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Jesus was born in a manger, and Silicon Valley was born in a garage.
With the venture capital industry as its father and
Stanford University as its mother.
This region once home to plum orchards and cattle ranches became the fertile
ground for the world's greatest technological innovations.
Throughout the 20th century, the Legend of Silicon Valley grew, attracting apostles,
and engineers from all across the land to join in the great salvation.
That would be brought on by computers and the Internet.
That is until tragically in 2001,
irrational exuberance condemned the Silicon Valley bubble to pop.
For three years, the valley laid dormant.
Trillions were lost, or so it seemed.
Until in 2004, Silicon Valley miraculously rose again.
>> [LAUGH] >> With the IPO of Google incorporated.
Thus is the origin story for Silicon Valley.
The modern messiah of the world's most powerful religion, capitalism.
Every culture has it's own mythology.
The fundamentally normative stories, the preserve and
perpetuate the values that define the culture itself.
And Silicon valley is no different.
We have our god-like founders, our visionary prophets, our epic disruptors.
Hewlett and Packard, building their first audio oscillator in a Palo Alto garage.
Bill Gates selling DOS to IBM for retaining the licensing rights.
Mark Zuckerberg, bringing his band of misfits to the valley and
hacking together the Facebook.
But these myths have consequences.
The myths of Silicon Valley, and more specifically,
the archetypes who inhabit these myths.
Form a sort of magnetic field that tugs on the tech industry's moral compass,
shaping where we work, what we build and how we lead.
So I want to critically examine the nature and the influence of three of these
powerful Silicon Valley archetypes, the founder, the oracle and the disruptor.
Our first Silicon Valley archetype is the hero himself,
the technological Uber match, the Superman, the founder.
Who is this mythical founder?
Well, they start their career as a college dropout.
Famed venture capitalists, Peter Teal was giving high school students
$100,000 grants to start companies, instead of wasting their time in college.
The founder is ruthlessly efficient.
They don't have time to eat meals, so they drink Soylent.
They can't waste precious metal cycles trying to figure out what to wear every
day, so they were the same t-shirt and hoodie, and jeans.
And the founder must be ruthlessly efficient because they're
frequently the CEO of two or three, or four different companies.
The soul and lifeblood of their respective organizations, utterly irreplaceable.
But I ask you to consider,
what kind of future does the Silicon Valley founder create?
For the founder, there's no room for empathy, only efficiency.
There are no people problems, only engineering problems.
Everything has an optimal, measurable solution.
And so our technology companies end up building products that optimize for
engagement.
With notifications and pings vying for every second of our waking attention.
Colors tuned to make us click,
positive feedback loops of likes triggering our dopamine response,
like slot machines, and cigarettes, to have us tap again and again, and again.
And so we end up with social networks that leave us not connected, but depressed.
With news that leaves us not informed, but angry.
With mobile games that leave us not entertained, but addicted.
There are only two types of pushers of products that call
their customers users, techies and drug dealers.
>> [LAUGH] >> Our second Silicon Valley archetype is
the oracle.
The oracle is the future seer, the thought leader, the visionary who can predict
the technological forces that will shape our future world.
Perhaps the most recent famous Silicon Valley prophecy comes from the gospel of
Marc Andreessen.
>> [LAUGH] >> In the Wall Street Journal in 2011,
the Netscape founder and
venture capitalist wrote that software is eating the world.
And it's not just individuals who serve as the Silicon Valley oracle.
The valley as a whole perpetuates this sort of predictive zeitgeist for
what will obviously be the next big thing.
Machine learning, self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, drones, chatbots.
And so the rest of the world looks to the Silicon Valley meta oracle to
see where to invest or where to brace for impact.
But again, what kind of future does this Silicon Valley oracle create?
So much of Silicon Valley prediction is predicated on this notion of technological
inevitability.
That the inexorable march of progress is an unstoppable force of the universe.
And your only options as an individual are to either invest or get out of the way.
Automation is going to take your job so you better learn to code.
Your digital footprint is everywhere so
you better reconceive of your notion of privacy.
Electric scooter is the next big advance in mobility, so
you better hop on or get left behind.
But the silicon valley oracle believes in these things coming true, and
they very match well may come true.
But it's the attitude of the oracle of inevitability that removes human agency,
and that's human responsibility from the future that we create.
It is not a human hands so this logic goes but
the invisible hand on the wheel that stirs the ship of progress.
Who will be the winners in this supposedly inevitable future?
And who will be left behind?
Our third and final Silicon Valley archetype is the disruptor.
Silicon Valley is obsessed with disruption of innovative new
technologies coming in and turning existing industries upside down.
The pre-eminent global startup conference is called Tech Crunch Disrupt.
There are firms dedicated to disruption consulting.
At USC today you can get a degree in disruptive innovation.
>> [LAUGH] >> Perhaps the God-king of recent
Silicon Valley disruption is Uber.
The taxi industry in its antediluvian period is rife with inefficiency.
In comes Uber, you can summon a car at the touch of a button,
the status quo is offended and the disruptor reigns supreme.
But what kind of future does the Silicon Valley disruptor create?
The disruptor in these myths is the deliverer of a sort of Darwinian justice.
But the old order content and its dominance, and
stagnation deserves to be taken down.
And so the disruptor in these myths doesn't, and
indeed mustn't think too hard about the collateral damage of their disruption.
Yeah, what Silicon Valley companies are disrupting today is no longer just
old hard drives.
It's people, it's labor markets, it's eduction, it's healthcare.
And today's Silicon Valley disruptor is looking less and
less like the creator of a fundamentally new technology.
And more, and more like an adept user of venture capital dollars.
To undercut prices and dodge regulation, and avoid labor laws, and
exploit public places, and under pay workers, and strong-arm suppliers, and
achieve monopoly.
What Silicon Valley so mythologizes as disruptive innovation
is robber baron capitalism reborn in the mobile era.
These three archetypes, the founder, the oracle, and the disruptor formed
the foundations of today's Silicon Valley institutions, and culture, and values.
But these myths are trapped in a different era.
They're trapped in an era of silicon,
they're trapped in an era of wafers and chips of servers and cellphones.
Our world has changed.
The problems that Silicon Valley tackles today are of a much more human form,
of relationships, of community, of biology, of the nature of truth itself.
Our old myths are not fit for this new era.
So who is it that we want to be doing the creating that we want to deliver
us into a future built for everyone and not just a select few.
I want the humanist who focuses not on achieving growth,
but on achieving sustainability.
Who doesn't just optimize for engagement, but optimizes for empathy.
For whom diversity and inclusion don't just make their company stronger,
but make society stronger.
I want the artist who doesn't just see technology as instrumental and
commercial, but as inspirational and creative.
Who doesn't just look for solutions that are optimal, but that are beautiful.
For whom progress means not achieving greater returns, but
achieving greater global understanding.
And I want the synthesizer who doesn't just look to technology as the solution
to every problem, but to community, or to government, or to education.
For whom technology is not an end in and of itself, but just one of many
different means for fulfilling our humanities greatest potential.
Silicon Valley will always represent a great force for a change.
But I believe that all of us in the Valley are fundamentally responsible for
the shape that change takes.
But Silicon Valley needs new myths.
We need new heroes.
And I believe that those heroes could be all of you.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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