocalypse, fantasizing about outlandish ways to spend–and make–profits via projects that deepen long-standing commitments to Western supremacy and colonization, albeit with a futuristic bent. At the 2016 Republican National Convention that heralded the political ascendency of Donald Trump, PayPal billionaire and Gawker/journalism foe Peter Thiel (Thompson 2018) hailed the conquest of Mars as a worthier endeavor than wars in the Middle East. In doing so, Thiel inadvertently showed his ideological hand by invoking both as equivalent games of conquest (Daily Beast 2016). Other projects in this vein include Biosphere 2 (once the province of former Trump advisor and professional propagandist Steve Bannon), HI-SEAS, Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters, and the NSA’s Star Trek-inspired control room, all of which posit various offworld-oriented technological solutions to a dying future. It is a future in which capitalism has already played out the dissolution of democracy and social equalities, favoring a libertarian fend-for-yourself approach for those who remain– and those who remain, according to these projects, are overwhelmingly White, wealthy able-bodied people of the Global North.

    Figure 5. NSA’s Star Trek-inspired “Information Dominance Center” (see Greenwald, 2013)
    Figure 5. NSA’s Star Trek-inspired “Information Dominance Center” (source: Greenwald 2013)

    Biosphere 2 was an architectural and ecology project launched in the early 1990s, privately funded by the Texas oil billionaire “ecopreneur” Edward Bass, who, given his industry, likely had certain expertise and foresight related to impending ecological collapse (Atlas Obscura 2013; “Biosphere 2” 2003). Based on science-fiction and architectural futurist concepts of fully-enclosed and self-sufficient human habitation environments known as “arcologies” (Plunkett 2011), Biosphere 2 was an attempt to create Earth-like living conditions within a container–what some early media reports described as “life in a bottle” (Turner 2011). The underlying conceit was that such living habitats would become necessary on Earth or on other planets, after life on this one could no longer be sustained.

    Figure 6: An array of arcologies for players to build, as depicted in the video game SimCity 2000, released in 1993 by game publisher Maxis. http://simcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arcology
    Figure 6. An array of arcologies for players to build, as depicted in the video game SimCity 2000, released in 1993 by game publisher Maxis (Source: Simcity wiki)

    The project quickly failed on many fronts, at which point future Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Steven Bannon, at the time a former Goldman Sachs investment banker specializing in media and entertainment investments, was asked to come in to financially salvage the project (Jardin 2016). During this period, Biosphere 2 spiraled down from a quasi-legitimate scientific endeavor into a tourist spectacle, sharing more in common with Xanadu Computerized Houses of the Future (Dells Travel 2014) than legitimate empirical scientific research; lawsuits ensued in short order (Murphy 2016).

    While Bannon claimed publicly that the Biosphere 2 experiment had been to study the effects of CO2 emissions and climate change in real-time, rather than merely through computer simulation, the entire project became one of fake science, with its focus repeatedly shifting to any story of innovation that could be packaged for the media.

    Figure 7. One of several foam futuristic dome structures known as “Xanadu House of Tomorrow” located in tourist destinations across the United States from 1980 until the mid-1990s; this one was located in Kissimmee, Florida. Photo credit: Wollewoox, under Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
    Figure 7. One of several foam futuristic dome structures known as “Xanadu House of Tomorrow” located in tourist destinations across the United States from 1980 until the mid-1990s; this one was located in Kissimmee, Florida. (Source: Wikipedia)

    In a similar case of earthbound arcologies meant to imagine a future framed by offworld life, the volunteer crew of the latest NASA Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission remained cloistered for eight months as part of a study to learn how astronauts might interact and problem-solve during long deployments. In HI-SEAS, six volunteers inhabited a fake Mars colony, playing the part of astronauts. Project chronicler Lynn Levy described the project as planning “for the day when the dress rehearsals are over, and we blast off for real” (Gimlet Media, 2018). Here too, however, participants were kept busy with scientific homework: “The HI-SEAS site has Mars-like geology which allows crews to perform high-fidelity geological field work and add to the realism of the mission simulation” (HI-SEAS, n.d.).

    It is worthy of note that the HI-SEAS site was chosen for its environmental similarities to Mars, but seemingly without any acknowledgment of the irony that the make-believe colony is located on the very much contested and already colonized island of Hawai’i, where active protests are now underway to impede the placement of further telescopic equipment used for astronomical observation atop sacred mountains.

    Figure 8. A HI-SEAS "fake Mars" project astronaut. (Source: Hersher 2016)
    Figure 8. A HI-SEAS “fake Mars” project astronaut. (Source: Hersher 2016)

    A nod to offworld architecture and otherworldly craft was resonant too, in the design of both Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters and the NSA’s control room. Both structures were characterized by design demonstrating the desire to have not only control over but also a front row seat to the apocalypse . The new Apple campus, shaped like a flying saucer (or perhaps the ouroboros-like literal form of its longtime “infinite loop” street address) has all the amenities of a city, becoming, much like Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise or a fully-enclosed archology, its own world-within-a-vessel. It operates like a spaceship that has landed on earth rather than one about to take off, and by design uses its surroundings to anchor itself for future generations. The spaceship is surrounded by a thick layer of trees, mostly apricot, maintains a thousand bikes on the site for workers to get around, and has its own energy center that runs mostly off-grid. The spaceship aesthetic and panoptic/open floor work spaces reinstate order and hierarchy through structural and embedded surveillance while suggesting freedom of movement and action. Ample amenities are designed to keep workers on-site and productive, ideally for longer than an eight-hour workday, recalling the company towns of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Not to be outdone, both Google and Facebook have announced employee housing near their expansive campuses (Stangel 2017), in partial response to extraordinary housing costs in Silicon Valley (created by the demand from their own workers).

