Is Silicon Valley Hell on Earth?

You would think, as I think, that Silicon Valley is chock-a-block with liberals, progressives and radicals. You would think that it is suffering from a severe paucity of middle-of-the-road or conservative thinkers. After all, Google fired James Damore for not toeing the party line on socially constructed gender. It went into protracted mourning when Hillary Clinton—a notably incompetent fraud—was not elected president. And it followed up by walking away from a Pentagon contract… on the grounds that it could not participate in any project where someone might get hurt. Apparently, the company has no such compunctions when it comes to working for the government of China.

Anyway, Silicon Valley is awash with money. It reeks filthy lucre. It pays its workers very well and enriches them beyond human endurance. It has produced so much inequality that the streets of San Francisco (see prior post) have become an open air toilet.

So, life must be good in Silicon Valley.

Well, think again. However woke it is, however well it treats its workers, however well it provides for the people who work there, it isn’t woke enough for Gloria Liou.

Who is Gloria Liou? Well, she’s a young product manager at Google. She is doing very well indeed. She grew up in the Valley and is doing what she was groomed to do. And yet, Silicon Valley, and presumably Google, is not woke enough for her. So she is decamping for better climes. 

One suspects that Liou, who attended Pomona College, a fine school, but not Stanford, imbibed the truths of the therapy culture…and concluded that Silicon Valley was Hell on Earth. She did not see the glass as half-empty. She saw it as empty, as soul-suckingly empty.

She has written a good-bye letter to Silicon Valley. In it she manages to disparage and demean everything that high tech is about, on the grounds that it does not fulfill her radical ideals. It makes her depressed. Or better, it does not cure the depression she was suffering when she was in high school.

Using a familiar sophistry, she begins by describing what appears to be the goodness of her current lifestyle:

Many new graduates, myself included, are making six-figure salaries straight out of college, plus equity, bonuses, and benefits on top of that. I get unlimited free food at work — three full meals a day and as many snacks as I want in between. There’s a place to do laundry and get a haircut. There’s even a bowling alley and a bouldering wall.

This is Silicon Valley. Who wouldn’t want to live here?

But then, there is the injustice of it all. There are the teenage suicides. There are the college counselors who charge $400 an hour… and so on. It reads like a litany of complaints:

When I was in eighth grade, over a six-month period four students at a nearby school committed suicide by jumping in front of the Caltrain. During my sophomore year of high school, a schoolmate I used to walk with to the library took her own life. In my senior year, every single one of my peers had a college counselor. Some paid up to $400 an hour for counselors to edit their essays, and I witnessed other students paying to have their essays literally written for them. My classmates cried over getting an A- on a test, cried over getting fewer than 100 likes on their profile pictures, and cried over not getting into Harvard. (I admit, I cried over that one, too.) They pulled multiple all-nighters every week to survive their seven AP classes and seven after-school activities, starved themselves to fit in with the “popular kids,” stole money from their parents to buy brand name clothing, and developed harrowing mental health disorders that still persist today, years after high school graduation.

This is Silicon Valley.

Of course, putting adolescent suicides in the same paragraph as college counseling does not really tell us what might or might be producing the depression and anxiety. We wonder about whether or not these children have stable homes. We want to know whether their parents are still married. Did they have family dinners? Did they die of overwork? Or did they die because the “woke” legions who set the moral tone for the place insist girls compete against boys. Are these children being damaged by systematic gender neutering? We do not know. Blaming it on capitalism feels like an adolescent’s way of dealing with something she does not understand.

And while she is looking for someone to blame, Liou hones in on the lack of diversity. As I said, she thinks like an adolescent, one whose head has been bloated with visions of a totally diverse workplace. She must know, as everyone else knows, that Silicon Valley did not become world class by choosing the most diverse candidates. It chose the brightest students.

During my four years of high school, there were a total of three black students and around a dozen Latinx students in my school of 1,300 kids. On my floor at work, at a company that puts so many resources into diversity and inclusion, there are no black or Latinx engineers. In 2017, of all tech hires at Google, 2 percent were black, 3 percent were Latinx, and 25 percent were female. Upper management statistics are worse, and numbers throughout the Valley are just as depressing.

Apparently, to her mind, all would be well if there were more diversity. Clearly, she has suffered some serious indoctrination in college. As she puts it, Google employees are all conformists— God help us!

