Upstream - Abolishing Silicon Valley with Wendy Liu

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

The idea of Silicon Valley means many things to many people. The most prominent associations with this region and culture probably have to do with the tech industry — but that’s not the whole story. Not even close. There’s a dark side to Silicon Valley that doesn’t always make it into mainstream conversations and popular assumptions. Beneath the image there is a stark reality. In this Upstream Conversation, we spoke with Wendy Liu, an author and Silicon Valley insider turned critic. Her debut book, Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism, is a memoir and a manifesto on how to transform the tech industry from the hypercapitalist culture of inequality, gentrification, and greed that it is to something more equitable, accessible, and supportive of the real disruptions we need today.  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.

Oh When I kind of you know took a step back and started paying attention not just to the tech industry, but also to the underlying economic and social principles of capitalism, it became clear that whatever Silicon Valley was doing, it wasn't exogenous. It wasn't like some alien force coming out of nowhere to impose a weird set of principles that had nothing to do with capitalism. Silicon Valley was just taking the core operating tenets of capitalism and just doing them really well the companies that we revere in the industry are the ones that have scaled so quickly and have

grown to just these massive massive sizes in a very short period of time and they've done it in a way that allows them to maintain power in a very concentrated hyper capitalist way and so yeah like once I looked at it, I was like, oh, well, it's not actually about the tech industry, right? Like the tech industry is just concentrating the most fundamental principles of capitalism. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation, we're speaking with former insider turned critic, Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon Valley,

How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. Upstream is a labor of love. To help us produce more content, consider making a one-time donation or a monthly contribution at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you. Thank you so much again, Wendy, for joining me on Upstream. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I've been a fan of Upstream for quite a while now. I remember, I think you guys made some stickers that were about, you don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. And I thought that was hilarious. And I ordered some. Oh, that's so fun to hear. I had no idea. That's wonderful. Wow. Would you mind by just

introducing yourself for our listeners? How would you describe yourself? Sure. Yeah, that's about, you know, not necessarily an easy question for me to answer. But I guess the reason I'm on the show today is because I wrote a book called Abolish Silicon Valley, which is a, you know, a provocative title. And the book is part memoir, part polemic, I guess it's, you know, it's a mixture of my personal story of disillusionment with Silicon Valley and capitalism as a whole. But it's also, you know, an attempt to look at how the industry works and why it is the way it is. Beautiful. Yeah, I was just, I just so enjoyed both getting to know you through reading it. I found it very vulnerable. And also, I loved finding the ways in which you kind of started to become disillusioned.

I mean, of course, I don't love that, but it was it was so fascinating to see those moments. love that. But it was so fascinating to see those moments and then to see the journey that you've taken since those moments to proposing alternatives and asking really excellent questions. So yeah, really excited to chat about your book and all of that. So maybe for the audience, though, what would you say is your relationship with this thing called Silicon Valley? And what is it? How would you describe Silicon Valley? Because many of our listeners are international. Maybe they don't quite know what we mean by that. Yeah, I think I mean, even those who work in Silicon Valley don't always know what it means. It's a it's almost a deliberately amorphous concept. But the way I would describe it is that it's similar to Wall Street in that, you know, it's associated with a

geographic region, but it's not just that region. And it's about an industry, but it's not just about industry. It's also about a kind of a way of doing things. It's a paradigm. And so, you know, when we think of Wall Street, we think of people in New York mostly, but also, you know, around the world who are part of this global financial system that is mostly driven by America, but is, again, not just limited to America. And in the case of Silicon Valley, what you have is an industry that sort of revolves around technology, but has gone beyond just software. And moreover, it's driven by a particular way of funding companies and owning companies and developing companies that is definitely entwined with American interests because it's headquartered, I guess, in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it's

not just about the U.S., it's not just about California. So it's a little tricky to talk about because there are a lot of different things we mean when we say Silicon Valley. Most people would think of maybe Apple or Facebook or Google or maybe younger companies like Uber or Airbnb, but it also encompasses the ones that are less successful, like, for example, Theranos or WeWork or just the vast number of startups that never actually get off the ground. And my personal relationship with Silicon Valley is that I fell in love with the place from a pretty young age, or at least what I understood as Silicon Valley. When I was around 12 years old,

I started programming, I started making websites, and I started just spending a lot of time on the internet and becoming deeply enamored with what I thought of as hacker culture, internet culture, I don't know, the atmosphere of programming and everything that implied. And so I learned about venture capital, I learned about startups and how they worked. And so I learned about venture capital. I learned about startups and how they worked. And I really thought, oh, this is my destiny. I'm going to study computer science, you know, become a software engineer, maybe start a startup one day. I wasn't sure exactly what my path would be, but I knew that the kind of center of gravity for my life would be around Silicon Valley. And so, you know, I just, I really dove into it. I interned at Google in San Francisco

during college. And then afterward, I was planning to go back to Google as a full-time software engineer, but then ended up starting a startup instead. And, you know, at the time I was starting a startup, that was probably the peak of my love affair with Silicon Valley. I was just, you know, reading the blog posts and essays of all these famous venture capitalists. I would read tech news all the time. My heroes were people like Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes, embarrassingly enough. For those who don't know who Elizabeth Holmes is, she's the disgraced CEO and founder of Theranos, which is a company that raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was worth, I believe, several billion. I forget the exact amount, but then imploded because it turned out they didn't

really have any innovative technology. They were just really good at raising money. So yeah, that's an embarrassing thing in hindsight for me to think about the fact that one of the people I really hero worshipped in Silicon Valley is someone who turned out to kind of be a fraud and is now being investigated by the SEC. Wow. Yeah. Thank you for that.

