[California’s tech industry cannot escape its original sins.]
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EUGENICS, ENVIRONMENTAL RUIN, AND SURVEILLANCE: THE STORY OF SILICON
VALLEY  
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Edward Ongweso Jr.
June 23, 2023
The Nation
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_ California’s tech industry cannot escape its original sins. _

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1862), Emanuel Leutze

 

In the opening pages of his magisterial Bay Area history, _Imperial
San Francisco_
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historian Gray Brechin presents his book as an attempt “to answer
the question raised by the kind of cities we build today: Are they
worth it?” It’s a deceptively simple question, and it reemerges
when we discuss San Francisco and its discontents.

From the city’s earliest days, visionaries looked at San Francisco
and saw an heir to Rome. Brechin points to Army scout John C.
Frémont, who said he named the bay’s mouth
“_Chrysopylae_ (Golden gate) on “the same principle that the
harbor of Byzantium (Constantinople afterwards) was
called _Chrysoceras_ (Golden horn).”

Brechin also discusses Emanuel Leutze, who painted a mural on a wall
in the House wing of the Capitol called _Westward the Course of
Empire Takes Its Way_
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which depicts settlers seeing California for the first time. “To
Leutze’s cultivated sensibility, these were more than settlers
entering California,” Brechin writes, “they were both the
Israelites entering Canaan and the holy family of the New World.”
Brechin describes a party attended by Leutze where the painter
concedes that the mural’s historical references might be lost on
some and that its Catholic symbols could offend others, but he
contends all the attendees grasped his intention.

“All could understand the divine justification for empire’s
expansion,” Brenchin writes. “As if to emphasize that this was a
literal shrine to the religion of territorial conquest, the artist
included a long panel at the bottom of the mural resembling the
predella of a Renaissance altarpiece.” Rifles, axes, plows, powder
horns, Native American trophies, crossed shovels, pickaxes, revolvers,
and gold littered the mural as well. “No pent up Utica contracts our
Powers, but the whole boundless Continent is ours,” reads the
inscription by the mural’s weapons.

In _Imperial San Francisco_, the land outside of America’s Rome is
reframed as a _contado_—an Italian word (and another nod to Rome)
for a land that “contains other cities and villages that owe tribute
to the dominant city.” To Brechin, imperial cities, like San
Francisco or the District of Columbia, command _contadi_ that
stretch much further; they demand tribute from nations, continents, or
even the entire planet. “The difference is one of size as well as
consequence,” Brechin writes, “just as the mighty Maelstrom
differs from a mere eddy.”

The book does not call on us to abandon cities. It does not wave away
the pleasures and benefits of living close to others, but it refuses
to pretend that the costs are small matters. We must grapple with the
history of urbanization, especially when we are tracing forces that
exterminated natives, reshaped the land and waters, drove people
together, and then repeated that process for lands further and further
away.

Brechin invokes Lewis Mumford’s “Pyramid of Mining,” a concept
that imagines a “megamachine” consisting of a city’s core
activities, that subordinate nature and consolidate elite control.
Mumford argued that we suffered authoritarian forms of technology in
part because of warfare and mining. Organized warfare demanded an
inexhaustible supply of metals for weapons, and mines demanded certain
types of technologies and activities to sustain them, and so
hierarchies and social organizations emerged to preserve these
efforts.

In Mumford’s megamachine and in Brechin’s case study of San
Francisco, mining was at the foundation of everything. Mines were the
source of minerals and metals needed to build and rule the city and
its hinterlands. Mines brought workers to the city and the nearby
pits. Mines provided the wealth to fund cities and sustain them. Mines
shaped the development of technologies, giving operations more power
to spoil the land in pursuit of greater bounties.

