To speak about crime in this context, even critically, is to accept a classed definition. Wage theft, stock fraud, and tax evasion are serious crimes, and they escalated dramatically in this period, but those are not the traditional referents for the 1990s “crime wave” discourse, because we have come to see ruling-class violations as part of a system that encourages cheating and corner cutting rather than as individual acts of social antagonism.40 The crime wave refers to crimes that interest the police and prosecutors, which is to say crimes committed by working-class and poor people, which also increased during the period. Any serious analysis of this kind of crime puts labor conditions at the forefront rather than some individualist idea of criminal intent; there was never much mystery to the phenomenon from a sociological point of view. But administrations from Reagan through George Bush Jr. (at least) understood that, to avoid risking another wage-price spiral, they had to deal with crime as a problem of too many criminals rather than too few good jobs.

Despite some victories on the cultural and legal fronts, Netscape had to match Microsoft and give up on charging users in the meantime. Software tended toward free, and the internet was made of software. Netscape pivoted to advertising, which became the standard move for companies with nothing to sell but user attention. Still, early investors were not too worried about how web start-ups were going to eventually make profits; it was a land rush, so they pushed in and kept their eyes fixed on the IPO horizon. Established banks were happy to play along, especially considering the inflated fees they could charge players in the frothy sector. Remember that people were doing a lot of cocaine.

The real problem with the delivery dot-coms was that the people running them didn’t understand their historical context. In 2013, Peter Relan, the founding head of technology at Webvan, published a post on TechCrunch discussing why the company failed and how the next round of delivery start-ups could avoid the same fate. Webvan’s strategy, he wrote, was to offer “the quality and selection of Whole Foods, the pricing of Safeway, and the convenience of home delivery.”59 But according to Relan, the company shouldn’t have invested in so much infrastructure. Webvan built high-tech distribution systems from scratch: giant networks of new algorithms, miles of conveyor belts, fleets of custom trucks with PalmPilot-wielding delivery drivers. At its short peak, Webvan had a billion-dollar contract with Bechtel to build new distribution facilities around the country. This was the utopian vision of e-commerce, one in which the web’s efficiencies generated gains for everyone involved: investors, workers, and customers alike. In a 2000 report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Webvan bragged that all its couriers “are Webvan employees.… The courier training lasts two weeks and includes 36 hours of classroom training, 12 hours of driving training and 28 hours of on the job training.… Webvan’s couriers receive a competitive compensation package, including cash and stock options…”60 Commentators pegged Webvan’s delivery-labor costs at $30 an hour, or over $50 in 2022 money.61 Of the company’s 4,476 reported employees on January 1, 2001, 3,705 worked out of the “real” operating facilities spread over nearly 1.5 million square feet of rented urban warehouse space across seven metropolitan regions.62 The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the summer of 2001 after losing hundreds of millions of dollars the year before.63

As Google grew, it combined the monopolistic business strategy of Microsoft with the disrupting scraper speed of Napster. It’s a potent combination, and it left Google strong enough to defend its book scanning from the Authors Guild all the way to the top courts. Not even Bill Gates himself could have conceived of a business plan in which his company extracted value from every word accessed or typed on a Windows machine. Google belonged to a different era. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, as output growth slowed and capital hunted for low-commitment bets, global advertising increased dramatically. In the second half of the 1980s, TV ad spending doubled, from $25 to $50 billion, then doubled again in the ’90s, then doubled again in the first decade of the new millennium—and for the first couple of decades, newspapers and magazines matched that growth.26 Advertising was a good way to compete without getting into the risky business of price competition or product innovation. The fact that ads didn’t actually add anything to the economy was good, since the world was increasingly oversupplied with cheap stuff anyway.

In the following years, before the Facebook IPO, Milner vehicles DST and Mail.ru increased their positions in Facebook, pleasing their investment partners by offering to take their shares off their hands if they lost their nerve, and pleasing Facebook by financing an 8–10 percent stake in the company without asking for anything other than a seat on the ride. With the IPO, they netted billions of dollars in profit. The London Sunday Times named Alisher Usmanov not only Russia’s richest man but also, with his London mansion, Britain’s richest man, displacing Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.27 Usmanov channeled his generic iron-ore monopoly profits into Anglophone brand plays, including the Arsenal Football Club (30 percent) and Apple, pushing $100 million into the iPhone maker and putting a stop to a dangerous and somewhat unexplained slide in investor confidence.28 Milner continued pumping up tech valuations, investing in Facebook-based game maker Zynga, discount coupon site Groupon, and music streamer Spotify. He put $380 million in Twitter, and in 2011 he teamed with famed Silicon Valley angel Ron Conway to offer $150,000 to each and every start-up in the Bay Area tech accelerator Y Combinator, laying down a bet on the whole regional ecosystem.

When it came out in 2017 that a significant amount of DST’s capital originated with the Russian state, the news yielded shrugs in the industry.30 No one could suck that kind of money out of the country without close ties to the government.vii And besides, sovereign wealth funds invest in Silicon Valley all the time. Saudi prince Al Waleed bin Talal made a crucial nine-figure investment in Apple in 1997.31 SoftBank, one of the biggest investment funds hunting in Silicon Valley, got most of its game-changing $100 billion Vision Fund from Gulf monarchies.32 Why wouldn’t Putin want to put money in Facebook? As far as the gangster state was concerned, there was no better place to allocate the nation’s cash. Based on the numbers, it’s hard to disagree, and in Silicon Valley, which Milner now calls home, he’s in good standing in the highest reaches of the capitalist elite. [...]