And I hear that when we look back into our history, especially our livelihood, what we realize now. I know, you know, I really consider myself a renegade economist. And yet, when I was in undergrad at UC Davis, I actually did a project on how putting a Walmart in a developing country ups the human development index in that country, because that was the statistical analysis that I was asked to do. So I totally hear you on the things that we just took for granted or just assumed, right? And it also, I know, similar to you, I also have had these kind of moments of disillusionment or questioning around economics. I really relate

to that. So tell us about some of those moments then. You know, you said that you loved hacker culture. You really resonated with Silicon Valley. You were enamored with it. And then you said that you had this internship at Google. And then, of course, after college, started your own startup and got really involved with that culture. So what were some of the key moments when this kind of enamorment or this love for Silicon Valley started to unravel? I would say the way it worked for me is that it was a series of different things and, you know, all these different areas rather than like one moment. So because at the time, Silicon Valley meant a lot of different things to me. And in some way, I can kind of ignore some of the criticism.

You know, if one thing happened with one company, I can say, oh, that was just one company. But there was a period of time, maybe around 2014, 2015, when so many things were going wrong in Silicon Valley. And some things that come to mind include the way women are treated in the tech industry. Some things that come to mind include the way women are treated in the tech industry. There are a lot of stories that were coming out in the early 2010s about prominent women in the tech industry who just had horrific treatment at the workplaces or by venture capitalists they were trying to raise money from. They were being undermined. They were being dismissed. They were being preyed upon by these male founders and VCs. being preyed upon by these male founders and VCs. And I guess for a while I could think like, oh, well, maybe this is just an isolated incident.

Maybe it's just these particular women are just not cut out for the industry. But as these stories kind of kept piling up, it became harder to dismiss and it became harder to maintain my image of Silicon Valley as this meritocratic, amazing place where it didn't matter what your gender was or the color of your skin, as long as you were good at what you were doing, then you'd make it. And it seemed very clear to me that that wasn't quite as true. And at the same

time, I remember there were these things happening within the open source community, which is something I'd always felt a lot of gravitation towards. I did a lot of open source programming when I was first starting out, and I really believed in the idea of it. And there were these prominent men in the open source community, who I respected and revered, who just had these very weird attitudes towards women. And that made it difficult for me to continue to wholeheartedly believe in the industry. Because I think the way I thought of Silicon Valley is that it was more than just these for profit enterprises, but also had to do with the fact that you had all these open source programmers working on something really cool. And I really respected that. And I think once I started to lose faith in how those

communities were built, it was hard for me because at the same time, while that was going on, the for-profit corporations weren't doing so great either. I remember hearing about these suicides of Uber drivers in New York City and thinking, oh, I didn't know that was going to happen. I remember hearing about these suicides of Uber drivers in New York City and thinking, oh, I didn't know that was going to happen. I thought Uber was actually making life better for these people. I thought it was about giving people opportunities. How could this be happening? Something must be going wrong here. And then all these stories of Amazon warehouse workers started to trickle out. And then, you know, over the years, especially over the last few years, all these stories about Google and Microsoft and Facebook and how they have all these contractors who are not given the same privileges as full-time workers, while at the same time they're collaborating with, you know, the U.S. military or just all these other things that made it clear that these companies were not merely the underdogs and they were not just the good guys and so it felt like oh these are these

are massive corporations and it i felt kind of silly to not have realized that before that these are not it's not just about you know these small scrappy startups trying to make the world a better place it's about these multi-billion dollar corporations that are entwined with all these other systems of accumulation that are in bed with wall Street, in bed with the US military, in bed with ICE. And they are doing whatever they need to, to deliver return to their shareholders. And so once I started to realize that, it became clear that whatever lofty vision I'd had of Silicon Valley was just, it was just naive. It was me projecting something that wasn't actually there. And once I started to see what was actually there, I became a lot more cynical, a lot more hesitant, a lot more

concerned with what the industry was becoming. Thank you for describing that process. And I know in your book, you then talk about how you go into this deep dive of books, all these kind of, you know, post-capitalist or anti-capitalist books for months. And I just love reading that part and can just imagine all that you were learning. And it really shows through the book and what you then propose. And we'll get to that. But I also want to bring up, you mentioned the New York drivers related to Uber. And I actually, in preparation for speaking with you, I revisited the last post of Doug Shifter, who was a New York taxi driver who committed suicide in front of City Hall due to the negative effects on his livelihood and his

life of Uber and Lyft and other rideshare companies. And he said, the whole purpose of life is to learn, teach, and love, to care for each other, and yeah, just really touched by the impacts that Silicon Valley has had. And I'm wondering, what about inequality? What would you say is the connection? Because I know you're currently in San Francisco, right? And you've traveled, and so you've been in many different places. But what is the connection between Silicon Valley and inequality in the Bay Area, but also beyond? It's funny, that's exactly the question I set out

to answer when I started my master's degree, because my master's degree was in inequality. It was at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. And when I applied for the program, I didn't really know much about inequality. I didn't know what the term really meant. I didn't know what sort of disciplines looked at it. But, you know, I was at a phase of my life where I thought, well, I don't feel morally comfortable with what I was doing before, and I don't want to go back to it. So I want to instead understand why the world seems so broken and what can be done about it. And so, you know, the guiding question I had was, how does Silicon Valley contribute to inequality? And how is inequality manifested within the industry itself in terms of, you know, racial,

gender, other kinds of inequalities? And I think I came to a point where I realized that maybe wasn't the right question, where instead the question I should have been asking was, how does inequality fit within capitalism? And what is Silicon Valley doing to make it worse? Because when I kind of took a step back and started paying attention, not just to the tech industry, but also to the underlying economic and social principles of capitalism, it became clear that whatever Silicon Valley was doing, it wasn't exogenous.

