Abolish Silicon Valley

Despite the title of the book, there is very little that is actually about abolishing anything; you cannot abolish anything by reforming or restructuring it, even if you think your proposals are radical (when they aren't). Seriously, phrases like "radical reform" and "radical restructuring of existing institutions" are nestled within a text that serves mostly as memoir and then as a vague call-to-action that feels anything other than radical. At best, it sounds (as the other words imply) reformist and feels as if it doesn't want to grapple with aspects of other assumptions it makes.

I don't want to really critique the first nine chapters, as those are her own experiences of working within the tech industry that show how fully it consumed her being and how hard it has been to kick some of that thinking. However, I will say that, while I don't need graphic details of someone's life, parts of it feel like the perpetual trick of sticking to what is true on the surface while skimming over the deeper reality of what happened. There are a lot of moments where it's hard not to recognise the severely middle-class life that helped support and enable this kind of thought. (And I do actually like that she admits that the chances of her having had this kind of epiphany would've been less likely had her startup been successful, though I do wish she would've reflected on that a bit more than she did because that is a very necessary perspective to flesh out and examine.)

It's in the final three chapters that any real analysis of Silicon Valley (and its cousins in other geographies), along with capitalism, takes place; this is the only place where we engage with any of her actual critique on everything she's witnessed, experienced, thought, or felt. The tenth chapter is a sort of reflection on the state of things, the eleventh represents a call to action, and the twelfth is the epilogue that attempts to leave you with some degree of hope for what can be.

I'm sticking primarily with the eleventh, as that is the one that I found the most frustration with. In it, we're given five directions for what we should be doing: reclaiming entrepreneurship, reclaiming work, reclaiming public services, reclaiming intellectual property, and reclaiming culture. Immediately, it felt like a reformist critique of the system that has never engaged with actually radical positions. While I don't think people must be anarchists or socialists, I do think that more people need to actually engage with the critiques coming out of those spheres and try their best to imagine their potential. They don't have to like them, but they should at least engage with them. It's in these chapters that I can see that, in terms of thought "on the left," she really only has engaged with capitalism-critical statists and Marxists. (The latter isn't inherently bad, but I do think it is severely limiting on possibilities.)

On the surface, I can see how someone in her position would view these as radical ideas, but the solutions within each of the directions she provides come off as quite milquetoast (and I suspect they would've even felt that way had I read this book around the publication date in 2020). They still maintain a lot of assumptions without actually considering potentialities for what can be done. They engage with certain aspects of labour history (the Lucas Plan of 1976, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's hiring hall model), but they rarely go beyond this.

We get a lot of common (and very old) suggestions from the labour movement: higher minimum wage and raises to keep up with inflation, universal healthcare and unemployment benefits, unions and related support, and elected worker positions on corporate boards. These were things that, though we'll never know if he would've implemented as president, Bernie Sanders even had as part of his platform. These are not radical positions; these are the moderate positions that look radical because of how much worse the world has become. The only thing she adds that isn't often found within a union platform is that migrants need more lenient immigration regimes to protect themselves from employers. (This has often been a platform that some unions have worked against—not all, but there is sufficient history of well-recognised unions fighting against migrants rather than supporting them).

We also get a lot of other ideas that fail to consider their assumptions of how the world works. She suggests that we should turn to non-profits as the model for most companies, but she ignores that non-profits can also be equally as corrupt as their for-profit counterparts. They can engage in union-busting (something which happened three years after this book was published at The Trevor Project, though this isn't at all the first time something of this nature has happened). They weaponise the social good in order to get more work out of their employees for less. We also know that a lot of abuses happen towards employees in non-profits. Shifting models without addressing how those things happen will not help us.

She also suggests worker co-ops, which I'm not inherently against. However, we also still see within them a lot of the same problems that occur elsewhere and have been described just prior. We see the same issues of hierarchy (via varying bigotries), we see the same personalities trying to take over and push people out, and we see people being pushed to do more for less. This isn't an "all co-ops" sort of thing, but there has to be work done to ensure that these abuses don't happen. It's not really the structure of the business that causes most of the problems; it's the structure of society that we need to deal with.

She also suggests that we "create a publicly-owned investment fund whose scope is limited to non-profit ventures." This sort of overlooks the fact that the current system of grants in many places already operates in this manner (though, grants can also be given to private enterprise at the current time). How do we ensure that these investment funds, which I assume utilise the "progressive taxation" she constantly references, actually get spent on socially healthy non-profit ventures? Especially when we consider how our political systems function and who often gains power within their current structures. (There's no questioning about how taxation is done, whether it's successful, who is doing that taxation, or who is choosing how it gets used... but a lot of suggestions for taxing profit and taxing wealth, ignoring that the people she wants to tax are often one and the same as the people regulating or enforcing it.)

She mentions that we should peg the income of CEOs to their lowest paid workers, but this doesn't even ask a basic question (from someone who has a "boundless desire" to question things): Do we even need the C-Suite? What is their actual purpose? She also says we should democratise stock options because that's part of the income package, but that doesn't really engage with whether or not the stock market model of operation is healthy for anyone.

And here's why I think more people need to engage in anarchist and socialist thought: Not once does she take the actual radical positions of any of the things that she describes, which would actually work towards abolishing Silicon Valley. She doesn't include the idea of fighting against and abolishing borders, participating in the anti-work movement, and abolishing institutions that support the current harmful regimes. Also, while there is quite a lot of focus on the workers, it doesn't actually focus on the geographic community of where that work is situated; she has a desire to "create a radically different vision of work," but that vision never once really includes decreasing productivity of all people in the way that the anti-work movement has been putting forward. There are things that are so much more radical that could be our starting points of negotiation, even if we don't get them today. Everything she's put forward has been very moderate and incrementalist.

While discussing 'reclaiming public services', she focuses primarily on investing in better institutions. Not once does she consider where some of the beliefs that she garnered about the world and about technology comes from. There's the perpetual push to better fund primary and secondary education and create tuition-free post-secondary education (while decoupling it from the drivers of fueling readiness for jobs in technology), but there's little recognition for what schools have always been and how schooling has always been a force for social propaganda (whether we acknowledge it or not). Similarly, there's a suggestion of "progressive reclamation of housing" that should also work in tandem with "curtailing the power of landlords," even though it really wouldn't be that difficult of a decision to just... give everyone the house they already live in, immediately removing the need to pay rent to a landlord who serves no purpose other than to remove resources.

'Reclaiming intellectual property' and 'reclaiming culture' are basically the same thing from different directions; I don't know why they were even split apart.

Anyway, for a book that claims a "radical" vision, a lot of this feels it would be really out of step in a bargain. Shouldn't we, at the very least, be demanding more than we'll ever get so that the negotiated position isn't more of the same but with a smile?