Visiting Silicon Valley in 2017, I found myself caught short on a tour of the Google Campus and forced to urinate in an underground staff car park. Watching the amber glow of my urine spread out between the smooth alloys of the Teslas turned out to be a strangely satisfying feeling. The day had been spent in a state of forced fealty to the brahmins of our digital future. Now, I was having my own little bit of revenge. 

That was, of course, until I was caught. “Hey, buddy,” shouted a voice from across the dark parking lot. “We don’t do that sort of thing here.”

Even the old guard of Microsoft and Apple have seen their valuations fall

Today, Silicon Valley is a very different place. Both the myth and the prestige are dying. The collapse of SVB Bank has seen a generation of disruptors and innovators shut out. Workforces have been slashed. Then there are the existing giants who appear in the grips of an existential crisis. Zuckerburg has lost himself in a glorified playpen for nerds. In Africa, tech do-gooders who took inspiration from its move fast break things mantra have ended up presiding over a company rife with sex abuse and educational dumbing down. The good people at Twitter 1.0 turned out to be in collusion with the more nefarious elements of the US security state. Even the old guard of Microsoft and Apple have seen their valuations fall.

Amidst this turn of fortune, its chief pioneer Elon Musk has said something uncharacteristically drab regarding its latest front of innovation. “AI stresses me out,” said Musk at the beginning of March, before recently going on to sign a letter by the Future of Life Institute along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak that called for a six month ban of development of advanced AI systems.

Silicon Valley, that shining city on the hill of innovation, is moving into a different age. 

This present apocalypse has been much misunderstood, however. Writers have seen fit to declare that the big tech companies who defined our era have hit a wall, even suggesting it is reckoning that may herald the end of big tech. The reality is much more complicated. The real story of the collapse of SVB, in light of it being the second largest banking crisis in American history, is how a major crisis at the hands of our tech gods was evaded via a technocratic coup. 

Big tech moguls still command the unprecedented wealth (if not the reputation) to carry out their dreams. Beyond headline grabbing chatbot advances, the monopoly over information systems and big data already has a far greater influence on our public services, search engines and financial systems. As David Auerbach has identified, much of the digital infrastructure for our future is already built — the issue with AI is how it will be applied to the “meganets” already in place. 

The question now for Silicon Valley is not how to reverse this decline in fortune, but how to preserve the future they’ve already created. 

To understand the potential of a different, more conservative Silicon Valley, you have to understand the history of the state which has nurtured it. Read on the surface, California’s recent past is one of innovation, success and wealth. Delve a little deeper, and there’s a murky underwater of failed idealism that continues to haunt the state and indeed the world. 

It is one of the great ironies of the counterculture that flourished in California in the sixties, that it came to be co-opted into one of the greatest wealth making machines in history. Sell out hippies were at the vanguard of welding the ideology with consumerism, but Silicon Valley was far more effective in blending together the different threads of ideology that were unleashed over that decade.

Thirty years later, writers were even putting a name to it. The Californian Ideology was named in a 1995 essay, pointing out how Silicon Valley had come to co-opt a series of conflicting ideologies that had taken off in California during the 1960: The New Left, the New Right, Ayn Rand libertarianism, techno-mysticism, even a bit of good old fashioned new age do-gooding had been cooked together alongside the utopian hope of the new technologies being developed. Whilst the rest of America had to put up with the violence, instability and foreign war unleashed by that turbulent decade, the transgressive energy of the sixties had incubated itself in Silicon Valley. It was now waiting to be reborn in a future it hoped to dictate.

As its critics were quick to point out, the Californian Ideology, and the tech utopianism it envisaged, was an incoherent hodge podge of ideas. Under a veil of half-baked philosophy for the accumulation of wealth and power ready to be exploited by the chancers, the entrepreneurs and the grifters would rush into the valley like their goldrush forebearers of old. 

But what did that matter? By the 2000s what was emerging in the Valley had found a consumer. Equally as important, it found a public facing establishment endorsement: “I believe the computer and the Internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history,” said President Clinton on a panel with Bill Gates at a White House Conference on the New Economy in 2000. 

Watered down Californian ideology seeped into our lives

Over the next two decades, the world bought into this idea and more. The Californian ideology persisted, in part because it morphed into something far blander, more corporate and insidious. A half baked LinkedIn philosophy was never far behind the big profits and the new products. It was about making the world more connected, efficient, just plain better. It glued together the increasingly unaccountable, disruptive and even mysterious companies that came to dictate this false progress. From social media to smartphones and big data infrastructure, we ended up speaking about networks, hooking up, digital nomading, data backed solutions and insights, disruption, innovation. We even modelled our offices on it. The watered down Californian ideology seeped into our lives. More importantly, so do its products.

Yet in the real world things seemed to get worse. Inequality rose, along with drug addiction, violence, mistrust and all the unresolved tensions and contradictions of an age that had been ushered in by California itself. Just beyond the dreamy haze of the valley, lay the real world. 

Reality two decades on, as it always does in California, is now coming back to bite. The last two decades have borne witness to the failure of Silicon Valley to change the world as promised. Now it has found itself forced to confront reality. The advancement of AI, one of the oldest examples of sixties tech utopianism, has now come of age in a world so unstable and beset with problems that even the great pioneers of modern Silicon Valley now regard it with fear and trepidation. 

There is of course a precedent for what happens when Californian dreams run into their own nightmare. In response to the “mess” at Berkeley, Ronald Reagan emerged from the transgressive cauldron of sixties California to redefine electoral politics and create the embryo for the most successful conservative movement of the century. Richard Nixon, a classic sixties grifter and a native of small town California, rode the storm of the decade to eventually emerged as the preferred president: tough on crime, stern, sensible. It was the platonic opposite of utopian ideology and half baked dreams.

In some ways, Musk and the other newfound Silicon Valley realists can be seen as part of this long tradition of California’s reactionary conservatives. In part, this is now in response to what they have to lose. Having built their empire, a further attempt to pursue the old dreams of the Californian ideology may now serve to destroy it. 

Emerging from its present crisis, Silicon Valley now finds itself forced to reckon with a different future. The collapse of SVB bank is already being relished as an opportunity in Washington to rein Big Tech in. In a divided republic, mistrust of Big Tech is one of the last consensus issues between its warring factions, and there is populist energy to be had in resisting its further advances. Ironically, one of the most pervasive arguments for the pursuit of AI (and the one most likely to win) is the geopolitical risk of losing out to China in a technological arms race. The future of Silicon Valley is now no longer dictated by its own myths, but the world it once sought to escape. 

For the last two decades, Silicon Valley has rode the last waves of the previous century’s idealism. Now only a proper understanding of reality in this one can save it.