It wasn't like some alien force coming out of nowhere to impose a weird set of principles that had nothing to do with capitalism. Silicon Valley was just taking the core operating tenets of capitalism and just doing them really well. The companies that we revere in the industry are the ones that have scaled so quickly and have grown to just these massive, massive sizes in a very short period of time. And they've done it in a way that allows them to maintain power in a very concentrated, hyper-capitalist way. And so, yeah, like once I looked at it, I was like, oh, well, it's not actually about the tech industry, right? Like the tech industry is just concentrating the most fundamental principles of capitalism. And so if I wanted to understand inequality and how that interacted with the tech industry,

I had to understand how capitalism worked. So from there, I kind of got to the point where it seemed like there were a lot of issues within the Bay Area, specifically around housing, around gentrification. And I think that's, it's a very difficult discussion to have because, you know, the people who are pro-Silicon Valley and who live in the Bay Area, like people who are pro-tech industry specifically, they will defend their industry with all of their might. They will say, well, you know, we're taxpayers. It's fine that I'm worth a hundred million dollars because I pay, you know, tiny percentage of my income in taxes or whatever. And it's a hard discussion to have because they really believe it

and because they really think that they've done everything right, that they've just followed the incentives that were in front of them. They followed the rules. And now there's a growing resistance to the tech industry and the massive wealth concentrated within it. And it's tricky because in a sense what you have is you have like a conflict of two different worlds. And the world that is represented by the tech industry is the greed is good world. It's the one that is epitomized by Silicon Valley's hyper capitalist philosophy.

And then there is another world where people just want to be able to live their lives without having to think about money all the time. And the other world, I think, is the one that I was not very aware of until very recently. But now that I'm thinking about it from this perspective, it makes a lot more sense to me than whatever the Silicon Valley ideology is. And I would say, like, the problem is that the Silicon Valley ethos doesn't really respect human rights. It doesn't respect social well-being. It doesn't really treat people as if they're worth anything. All it really optimizes for is growth and future profits and monopoly power. And here's the thing, like, that kind of model could maybe work on a small scale. If it was just limited to, you know, like a few people working on problems in their garages

and trying to build companies like that, it's probably not a big deal. But when you get to the point where this becomes a massive industry and there are billions and billions of dollars pouring into it to the point where the industry takes over, you know, an entire geographic region

and just drives up home prices, then it is very difficult. And so I think that going back to the question of how Silicon Valley has led to an increase in inequality, I would say it's done so the same way that, say, Wall Street has in New York. Maybe it's done it a little bit faster. It's done it in a way that's a little more obvious. But it's not something that you can necessarily trace back to Silicon Valley itself. It's more that this is just what happens when any industry that has these principles becomes hyper concentrated and just gets to the point where it just overshadows everything else. And so, you know, the Bay Area has become just so tech heavy that is very difficult for people who are not working in tech or in the adjacent fields to survive and to be able to stay in the area. And I think that's a difficult thing because, and I think that completely ties back to the economic principles underlying Silicon Valley and, you know, capitalism as a whole. That is so interesting to hear that you

sought out in your master's to explore inequality in Silicon Valley and then really just found that, yeah, you can't look at Silicon Valley without looking at capitalism and just how Silicon Valley's negative impacts are really related to the fact that it's within this capitalist ecosystem. It's really fascinating. And I'm wondering, you know, this show is called Upstream and, you know, it's about going upstream to the root causes. And one of the ways to look at that is what's the mindset or the paradigm beneath it? So, you know, what would you describe when you look at the worldview or paradigm that is the dominant thinking around Silicon Valley and capitalism in general, if you'd want to do that. And I do have a quote from your book. You say, this is a convenient narrative for Silicon Valley, which then gets to frame itself as synonymous with progress. Silicon Valley is the harbinger of the future and anyone who poses it is stuck in the past. So that's one example of the worldview beneath it. But yeah, I'm just wondering,

you know, if you go upstream from these challenges and issues that you described earlier, what would you say is the paradigm or the worldview that you find and the root causes there? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's a bit of a complicated one to answer. Because I think when we talk about Silicon Valley, we're grouping together a lot of different forces. And there's sometimes when that does make sense. And there's sometimes when I think it obscures more than it illuminates. So, for example, if we, you know, when we're talking about the people that make up Silicon Valley, we're talking about, sure, venture capitalists, founders, billionaire executives,

but we're also talking about the rank-and-file workers. And for a while, I think the media did a pretty bad job of separating out the two. And so a lot of us have this stereotype of just a privileged techie who's a libertarian and a millionaire and, I don't know, went to Stanford. And it's like, that's true for some of them. But then there is a whole mass of people who are being kind of written out of that story. And so then when it comes to the dominant paradigm, I would say the part of Silicon Valley that has a recognizable paradigm that's interesting to talk about is the top. a recognizable paradigm that's interesting to talk about is the top. It's, you know, the people who are at the top of the class pyramid, or those who are maybe aspiring to be there and who think they

will get there one day. And for them, just speaking broadly, I'd say they believe in meritocracy, they believe that income inequality is good, because they succeeded. And so, you know, income inequality is fine, as long as they're the ones who are making a lot of money. succeeded. And so, you know, income inequality is fine as long as they're the ones who are making a lot of money. They believe that government and other institutions are ossified and need to be disrupted. They believe that if you get enough smart people in a room and give them a lot of money, they will figure out whatever problem you need them to. And I think those kind of combine to create this particular worldview that's, like I said, very similar to Wall Street, because I've been reading a lot about Wall Street and the myths that people on Wall Street

tell themselves. And it's just so eerie how similar it sounds to Silicon Valley, which was a very strange for me to encounter because I had always bought into the idea that Silicon Valley was different. I started college in the wake of the financial crisis. And so it was very clear to me that there was something wrong with Wall Street. But I had no inkling of anything being wrong with Silicon Valley until several years later. But yes, and then going back to the paradigm of Silicon Valley, I guess it's like in terms of the operating principles, in terms of how companies and players within it actually operate, I would say it's driven by several things. So one is that

growth, even more than profitability, growth is key. Profitability can always come later. But the point is, you have to become massive and dominant enough to get to the point where your profits can't be challenged and where your profits can actually just be astronomical. There's no point in doing, I don't know, a lifestyle business that has like a $10 million annual revenue. Like, what's the point? If you're not thinking big, then you're just wasting your time. So I think that is pretty core to at least where the money is going in Silicon Valley. It's not going towards, the bulk of the money is not going towards small social enterprises.

