Silicon Valley Boys

A fan favorite around here, Joel Kotkin has been interviewed by Brendan O’Neil, of Spiked fame. They address a simple but compelling question-- what happened to Silicon Valley? How did it transform from a place run by innovators to a place run by a bunch of leftist radicals, people who are barely capable of building much of anything.

O’Neill begins:

Silicon Valley used to be a place of innovation, dynamism and ambition. A place where hard-working people could make the products of the future, and make something of themselves, too. But no more. The forward-thinking engineers of old have been replaced by a new elite, made up mainly of financiers, media types and NGO bureaucrats. The new overlords of tech are more interested in virtue-signalling and woke proselytising than in building and making things. Theirs is a world built on the sand of cheap credit and Democratic Party largesse, as shown by the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month. And it’s a world increasingly removed from the rest of America.

As Kotkin points out, the tech staff in Silicon Valley is largely Asian. The American educational system is producing social justice warriors, not tech engineers.

I remember travelling to China with a bunch of Chinese-American executives from Silicon Valley who had come up the hard way. They had gone to school in places like South Dakota, and they built and made things themselves. The people running tech now didn’t start as designers of silicon chips or running factories. They came up with MBAs and they live in an ephemeral universe where they basically just manipulate symbols. That’s who runs Silicon Valley today.

Kotkin believes that MBAs now run Silicon Valley, which seems to be a slight exaggeration. If 70% of the tech workforce is not American citizens, this does not say anything good about our school system. I would add, and I do not know the answer, that given the mass layoffs in Silicon Valley, it would be interesting to know how many tech staff are American and how many have H-1B visas.

Today, the people who make the products are either in Bangalore or are H-1B visa holders. Over 70 per cent of the tech workforce in Silicon Valley are not even American citizens. That was not the case before. There were always immigrants and they played a great role, but it was not like today.

So, Silicon Valley country have made a virtue of necessity and have backed China.

Some of the biggest backers of China are Silicon Valley companies. Apple has already signed an agreement to share its computer technology with China and to start buying some of its chips from China. If you read things from people at Apple and other tech companies, they may think it’s nicer to live in Silicon Valley than in China. But I don’t think they see the future being here. They feel no visceral connection to the culture of the vast majority of America. That’s at the root of a lot of this.

And, of course, these companies are running, not on fumes, but on politics. In particular, on democratic politics. When the Silicon Valley Bank failed, they discovered that they had made a good wager:

People will see how the US government bailed out Silicon Valley Bank, supposedly because it had all these important companies attached to it. Would the government have done the same for a midsize bank in Oklahoma, which has oil and agriculture and main-street businesses as its clients? Are they not important? Shouldn’t they be protected? Everyone can see that the Democrats are playing favourites with Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley elites decided to become the main funder of the Democratic Party and to identify with every ‘progressive’ cause. And then they wonder why Republicans, who usually slobber after anyone with money, are saying that they have nothing to gain from supporting Big Tech. If I’m a conservative, I have nothing to gain from Meta, from Google, from Apple, from Microsoft, from Amazon. I’m their enemy, they’re trying to squash me or they don’t want to do anything that would help my constituents. So you’ve got this coalition of right-wing populists and left-wing populists. If they could ever come together, I think Silicon Valley will have some serious problems.

So, leftist intellectuals run the Democratic Party and also run Silicon Valley. If ever the people figure it out, the jig will certainly be up.