The bounties of farmlands and the underworld mines grew and grew. The
sciences that developed both helped those industries metastasize
larger swaths of the land. A few individuals generated dynastic
fortunes that helped build newspaper empires, propaganda campaigns,
monuments and memorials, all aimed at inspiring and sustaining the
waves of bodies feeding into the megamachine. More fortunes still were
used to fund efforts to develop the knowledge, tools, and techniques
to better dominate nature. Universities, laboratories, and
corporations innovated tools of remote control to administer
California’s depleted ecology and corral the populace. These forces
shaped San Francisco’s development, and they never completely
vanished.

The problem is that San Francisco’s _contado_ is now the
world—there are always more mines, more bodies, more forests, and
more wealth to be extracted; and there will always be a need for tools
and techniques to subordinate everything outside the city for some
Great Work.

For all its ambition and insight, Brechin’s case study is limited.
It begins in the late 1800s as mining operations render the California
countryside unrecognizable and ends in the 1950s, reflecting on the
region’s scientific contribution to the creation of atomic weaponry.
San Francisco has roots and tendrils that escape these
bounds—specifically to Silicon Valley.

It is Malcolm Harris’s equally magisterial _Palo Alto: A History of
California, Capitalism, and the World_
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drives Brechin’s inquiry to its logical conclusion. Harris’s text
stretches further back to the scouting, conquest, and colonization of
the region and then stretches even further forward to the present as
it sits atop a worldwide megamachine that has, as the subtitle
suggests, shaped California, capitalism, and the world itself.

Silicon Valley may not have been born with the same imperial ambitions
of San Francisco, but eugenic forms of it were present from the
beginning. Harris teases that Silicon Valley’s first tech giant was
a horse-stock farm developed by Leland Stanford. Here the visionary
capitalist innovated the “Palo Alto System,” which combined
“capitalist rationality and the exclusive focus on potential and
speculative value.” Applied to horses, it would breed champion
horses at record pace (never mind the busted limbs and corpses).
Applied to humans, it would generate inordinate wealth (and consume
everyone and everything it could in pursuit).

The horse-breeding system and its eugenic taint were soon exported to
everything Stanford and his cohort touched. At Stanford University,
which bears Leland’s name, professors of bionomics (the study of how
biological beings respond to artificial environments) worked on the
theory, and eugenicists like Ellwood Patterson Cubberly worked on the
practice. “Assimilation, he believed,” Harris writes of Cubberly,
“is best performed by the schools, which must prepare foreign-born
to blend into the American race.” Thus came intelligence quotient
(Stanford-Binet) tests promulgating the myth of “unitary general
intelligence” along with tests straight from the horse-breeding
system testing how fast children could run.

“Budding geniuses needed to be identified and elevated, while young
degenerates needed to be corralled where they couldn’t dilute the
national race or turn their underachievement into social problems,”
Harris writes. “Stanford made large contributions to both
strategies, promoting inequality as the only policy compatible with
nature.”

Bionomics and eugenics faded but did not disappear. Breeding
experiments and racist school policies became US apartheid and racist
social policy. As Kim-Mai Cutler reported
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just east of Palo Alto’s Edenic paradise lies a stretch of land
painted both as “a haven of affordability” for poor Black and
brown people and “a stubbornly intractable core of poverty and
violence amid Silicon Valley’s glittering wealth.” Years of
segregation funneled non-whites into the neighborhood, while a nearby
facility processing chemicals from semiconductor and hardware
production poisoned the water and air. Superfund sites litter Santa
Clara County—home to Palo Alto and East Palo Alto—and most are
concentrated in predominantly Black and brown communities
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The Palo Alto System pays them little mind as capital sloshes around
them trying to find the greatest return at the lowest cost—or
perhaps, the least noticeable cost.

