Silicon City

by Cary McClelland

  Whereas Silicon Valley, culturally—and I think this is the old hippie, DIY thing—it’s about what’s new. Do you have passion? Has the world not seen this before? Great. Let’s do it. Let’s get some money and let’s give it a shot. That passion exists so much that they fund really stupid ideas. What’s new? What’s next? What’s coming?

  The culture out here encourages you to fail. People think, Well, you learned something. You tried to do what was next. You got it wrong, but that’s a plus. Throw a lot of stuff out there. A lot of it is going to fail. You just have to keep throwing stuff, throwing stuff, throwing stuff, throwing stuff. That’s American optimism. Everybody wants a chance. But there’s a lot of misery that comes from that lottery system.

  These instincts exist in Amarillo, Texas. It’s just they are starting muffler stores. They start a Subway franchise. You can’t get millions and millions of dollars. You can’t start a big internet company. They’re not playing in the same league. And I don’t think that the culture necessarily embraces the new.

  Every place has its own mythology. We lionize these heroes, like Steve Jobs. “It will rain tomorrow,” he says. And then it rains, we say, “Oh, you’re a genius!” Either the rain is going to come or the rain is not going to come. But if you can call it right, people will believe in magic.

  LISA CHU

  We are sitting in the UC Berkeley quad on a bench in the shade of a large tree. This is practically her hometown. She points to where she grew up, where her siblings lived and studied, and where she lives on campus now. We can hear a group gathering across campus to protest the invitation of a right-wing pundit. The university was the cradle of the 1960s free-speech movement and remains something of a center of progressive politics. Today, the school also acts as a pipeline to careers in tech, tempting students with all the industry promises.

  The Berkeley Computer Science Department has a ratio like 1:6 or 1:9 females to males. My first day, I walked in—it’s a class of, like, thirty people, you could count the women on one hand—and I was, Ugh, this is going to be a great semester. . . .

  I’m Asian, I’m female, I’m of small stature, I take hard classes, right? But I really, really, really hate being lumped into the quiet-Asian-small-girl stereotype.

  I play the tuba, I started in high school. People were like, “The instrument is bigger than you are!” And that kind of got to: “Fuck you, I’m going to play this instrument, and I’m going to play it damn well!” It became part of a newfound self awareness and independence. I got rebellious a little bit.

  I don’t know if I can apply the same spirit to CS. People keep telling me that computer science is all about perseverance and grit. Even if you’re not gunning to be the next Bill Gates, whatever, as long as you work hard you’ll be fine. But I do think there’s a certain way you have to think about computer-science stuff—a certain way you need to approach problems. And I don’t know that I’ve developed that sense. So I’m worried I’m going to keep pushing all this energy into CS, and it’s not going to be enough. It all really boils down to fear.

  But then, every day at UC Berkeley, college life gets everyone riled up. Whenever there’s a protest that gains momentum, all the other causes kind of tack onto it. A protest on fee hikes becomes a protest on fracking, becomes a protest on racial inequality, becomes Occupy, becomes Muslim rights, becomes fuck UCPD.

  It makes you aware. Inspired. Maybe it’s the West Coast. The Bay Area has a . . . dynamism. People recycle here. People care more. If you see something wrong, you can have an impact. Ideals. It feels like there’s this movement towards change.

  That’s part of why I’m comfortable with computer science. It’s because of technology that we’re able to connect with all these different people in various parts of the world instantaneously and suddenly be able to think on a more global level. So computers and making an impact are inherently intertwined.

  If it was solely up to me, I think I would rather do the agent-of-change thing. But there is such pressure on campus, and in the area, to join tech. I would feel a little bit guilty if I went off and did my own thing and (not really) threw away all that my dad, my parents, worked for. My mom passed away at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school. Cancer. My dad really, really wanted me to go here, to have that bragging right—for me to study computer science, nudge, nudge, nudge—to give his daughter a good future.

  Then again, my mom was a lot like me, I’ve been told. We’re both feisty. We both have bad tempers. We’re both a little rebellious.

  She wrote a lot, she did photography. We have a bunch of photos hanging in my house, she took all of them. She made my clothes, she would make me all these dresses when I was growing up. Once I hit middle school, suddenly it was not cool to wear dresses to school, and I would be like, “No one else wears dresses in school.”

  And she’d be like, “Why are you trying to go off of what other people are doing? You need to be independent.” I learned, Okay, just wear it like you like it, and no one else cares.

  She had really big dreams, and those got stalled a lot after she got diagnosed. And when all the side effects came in—loss of hearing and her not being able to speak English . . . She really wanted to come to America and go into law—or do something really grand—and it all just kind of got stalled. . . . She ended up staying at home and taking care of me and my sister. And she devoted her efforts to us.