The lack of diversity doesn’t stop at work — it permeates every aspect of life. Everyone wears Patagonia and North Face, everyone has AirPods hanging from their ears, and everyone goes to Lake Tahoe on weekends. And everyone talks about the same things: startups, blockchain, machine learning, and startups with blockchain and machine learning.

And, what is worse, they are not sitting around whining about climate change. Liou thinks that this is the most important thing happening in the world. Which means that she has had her mind hijacked by her college teachers. Or, by that crazed sex poodle, Al Gore. Sad, but probably true:

For example, a friend in the program and I have brought up climate change on many occasions, since it’s an issue we’re particularly passionate about. We’ve mentioned the worsening air quality in light of the Camp Fire that devastated more than 150,000 acres of Northern California, lamented the fact that Google still uses plastic water bottles and straws, and encouraged others to donate to environmental organizations during our company’s giving week. Each time, we were met with silence.

Yes, indeed. Employees at Google care about creating wealth. They do not waste their time trying to solve the false problem of climate change:

In Silicon Valley, few people find things like climate change important enough to talk about at length, and even fewer find it important enough to work on.It’s not where the money is at. It’s not where “success” is at. And it’s certainly not where the industry is at. Instead, money comes from changing a button from green to blue, from making yet another food delivery app, and from getting more clicks on ads. That’s just how the Valley and the tech industry are set up.

And then there are the poor. You remember the poor. They are living on the streets of San Francisco. Google cares about the poor. All companies in Silicon Valley care about the poor. Of course, it’s all posturing. They care as long as the poor do not block the view or stink up the streets. Then they just want to know how much they must spend to make the poor go away:

One could argue that some companies in Silicon Valley do care about the poor. Many companies have annual holiday giving campaigns. At Google, employees are allocated $400 to give to an approved organization, like a food bank or a homeless shelter. But while Silicon Valley employees may donate to these causes, they also complain about the tent camps in the city “ruining the view,” and they complain about the very people they claim to care about. Over 2,200 complaints have been filed, in the last decade, about homeless people on San Francisco’s Hyde Street alone, and reports suggest that some homeless people are even harassed in an attempt to drive them out.

So, Liou has become alienated from her home and her cushy job. We do not, incidentally, know how well she is doing at said job. We do not know the results of her performance reviews. We know that she would rather save the world than contribute to capitalist wealth creation. And that she blames Silicon Valley for all the health problems that are popping up in her neighborhood:

Silicon Valley is no longer my home. I feel myself being influenced by the tech bubble. I feel myself shifting my focus to money and career trajectory rather than serving those in need locally and worldwide, and I see myself being applauded and fitting in because of it. I feel myself becoming part of the machine. Living here, I reflect on my high school experiences and am filled with misery and anger. The mental health crisis among Silicon Valley high schoolers is getting worse. I think about the negative impacts of social media on mental health that my friends and I suffered in high school and how ironic it is that those same friends now work at Facebook.

So, she is leaving. She is probably doing what her therapist told her to do. We do not know whether or not she has a therapist, but clearly, this stream of thinking is coming straight out of a therapist’s office. Having been brainwashed in college she managed to find a therapist who finished the job… and alienated her from her environment:

I don’t know what to do. Since moving back, my depression has returned after a four-year hiatus, paired with anxiety, a growing disappointment in humanity, and an influx of fake, self-serving, status-seeking “friends” and acquaintances.

So, I’m leaving. But I do hope to come back someday.

She is leaving Hell on Earth but is hoping that it turns into Happy Valley.

I hope to come back to a different Silicon Valley. One that takes care of the mental health of its students. One that doesn’t just strive for diversity, but embraces and celebrates and exemplifies it, not only in the people, but also in their lifestyles and conversations and interests. One where people recognize that their picture-perfect lives come at a cost to others, and one where they strive to help those that they hurt.

Most importantly, I hope to return to a Silicon Valley where people care about others and want to work on things that actually improve our world, even if it doesn’t generate clicks.

To be more obvious than usual, what makes you think that Silicon Valley does not provide health care for its staff and their children? Doesn’t famed educational psychologist Christine Blasey Ford live in Palo Alto? One suspects that these companies provide the beset health care that is on offer, but that it is sorely inadequate.

Might we also want to consider the position of a woman in a male-dominated ethos, an ethos that pretends to be gender neutral but that isn't.