Like me, and perhaps like you, Silicon Valley has not ended up where it set out to go. It has certainly progressed, but perhaps not in the direction any of us imagined or in the way we would like to see it continue. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has called the current, centralized version of the internet “anti-human” and argued that it has failed humanity, rather than serving it.4 MIT professor, internet activist, and tech pioneer Ethan Zuckerman has deemed the modern web a “fiasco.”5 Indeed, Silicon Valley’s promise to make the world a better place seems increasingly hollow as it becomes clear that its values and intentions have been corrupted by a system that continues to prioritize the wrong things: profits, shareholders, consumption. Most compellingly, to my mind, it has undergone a profound shift from the thinking and psychological tenets on which it was founded, resulting in both an industry-wide identity crisis and a range of social impacts with which we are now grappling.

But of course you wouldn’t be; you would be in the home of the third and fourth industrial revolutions and the epicenter of the information economy . What defines Silicon Valley ultimately has very little to do with its landscape, infrastructure, or its many products and platforms. What makes the Valley what it is are its many intangibles: its people, ideas, and unique ways of thinking about the world, which have converged to produce the most profitable, fastest-growing, and influential industry in the history of mankind. The idea that Silicon Valley has become untethered from its geography is echoed by tech journalists such as Leslie Hook, who explains the Valley is not a place at all, but an abstraction of the tech industry itself.4 Alexandra Suich Bass simply calls it “an idea” and “a byword for innovation and ingenuity,”5 while LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously observed, “Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location,” which no doubt made its way into many a startup slide deck. Each of these interpretations harken back to a central idea: Silicon Valley is not a place; it is a way of thinking and a set of mental characteristic and attitudes. It is defined, in other words, by its psychology.

Central to the Bay Area’s historical identity are its sheer number of financial success stories. Since the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century, Northern California has been unequivocally associated with economic prosperity. Richard Walker, a historian and urbanist at the University of California, Berkeley, explains the significance of the Gold Rush as one of San Francisco’s structuring myths, which has recycled itself in various incarnations since literal gold “spilled out of the mountains” of the Bay Area, ushering in the mining era and the region’s reputation for financial opportunity.7 For over 150 years, Northern California has continued to be associated with entrepreneurialism, risk-taking, and affluence, from the gold and metal fortunes of the 1850s, to the railway companies of the early twentieth-century, to the more recent dot com and silicon booms of the 90s and 2000s.

Despite the profound shifts that have occurred in the industry as the web has been invaded by big tech, the image of the rebellious counterculture of underdogs has been preserved within the psyche of the industry and incorporated into the story of its identity. Such a picture is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the more modern, corporate objectives of most Silicon Valley companies, and has created a tension that strikes to the heart of the industry’s confusion about what it truly is.

It is important to note that this misunderstanding tends not to be inauthentic so much as profoundly outdated. In the same way the Gold Rush lingers in the collective unconscious of the Bay Area, so does the rebellious, socially woke ideals on which the tech industry was founded. A more honest appraisal of the industry’s values, an appreciation of how these have changed, and a willingness to reenvision the principles of Silicon Valley may help the industry as a whole synthesize two competing (though perhaps incompatible) elements of its character.

Many believe the success of the industry, combined with its newfound cultural relevance and the glamorous pull of working for a top tech company, has reinforced not only Silicon Valley’s insularity, but also driven what some describe as outright hubris. (Humility, incidentally, was not amongst the qualities anyone I spoke to associated with Silicon Valley.) A woman at one social media firm explained the industry’s growing arrogance as stemming from a belief that no problem existed that tech could not solve. Such conceit becomes problematic, she explained, when lessons that could be learned from other industries, the past, or the experiences of others are ignored, which might potentially make the products and services of the industry better, safer, or more ethically informed. When I asked why this attitude was so prevalent, the woman described a systemic belief, particularly amongst executives, which held that those in the industry were the smartest and best suited to solve the problems they were tasked with, and therefore couldn’t “really learn anything from anyone else.” I asked what she believed informed this attitude, the woman replied the problem stemmed, in her experience, from a lack of awareness and emotional intelligence within Silicon Valley. When I posed a similar question to an engineer at a different company, his response illustrated her point: “I spend all day thinking,” he explained, “and believe I’ve exhausted all possible scenarios in that thought process and tend to arrive at the right answer.” The idea that there might be an alternate, let alone a better solution brought about by a different process or way of thinking was simply not a possibility that seemed particularly likely to him.

In addition to speaking to those who worked at tech companies, I also spent time with psychotherapists in the Bay Area, each of whom had clients who worked in tech. The arrogance exhibited by these clients was one of the more pronounced themes the therapists reported. One man, who worked in-house at a large tech company two days a week, described the attitude as one of “unaware exceptionalism.” When I asked what he meant by this, he explained that the perception of doing something new and radical was often accompanied by a sense of hubris and, in extreme cases, almost an expectation of worship. Another psychotherapist in San Francisco described a similar dynamic among many of his clients, which he ascribed to the “positive feedback loop”—both within companies and from society more broadly—that “exalted” tech employees for the skills and service they provided.