  My mom would want me to go to law school. If everything was an ideal world, I would double major in CS and something else. I would work at some badass nonprofit, travel and do all this cool stuff, also make money so I can pay off all my college bills. And then once I’m stable and I’ve traveled and I’ve done all the hands-on change stuff that I want to do—then I would go to law school, become a judge or a lawyer, and then do political work.

  Going to Berkeley and being surrounded by all these brilliant people, you realize how ordinary your intelligence is. There’s this feeling of having to prove yourself. You have to carve out your own identity. I think I have the balls to do that.

  CHARLES CARTER

  He started his career in urban planning, working for the cities in the East Bay. First Emeryville, a small city parked between Berkeley and Oakland. Then Richmond, a once-thriving industrial city to the north. A talented young planner, he thought he could spend his career helping the Bay Area “transition from true industry, converting factories and shipyards to creative incubation spaces.” Then, Stanford made him an offer he could not refuse, and he moved his family to Palo Alto. He spent a nearly thirty-year career in its Office of Land, Buildings and Real Estate, overseeing the infrastructure and physical development of the campus.

  I lived through the greatest-ever growth period at Stanford. When I came in ’82, we would be doing one major building at a time. We never had five, six major buildings going on simultaneously, like we did when I left. Now it looks like it will stay like that as long as the university can afford it.

  Stanford probably operates more like a business than any other university. Its success has always been tied to the land endowment, and that land endowment has also enabled its business success. The research park, the shopping center. We used to get these field trips from other universities who’d say, “Well, we got this excess land, and we understand you made some money off of yours. So could you maybe show us how to do that?”

  Stanford is 8,400 acres across six different jurisdictions. The campus is about 2,200 acres. That’s including the medical center. Take another 2,000 acres for Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Then a couple thousand other acres that are developed commercially, the shopping center. Even everything on the far side of Page Mill, between Foothill and El Camino, all the way over to the VA Hospital, that’s all Stanford land. All those tech companies in there, all those law firms in there, Stanford is their landlord.

  Something like half the jobs in Palo Alto are on Stanford land. The daytime population is something like 60 percent higher than the residential pop
ulation. It’s a job center. So Stanford is not just driving economic development by creating ideas and innovation. It’s providing the bricks and mortar where this stuff occurs. It has not only fostered the relationship between academics and the people selling ideas, it makes money on the ideas itself. You get bigger by getting bigger, by feeding the beast.

  That starts to get real murky, because it’s a private institution. The whole Hennessy-Google thing. John Hennessy was the president of Stanford University. The guys that started Google, they were students of his. Now he’s a shareholder, and he sits on the board. In fact, he’s maybe the most powerful person on the Google board. So there’s a lot of entanglement when you start to dig around.

  In my department, priorities would change depending upon the wealth and influence of the donor paying for the project or the makeup of the board at the time. Decisions being made at a very high level. This donor and this board member would call my boss, and the next thing I knew we were building a new business school. Even efforts to push the humanities along have been guided in a specific direction by a specific donor—not the outgrowth of a holistic education policy or vision for the university.

  I don’t think Stanford’s necessarily lost its higher calling. I think the academicians still believe they’re doing useful things. But I’ve definitely heard it called the world’s most successful technical college. We had an intern who used to love to wear this T-shirt that said something like GO TO STANFORD. HAVE BIG IDEAS. MAKE LOTS OF MONEY. Ah, so there needs to be a practical end to this great thinking you’re doing.

  Have you ever read the original founding document? It says all kinds of things—they pick and choose what to use, like the Bible. It says that all the lands, thus given and endowed, are to be used henceforth and evermore for the advancement of the university.§ Now, that’s liberally interpreted—that’s why Stanford land is never sold.

  It talks about practical education—I can’t remember the exact language—but the founders wanted people to do useful things.¶ So the pure learning, knowledge for knowledge’s sake—which we all understood college to be at some point—they dispensed with that early on at a policy level. It ain’t the “Farm” anymore. Some of it is just raw ambition. The Gold Rush ain’t about nothing but getting rich, right?

  CAILLE MILLNER

  An author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who grew up in the Bay Area, she has followed the tech industry as it spread from San Jose to San Francisco, uncovering many stories along the way. “It’s good to be here as a writer because no one is paying attention, no one reads here, so there is freedom to it. It’s a powerful position—I can watch, I can observe.”

  When we were growing up, there were still farms. There were still orchards and the people who lived there. It’s curious, because I think it somehow explains the politics.

  We lived in a very, very racially diverse, economically diverse neighborhood. There were a lot of educated black people who were in the tech industry, believe it or not. Or, like my dad, they were professionals or academics. My brother and I grew up with Mexicans and Filipinos, part of a pack of kids just roaming the streets. I think that’s still my platonic ideal.

  In the ’80s, there was IBM. That was it. You went there. You worked there for your entire career. You were making the equivalent of planes or heavy equipment—technology for businesses and not consumers. It was a very solid, middle-class, white-collar place, not completely out of scale or out of order with anything else that was going on in the rest of the country.