    Figure 9. Concept drawing of Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. (Source: Techboss24, http://techboss24.blogspot.com/2013/11/apples-new-spaceship-campus-see-unseen.html
    Figure 9. Concept drawing of Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. (Source: Techboss24)

    The unbroken circle design of the building creates an inside vs. outside protected space for Apple employees in much the same way that projects from 1950s fallout shelters to Biosphere 2 have sought to seal off a group of the chosen from the others who must remain outside the walls. Indeed, just as the skies part to allow ascendency to Heaven of God’s anointed on the cover of the Left Behind video game (as seen in figure 1), the artistic rendering of the Apple Spaceship shows a similar break in the clouds and sunlight beaming down on its infinite loop.

    The appeal of science fiction fantasy has been taken up by government agencies, too. In contrast to the Chilean “Synco” or “Project Cybersyn” of the 1970s, which used cybernetic aesthetics to create a work room to respond to economic crises in real time (Medina 2011), the former National Security Agency (NSA) Chief Keith Alexander’s had constructed an “Information Dominance Center” war room (Greenwald 2013). For Chile’s socialist President, Salvador Allende, ‘revolutionary computing’ meant putting workers in control of decisions (Medina 2006, 574–575). This socialist project stands in contrast to the “Information Dominance Center” designed to allow the USA’s NSA virtually one-man control over an increasingly vast network of surreptitious surveillance and data gathering.

    In the case of both Big Tech and governmental surveillance agencies, undergirding a commitment to the inevitable and imminent time after Earth is the appeal of science fiction aesthetics, concepts and projects, all aimed toward the new goal of having new places and opportunities to conquer, colonize and dominate post-Earth. SpaceX’s goal is to land a person on Mars; closer to home are other instantiations of futuristic fantasy, from the NSA’s Star Trek-inspired control room to Apple’s Spaceship. Hermetically-sealed scientists and volunteers roleplay in extreme environments to ready themselves for off-world living. In all of these examples, the playing out of “accelerationism” is both a chronological and technological acceleration, as well as the strategic buying and use of remaining time–to hide, prepare and come up with exit strategies.

    What makes these cases so compelling is that they often inadvertently show the élites’ cynical, hubristic and pessimistic hand, a tell that gives away the fact that their technological propositions cannot salvage life on Earth for the masses, and, even worse, that they are no longer interested in trying. These projects all cater to the right’s accelerationist rationale that it is too late to act, too late to come together for collective decision-making, and too late to care, all while disavowing the powerful agency that has gone into making those beliefs into fact (such as in the case of the fossil fuel magnate who bankrolled Biosphere2). The investment is therefore into a future for the prepared and worthy few, and damnation for the rest.

    Conclusion: Prepping for Pleasure and for Profit

    For this special issue of b2o, we have explored Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In them, we find deep political, ideological and even theological deployments of technology concerned with escape from planet Earth. These projects and structures necessarily downplay and deny their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. The common throughline to these projects is the often unarticulated and disturbing conceit that the viability of Earth to sustain a high quality of life for élites, and, by extension, for the vast majority of the population is no longer assured. In such a scenario, escape to the stars, as best imagined in Cold War-era pulp science fiction, should not only be welcomed but perhaps hastened; a secular Rapture or “Left Behind” for Dawkins-esque technofetishists who pray at the altar of “disruption” and “innovation.”

    Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged or obfuscated ideological origins in accelerationism and nihilism, these endeavors, and their proponents in government and technology sectors, represent the ultimate preppers, ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else: in a self-contained unit like Biosphere 2 or HI-SEAS, on the newly discovered “habitable” planets, or on Mars.

    Nick Land’s accelerationist vision of society is one already lost to any means of human intervention ; as such, we should let the process unfold as society proceeds toward inevitable collapse, in order to start anew. It is a grim End Times vision of Biblical proportions; what it lacks in evangelical Christianity it makes up for in a totalizing world view demanding adherence rising to zealotry.

    For those who are not solely hypercapitalist zealot-purists of a Landian variety and yet are attracted to futurist projects (but a few of which we have catalogued here), acceleration towards cataclysm, as articulated through large-scale prepper projects for an off-World future, has its own draw and proposes its own alluring rewards: the economic incentives of colonization, resource control and a rush to develop, own and extract post-Earth is expected to pay off, financially and figuratively. Woe be unto the rest of us who do not heed the signs and find ourselves left behind.

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    Sarah T. Roberts is assistant professor in the department of information studies at UCLA. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, is out now from Yale University Press.

    Mél Hogan is assistant professor of Environmental Media at the University of Calgary. She is writing a book about genomic media and DNA data storage in the cloud.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] It is worth noting that geodesic domes were the province and product of Buckminster Fuller, whom Stewart Brand, early Silicon Valley champion and counterculture hero, credited as the inspiration behind his Whole Earth Catalog. Fred Turner, in his chronicle of this period and culture, writes “in retrospect, it is easy to understand Fuller’s appeal to cold war American youth…he simultaneously embraced the pleasures and power associated with the products of technocracy and offered his audiences a way to avoid becoming technocratic drones. Moreover, according to Fuller, the proper deployment of information and technology could literally save the human species from annihilation” (Turner 2010, 57)

    [2] See also Shukaitis (2009): “one could argue that through much of leftist politics runs the notion of an apocalyptic moment, of some magical event (usually revolution), followed by the creation of a new and better world” (97).

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    Works Cited