Upstream - A People's History of Silicon Valley with Keith A. Spencer

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

The dark shadow of Silicon Valley is growing longer everyday, covering more and more of the globe and spreading not just technology, but a particular value set as well. By this time many know about the hyper-exploitative business models of companies like Uber or TaskRabbit. Or about how AirBnB has heavily reduced housing stocks in cities worldwide. But in his new book, Keith A. Spencer goes further than just picking on a few high profile companies. He lays out an argument for why Silicon Valley, at its core, is a highly exploitative and problematic industry. With a look at the tech world from the vantage point of the marginalized and oppressed—those who have not benefited from the incredible wealth bubbling up in the valley—”A People’s History of Silicon Valley: how the tech industry exploits workers, erodes privacy, and undermines democracy,” presents a damning thesis for why this new world of addictive gadgets and union-busting is increasingly undemocratic and dangerous. A People’s History of Silicon Valley is published by Eyewear Publishing.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

The term Silicon Valley has become synonymous with the tech industry. It's not just the Santa Clara Valley. And so the thing about writing people's history of Silicon Valley has become synonymous with the tech industry. It's not just the Santa Clara Valley. And so the thing about writing people's history of Silicon Valley is that you have to cover how the tech industry has affected people's lives across the entire world. When someone at Uber changes how the algorithm works for picking up rides, like an Uber driver in Mumbai is affected, or if Facebook all of a sudden changes the way that you see things in your timeline, like a small family business in Beijing may suddenly have fewer customers.

So the decisions and the choices that a small number of people, you know, engineers and CEOs, the decisions that those engineers and CEOs make in Silicon Valley have repercussions across the whole world and can sometimes radically affect or ruin people's lives overnight. And that's profoundly undemocratic. I'm Della Duncan, and you're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Keith A. Spencer, cultural critic, editor at Salon, and author of the book A People's History of Silicon Valley, How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy, and Undermines Democracy, just out by Squint Books. Hi, Keith. Welcome to Upstream. To begin, I'm wondering if you could introduce yourself to

our listeners and maybe tell us a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing? Sure, yeah. My name is Keith A. Spencer. I'm an editor at Salon and I manage the science and tech coverage and write a fair bit of tech criticism myself too. My family goes back to the Bay Area many generations and has been, for the most part, unincluded in the economic boom that Silicon Valley is considered to have created in the Bay Area, which I think watching that happen and observing or hearing my family tell stories about the Bay Area and why so many of them left

over the years kind of really colored my perspectives on Silicon Valley over the years growing up. And then when I was an adult, when I was in my 20s, my grandfather, who had been born in Mountain View and lived in what is now Silicon Valley, what was then called the Valley of Hearts to Light for his whole life, he got evicted from where he lived, his house in Menlo Park when he was 90 years old. And basically he moved to Chico, California, and he thought that he could get a special type of veteran's assistant loan because he's a veteran to buy a house there. And it ended up not working out because he lost a lot of his memory from the trauma of having to move when you're that old. I think it's really hard. But I'd watched him through his whole life move into smaller and

smaller places in Silicon Valley because he never bought a place and he could never afford to buy a place and certainly couldn't when he was older. But it was interesting living in the Bay Area. So I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. My dad left the Bay Area a long time ago, even though he grew up here for similar reasons. And I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. My dad left the Bay Area a long time ago, even though he grew up here for similar reasons. And I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. And then when I went off to school at Santa Cruz in 2004, that was kind of the beginning. That was when I first moved to the Bay Area. And that was the beginning of watching all the stuff happening in Silicon Valley and thinking, wow, it's interesting.

Everyone thinks what's going on here is such a great, amazing, wonderful, like, you know, some people in tech literally call it a renaissance, say that there's like a modern renaissance happening in Silicon Valley. But my experience and my family's experience are really different. So I think that was a big part of what led me to have a more critical eye on the tech industry and then ultimately write this book, People's History of Silicon Valley. Yeah. So tell me a little bit in regards to that book, People's History of Silicon Valley, which you just finished. I'm wondering what your hope, your purpose in that. I mean, you explained a little bit. You're trying to tell a different side of the story, the mainstream story. So what specifically, what were you hoping to get across or to accomplish with that book?

Yeah, so generally, the idea of a people's history, which, you know, there's no patent or copyright in that term. Howard Zinn, the historian, wrote People's History of the United States, which was sort of his attempt to write history not as told through the lens of the richest and the most successful and the people who generally write the history, I guess, to have a perspective on the United States as told by, for lack of a better term, like the oppressed over time

and paying attention to the particular struggles that people went through in building the country. And so there have been a lot of other books in that vein that have the title People's History in them. There's People's History of the World, People's History of London, People's History of Ancient Greece, lots that have taken the tack of covering the history of the different places from the perspective of the underclass. And so I had been writing a lot of tech criticism and I got in a conversation with this publisher, Squint Books, that's publishing the book, about writing a book like this.