  In the ’90s, that changed. The first wave of consumer-driven technology companies hit, and the money really started coming in.

  Growing up here, looking at it from the outside, I’m not sure that anyone believed it was gonna last. People didn’t realize. They thought, IBM will always be around. It will always be there if this little company doesn’t work out. The stakes didn’t feel as high as they do now.

  The people who moved out here, they were coming from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas. They were all white males, and they didn’t necessarily have fancy educations. And they were also kind of weird. These were very strange people, very socially maladjusted. They had grown up with computers, they did it from childhood. And they had very serious beliefs about it.

  Technology was how they connected to the world. They talked about it having this Messiah-like reality: Technology is free and has the power to connect us all. You see it in those early chat rooms, projects like Wikipedia and Craigslist, the guys who created Netscape. Those were Tech 1.0. A lot of those guys weren’t in it for the money. They were in it because that was how they saw the world. They were just too utopian, really.

  We’re just gonna do some weird, free-wheeling stuff. We’re gonna start this weird company and call it Yahoo! We’re gonna have “surfers” who are gonna look through the net and order things like librarians. No one took it seriously. No one thought like, Oh, this is going to become a serious business. No one thought this little company was going to become an institution.

  Eventually they paved over all of the farm country and all the orchards. They put up housing, built very few businesses. And the area got bleaker. My parents were making more money. And we moved to the “better” part of town. It was so sterile. No children, no one to play with.

  When the jobs went away, the working class just simply becomes “not working.” Now there are very few black people in the South Bay. The Mexicans who worked good jobs in construction, farming, they have become the underclass. And San Jose became this weird core of Middle America in California—people from Dust Bowl geography with Dust Bowl mentality—surrounded by educated people of color.

  “Normal” people did not start getting into tech until 2.0. People talk about the “tech bros,” but they wouldn’t have had anything to do with the first tech boom. They understand tech as a business, We wanna grow. We want to make X amount of dollars. We wanna scale. We wanna do this, we wanna do that.

  They are billionaires wearing hoodies.

  My parents came when they were children, and there was opportunity here. None of their parents had been here but they all knew something small, very small, about California that led them to think this was where their kids could do something with their lives. They thought, even black people could get educated here. They could get higher education—the college and the state university system was free. My parents were at Berkeley in the ’60s, the student movement and all of the unrest. My dad went to all the marches and all the rallies.

  As a result of specific policy changes, political changes, and social changes, California is now a climate of restriction and not-having and scrambling, as opposed to a place where you can make something of yourself. Kids in California now are faced with fences as opposed to the open plain.

  My dad said something back when the changes started. He was like, “Oh, there are too many Mexicans. There are too many Asians here. Watch what happens. As soon as they all go into the school system, they’re going to stop putting money into the schools.”

  Prop 13 is what happened.# The tax backlash was enormous. We also had a very serious situation with the criminal justice system; we incarcerated a lot of people here. So we defunded the schools, and we funded the prisons. Those two things are directly based on demographic change. People of color, we’ve been dealing with this forever.

  California, it feels like we’ve given up on big policy changes. We’ve given up on trying to do big solutions and ceded that ground to the business of tech. I don’t know how well that’s going to work out.

  We natives, those of us who grew up here, the question of our lives is When is the bust coming? Because there have been so many. People joke, “We’re gonna wait for the bust, and then we can go to that restaurant again.” It applies to larger things too—because it’s only then, in these little windows, when the money isn’t crazy, you can actually buy a house, have a kid, do these things that normal adult people do. So you wait for the bust to make progress in your lif
e. To have some space.

  And so we always say, But there will be a bust, but there will be a bust, but there will be a . . .

  * Apple’s first iconic product—with a housing, monitor, and keyboard—the Apple II was a huge leap forward from the Apple I, which was just a spare circuit board hobbyists could use to build their own computer.

  † The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) invests on behalf of the US government in groundbreaking technology for national security. It hosted a series of competitions, challenging students from the nation’s top universities to demonstrate breakthroughs in robotics and autonomous vehicles.

  ‡ Economist Joseph Schumpeter described “creative destruction” as a kind of mutagenic or Darwinian force at the heart of capitalism—one that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

  § The Stanford University Founding Grant provides that the gifted land “shall constitute the foundation and endowment for the University herein provided, and upon the trust that the principal thereof shall forever remain intact, and that the rents, issues, and profits thereof shall be devoted to the foundation and maintenance of the University hereby founded and endowed, and to the uses and purposes herein mentioned.”

  ¶ The Founding Grant intends that “the instruction offered must be such as will qualify the students for personal success and direct usefulness in life.”

  # A 1978 ballot initiative that cut property taxes and capped their increase. The measure drained local school districts of a critical source of funds and disproportionately affected large cities, where schools suffered most.

  PART II

  THE SOUL OF THE CITY