

Navigating Silicon Valley’s Contradictions

Silicon Valley
J. A. English-Lueck
November 9, 2018

Silicon Valley’s workers must maneuver their way through this place of diversity and
discrimination, capitalist aims, and countercultural aspirations.

Burning Man artist Dana Albany’s Tara Mechani is temporarily installed next to The
Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, as a piece of public art. Built from tiny pieces
of hardware, this Tibetan bodhisattva represents the virtues of success in work and
achievements. Duncan Rawlinson/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

You can spot the extremes on the street in Silicon Valley. You can nd monumental architecture and
tour “the mothership,” a gigantic circular edi ce that is the home to the Apple headquarters. You
might spot a few autonomous vehicles, piloted by a host of competing companies, especially
Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. You might, if you were to walk through
the public squares at dawn, need to navigate around the sleeping homeless. Half of the world’s 143
technology-fueled billionaires live here (Schleifer 2018), but mere millionaires are not even sure
they are middle class in Silicon Valley. In San Francisco and San Mateo and Marin counties, a family
of four earning less than $117,000 a year is considered “low-income” (Robertson 2018). Teachers,
nurses, and others who would be considered middle class elsewhere commute from the distant
Central Valley or Salinas to the south. The struggle of people on minimum wage is intense. Janitors
and gardeners live in overcrowded apartments or commute from long distances. In the predawn
hours a Greyhound bus from the agricultural Monterey County to the south will be lled with
sleeping workers on their way to their minimum-wage jobs in San José.

Silicon Valley’s story is a tale of two contradictions. It is a place of deep diversity and divisive
discrimination, of countercultural aspirations and unabashed capitalism.

Dealing with diversity

Native-born workers and their families are leaving the region at the highest numbers in the country
(Robertson 2018), yet the population of the area continues to grow as immigrants come to the
Valley for work. Some of these immigrants are completely perplexed by the conspicuousness and
tenacity of the inequality. Isabella, a European sojourner who directs an international corporate
outpost, nds it di cult to reconcile the gap she experiences every day as she walks to work. She
told me,

I can’t understand it and I feel like everybody’s just coming up with excuses. “These people
want to live in the streets.” That’s my favorite answer. I’m like, “No. Have you ever slept on the
street? Just like one night?” I did…Nobody wants to live on the street, nobody.

In the middle and upper-middle classes that comprise most of the tech and white-collar workers in
Silicon Valley, inequality fades into the background. Jennifer, an instructional designer and trainer
told me how she and her colleagues went to the theme park, Great America, and interacted with the
“lower classes,” re ecting that she is in a kind of ivory tower on her tech campus. Jennifer can see
homeless people from the train as she goes to work, but it’s easy to feel insulated from that reality.

The inequalities of Silicon Valley are not just economic, but are situated in a global landscape of
biases, re ecting an array of beliefs about gender, class, and race. This bricolage of discrimination
plays out in the networks of tech workers.
While high-pro le cases of elite gender or racial discrimination at places such as Facebook, Twitter,
and Uber are pro led in the media, the larger story of regional diversity is often left underexplored.
Nearly two- fths of the region’s population is native to a nation other than the United States and
more than 70 percent of Silicon Valley’s technology workforce is foreign born. Such diversity
reshapes how people live their lives and how they interact with work. The workplace is one platform
for this interaction, but so are schools, grocery stores, and even quidditch elds. Dozens of
languages are spoken in households ranging from Spanish to Marshallese. Even using such crude
measurements as language or place of origin, people identify with at least 50 di erent cultures
(English-Lueck 2017).

Realistically, people operate in a much more nuanced eld of self-identi cation and impose self-
constraints on their interactions, but that still means that people cannot accurately predict the way
in which their interactions with other people will unfold. Their culturally shaped expectations of
gendered behavior, timeliness, and the importance of being right at work are more likely violated
than met. Carl, an engineer whose work required that he work with immigrants and sojourners from
India, re ected on how each team he worked with imposed notions of hierarchy di erently. Since
his job involved localizing network systems to India, he did not dare indulge his own or others’
ethnocentric impulses. He noted that

dealing with the variety of people, all the cultural issues, it is impossible to know enough of
the cultural issues to not step on toes. So the solution seems to be for people to get used to
wearing steel-toed shoes. People are getting…more tolerant (English-Lueck 2017, 164).

Under such circumstances, each performance review can hold a potential cultural grenade.

Cli ord Geertz speculated about such deep diversity, imagining complex sets of interactions across
meaningful cultural di erences, and he wondered if it were possible to create communities under
such circumstances (Geertz 2000, 86, 224). The people who live and work in Silicon Valley, must
navigate such diversity each time they step into a work meeting or go to their child’s school for
events. Ironically, while the frictionless, e cient future promised by technology can obscure cultural
di erences, those underlying diverse perspectives do not disappear. Tolerance can be one
pragmatic tool people use to navigate di erence, but social practices of overt tolerance are only part
of the story. A discourse of tolerance can also conceal underlying gender, age, and racial
discrimination. And, when the primary motivation for tolerance is self-interest, tolerance is reserved
for the potentially powerful. A future potential supervisor should be treated well, but what of those
who are not likely to be in a position of power? In such relationships being marginal is a liability,
whether the person is a woman, African American, or pushing 60.
 Ironically, while the frictionless, e cient future promised by technology can obscure cultural
di erences, those underlying diverse perspectives do not disappear.