And it's interesting because it's a different challenge. The thing about Silicon Valley is that it's not really just a place like London or the United States or ancient Greece is. It's also kind of ethereal. The term Silicon Valley has become synonymous with the tech industry. It's not just the Santa Clara Valley. And so the thing about writing people's history of Silicon Valley is that you have to cover how the tech industry has affected people's lives across the entire world. When someone at Uber changes how the algorithm works for picking up rides, like an

Uber driver in Mumbai is affected. Or if Facebook all of a sudden changes the way that you see things in your timeline, like a small family business in Beijing may suddenly have fewer customers. So the decisions and the choices that a small number of people, you know, engineers and CEOs, the decisions that those engineers and CEOs make in Silicon Valley have repercussions across the whole world and can sometimes radically affect or ruin people's lives overnight. And that's profoundly undemocratic, the way that Silicon Valley can affect people like that. And a small number of sort of rich people can manipulate people's lives so suddenly

and quickly because they can rewrite the algorithms that govern them. So the book is an attempt to write a dual history that's both about the people physically who live in Silicon Valley, the workers, and also the way that the technology that people in Silicon Valley are making and how it affects everyday people's lives, while also telling the larger story of how people across the whole world are implicated in making the tech industry function and providing the profits that make Silicon Valley be perceived as this really wealthy place where there's a renaissance happening, as some CEOs like to say.

Yeah, I really liked how you started the book sort of broadening out the boundaries. One would technically would say maybe, I don't know, Silicon Valley stretches from San Jose to San Francisco, you know, something like that. But you broadened it out to really encompass all of the places where sort of the the algorithmic tentacles spread out and reach out to I really appreciated that. I think a lot of people would think, you know, they would think about the Congo, and the coltan mining and that kind of thing. But it's a little bit more subtle than that, too, they would think about the Congo and the coltan mining and that kind of thing. But it's a little bit more subtle than that, too, like you described with the changing the algorithm could affect a worker in a completely different country that has no idea why something has all of a sudden changed on their app.

Right. So I'm wondering if you could maybe just sketch a brief picture of the deeper history of Silicon Valley. Maybe you go through the book, you go through like pre-colonial times a little bit and then up through its agricultural peak. Like you said, it was known as the Valley of Heart's Delight for some time. And then it sort of extends out and has some ties to the Cold War and the defense contracts and all of that stuff. I'm wondering if you could maybe just do a brief outline of that deeper history. Yeah. So as you were saying, the soil and what we call Silicon Valley, I mean, a lot of the soil in the Bay Area, it's some of the richest, most fertile soil in the entire world. I mean, there's a reason that California is half of the produce in the country is grown here. But unsurprisingly, it was called the Valley of Hearts to Light because of all the orchards, all the peaches and plums and apricot trees that lined El Camino Real, what's now mostly Highway 101, from San Jose all the way up to San Francisco. And that area became largely because of military

contracts and defense contracts and war. A lot of the Santa Clara Valley region became home to radio companies that made different components for both commercial and military use radios, semiconductors. And shortly after, like in the 60s, which is, you know, a little bit after when the Cold War was still happening and there was still a lot of military contracts, but actual war was World War II was a memory. The counterculture movement also happened here. And so, you know, I would say in the history of Silicon Valley, the presence of the radio industry and those manufacturers combined with the development of the internet, which happened later, and then especially the

counterculture movement happening here. I mean, it's interesting because there was a lot of engineers and such who were working in computing and making early computers and working with early computers or things like that here. And at the same time, the presence of the counterculture movement meant that a lot of people tied these two ideas together. There were lots of hippies who thought computers were these revolutionary machines that were going to free us in some way. And the internet also enhanced that feeling for a lot of people. There are people who thought that if we network computers together, it would just sort of innately lead to these anti-authoritarian free networks where we could all communicate without any

government or corporate control having any involvement in our lives or how we think or anything like this and that we were going to be completely freed by these machines. And even a lot of these people are still alive and are like millionaires now. But Steve Wozniak

was part of that crew and Steve Jobs believed that, both of them. They very much were utopian in what they thought about computers. And that's a sentiment that carries over to today. But in hindsight, these things always make sense, but I don't think you could have gone back in time and predicted that Silicon Valley would happen here, precisely what would happen here, that you would get this very bizarre, extremely unequal, rich suburb, you know, mixed with office complexes that is like, you know, the one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in the world. You wouldn't have been able to predict how it would look today, or a show like Silicon Valley, the HBO show, I mean,

that sort of vicious satire on it if you'd gone back 100 years and seen just like the radio semiconductor manufacturers here. So it's only in hindsight that these things make sense. Right. Yeah. So it's interesting in the 60s and I guess the 70s, there's this sort of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, right? They write about the California ideology, like what you're describing, the weird mixture of hippie culture and sort of a libertarian tech utopianism, which combined to really create the culture that we have here now, which is libertarian and tech utopian and also has a weird tinge of like, Burning Man culture, I guess, like hippie culture to it a little bit. So yeah, sketch out sort of what happened in the 80s,

