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Meet Me in the Eternal City: Silicon Valley has always dreamed of utopias. Who’s ready to move in?
Silicon Valley has always dreamed of building its own utopias. Who’s ready to move in?
On the internet, Brown is combative and self-aggrandizing, but in person, he has the reflexive politeness of someone who is used to older adults referring to him as a “nice young man.” When he was in his early 20s, he posted a meme on Facebook identifying himself as “fiscally conservative and socially awkward.” He’d been avoiding me in New York, but when I appeared in Montenegro, he received me with surprising warmth (“You made it!” he said, after I sneaked into the Grimes show). In a famous 1995 essay, “ The Californian Ideology,” the British academics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron explained that the technologists of Silicon Valley looked forward to a future in which “existing social, political, and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.” The authors also observed, dryly, that California’s highways, universities, and extensive public infrastructure had all been built by complex bureaucracies and funded by taxes. The mixture of wet coal debris and street sweepings attracted rats, mosquitoes, and a famous Long Island alcoholic, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in The Great Gatsby described the mess as “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” It’s thanks to a dysfunctional bureaucracy that the trash heap became a park with 100 soccer teams playing in it every weekend.
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