For the last quarter century, social scientists have been captivated by the idea that Silicon Valley’s
regional advantage was in its ability to leverage networks. Other more conventional centers of
technology fostered organizations that were self-contained and secretive. In Silicon Valley networks
of coworkers shared tidbits of information, making them more socially mobile, adaptable, and able
to take advantage of opportunities around them. As immigrants leveraged their own global
connections, these networks expanded to include other tech centers in India, Greater China, Israel,
and European wellsprings of talent (Saxenian 1999).

It is no accident that twenty- rst-century social networking platforms ampli ed the power of this
egocentric connectivity. Networks are at the heart of how Silicon Valley’s people function, whether
they use them to get intelligence on potential childcare or to nd a solution to a knotty technical
problem at work. However, the underside of this apparently in nitely adaptable social structure is
that people’s networks ow along the course of least resistance. A male engineer, whatever his
culture of origin, will gather to him more male engineers, preferably those who speak the same
language, laugh at the same jokes, and like the same foods. This social force drives a network
homogeneity that runs counter to the reality of diverse workscapes. The contradiction between
apparent diversity and limited access to opportunity is at the heart of why corporate leaders in an
apparently progressive and hypervigilant landscape can still be surprised by acts of discrimination.
“Bro culture” is not the best mindset for navigating deep diversity, and counteracting it takes active
e ort whether in work teams or board rooms. E orts to counteract those protected networks do
exist. Taavi, an engineer at an innovative social media company volunteers her time, with company
support, in Black Girls Code. This nonpro t is headquartered in Oakland and works to disrupt the
traditional engineering pipeline and create new networks of STEM education and employment.

Disruptive countercultures

Silicon Valley is an icon of late capitalist entrepreneurial success in the public imagination,
inextricably intertwined with technology—its inception, development, production, and use. To be
sure, every major freeway or expressway will take you by company names you would recognize:
Apple, Google, Adobe, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and Mozilla. If you include what is now
being called Greater Silicon Valley—San Francisco and Oakland—you can add Twitter, Pinterest, and
Pixar. The pursuit of pro t is certainly the mainstay of the technological economy, but in the Greater
Silicon Valley, other subtle cultural forces are also at play. The Bay Area is heir to a countercultural
legacy that deliberately sought to exchange ideas and practices with global sojourners to reinvent
cuisines, spiritual practices, and wellness routines. These values are important to and inspiration for
the evolution of the technology of the region. The innovators of the 1960s and 1970s who laid the
foundations for personal computers and the ancestral internet were fascinated with individual
augmentation and the possibility of overcoming geographic parochialism. This generation of
technologists brought yoga, ethnic and vegetarian cuisines, and a disdain for hierarchy into their
start-ups and workplaces. The traditions belonging to an in ux of global immigrants blended with
older cultural appropriations to create a cosmopolitan counterculture. In the 1990s, software
engineers would tell me how they were fueled by the potential for “connection” and “community”
that their devices might bring. Like Apple’s Steve Jobs, a generation of entrepreneurs, and those they
trained, hammered at the boundaries of art and science. Their legacy is an enduring fascination with
elegant design and technological disruption. It is not enough to make incremental changes; good
technologies upend the old patterns of thinking.

The origin story of “Silicon Valley” is one of creative destruction. Transistors gave way to integrated
circuits, which were repurposed into personal computers, in turn to be economically supplanted by
the internet and then by mobile applications. In this narrative, each new revolution must give way to
the next, coincidentally fueling Silicon Valley’s economy and keeping the workforce around during
the periodic recessions. This melding of counterculture and capitalism is the second apparent
contradiction that fuels the Valley—one that appears in the mission statement of organizations and
corporate café conversations. The latest technological promise is in the ubiquitous Internet of
Things, embedding the internet in everyday objects to regulate the devices and communicate
between them. This vast array of objects includes sharable autonomous vehicles, alternative
energy grids, and wearable wellness devices. It is worth noting that the countercultural values of
sharing, alternative and e cient living, and self-augmentation are also built into these devices. The
beat goes on.

Silicon Valley is not just an experiment in technological innovation and immersion, but in managing
social complexity. Social problems, however, are not as easily solved as technical ones. Corporate
leaders, civic entrepreneurs, and social activists all struggle to navigate and manage the
contradictions that face them at the heart of Silicon Valley life.

J. A. English-Lueck is professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and a Distinguished

Fellow at the Institute for the Future. English-Lueck is the author of four ethnographies about Silicon
Valley including Cultures@SiliconValley, now in the second edition, which explore the way in which
work reframes regional life.
 Cite as: English-Lueck, J. A. 2018. “Navigating Silicon Valley’s Contradictions.” Anthropology News
website, November 9, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1036

Related Categories 

Related Tags 

Commenting Disclaimer 

© 2019 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd, Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX
(703) 528-3546