sort of when the modern tech era began, and how guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and other early leaders of these major tech companies around that time, how they sort of capitalized off of what was going on. And a lot of this idea that you write about is like trying to raise many boats with this rising tide but ultimately most boats have not risen in silicon valley because of everything that's going on with tech so i'm wondering if you can just maybe describe that contrast and and how that emerged as as the tech boom began yeah silicon valley Silicon Valley, in terms of being, I mean, I would constitute it as always having been a bubble. It's never equally affected everyone who lives in the region. It's always created, I think, probably more displacement than it creates wealth. And

the wealth is always super unevenly distributed. Back in the 80s, you know, when it was sort of a pre, I mean, the internet, as we know now, didn't quite exist in the same way. But there was a lot of venture capitalists, similar to how there are now, who were just obsessed with the idea of computers and computing and would just give vast sums of money to these startups just because they did something vaguely computer. That's interesting because there's a pattern that keeps happening. It happened in the 80s. It happened in the 90s. It happened with social media startups and the aughts. So there's kind of like a history of these boom-bust cycles in Silicon Valley. And partly that is because of what we were talking about before with computers and the

internet and smartphones. They all symbolize some kind of utopian promise or some type of making us all better and smarter and more improved people promise, which I think a lot of people in the tech industry, whether they know it or not, they or their marketers consciously exploit that to make their companies seem more valuable both to people who use their products and to investors. to people who use their products and to investors. But to go back to your question, I mean, it's unsurprising that so many tech CEOs and so many people who work in tech have really libertarian beliefs, like kind of ignore the social realm or don't think of themselves as products of society, but just sort of these individualistic ubermenches

who, by the virtue of their own genius and brilliance, create these amazing products, which is patently not true in any case, whether it's the iPhone or anything else. But by having libertarian politics and by a lot of these rich people spending money either directly or through their companies on lobbyists that lobby against things like fair taxation or having their products, which are developed with a lot of public money, ultimately actually have any of that money go back directly to public offers. They've ensured that there's going to be income inequality in the Bay Area for a long time to come. You know, it's always astounding to think that San Francisco

is lauded as one of the wealthiest cities in the country in terms of how much wealth is here. And yet there's so much poverty here because it's just not distributed. The wealth isn't taxed in the right way. The city doesn't get any of the money. And that's, you know, the tech industry also, the people who work in it, because they tend to have libertarian politics, they're not interested in that. And I mean, I think that a lot of the things that we think of as being intrinsic to the tech industry or to Silicon Valley were created by public money and like with public dollars. of the things that we think of as being intrinsic to the tech industry or to Silicon Valley were

created by public money and with public dollars. And the US government has a really bad history of inventing things or coming up with things with public money and then not in the way that a company, if they came up with an idea, they would patent it and then they would reap the money from it for decades. Our government does not do that. And a lot of the basis of what the internet is was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects group in the Pentagon. And a huge amount of the technology in the iPhone was created with public money. But those pieces of the iPhone or the internet aren't patented in the same way that Apple or Microsoft patent their things.

So they're essentially just giving away these goods towards private profits. I think one of the most egregious examples to me is the GPS system. Think about how much wealth is created with GPS. Uber couldn't exist without GPS. Lyft, Google Maps, Apple Maps, any

mobile mapping tool you have couldn't exist without GPS. They could exist, but they would be based only on your nearby Wi-Fi networks and cell networks, and they'd be way less accurate. GPS allows your phone or computer to know where you are within a few feet. And those are all government satellites. Billions and billions of dollars were spent by the U.S. government to put those up.

And when tech companies use them to create these products, they don't pay any money to them, even though taxpayers funded them. Yeah, it's so interesting because if we talk about capitalism in a way that is critical, a lot of the times people will call that hypocritical and say, oh, you're using an iPhone, which has been created by capitalism to critique capitalism. And it happens all the time. It's like a talking point among a lot of these defenders of the status quo, essentially. And it was really illuminating your book to read yet GPS, but also so many other components that go into the iPhone in particular, like the touchscreen and just all

sorts of I mean, going all the way down to just the processors, right? Everything was created with public funding. Yeah. It seems like that's just a the whole model of Silicon Valley is to you look at Uber, for example, and the way that works, it's like they're not really doing anything. They're providing an app that connects one person to another person, but they're not, Uber is not doing anything, really. They're just taking a cut off of other people's labor. And it seems like the whole system, the whole industry, I should say, is sort of based off of that idea. Just how do you profit from other people's work? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the platforms, as they're called, things

like Uber and Facebook and Twitter, the labor is all distributed largely, aside from the engineers who do the backend coding or whatever, the actual labor that makes those things function is all distributed just through users slash drivers in the case of Uber. And yeah, I agree. I mean, if there was some way to launch it initially, there's no reason that Facebook or Twitter or Uber couldn't just be like cooperatives run by the users in the case of Twitter and Facebook or the drivers in the case of Uber or Lyft. Everyday people who want to drive or make extra money don't generally have the means to start the initial investment to create a platform like that and to get it big. But I think, you know, Airbnb, too, those are all, I think, good examples of like it's like they're all middlemen that just own the clock in clock out machine basically and take a cut on every ride.