• Don’t be evil. (Google, scrapped in 2015.)
• Bring the world closer together. (Facebook.)
• Put a dent in the universe. (Steve Jobs, Apple.)
• Move fast and break things. (Facebook.)
• Organize the world’s information. (Google.)
• Broadcast yourself. (YouTube.)
• Give everyone a voice. (Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook.)
• Make tools that advance humankind. (Apple.)
• Improve communities around the world. (Salesforce.)
• Create a world where you can belong anywhere. (AirBnB.)
• Communicate with the full range of human emotion. (Snapchat.)
• Connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge. (Yahoo!)
• Give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers. (Twitter.)
• Simplify life for people around the world. (Dropbox.)
• Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. ( Microsoft .)
• Solve intelligence, use it to make the world a better place. (Deepmind.)
• Work hard. Have fun. Make history. ( Amazon .)
• Do the right thing. (Google, current.)

In an article entitled, “The Shut-in Economy,” tech journalist Lauren Smiley details how a growing majority of products emerging from Silicon Valley “are created by the urban young for the needs of urban young,” many of which are born of the ubiquitous “on-demand economy.”32 Examples range from suitcases that follow you from the airport check-in desk to your gate; smart underwear; smart salt shakers; toothbrushes equipped with AI; virtual candles, lighters, and fireplaces; and more food delivery and laundry apps than you could ever hope to use in a lifetime. There really is something for everyone. And by everyone, I mean predominantly the people who envision and fund these products. Tom Goodwin describes how Silicon Valley’s more recent products appear to be increasingly designed for a smaller subset of people.

There’s an app where you can order another car to come and fill your car with petrol. The target audience for a lot of these things appears to be the founders themselves, because it’s normally something for a 26-year-old, privileged white guy who isn’t very social. When you consider the products that they make and the way that they do things, it’s as if they’ve never really met a normal human being.33

Based on their behaviors to date, many would likely argue that the industry has not proven itself to be sufficiently mature or capable of handling such responsibility. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former CSO, has put forth the argument that the attitude towards responsibility in Silicon Valley has not kept pace with the changing landscape, power, and influence of the industry.

While the times have changed, the community and the industry have not really changed with them. The truth is that we are no longer the upstarts, we are no longer the hacker kids fighting against corporate conformity…. We don’t fight the man anymore, in some ways we are the man. But we haven’t really changed our attitude towards what kind of responsibility that puts on us.46

What Stamos touches on here is a critical shortcoming of the industry, with far-reaching implications: the tendency to grow without necessarily maturing, and the willingness to assume the most important professions of the digital age without assuming the corresponding moral demands those roles entail.

David Hanson, a programmer and partner at software firm Basecamp, argues “it takes a while for people to catch up when the world changes, but eventually they do, and now they have.”

It used to be that you could unironically claim to be disrupting this or that, and people would look at you with puppy eyes asking to hear more. Now if you claim to be on some disruptive mission, you’re far more likely to be met with skepticism and critical inquiry, if not outright eye rolls. That’s because the disruption story hasn’t had the neat happy ending its main protagonists would like you to believe. Whether it’s the gig economy normalizing, nay, celebrating, working three jobs to make ends met. Or specifically ride sharing outsourcing all capital costs and risk to drivers. Or apartment buildings turned into defacto hotels by short-term rentals. There are real, systemic downsides.49

The possibility of mass automation in the long-term is an eventuality that should be discussed and prepared for, beginning immediately. The more pressing problem, however, is the transition to a more automated society that will occur over the next several decades, particularly in countries such as the US, that do not have strong social safety nets. Ben Tarnoff asserts that it is not automation itself that is a problem, but the economic and social insecurity of those who will be affected by it.

It’s reasonable to expect at some point in the next 50 years, technology will proceed to the point that a large number, potentially even most occupations, can be partially or fully automated. If that scenario arrives under our present political and economic arrangement, the consequences would be catastrophic.6

The current hypercapitalist economic system in the U.S., in other words, combined with a set of highly individualistic values, would exacerbate the sting of economic inequality in the face of technological unemployment . According to Mathew Lawrence, a senior research fellow at IPPR, “[m]anaged badly, the benefits of automation could be narrowly concentrated, benefiting those who own capital and highly skilled workers. Inequality would spiral.”

Mass automation wouldn’t necessarily be a negative development, but if it occurs in a capitalist system designed to funnel the spoils of economic and productivity growth to those who are already sitting on billions of dollars, there’s no question that most people would not see the benefits and would likely take to smashing the machines responsible for their immiseration, as so many other workers have done before them. And it would be hard to blame them for it.8