When one of the Sac Street dealers told the Mercury News that he was just another businessman in the Bay Area, his specific references might have been lost on the average reader. “You expect me to work at McDonald’s or Home Depot?” he asked reporter Sean Webby a couple of years after the shopping center opened. “I make more here in an hour than I would make there in a week.”41 McDonald’s and Home Depot weren’t just arbitrarily chosen mass-market businesses dependent on low-wage service work: They were also two of the big tenants at the Ravenswood 101 Retail Center, along with (no surprise) Starbucks and three big-box electronics retailers. The state authorities and their friends at the Department of Commerce did expect him to work at McDonald’s or Home Depot, or Togo’s or Taco Bell, or Good Guys or Best Buy or Office Depot. Precisely so. That’s where EPA was adding jobs in the twenty-first century, and there wasn’t anything subtle about it. In addition to Hoover’s federal department and the retailers, the center’s inaugural plaque acknowledges Bank of America and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. At the very bottom: ORIGINAL SITE OF RAVENSWOOD HIGH SCHOOL.

In East Palo Alto, as in the rest of the world, capital called forth the labor it needed at a price it was willing to pay. There’s no reason we need to pretend that authorities at any level wanted everyone in LouAnne Johnson’s bused EPA class to succeed, for none of them to be left behind. Capitalists needed low-wage employees because that’s where the growth was. If all the kids in East Palo Alto became engineers and doctors and lawyers, who would fill the hundreds of jobs at the new IKEA by the freeway? In 2003, the hulking furniture sales warehouse filled out the Ravenswood 101 center, thrilling local shoppers in a way big box electronics resellers never could. It was the age of brands, even if the brands were attached to DIY sheets of plywood. Domestic IKEAs were few and far between at the time. The store’s serve-yourself model reduced the number of higher-wage delivery, warehouse, and sales jobs, leaving mostly deskilled service gigs with compensation near the legal minimum. Locals protested during the zoning process that they wanted a grocery store instead—as with a high school, East Palo Alto went without—but leaders were swayed by the retailer’s promise of at least $1 million a year in tax revenue.55 The store opened its doors to what the San Francisco Chronicle described as a “rampaging horde.”56 Say what you will about drug users; they don’t line up 5,000 deep to score. Fifteen minutes on foot from Sacramento Street, the new million-dollar spot was blue and yellow.

It’s a mistake, then, to think of Uber’s carcinized business strategy as driven by its scandal-prone leader, Travis Kalanick, and his bad personality. When author Brad Stone asked Kalanick why the company raised over $10 billion in the previous two years alone, the billionaire’s answer comes off as more resigned than pumped: “If you didn’t do it, it would be a strategic disadvantage, especially when you’re operating globally,” he told Stone. “It’s not my preference for how to build a company, but it’s required when that money is available.”14 That last part is worth repeating: It’s required when that money is available. If Uber didn’t take $3.5 billion from Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, the royals would have put it on Lyft, and then maybe no one would want to invest in Uber, and then it would all be over. These companies didn’t choose to become crabs—that’s not how evolution works. The founders couldn’t stop themselves any more than the railroad barons could.

The result was rapid-onset inequality, as capitalists drove up rents and hollowed out relatively high-wage and formerly influential sectors of service employment, such as hospitality and transportation. California’s unsheltered homeless population increased by 57 percent between 2010 and 2020.24 Complaining about its attic portrait once again, the tech industry has grown frustrated with its intractably displaced neighbors.25 The number of property thefts from cars exploded, contrasting with declining crime rates throughout the country and state and triggering Dirty Harry complexes among the techie elite.26 Some took the well-trod civic vigilante route and funded 2016’s Proposition Q, which empowered police to dismantle homeless tents and camps. The Sequoia Capital chairman, Michael Moritz, and archangel investor Ron Conway—very thick pillars in the community—each contributed just under $50,000, pushing the measure to passage by a narrow majority.27

“What does it mean to abolish Silicon Valley?” asks tech worker Wendy Liu in her prescriptively titled book, Abolish Silicon Valley.1 Liu’s conclusion is that capital’s ever-accumulating need for profitable sinks is incompatible with the kind of democratic control over modern technology that the Black Panther Party put on its program. Based on what we’ve seen of Palo Alto’s 150 years, it’s hard to disagree. As long as capitalists have capital, they have to find somewhere to put it, and capital will always find its capitalists. It may be that Silicon Valley is best understood as a particular expression of this impersonal drive: geographic, historical, and imaginary. It represents the gold rush and the next gold rush and the one after that, from produce to real estate to radios to transistors to microchips to missiles to PCs to routers to browsers to web portals to iPods to gig platforms to… If California is America’s America, then Palo Alto is America’s America’s America. Not just opportunity but also the ceaseless renewal thereof. Silicon Valley is defined by a refusal to stop or even to slow down, which, given the dynamics of finance-led growth, would amount to the same thing. How do you end that story? One way or another. What is the one way, and what is the other?