So there is an idea that I think Silicon Valley has done a very good job of sort of running this PR campaign to convince people that this is an incredibly progressive place. Yeah. And in many ways it is. But at the same time, when we look at a lot of what's going on within certain companies in terms of wage gaps and in terms of racial discrimination, and that kind of stuff. Internally, it's not a very progressive place, right? When you're actually in the workplace. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, because I read there's a there's a great Onion article that the headline is something like, you know, the Kraft Foods company invests $100 million in employee innovation center to have saunas and massages for their employees and organic food cafes. The joke is that only in Silicon Valley

do companies treat their employees so differently. It's an interesting question raised by the internet, which is why do employees of tech companies have saunas and these fun, weird work environments and the employees of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Corporation just sort of have cubes, right? Part of the brilliance of Silicon Valley

is that it's like this branding or this marketing idea I mentioned before, that they're exporting the future that they create, these utopias. They perpetuate that even through office design. These little things that we think of as being such amazing amenities, they actually are part of a system of control to make their employees want to stay at work forever and not necessarily want to go home or even need to go home

because they have food at work and have laundry at work and even beds if they stay late at work. It's what's sort of what's sometimes called the golden handcuffs effect. And you see that too just in their rhetoric. I mean, like more so than I think most other industries, most people in Silicon Valley, most employees who are just being exploited by their employer who's taking a cut of their surplus labor like any other standard for-profit company, they don't relate to each other, their employees. They don't relate to other workers.

They relate to the CEO. They think that anybody can become a CEO and a founder if they just put their mind to it. And so they often will relate less with other exploited workers and employees and more with the rich people who sort of have all these tricks and systems built in place to like, you know, wring as much work out of them as possible and pay them much less than they're worth.

I mean, you may remember in the book, there's like this really egregious case that isn't talked about as much as it should be, but a huge number of the biggest tech companies, including Apple, colluded to keep their engineers' wages down in the 2000s, which is totally illegal. I mean, you can't go to, you know, Apple isn't allowed to talk to Adobe and say,

hey, we're only going to pay our engineers this much, so do the same so that we both save money and work. But that was basically what happened. And the amount of money that these engineers, being a software engineer, it's already a very high-paying job. But even with all the perks and amenities that we think of as the sort of modern-day tech royalty that software engineers are being paid, it's still much less than they're worth and much less than the companies actually wring out of them.

And the fact that they're willing to collude to avoid them making more is kind of astonishing. It's also astonishing that a lot of software engineers didn't wake up and think, oh wow, my employer actually doesn't care about me. But yeah, there's way more exploitation in the tech industry than I think people realize because a lot of it's white-collar labor. Not to say that there isn't a huge sort of blue-collar class of manufacturers who produce these products. Often that happens overseas.

But when we think of Silicon Valley, I think what's most visible to most people is the white-collar labor. And I wasn't surprised personally because I researched this stuff quite a bit. But I think a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley might be surprised to realize that a lot of these companies, Tesla, for example, being one of the biggest are really staunchly anti-union and go to pretty great lengths to punish and avoid by any means their employees joining unions. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Silicon Valley has always been very anti-labor. And there's an article that was published in the late 80s, early 90s that I quote in the book, actually, that talks about this.

I think it was like an AP report, so it was sort of written in that kind of neutral tone. But some of the quotes in it are really interesting and speak to that sort of California ideology or the sort of Silicon Valley mindset. Like a lot of employees, like I said, relate to the boss, not to each other. So that belief keeps them from thinking they need a union because they're like, well, what if I'm the boss? What if I'm a founder someday and I want to pay my workers less or don't want them to have benefits or want to have more control over them? And another idea, you hear this in other industries,

but I think more in Silicon Valley is like, Silicon Valley management will argue that unions are outmoded or they're not innovative or that there are these old stodgy things that we don't need anymore because we advance beyond them because we have some, I don't know, Silicon Valley is just innately different, which it's not. I would say if the book has one big point, it's like trying to shatter this illusion

that Silicon Valley and the tech industry is somehow inherently different than any other capitalist enterprise. It's not. It's really hard for people to see that, I think, because of how the ideas around it and the marketing around the tech industry is trafficked in our society, in our culture. And it also has to do with kind of like how Western civilization generally in post-Enlightenment world where like the only real universal reference point that a lot of us have

or a lot of us believe in is science, right? We don't live in a religious society anymore where everybody looks to the same God. But science tends to be a very universal thing that a lot of people believe in. I mean, it's like a reference point, empiricism, I should say, generally. So because Silicon Valley traffics in like, you know, technology and science are considered so closely related and the way that they manipulate reality as it were, but, you know, use physics and engineering to create such wonderful devices

and software and stuff like that. It really plays to this kind of deep cultural idea of this is how our civilization finds meaning and this is the only universal thing our civilization has is science and technology. Even though, I mean, something else I try to show is that the idea of technology is actually quite shaky, right? The idea of something being more technologically advanced than something else is really shaky. Silicon Valley has done a really good job of capitalizing on the mere idea of what technology is and means in a way that I think is kind of dangerous.