It's going towards startups that have this go big or go home mentality, you know, either become a billion dollar company or die trying. And another principle is the idea that you have to, you don't have to ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness. And I talk about this a little bit in the book. And it's something that definitely characterized a lot of the startups that I knew about my own startup as well, we really thought that, well, the rules are kind of meant to be broken. And, you know, if you end up breaking some laws or just doing something kind of sketchy, it's probably fine. When you become a multi-million dollar company, you'll be able to hire lawyers, have a good marketing team, you know, pay off some politicians. It's fine. And looking around at the landscape, a lot of startups that later

became very successful did exactly that. They did something kind of sketchy. They weren't exactly following the rules, but they managed to get big anyway. And so I think that sets a precedent for whether or not ethics is important when you're thinking about starting a startup. Because I think the message to a lot of young founders is that, no, it's not. You don't have to worry about that. That's someone else's job. And then finally, I would say the principles that kind of underlies everything, you don't have to worry about that. That's someone else's job. And then finally, I would say the principles that kind of underlies everything, but isn't necessarily talked about is this idea that money is a reasonable proxy for worth.

And which is funny because, you know, this is the kind of animus that's driving the entire industry, but it's not something you're going to see like on the walls of a VC firm. They want to believe that there's a, they're more apt to talk about, you know, mission and making the world a better place. They like to cloak what they're doing in this rhetoric of social good. But really what it's all about is there's this assumption that what is socially good can be approximated by what is a

trillion dollar market, by where are you going to find the most money. And, you know, I think to people, I guess, like us, who are critical of capitalism, critical of the status quo, that just seems absurd. This idea that where there's a lot of money to be found, that is what is most important for the world. That is where progress should aim towards. And, you know, that's, but at the same time, I think that is just kind of key to how Silicon Valley works, partly because of its funding mechanism. The way venture capital works is that it's a venture, right? It's not necessarily a given.

The point is to take some risks. And so you have, for a venture capitalist, they have all this money and they have to invest in a lot of different companies. Some of those companies will fail. Most of them will fail. And the ones that remain, they have to this money and they have to invest in a lot of different companies, some of those companies will fail. Most of them will fail. And the ones that remain, they have to be successful enough that they can return the whole fund. And so it's no good for a venture capitalist to only invest in these very small, low-risk, profitable businesses. They have to invest in the big ones if they want to see massive returns. They have to invest in

the future Amazons or the future Ubers, assuming that Uber goes well. And I think that creates a really weird value system in the industry and a weird kind of culture around it. Yeah, thank you for that. And let's dive a little deeper into money and profit, because I really do agree with you that one of the root causes of a lot of suffering is seeing money as an end and not money as a means to an end or profit again seeing profit as the end goal and not a means to an end and one thing I've been inspired by is the idea of creating not-for-profit businesses where you have a business that generates profit but 100% of that profit then goes into a non-profit like a socially mission-driven

you know either environmental or social organization. But I think you even go further than that. You write that profit should be a sign that the system is in need of a correction. I just, I love that. And I just wonder, yeah, like what did you discover about profit on your journey? And then what is your, because you have a very particular recommendation for changing entrepreneurship and changing profit. So share a little bit about what you've learned about profit and what you recommend based on the journey that you've taken. it was. And this was at a time when my startup was failing. I did not have a lot of hope in my startup or the industry as a whole. And I was just kind of like, well, everything seems, you know, I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I might as well just read books and think about money. And in the background, the Greek debt crisis was going on. I remember this very vividly.

And I had no idea what the background of that was. I didn't understand why Greece was in debt in the first place. But just looking into it got me thinking about what is money and what are the different ways we have of conceptualizing money and how do they contradict each other and when is one, you know, more prominent than the other. And so I think, you know, looking at the Greek debt crisis, it became clear that money, specifically debt, was a form of power. It was a way for these central bodies like the European Union, the European Central Bank, the IMF, to exercise power over the government of this country. But at the same time, I mean, if we look at, say, Silicon Valley, money is kind of a reward. For a lot of people, it's thought of as like a reward for doing a good job.

You become a billionaire, not because you inherited it but because you created this innovative new technology that everybody loves but on the other hand money is also a way of distributing resources it's a way of saying like this is a problem that should be worked on if a company raises a hundred million dollars you know then it has a hundred times the resources as a company that's raised one million dollars at least theoretically and so it seemed i was trying to think like how do you reconcile all these different kinds of money with the fact that for most people the main way they conceive of money is just a means of survival for people who are living paycheck to paycheck which you know is most people in this country money is is not about, you know,

your $100 million startup. It's not about the national debt. It's about, am I going to be able to put food on my table? Will I be able to pay my rent or will I get evicted? Can I cover this unexpected medical bill? And so, you know, it just felt really weird to me that we were letting money be this gateway that prevented certain people from living fulfilling lives, or even from surviving at all, while also treating money as this much more abstract system of reward, this way of distributing resources and social priorities. You know, the more I kind of paid attention to the lives of ordinary people, and just how difficult it was for those who weren't in Silicon Valley, who weren't making six figures as a software engineer or an investor or something,

