Before Christmas, I received an invitation from Global Views Commonwealth Publishing to read their new translated book, Silicon States (博客來 (Books.com.tw) link), ahead of its December 27 release, and to write a review. I have received similar invitations before. What I consider is whether the content is interesting, whether I have the time, and most importantly, whether it would help my readers. After a quick look at the outline, I figured I would have some time over Christmas, so I said yes. I have been living and working in Silicon Valley for almost five years, and I often write about issues I find interesting. I suspect the publisher invited me because of that firsthand vantage point. But once I finished the book and sat down to write, it felt just like writing a book report back in school.
Silicon States is a translated book. The English edition came out in 2018 and received the following recognition:
800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Forbes CMO Network, social impact must-read list Esquire, Best Books of the Year Women.com, must-read list of the year Book Riot, must-read list on tech and startup culture
Unlike the usual view that everything about Silicon Valley is wonderful, this book sits at roughly the other end of the spectrum. As the title suggests, the author believes Silicon Valley companies have grown enormous across many fields, and that this has created many problems.
The book walks through some of Silicon Valley’s history: when and why it began to rise, and how today’s tech giants understand their consumers better than companies of the past did, while actively building influence in field after field.
Quite a few of the book’s views left me wondering whether the author has never actually spent time in Silicon Valley, or simply wanted to give people outside it a certain impression. For example, one passage says:
The people of Silicon Valley live in a new kind of ivory tower. They are shaping the culture, yet they do not regularly interact with anyone outside their own socioeconomic circle. The best known and most widely reported example is the luxury buses the tech companies send out to shuttle employees between the tech campuses and San Francisco. The typical employees of these companies are men who graduated from Ivy League schools, enjoying unlimited food, drinks, and services every day. These are not people like you and me, so it is hard for us to judge whether they can represent the general public.
Luxury buses? I know the public bus system in the US may not be great, but calling the average Silicon Valley company shuttle luxurious is a stretch. The author also builds an argument on company perks plus the fact that many employees are Ivy League graduates, concluding that these are not ordinary people and cannot represent the public. That logic might make sense for the composition of a government or an elected body, but I do not really see what representing the public has to do with working at a tech company. On the one hand, tech companies today are well aware of diversity in their workforce. They publish diversity reports disclosing the gender and ethnic makeup of their employees, and they hire with diversity in mind. The apprenticeship programs that a growing number of companies now run, which I have written about before, are one example (An Alternative Path Into Big Tech for Software Engineers: Apprenticeship Programs). On the other hand, when it comes to understanding the public, many tech companies use scientific methods: A/B tests grounded in statistics, and all kinds of user research. The closer a company gets to every group of people, the better its products will do. So the conclusion the author draws from the argument above does not hold up.
Another passage mentions:
New technology can also reduce revenue the government cannot do without. Self-driving cars, in theory, would suddenly reduce parking tickets, speeding tickets, and other fines to zero. A report cited in the book points out that California cities collect an average of 40 million dollars a year in towing fees, split between the government and the towing companies. In short, bad driving behavior brings in hundreds of millions of dollars, an important source of funding for transportation infrastructure and maintenance, public schools, judicial salaries, domestic violence prevention campaigns, conservation, and many other public services. With a phone, car owners can pay for parking remotely without worrying about being late, but that also reduces government revenue. And if self-driving cars mean fewer accidents in the future, that affects the income of insurance institutions. Overall, through automation, and by creating new things that require regulation, Silicon Valley’s technology will make things even harder for the state.
This was eye-opening for me. Apparently the author is not pleased that autonomous driving would reduce parking and speeding tickets, and counts people no longer being fined for late payments as damage to government finances. If a better system can prevent accidents and make traffic safer, and if the public pays its fines on time, shouldn’t that be encouraged?
The author argues that Silicon Valley has overturned many of the old rules and now provides services in so many parts of our lives that we can hardly do without these companies. At the same time, Silicon Valley’s expansion has not helped the government solve nationwide crises like food problems, unemployment, or drug addiction. I believe every tech company starts out with a problem it wants to solve, and the purpose of a private company is to make a profit. Criticizing tech companies for focusing only on certain issues seems unfair to me. Tech companies can support charities and causes, but if their focus were charity or solving social problems, that would conflict with the very nature of a company. That is the responsibility of governments and charitable foundations.
In many chapters, the author brings up the role of government and its support for scientific research and innovation, without that role getting the credit it deserves.
The US government has actually done many good things, and funded science and research in many ways, which is how we got the technological wonders we have today. But the public often overlooks all this. The government funded Musk’s space travel through contracts, yet when Musk sent a Tesla into space, he received all the glory. The government also played a key role in creating Siri and the internet. And it is the roads the government built and maintains that allow tech workers to get to work.
I find it entirely reasonable that the government gave SpaceX contracts, which gave Elon Musk the chance to send a Tesla into space after a series of experimental rocket launches. People may not have thought much about the government’s key role in SpaceX’s space program. But connecting Apple’s Siri to government-built roads makes no logical sense to me. It feels like a strained reason grabbed at random because no better one could be found, XD. If that counts, then the US government has had a key influence on everything that happens in America.
The book also covers Silicon Valley’s involvement in healthcare, education, and philanthropy, and the sharing economy and the share of women at Silicon Valley companies each have a chapter of their own. All in all, I learned quite a bit about Silicon Valley’s attempts in healthcare, education, and charity.
I do not agree with many of the author’s views, and I find the reasoning behind quite a few arguments less than rigorous. But reading this book showed me how people observe Silicon Valley from a different angle, and how they explain what they see, and I learned what the arguments sound like outside my own bubble.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, famously said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Not limiting yourself, staying open-minded, and continuously updating your information and thinking is how you keep improving and eventually become truly good at what you do.
In my view, this book makes many points that differ from my own understanding, and I do not agree with many of its arguments. But I believe a large part of our choices in life is about studying trends and positioning ourselves to ride them. The automation that followed the Industrial Revolution brought sweeping change, and the information and internet revolutions are now following a similar trajectory. Many industries are being digitized. If ordinary people like us can seize the opportunities of this era, it helps us accumulate both personally and professionally. It is like Taiwan’s electronics boom in the past: those who shared in that era’s dividends gained more in a short time than people in most other careers. The tech giants and Silicon Valley’s ventures into so many fields described in this book are themselves proof of technology’s current influence. For the future, I believe readers can also find major trends in this book to align themselves with and plan their development around.
This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on December 27, 2019. The blog is now offline, and the text is preserved in a Wayback Machine capture. It has been lightly edited for this site, and the expired book giveaway has been removed.
