Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu

Author:Wendy Liu [Liu, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781912248711
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT: GIVING UP

But back I cannot go, this waste of time, this admission of having been on the wrong track would be unbearable for me. […] The time allotted to you is so short that if you lose one second you have already lost your whole life, for it is no longer, it is always just as long as the time you lose. […] As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.

— Franz Kafka, “The Departure”1

Summer faded into autumn. The days got shorter and crisper. Shadows lengthened as leaves turned crimson and drifted toward the ground. The realisation that I had been chasing the wrong thing was starting to catch up on me.

The thing is, every little thing we did had seemed rational at the time. We had begun with technology that we thought would disrupt an ossified market; from there, we had iterated our way around the sector in pursuit of product-market fit, repeating those trochaic syllables as if we were saying the rosary. Always pivoting just in time to avoid the raw emptiness at the edges of this ambition. Two years of aimless pivoting later, we had decided we didn’t like our business model and wanted to try something new. Another startup idea, another shot at the goal, another knock at the hallowed gates of Silicon Valley success.

Yet after a summer of futile brainstorming, our hopes of finding a miracle pivot were deflating. But I didn’t know what else I could put my hopes in.

And then, right in the middle of my personal startup pity party, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. I took a couple of days off to do what every other liberal seemed to be doing: mourning, decrying racism and sexism, scrolling endlessly through social media.

For years, our expectation had been to move to the US eventually, simply because that was where all the money was. At first, the San Francisco Bay Area had been our target; after spending a summer in NYC, we had switched our sights to the East Coast. But we had been counting on Hillary Clinton becoming President, on the grounds that she would be more likely to pass immigration reform that would make it easier for people like us to move. Never could we have imagined a President who would turn the clock back the other way, making an already restrictive immigration regime even more nativist. My longtime dream of moving to the US slipped further out of reach.

And in the meantime, I was watching to see how the tech industry would respond to this new administration. Silicon Valley was often stereotyped as liberal — at least socially progressive if sometimes fiscally conservative — and I expected high-profile tech leaders to use every lever at their disposal to put up resistance. I was left severely disappointed. There were a few bold statements in condemnation of Trump, but most of Silicon Valley seemed perfectly willing

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