Silicon Valley Needs to Lose the Arrogance or Risk Destruction

When an industry has a hold on the public imagination, it’s easy to forget just how fickle that imagination can be. By 1946, when women were nearly rioting to get their hands on scarce pairs of nylon hose, plastic had emerged not merely as an enormous business but as the very stuff of dreams, a substance poised to shape the American future. Soon after, plastic spurred visionary industrial designers toward entirely new forms, dramatic curves and swoops that would have been impossible in a preplastic age. Twenty years later, though, the love affair was over—a reversal captured in a famous scene from 1967′s The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman’s dissolute title character receives some career advice from a family friend: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.”

It was a savagely ironic line, and not because plastic use had declined (it hadn’t) or because plastics firms were bankrupt (they weren’t) or even because plastic had become widely known as an environmental disaster in the making (it hadn’t quite, yet). The irony ran far deeper than that: To a sophisticated audience in 1967, “plastic” had come to stand for everything wrong with the culture, for what Tom Wolfe would soon call the “poor old Formica polyethylene 1960s America,” with its superficiality, its acquisitive domesticity. This new generation had heard all about the marvelous plastic future, and they wanted no part of it.

Since the late 1970s, we’ve dreamed in silicon, not plastic. From the personal computer to the MP3, from the Internet to the smartphone, a seemingly unending stream of computer-based innovations has kept Silicon Valley aloft not just in profits but in the public imagination.

But by the waning days of 2013, when protesters smashed a window of a Google commuter bus in Oakland, California, it seemed as if the psychic bond with Silicon Valley might be fraying. There was the shock over revelations that the National Security Agency had used “backdoors” at the data centers of tech giants to siphon off private communications. There was the outrage at Uber, the venture-backed car service, over its practice of using “surge prices” during peak demand to charge seven or eight times the normal rate. (...)

It’s all adding up to a nasty picture of Silicon Valley—of an industry that hoovers up personal data and reaps massive profits from its use, preaching a gospel of sharing but refusing to share back. The criticism has become so pronounced that even The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, hardly bastions of anti-corporate activism, have taken to warning (respectively) about Silicon Valley’s “arrogance problem” and “the coming tech-lash.” The latter article predicted that in 2014, tech executives would “join bankers and oilmen in public demonology.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect tech VIPs to behave any better than other rich people. Maybe Silicon Valley ought to shed its halo willingly and accept its fate, like Wall Street or petroleum or plastics, as just another industry that makes no pretense about being anything other than what it is: a business.

by Bill Wasik, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Christoph Niemann