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.