I don't think you can actually say objectively that the new iPhone is more technologically advanced than an iPhone 4 or something like that. There's a very specific definition of technology you need to have to be able to say that. Or to say that even digital communication is more technologically advanced than analog communication. The whole idea of technology is defined by these corporations, and I think that's dangerous. You wanted to mention the Juicero? I think that's dangerous.

You wanted to mention the Juicero? I was totally just going to ask you to talk about Juicero. I think it's the best symbolic example of all of this. Yeah, so the Juicero was a very extremely over-engineered, I think it cost $400 or $500. It basically was this really over-engineered device that squeezed juice packets. So it would be this packet of liquid, kind of like it looked like a blood or an IV bag.

And you would stick it in and it would squeeze it and put it into a cup for you. And it had like an RFID on it or like a barcode that told you where the juice was from and when it was taken from the orange or the apple or whatever it was from, which is also information that you could just write on it. I mean, you could use a pencil to achieve that. But so like this product is a classic example of having a company that controls the subscription model. It's kind of like the Netflix or the iTunes

model, but applied to juice, which is like you buy the thing and maybe the thing is cheap, like you buy the TV or you buy the phone and then you have a subscription to the music for the rest of your life. So you're locked into this system. And the Juicero was the same thing where you can only buy the Juicero branded products to make juice from it. And so it was like you get the Juicero

and then you can't, it's not like a blender. You can put anything in the blender. You have to put the Juicero branded bag in it. So I mean, you can see already, there's a lot of weird things about this. Like is that more technologically advanced than, I don't know, a blender? Or like the little juicers you grind oranges on,

which you don't even need electricity for. Those have existed for several millennia at least. Yeah, but it's Wi-Fi enabled. It's Wi-Fi enabled, and you have to pay for the rest of your life to buy the juice packets. And yeah, so some reporters discovered when the product came out that you could just ring the juice bags by hand. You didn't even need this over-inch.

You had a machine to squeeze them for you. You could just squeeze them by yourself. And that was when the bottom started to fall out from under in this company. I mean, the amazing thing about the Juicero was I believe that the collective amount of capital invested, it was around $400 million. I mean, just think about how much public housing you could pay for in the Bay Area, that kind of stuff. We talk about wealth being distributed unequally in the Bay Area. A lot of it was from Google about wealth being distributed unequally in the Bay Area. A lot of it was from Google, too, which I think shows, like Google has a venture capital

arm, which I think shows how they think about the world, right? Like the higher-ups at Google were literally thinking, like, think about their ideas of what technology is and what high-tech is. You could make fresher juice with technology that's 3,000 years old. So which is more technologically advanced? You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Keith A. Spencer, author of the book A People's History of Silicon Valley, How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy, and Undermines Democracy.

We'll be back after a brief music break. I'm leaving here baby Don't know where I'm found I'm tired of feeling like a stranger In my own home town. That's why I made up my mind to leave this silicone world behind. Gone are the places I used to go Gone are my friends, they don't live here no more That's why I made up my mind

To leave this civil car The world behind ¶¶ guitar solo Well, all the people tell me That's just the way it is, boy And if you can't beat them, join them Or find someplace else to live Well, I want to tell you people That's just what I'll do Cause I'd rather leave my happy home

Live next door to you One of these days I might come home and smell the sweet breeze Blowing cool across the bay But until then I've made up my mind Leave this silicon world behind. I'm gonna leave this silicon world behind.

I'm gonna leave this world behind. That was Silicon World by the California Honey Drops. I'm Della Duncan, and you're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Keith A. Spencer, author of the book A People's History of Silicon Valley, How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erod, erodes privacy, and undermines democracy. You were talking about how we define what iPhone is more advanced as the new versions come out, how much of a technological advancement those things are. I feel like Silicon Valley has done such a good job of convincing us that you have like the iPhone, whatever X, I guess, or whatever it is now. And before that, it was like the eight. And it wasn't that long between those two versions

that came out. Yeah. And you think like, they and I feel this too, even someone that's like relatively conscious of this. I'm like, I had an older iPhone. And I was like, Oh, man, getting the next iphone feel like i would have a few other features and maybe i need to start considering upgrading and you think about how like from the beginning of humanity to like when the first iphone was created how much went into creating that product in terms of the knowledge and information and the resources and right all of that stuff and then in a matter of months it's junk right like you need to upgrade to a new version it's just such a unsustainable in so many ways but even environmentally this