there started to feel something really morally wrong about the fact that so much money was being poured into, say, Silicon Valley when there were people who live in the Bay Area who are homeless. There are thousands of people in San Francisco who don't have homes or who are just living in absolutely horrible conditions. And so when I said in the book that profit should be a sign that system is in need of correction, I'm thinking about money from a very different angle, which is more of a moral angle. Where should resources be distributed? How do we ensure that people are able to live satisfying lives? Because to me, that seems like the most important function of money. And that is the framing that has been

neglected for so long, because we are, we're under the spell of this different form of money, where money is treated as a form of reward, or some other more abstract thing that has nothing to do with the lives of ordinary people at the end of the day, just trying to get by. abstract thing that has nothing to do with the lives of ordinary people at the end of the day, just trying to get by. And so when it comes to seeing profit as a sign that the system is in need of correction, what I mean is, you know, we should be asking, okay, well, where is that profit coming from? Does that profit come from workers not being paid enough? Does it come from environmental externalities being neglected? Does it come from something more nefarious? And then, you know, once we start asking those questions, it feels to me like the answer is always yes.

The answer is always that workers aren't being paid enough. There are externalities that are being neglected. And overall, that there's something wrong. Because I think any instance where there's a surplus of money in a world where there are places where there isn't enough money somewhere, then that's kind of a problem. And, you know, it almost feels heretical to say this, because, you know, we're so used to this dominant idea of money as something that comes with a free market, something that flows to where it's most needed. But I really don't think it is. I think in the political economy that we have now, money is not going towards the places it needs to go.

It's going towards those who already have way too much. And the result is a misallocation of resources. It's a world where people are suffering needlessly simply because the world has decided they are not worth providing for. for. Yeah. Yeah. We know that, you know, from the spirit level, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, that inequality is worse for everyone and more unequal society is worse for everyone. And, you know, we know that income and happiness are only correlated to a certain amount. So, yeah, what you're saying about how there's these platforms or companies that have just become so profitable, profit maximizing, etc, that these CEOs just have so much money. And it's like, how can we have that, like you said, at the same time as people who are homeless or people who are very precarious. And so I love what you're saying that

yeah, we need, we need to see that excessive profit and excessive wealth accumulation as a sign that the economy needs correction. So I just, I love that you're pointing this out. And I'm wondering, what about on the personal level? So I know that you went on a journey about your own self-worth. I mean, I can imagine, you know, those moments when you were, there were points when you were selling your startup or, you know, thinking about acquisition. There were also points when you and your team, you described working really long hours, also weekends. You had one person you worked with who just refused to work Sundays and you all kind of were like, you know, you're not being a team member. And I thought that was so fascinating. So I'm wondering what has been your own journey in relationship with Silicon Valley with self-worth and your work and just, you know,

your own journey in this as well? Yeah, I really cringe. And I remember the way we treated our co-founder because we were obviously in the wrong. And it took us a really long time. Definitely took me a long time to realize that. But yeah, I mean, here's the thing. He actually did work some Sundays. It was just that we wanted him to work longer hours on Sundays. But I think, I mean, what this all stems from is there's a strong part of Silicon Valley culture that's about working really long hours, improving yourself. There's a quote from Elon Musk in the book about, you know, working 80 hours a week and how that's just normal. And the thing is, if you look into the stories of some of the most successful founders and investors you will find a lot of

long hours and a lot of dedication to what they're doing and that's not to say that every one of them has a story it's more to say that enough of them do that this mythology has kind of taken a hold that to be successful in the industry you have to be the kind of person who is willing to just put your whole life into your startup or whatever, whatever you're trying to do. And then you have to be passionate about it, not just as a, you know, a nine to five worker, but as something that you think is the most important thing that you would miss out on everything else just to be able to do that. But that's what the kind of dream is. And, else just to be able to do that but that's what the the kind of dream is and you know thinking about it now much more cynically i would say it is a way to dupe naive young people and to getting

them to put their youth into startups so that investors can make a lot of money off them it's not it's not you know it's a very um cynical way of looking at it but that i think that is kind of what it effectively becomes it's a way to do people into working longer hours than they have to so that someone can benefit down the line and I don't think that even the people who promote this kind of ideology think of it that way I think they've probably really internalized it and just for me me personally I think part of the reason that aspect of Silicon Valley felt so appealing to me is because I you know I went through a period of my life in my teens when I was just very alone I just didn't really have a lot of people to talk to except on the internet and so when I discovered programming and the kind of culture around

financial reward that came with it I also was also reading Ayn Rand for the first time it really it really spoke to me I really liked this idea that I could find self-worth from just being really good at what I was doing. And I didn't have to worry about, you know, building connections with other people, which I found really hard at the time. I could instead use my skills at math and logic and just, I don't know, find like an escape route and just find a way out. And so it was a refuge for me. And then, you know, as I grew older, I became a little bit more well-adjusted and I realized that, well, I don't have to think only in terms of programming and money to find self-worth. I can

still build relationships with people too. But there's still something about the original idea that appealed to me, this idea that there's this kind of quantifiable way of measuring things, idea that appealed to me, this idea that there's this kind of quantifiable way of measuring things, that there's this thing called meritocracy, and that as long as I'm talented, then I will be rewarded justly. I think there's something about that that really, really spoke to something deep inside me, and I found it very hard to let go of that. But then, you know, after some time, the more I thought about it, the more it just felt self-serving and naive. And at the end of the day, kind of immoral to think that it was the correct way of allocating money

was just to reward people for being talented, according to some arbitrary metric. That didn't really make sense in a world where there were people who were suffering and who were struggling to get by. And so at the end of the day, I think I kind of came full circle and realized, well, no, actually money is not being circulated efficiently. Meritocracy is a sham.

