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I’ll Never Leave Silicon Valley
Contradictions abound in this place I live and love
When my wife and I flew across the country from Baltimore to the Silicon Valley in 2012 to present a then-fledgling robot project at a Python conference, I had no idea that I’d soon move to this place and never want to leave. Driving around Santa Clara near the convention center where the conference took place, I saw building after building adorned with the logos of services and products I had used all my life — Evernote, Cisco, TiVo — with the tracks of the VTA light rail wending their way through it all. It was thrilling.
We found ourselves returning more and more. While walking through Terminal 2 at SFO and standing on the platform of the AirTrain on one visit, I remember seeing impossibly specific B2B advertisements for tech products like server room cooling systems and enterprise routers. I knew that this was home.
At the time, the weight of the Valley’s new responsibility as a mediator of world culture and information had not yet set in, and the “change the world” and “do no evil” culture was still very present, totally unqualified and unironic. Much about the Valley has changed since then. Much has not changed enough. Yet the Valley remains the tech world’s economic and cultural powerhouse, driving the most consequential (and most destructive) innovations of our times.
The region got America to the moon — and helped it amass the most dangerous arsenal of weapons known to man.
Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, California that “There’s no there there.” Through a process of collective reworking, the aphorism has come, over decades, to refer to another place: Silicon Valley. And it’s true — the Valley has no focal point, no center. You can drive through it for hours — winding your way from Sunnyvale up past Mountain View (skirting San Jose), through Palo Alto, and on into the semi-industrial gloom of South San Francisco — without ever knowing you’ve passed through it.
The Valley has no center, yet it’s one of the most exciting, dynamic, innovative places in the world. Despite other regions’ attempts to unseat it, Silicon Valley still attracted more venture capital money ($45.9…