whole idea is just so dangerous yeah it's very unsustainable and it's it's astonishing how much waste is produced and i mean what's most astonishing too is like how a lot of the tech companies brand themselves as green or environmentally friendly at the you know as we're talking the uh apple had its announcement for the its new iphones at its press event about i think it was six days ago and And at that event, you know, there was a whole big spiel. They had a big segment about how they're the greenest company ever because they power their data centers with solar energy. But I mean, the amount of resources and waste produced by one fund. I mean, something that people don't think about is like,

you know, the way mining works is that generally most metals, whether it's aluminum or titanium, the ore tends to have about, you know, around one in a thousand to one in a hundred thousand parts of what you actually want. So like a titanium rich ore might have one in a thousand parts titanium before they refine it or something like that. It varies depending on the metal. But the point is that for every ounce of aluminum, there's a pile of a quarter ton maybe of dirt somewhere. A lot of metals are like that, you know, so like for every phone you see, I mean, the amount of just try to imagine a huge pile of like, you know, waste sitting somewhere on earth that created that phone that's sort of been run through and now is just eroding in a pile somewhere. And, you know, and that applies to some

degree to the things inside it. There's, I mean, there's a lot of different metals inside your iPhone, lead, aluminum, titanium, tantalum, one of the most intensive ones and rarest, lithium, and a huge amount of waste produced as a result. But yeah, I mean, to go back to the other thing you were talking about, your iPhone, about the more advanced iPhone, the new iPhones coming out and desiring that new one. A lot of what passes for technologically advanced or what these tech companies sell us that's technologically advanced is actually really just what makes them more money. And that's something that we've sort of slipped into culturally is not questioning.

So Apple knows that. So people who have larger phone screens spend more time looking at their phone. And people who spend more time looking at their phone spend more money on apps and stuff. And Apple makes money if you buy, like every time you buy an app on their store or make a purchase through the app store on your iPhone, same with the Google phones too, but through their specific store. But every time you buy something, the maker gets a cut of that.

I think with Apple it's around 30%. So they want you to have a bigger phone because they make more money. So the sort of increasing size of these phones, like you can't buy the smaller iPhones. They've been getting bigger and bigger over the years. That's not because they're more technologically advanced or, you know, and the same with the screens. The screens displays get richer and richer and more engaging. I mean, it's not, I guess you could call that advanced, but why are they developing in that way, in that direction?

It's because Apple, these make Apple the most money. And that happens a lot with the tech industry. The same with the quick turnaround, the fact that phones only last, you know, you feel compelled to upgrade every year or two. Obviously, that makes the more phones you buy, the more often you upgrade, the more money they make. Right. I want to stick with this idea of the. It's kind of a common feature among all these tech companies is this idea of manipulating people in order to use their products and sort of get in a way addicted to their products, which really is exactly what's going on with a lot of these social media companies. going on with a lot of these social media companies. And I think you may have used this quote in the book, the idea of if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Right. And so can you maybe just talk about how like, yeah, we talked a little bit about how it's done with the actual hardware in terms of what, you know, Apple does, but also just in terms of

these social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of that kind of stuff. Instagram is owned by Facebook, but you know what I mean? Yeah, what's going on there? Yeah, so basically, I mean, generally, whenever something online is free to read or peruse, it's not because the company is doing you a favor, but because they're making money by selling either your data or your eyeballs. So most magazines and newspapers are free to read online. And that's because you look at their ads. In exchange for seeing the newspaper, you see their ads,

and that's how they pay for the journalism or whatever. But with the big social media giants like Twitter and Facebook they're a little different even than just a normal site like a newspaper your your GeoCities site or something like that which is that they have these increasingly sophisticated means of mining your information your personal information your personal data, your connections in every way as much as possible to build sort of a profile of you. And then they both sell that data to people like advertisers or credit card companies or anything like that, and also figure

out ways to market you things that you'll want based on what they know about you. And they get better and better at this, the more stuff that you put in there and the more they know about you. And they get better and better at this the more stuff that you put in there and the more they know about you. So there's this way that sites, particularly Facebook, will compel you to spend as much time in it as possible, to put in as much personal information as possible. And they also monitor you in increasingly sophisticated ways,

like how long your cursor hovers over something on Facebook's page is studied. If you start typing something in a status or in a comment and then delete it and don't ever post it, they keep track of that. Yeah, I didn't know that. That was so shocking to me. It doesn't even have to be posted. They keep all of that information. It's incredible. Yeah, and with Facebook, the bigger the company is, the more that they have people working on ways to monitor you everywhere. With Facebook, you may have the app on your phone,

and if you keep it running in the background, it probably knows where you are at any given second and how you're moving around places. And if you check in in other locations, it knows that you've been to those places and makes a map of where you go and where you've been. So there's a couple things going on. One is the sort of impulse that they create for you to spend as much time in their thing as possible because the longer you're staring at it, the more money