There’s a dark side to nearly every tech venture. Amazon giveth
same-day delivery; Amazon taketh the physical and mental health
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workers hidden away in its sprawling logistics empire. Apple divines
that we need $3,500 goggles, and overlooks the sacrifice zones
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the mines for precious metals powering its products and the suicides
at factories assembling them
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Microsoft agrees to labor neutrality
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efforts to unionize its various subsidiaries, and joins the other
tech giants
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a military contractor
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helping police departments
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the world find sleeker tools to terrorize their communities.
Google/Alphabet promises to revitalize its ailing search engine
operations with generative AI
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while pursuing military cloud-computing contracts
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Facebook/Meta may flail around legless in a $100 billion metaverse
prison
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its social media platforms stumble along
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just out of view lie an army of exploited and tortured content
moderators beside an ever-growing pile of corpses from the mob
violence
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cleansing
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and genocide
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products incite.

As Silicon Valley metamorphosed from stolen land to a pioneer
backwater to an imagined new Rome, as mines and oil wells puncturing
the earth were connected by railroads, as the Stanford colony evolved
into the American empire’s armament and laboratory during the Cold
War, as one tech startup bubble deflated then gave way to an even
hardier one, the Palo Alto System keeps living on like a hydra
sprouting newer, hungrier heads from decapitated stumps.

Brechin’s polemic history was published back in 1999, but he updated
it with an even bleaker preface in 2007 in which he doubted the
possibility of resisting urban imperialism. Targets for the
historian’s contempt included Thomas Friedman’s columns,
interviews, and bestseller _The Lexus and the Olive Tree_ that
insisted that American empire could bring peace and wealth through
awesome technology and unfettered trade; the decision
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California universities to run Los Alamos Laboratories to “more like
a business whose product is nuclear weapons”; and an obsequious
media that all but chanted Friedman’s mantra “Give war a chance
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and cultivated the profit-seeking
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to deploy the US war machine in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friedman had
invoked the line told to Tacitus by a chieftain crushed by the
Romans—“They make a desolation and call it peace”—but Brechin
doubted that he understood it:

Friedman had mangled his quip, for the taxpayer-financed fist that, he
asserted, kept the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology was as
much that technology itself as the military that used it. But even
that parsing missed the mark, for safety proved elusive for all
concerned. Full-spectrum dominance—whether expressed in Friedman’s
sound bites or in the Department of Defense’s Joint Vision
2020—was sure to provoke resistance from those meant to submit to
such wonders of remote control, as well as from the wounded earth
itself.

In between Brechin and Harris’s histories, did anything change? Sam
Harnett’s 2020 literature review
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journalism covering the gig economy offered a clear answer: no.
Sycophantic coverage continued as non-labor reporters and commentators
passed off Silicon Valley PR copy as journalism and helped will into
existence an untenable business model
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sought to undermine labor laws worldwide, re-legalize piece work
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new racial wage code
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and proliferate workplace structures mediated by algorithmic
overseers
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greed and bloodlust remained. Countless firms pushed this regulatory
arbitrage scheme, and countless public officials cashed in (namely
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those from the Obama administration) while the system subjected
workers to poverty
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theft
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and health problems
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A religious fervor took hold—this time thanks to the ecstasy of
innovation and digital disruption promised by Silicon Valley.

Not a single major firm in the so-called gig economy has reported a
profit
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hundreds of billions of dollars’ having been poured into the
industry. App-based ride-hail has helped degrade the quality of urban
life, contributing to increases
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pollution and traffic. The champions of the gig economy are fighting
to self-exempt themselves from US labor law
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partnerships with US cities
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cobble together a regulatory template for the coming years. As the
corporations of the gig economy consume industry after industry,
pushing larger swaths of the population into undignified working
conditions and starvation wages, the question reemerges: Are they
worth it? 

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ permission_
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Distributed by__ _PARS International Corp
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_EDWARD ONGWESO JR. is a Brooklyn-based writer who focuses on
technology, finance, and labor. He is a former staff writer at
Motherboard, Vice‘s tech desk. He cohosts the This Machine
Kills podcast on the political economy of technology._

_THE NATION [[link removed]] Founded
by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and
depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of the telegraph
to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and
progressive voice in American journalism._

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