Some people have too much, some people have too little, and we're not producing things in a way that is optimal or sustainable. It doesn't make sense to treat money as a proxy for worth in any way. Instead, what we really need is a world where people are producing according to their own abilities, where people are producing according to their own abilities, and they're receiving according to their needs, which, you know, obviously is something that critiques of capitalism have been saying for a very long time. Yeah, yeah. So let's go there. Let's go into the recommendations that you have for changing. So

the title of your book is Abolish Silicon Valley. And I wonder if the word abolish was as in vogue when you wrote it as now, because I know right now, like abolish ICE, abolish the police. It's, you know, that word is very common now as a demand. So in your book, you have this quote, abolishing Silicon Valley doesn't mean halting the development of technology. It means devising a new way to develop technology which fulfills technology's transformative potential. It means devising a new way to develop technology which fulfills technology's transformative potential. It means liberating technology from the clutches of a mindless system whose primary aim is profit. It means creating a world where technology is developed according to different values for different goals. In short, it means developing technology outside the logic of

capital. So I think it's important to point out that in your book somewhere, you also say you've written this from a place of love. You do care both from your own story in technology and the agriculture open source, as you mentioned in your own story. So yeah, tell us what do you mean by abolish Silicon Valley and what are some of the changes in the operating principles and even the structures and policies that you would recommend? I'll start by saying that the concept of abolition was not actually as in vogue as it is now. I'm really just amazed to see all these people talking about abolishing really everything, but especially prisons and the police. Back then, I think the reason I came up with that slogan

was because of the Abolish ICE movement, because there were people talking about conditions that ICE was keeping migrant children in. And there are definitely people in the tech industry specifically who are really, really upset about that because their companies had contracts with ICE. And so there's a really, really inspiring tech worker movement at companies like Microsoft, where these workers were saying, well, we don't like this.

And so that's kind of where I got the idea from. Abolish Silicon Valley kind of came from abolishing ICE, abolishing capitalism, just back in, I would say, maybe 2017, 2017, 2018. And these days, it's really great to hear that people are really thinking about abolition of all of these deeply ingrained institutions and structures. So yeah, I'm just, you know, this is awesome. I think this is great. But just to kind of clarify what I mean by abolishing Silicon Valley. So I'm not talking about reforms. I'm not talking about, you know, switching out Mark Zuckerberg with someone else. I'm not talking about making companies a little

more diverse, a little more fair or something. I'm talking about a complete reconfiguration of the socioeconomic landscape that gave rise to Silicon Valley, which means it's no small thing. And I think anyone who uses the term abolition in like a political context is aiming for something quite radical and nearly impossible to conceive of, you know, from where we are now. But that's, I think, precisely the beauty of thinking about abolition

is that it invites us to imagine a world that is both radically different from what we have now and radically, radically better. So yeah, when I talk about Silicon Valley, I'm talking about a relationship between technology and capital. I'm talking about the way that the technology that is developed is decided by the people who own capital. And so we end up with technology developed in the image of the way the system is now, as opposed to technology that could actually

challenge the status quo or technology that could actually liberate people and so yeah i think the reason i think it's important to think about capitalism when we talk about silicon valley is just to recognize that the problems that are coming out of silicon valley as it is today they're inherent to technological development under capitalism as a whole that's kind of the argument I'm making. And to get around that, we really can't just look at Silicon Valley itself. We have to look at all these other structures, the landscape that allowed certain companies to flourish.

Just as an example, you know, why are there so many medical tech companies in the US? Well, it's because we don't have a good healthcare system. Why are there all these payday loan apps because we don't have a good healthcare system. Why are there all these payday loan apps? We don't have like a safety net. We don't have decent wages for most jobs. So many of the reasons that these startups are founded in the first place is because there's a public service that is gone, right? We don't have decent transportation in a lot of these cities. And so Uber comes to the fore. Yeah, I think there are a lot of other examples. But then I think that the main one is that if there were better public services, then a lot of startups that we think of as constituting Silicon Valley would not exist in

the same way that they do now. They're really just preying on parts of the social fabric that have been eviscerated by the political economic consensus of the last 40 years. And so, you know, what do we need instead? I think what we need is a more democratic and collective ownership of technology as well as, you know, just the means of production in general. We need a better relationship to nature that is not predicated on extraction for the sake of profit. And we need a more equitable society as a whole. And I think all of these things cannot be achieved under Silicon Valley as it is now, cannot be achieved under capitalism as it is now. And so what I want for Silicon

Valley in particular is a way of existing that is less driven by capital, is less driven by capital. It's less driven by the needs of capital accumulation, the need to make a profit, the wage relationship. I would love to have a world where entrepreneurship can be conceived of as a social good. But the reason that you start a company is not because you think, oh, I'm going to become a billionaire by the time I'm 25. It's instead because you think, oh, there's a problem in my community that I think I know how to address and I'm going to put my time and energy into making this work. I think that's at the end of the day

what the good thing about entrepreneurship is it signifies a willingness to do something risky in the service of creating something. And the problem is that the current system of Silicon Valley and the current financial incentives that are at play, that desire to create something has become warped. It's become skewed by the needs to make a return on capital. And so you end up with these actually quite innovative and cool technologies that are being used not to help people, not to liberate

people, but instead to oppress them or just to make money off of them in a way that doesn't actually serve their well-being, that doesn't give them agency. You know, it's a pretty big thing to talk about. I don't know if I have actual concrete things that can be done right now. What I'm trying to do with the concept of abolition of self-immolation is just sketch out a different way that technology could be conceived of as something that is about actually serving people and that technologies should be subordinate to social need. It should not be a thing in itself that dominates people. It should be instead something that is designed to benefit people, to benefit citizens, to benefit workers, to benefit users, and not just something that allows