they make and the more engaged you are with it. Another thing that Facebook and these social media companies do though is that they have the effect of simplifying emotion. They actually hire a lot of psychologists to study what keeps you coming back to a page or a site or what will keep you there on Facebook as long as possible or on Twitter as long as possible. And these little things like liking a post or having someone, seeing someone like your posts, right? Like they know that these little notifications that you get, like a friend liked your post. These are little dopamine boosts that you feel. There's actually a whole strategy that they know of how to distribute these

throughout the day to keep you checking the app as much as possible. You're not going to get spontaneously. I notice this on Twitter a lot. Actually, it's interesting. If somebody likes three posts you have, they'll sort of spread it out and give you three different notifications. They want you to be like, oh, this happened. Oh, I should check it. Oh, and then this happened. Oh, I should check Twitter. Again and again. So there's a lot of very manipulative psychology

that goes into engineering these platforms. And right now we're going through a sort of phase in our society where people are starting to realize how a lot of pundits and intellectuals are starting to have a deeper understanding of how harmful this can be, the sort of economy of likes, and how easy it is to manipulate people because a lot of people will like a post or something because of the way it sounds. And it's easier, obviously, to distort the truth online because there's all kinds of ways of presenting fraudulent information in a way that is compelling or that gets the most sensationalist

in a way that riles people up. And you want to rile people up. I mean, that's the way that Facebook and Twitter have changed a lot of journalism, is that there's more of a need to resonate emotionally with people or create these kind of clickbait headlines to draw people in because media companies don't make money until you

actually click on the thing. It's not like the old days where you buy the paper and then you paid for it and the headlines don't have to be all clickbaity because you've already paid for the paper. There's no reason to do that. But online media, the free model is different. And weirdly, Facebook and Twitter are middlemen in this situation. Like, they take cuts from magazines like the one I work for, Salon. Like, they encourage us to publish on their sort of specific platform. Well, Facebook particularly, not Twitter as much. And then Facebook takes a cut of the view revenue. So they're immensely powerful. I mean, they're, and again, this is like, you know, like the example I gave before talking about economic democracy this is not a democratic situation

these companies have no prior precedent in history they're not quite media companies and they're not quite telecom companies and they're not quite newspapers and they're not quite phone books there's something that's all together in between and the amount of power they have over information and the way that we think is just astonishing and very unregulated, under-regulated, I should say. Right. They spend quite a bit of energy

lobbying. I think you write about how the model is to sort of break the rules and then sort of ask for forgiveness. Yeah, ask for forgiveness instead of permission. Yeah. I think Uber would be a classic example of that, right? Like they bust into cities and do all of this stuff that's often illegal, but then they can get away with it like they did in San Francisco. often illegal, but then they can get away with it like they did in San Francisco. They just dump a ton of money into the political system and they get their way. Yeah, definitely. It's also something that's happened a lot in the history of capitalism.

Like I know that the banks in the sort of robber baron era in the early 20th century, late 19th century, a lot of the finance industry was really similar where they would do sort of flagrantly illegal things and then ask for forgiveness later so that's another again that's another interesting thing about silicon valley that we think of as unique but actually predates them and is sort of a general very dominant companies that have a social position that is thought of as oh you're doing good things overall for the world feel like they can get away with that. Yeah. So I'm wondering, the show's called Upstream. And I'm wondering if we can sort of put that frame around, if we put that frame around Silicon Valley, and if you were to go upstream, and sort of look at what root causes that are tying all of these problems that we've been talking about today? Is there a root cause? Are there

a few different root causes? What do you think you would see if you were to go upstream and look at why all of this is happening? Generally, it's like many social ills that seem to be perpetuated by many industries. It's really just a sort of trickle-down effect of capitalism in the way that it molds people and molds culture. But if you wanted to sort of like a social democratic solution or explanation, I mean, I think that you could argue that if people who were involved in a lot of these platforms, like we mentioned before, a lot of these things that are causing immense social laws are technically platforms, right. Uber's a platform, Facebook is a platform. If we had some type of

inbuilt model of platform cooperativism where anybody who was participating was an owner, you wouldn't have the same problems because you wouldn't have a sort of central exploitative force that was pushing for these things. And if at the same time, the taxpayers were somehow getting recompensated for all the technology that they created with their money that is making all these people rich, you know, you could use that to fund public housing. I mean, it's interesting because there's a lot of different situations that often go outside specifically the tech industry. Like why is housing a commodity and not a right? I mean, in the Bay Area, especially, it's very, in areas where housing

is cheap, it's not often as much of a problem finding an affordable place to live, especially for working class people. But in the Bay Area, it's almost impossible. And it leads to all kinds of social ills as a result of housing being so expensive. So if housing were a right and not a commodity, I think that aspect of the social equation would be solved. And I think if platforms were democratized, it would not be as much of a problem. And even, I mean, even if a lot of Silicon Valley workers were unionized, that would be immensely redistributive economically in terms of actually redistributing wealth in the Bay Area and making it a more equal place. Did you, did you want to talk more about the, it sounded like you were gonna get into

