Silicon Culture
I love that song
with the line, “Everybody wants to rule the world”. In Silicon Valley, the
mantra is different, as annunciated in a Huffington Post ad that said:
“Don’t just take your place at the top of
the world. Change the world.”
Changing the
world: that’s Silicon Valley’s mantra. Ever since Steve Jobs famously asked the
CEO of Pepsi whom he was trying to recruit:
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life
selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”
Some of that
confidence/ arrogance is justified. As Heather Havrilesky wrote:
“Today the term "information
superhighway" no longer feels like hyperbole.”
At other times,
though, that mantra does seem like hyperbole, as exemplified the time a
character in the serial Silicon Valley
said:
“Because if we can make your audio and
video files smaller, we can make your cancer smaller, and hunger smaller, and
AIDS.”
On the other hand,
as Robert Pogue Harrison wrote,
hasn’t Silicon Valley changed the world, multiple times in just our lifetime?
“The innovations have come fast and
furious, turning the past four decades into a series of “before and after”
divides: before and after personal computers, before and after Google, before
and after Facebook, iPhones, Twitter, and so forth.”
Being flexible is
usually a good thing. In Silicon Valley too, if whatever the starup was aiming
for isn’t succeeding, they try something else. Often something very different
from the original goal. So much so that Scott Adams writes:
“Building a product for the Internet is now
the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard
part. And the only way to make the hard part work is by testing one
psychological hypothesis after another.”
That tendency to
pivot (Silicon Valley jargon for changing course), which means no longer
pursuing the original goal, is also probably why nowadays everything from
Silicon Valley seems to be about creating more and more satellites around the
sun called, what else, the smartphone. Or as Harrison wrote:
“In the silicon age, “changing the world”
means at bottom finding new and more ingenious ways to turn my computer or
smart phone into my primary—and eventually my only—access to “reality.”
Like Uber.
What’s for sure is
that, one way or the other, it doesn’t look the Silicon Valley juggernaut is
done changing the world yet.
Blog's finish line “In the silicon age, “changing the world” means at bottom finding new and more ingenious ways to turn my computer or smart phone into my primary—and eventually my only—access to “reality” was the point I had been pondering about for some time now. Glad to see that I was not completely unaware of happenings and the importance of them to my context!
ReplyDeleteHope I am still smart enough to acquire, learn and use the smartphone - keeping my laptop in the background. This may the digital age, but I still pray to God to help me with that! As a believer, I firmly cling to: many different eras have come and gone; God is always there!