some billionaire somewhere to make a penny anytime someone spends a dollar on the internet. Yeah. So to highlight what you just said, I have a quote from your book related. You said, of course, customers will pay for a venture capitalist subsidized rideshare in a city with underfunded public transit. Of course, people will resort to payday loan apps when their boss doesn't pay them enough to survive. The ostensible success of private enterprise does not imply that private enterprise is the best way to address underlying problems. So I really hear that. And I know that, you know, when we go upstream, we really see neoliberal capitalism has really undermined our government and our public funding mechanisms. And yet I can't imagine there might

be people who listen to this interview who say, okay, so your answer is big government. And, you know, people who may have experienced long lines at the DMV, for example, or, you know, even our healthcare online system for California, you know, having it be really clunky and difficult. And like, for me, I was when I first signed up on that platform, I was like, gosh, we have so many tech companies in the area. Why couldn't one of them design like a really seamless, user friendly program? So tell us explicitly your thoughts around government, because this is a particular sticky point for Silicon Valley views on government views on the public funding mechanisms and all of that.

What is your view on that? Yeah, so something that really frustrates me is when I'm having a debate or a discussion with someone on this topic, someone who doesn't have the same kind of radical perspective that I do, and they kind of assume that what I'm saying is that we need bigger government, which is really not what I'm saying at all. And I think, you know, especially if we look at the way the U.S. government functions right now, the U.S. government is not a force for good. It's certainly not. I think there are elements of it that we can think of as better than others. But I'm not saying overall we need bigger government or that we need everything to be like the DMV.

Although speaking of the DMV, I actually recently tried to apply for an ID through the California DMV, and the website was actually quite nice. I imagine they must have partnered with someone who, you know, had UX expertise. It was really good. And I think this idea of government services as being just incapable of producing a good user experience, I think that partly comes from the fact that public services have been starved of resources for so long. And it's also just a reflection of the priorities. Because, okay, so the unemployment website issue, I would say, you know, the government does not actually want people to collect unemployment, right? It clearly doesn't. The government is capable of funding departments in a way that allows them to become very powerful.

Look at the U.S. military. The U.S. military has no issue getting top-tier technology. Police departments are able to get a lot of great technology, mostly just weapons and surveillance technology. But we don't think of that the same way we think of the DMV or unemployment insurance. We don't think of that the same way we think of the DMV or unemployment insurance. I would say that reflects just the underlying priorities of neoliberal government. I don't even know if we can call the current administration neoliberal. It's just arch-conservative, I suppose. But the point is that if there was an administration that was actually devoted to creating good public services, it could. It could put money into it. It could ensure that it was paying decent enough salaries

to attract people who actually care about their job. And it could ensure that there's a more level playing field. I think it's very possible. And if we look at, say, some European countries that are run along more social democratic lines, they have much better public services. People don't have the same complaints as they do in parts of the US. So yeah, I think it's a tricky thing because on the one hand, I think certain government services are good and should be expanded. But the crux of my argument is not to say that because private enterprise is bad, therefore bigger government is good. It's a little more nuanced than that. It's recognizing that there are different ways of running a government service and that not all of them are benevolent. Yeah. And, you know, I read your book and I was like, yes, yes, yes, the entire time and really appreciated all that I learned and also all

the proposals that you have at the end for what abolishing Silicon Valley could mean. I'm wondering, though, what has been the reception by tech workers, by, you know, folks who you were founding your startup with or who you were in, I know you were in an incubator with, but also the tech elite, you know, because you mentioned you really cautioned us for making a broad brushstroke to say the whole tech industry, everyone is the same, everyone is X. Of course not. But you did say there is the founders or the tech elite, the top folks of Silicon Valley, that they do roughly think similarly. similarly. So I'm wondering, have any of them received your book? Have you had any dialogues or interviews with any of them? And what has been their response? Like, I'm just curious about, you know, potential for change for your book. Like, how could it shift perspectives and also galvanizing people into action, tech workers and beyond? God, even thinking about that just makes me nervous. I don't know if any people that we

would think of as tech elite have read the book. There's definitely people who are more successful than others who have read the book and have had surprisingly positive receptions. I think that's part of the reason is because the tech industry is changing. And it's no longer cool or normal to be as excited about tech as people were in 2010. It's just a very different industry. People are more mature and they're more weary of the way things are. And there are people who worked at companies like Google for, you know, decades and who maybe at one point really believed in the industry, but are now just kind of more like, oh, wow, this everything's pretty bad now. So, yeah, I've gotten really like surprisingly nice responses

to the book from people who've worked in tech for a long time and have become disillusioned kind of in a similar way to me I've also had really good feedback from those who are just starting out their careers either as students or as you know new new grads who said that you know the book resonated with them in a way that they couldn't really find elsewhere because there is not a lot of critical first-person writing about the industry that is as critical as my book is. I think it's, I was kind of like, I don't really care if I burn bridges. Most people who maybe share these views have to be a little more careful if they want to keep working in the industry.

So yeah, I think I've had mostly just positive responses so far. I've been really, really heartened by the fact that some people who read the book, they actually reached out to me directly and said, thank you so much for writing this because this is exactly how I feel. But I just didn't know if anyone else felt that way. So I think it's a good sign. I think there is a growing number of people in the industry who are, you know, feeling very, very critical of it and who really want the industry to be better than what it is and who are very cognizant of the gap between the rhetoric and reality.

Because, you know, the industry loves to sell itself as a place for social change, a place where you can make an amazing impact on the world. You can do great things. And it's just not really true. It might have been true for a very brief point in time, but now it's come to the point where it's so big and it's just the principles that drive it are not as lofty as maybe people used to think they were. And so I think it's really unfortunate. And a lot of people who are just now entering the industry

as software engineers or whatever role they have, I think they're coming to terms with that. They're grappling with this kind of post-tech clash atmosphere, which is probably very difficult. But I think what that means is that they're probably more receptive to ideas that are critical of the status quo than the actual tech elites are, of whom I have very little confidence. I really don't think that when you get to the point where you're, say, like a billionaire and you're surrounded by people who tell you how smart you are all the time, it's just not easy for someone like that to be able to see things from a critical distance.