the idea of capitalism and then you decided to come downstream a little bit? Or was I just misinterpreting that? I mean, okay, if you were to go really far upstream, I mean, I think that the problems are, one, housing is a commodity and not a right. Two, that the way that we think of is, we think of companies as existing, right, is that it's normal for there to be sort of these top-down entities, publicly held companies or private companies, where there's

someone at the top who's making money off all the people below them as opposed to co-ops are more unusual they're thought of as an as aberrant but if that relationship were inverted and the dominant model of any business was a worker on cooperative then again there wouldn't be the same incentive to exploit and manipulate employees because they would own it themselves. And yeah, I mean, those two things, some type of shift in those two things would change a lot of the way the Bay Area looked and felt. And I think that we may not have the same, you know, in a non-capitalist society, you wouldn't really have the same issue with planned obsolescence that we have and the sort of motivation to manipulate people, to get them to spend as much

time in your site as possible. I mean, I work in media, so I think a lot about what like media would look like as some sort of democratized model. Because I mean, like, you know, people often think about journalism as the fourth estate as being intrinsic to the operation of democracy. But the problem is that journalism is generally a for-profit venture. I mean, that's why we have clickbait. And if we had some type of sort of like institutional model that was similar to like a university or like big nonprofits and all journalistic outfits were kind of similar to a university and having an endowment and journalists could get tenure

so that they would be allowed to investigate whatever stories they wanted without fear of reprisal from their employer. That would solve a lot of the problems with like clickbait. So I think, yeah, that's the upstream view, I would say. Yeah, yeah, completely. It's interesting because a lot of people associate the advent of the internet and all this technology with the idea of you know the profit motive and in hierarchy and everything that comes with capitalism and i think it's it's really the opposite i think that a lot of this stuff like we were talking about earlier was generated through um the pooling together investment yeah exactly public investment yeah and yeah the profit motive kind of ruined it

yeah yeah or it wasn't involved. The internet was both as the DARPA project and as a CERN project was not done for profit at all. I think one of the most astonishing things about the internet that people don't really know is that advertisements were banned online until the late 80s, early 90s or so. I can't remember exactly when, but around then. There were a lot of listservs before the World Wide Web existed

where the main way people would communicate was on these boards and these listservs. You can still read a lot of these online, actually. A lot of them are archived. You're having a longer discussion through the context of emails and then the emails are archived. It looks like a forum basically. But there are a lot of big arguments when someone would occasionally try to advertise

a product or a book or something that they had on these things and people get angry because they're like, no, this is not a for-profit place. This is a utopian kind of, or not utopian, but even just a non-capitalist space. And it's kind of sad when you think about what the internet could be if it was not a commercial place. I mean, like we can't even imagine it anymore, I think, because we so accept this is a place where you shop, where you construct a brand of yourself on social media,

you know, where you find information, but that information always is coded in a way that it's selling something to you. Our whole idea of the internet has been skewed. I mean, I feel lucky even though I'm not that old. I was just on the verge of, you know, like I remember using the text only internet. My mom had a university account. We had a browser without frames, which you would access by going through like a Unix telnet terminal. And I remember like using the internet then and it was so different i mean i i

i'm glad that i have that memory because i don't think someone who's 10 or 12 years younger than me could imagine that you know but that was real and that existed you can still see you can go find the old bbs forums and listservs and stuff archived in pages like Google Groups and see how people communicated and thought to communicate in a time before social media and before the internet was a place where you go to buy things. Great. Well, thank you so much, Keith. Okay. Thanks so much, Robert. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Keith A. Spencer, author of the book A People's History of Silicon Valley, How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy, and Undermines Democracy,

just out by Squint Books. The interview was conducted by Upstream co-producer Robert Raymond, who's got a brief message for you. new podcast that's all about radical disaster recovery. It's called The Response, and it focuses on sort of the remarkable communities that arise after disasters, inspired by the work of Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein and others. And so the first season includes an episode examining Occupy Sandy's relief work in the Rockaways in New York City after Hurricane Sandy. Then we have an episode featuring the radical mutual aid centers that are popping up all over the island of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit. And finally, we did an in-depth exploration of how the Tubbs

wildfire last year in California impacted the undocumented community of Santa Rosa. You can head over to theresponsepodcast.org, that's all one word, theresponsepodcast.org, to listen and to learn more about the project. Thanks, Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate.

Because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit organization Independent Arts and Media, any donations that you make to Upstream are tax-exempt. You can listen to any of our past conversations and documentaries at upstreampodcast.org, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Upstream Podcast, and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts to get episodes delivered to you directly. Snowgates rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our bones that break Into the morning we run

To the shoreline Calling us to speak the sight Lights under the earth and rose Casting mostly shadows Tall like giants As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea

Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea S'un s'eve Thank you. O Oh Oh