It's just like, no matter how smart they are, no matter how empathetic or kind, it's just when you're in a bubble, you know, it's just so hard to see outside the bubble. What would you say to a tech elite person if you were sitting with them, if you had coffee with them? Like what, maybe what part of your book would you share, or what part of your experience, or just what might you say? I would say take a look around you. Talk to people. Talk to people who are outside your bubble. Talk to the people who are on the streets of whatever city you live in. Talk to people who are working, you know, multiple jobs and still trying to get by. Listen to the stories of those for whom the system is not working to understand why they would want to burn it down,

to understand why you have a responsibility to take the power that you have and do something about it. Because, you know, contrary to popular belief we do live in a society and what affects one of us doesn't affect all of us and i think you know what you were saying earlier about how an unequal society is bad for everyone i completely agree and i think it is bad for people on top in ways that they may not recognize you know it corrodes their souls in a way that it's they probably don acknowledge, but it happens by the changes that you are encouraging, who's excited by your book, your journey. You know, you mentioned in your book very

specifically that we need collective change, not individual behavioral change. So, you know, I can imagine someone saying, oh, yeah, I really should get around to deleting my Uber app. You know, it's time or, you know, really not shopping around to deleting my Uber app. It's time. Or really not shopping at Amazon anymore and really going to my local place or finding another place online where I could buy what I need. But you're obviously saying, yes, and we need collective change. So for folks listening who might want to get involved or who might want to contribute to this abolishing Silicon Valley that you're encouraging, that you're offering, what would you recommend? Yeah, I think the answer is politics. And when I say politics, I mean a more expansive notion

of politics that's not just about the ballot box. And, you know, although that's important too, I think progressive electoral causes are worthy, but there are other ways of doing politics that, you know, include the kind of street demonstrations that we've seen over the last few weeks. And that also includes workplace action. And so, you know, if you're listening to this and you work at a company who, you know, where you're just not really happy about the conditions or you wish you and your colleagues had more power to actually control the output of your labor, well, that's what the whole labor movement has been about for centuries. And so I would recommend, you know, looking into the history of labor movements, seeing how people in jobs that are maybe similar to yours, that may be different in certain ways, but still have a kind of kernel of similarity, how have they managed to come together and rise up against insurmountable odds? And how are people in professions like teaching, nursing, grad students, even just people in all these different professions that are maybe usually thought of as white collar professions,

but who are recognizing that their ability to achieve lasting change comes not from acting as individuals, but from acting as part of a collective. And I would say that that is a great place to look if you want to do something about the world we live in, but don't know where to start. The labor movement has been a crucial vehicle for radical change over many, many years. Yeah. So you described how when you were 12, you got into hacker culture and programming, and then you studied it in college, you had your internship at Google, you tried to start your own startup, and now you've written this book. And I kept thinking as I was reading it, where do you go from here? So I'm just curious, like,

what questions are you exploring now that you've written this book? And what are your maybe next steps, your actions, especially considering we're in time of COVID, which I can imagine has a total impact on Silicon Valley as well as being a writer and researcher. So where do you go next? What are the questions on your mind and what are the next steps that you wish to take for the change you wanna see?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's what I'm still figuring out. The pandemic and the uprising, they've definitely just shifted my priorities and it's making me think really long and hard about what I should be doing with my time. I think I do want to write more, but I also just maybe as a result of being alone and indoors for the last few months, I feel like I should be doing something more directly useful to my community at the same time. And so I'm currently doing IT work with a local nonprofit that provides legal aid, and I love it. And I think this is, you know, the sort of thing that I should be using my tech skills for, which is building technology to actually help people and,

you know, make their lives better in a way that isn't about helping some corporation become more powerful. So in the short run, I definitely want to keep doing stuff like that, just rediscover the joy of writing software to actually serve other people and to just do whatever I can to help other people. So I'm still definitely figuring things out. But I think the kind of thing I'm really interested in, in terms of reading and writing is just the labor movement. I really feel like I just have been missing out for so long and not knowing anything about the history of unions, about the history of how some of these progressive causes were

championed in the past. And just recognizing that the way that things have gotten better in the past is not from some, you know, great man coming down and saying, I'm going to make things better. It is the results of countless ordinary people coming together and saying, we demand better. And you can see this in so many different movements throughout history. And I think this is the path going forward. Like, I don't think we can count on, you know, a savior to come save us. Where the conjunction that we're in now with the pandemic, political systems collapsing everywhere, climate change just right around the corner, maybe on the verge of another economic crisis, I don't think this is something we're going to be able to solve by waiting for someone to come

and fix things. I think this will only happen if just we all kind of realize that we have agency and that we can only assert our agency by working in concert with other people. Wonderful. A great invitation. And also thank you for sharing what's happening with you. Thank you so much for your book. Thank you for the work that you do. And thank you for your vulnerability and courage and speaking with me and in sharing your story. It's really wonderful to hear what's going on for you. Thank you. Thank you so much for asking me. I really enjoyed this conversation. You've been listening to an Upstream podcast conversation with Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism.

Upstream is a labor of love. To help us produce more content, consider making a one-time donation or a monthly contribution at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Theme music for Upstream is produced by Robert Raymond. Thank you to our intern, Emmanuel Brown, for helping with the research for this conversation. Our other interviews and documentaries are available on our website, upstreampodcast.org, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and most other places you listen to podcasts. We're also on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Upstream Podcast.