During the Gold Rush, belief in imminent riches was what kept you shivering in cold streams waiting for a nugget to land in your pan. Uber still wasn’t profitable, but the prospect of future profits was enough to sustain a rising share price on the open market, which in turn enabled a number of early investors to cash in. By the time of Uber’s initial public offering nine years later, the value of their stake had multiplied nearly five thousand times. In 2010 a group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists invested $1.6 million in a start-up called UberCab. Even if the personal costs of failure are not particularly high for either, facing such odds requires a gambler’s faith, an act of defiance against the available evidence. The founder has to believe his business will become the next big thing so must the investor who backs the founder. It is common knowledge that some 90 percent of start-ups fail. But there is a rational kernel to the rebellious self-image shared by Silicon Valley’s flock of undifferentiated men in Patagonia vests, which is that a measure of contrarianism is an integral component of their success. The credit card executive in Delaware and the oil magnate in Houston presumably don’t. It might seem odd that some of the richest people in the country see themselves as revolutionaries. It also contains a particular theory of history: that technology makes the past, along with the forms of expertise that arise from studying it, irrelevant. Disruption is not merely a business strategy but a worldview that celebrates the creative destruction of existing institutions. What unites them is a commitment to disruption. These networks link founders, engineers, lawyers, venture capitalists, and Stanford kids in an insular ecology characterized by what Saxenian calls a “complex mix of social solidarity and individualistic competition.” In Silicon Valley you get the sense that, while everyone wants to win, at some level they’re all playing for the same team. Its secret to success, the scholar AnnaLee Saxenian has argued, is not the dominance of any single firm but the density of the area’s social and professional networks. In the valley, money begets money with an ease that would make Andrew Carnegie weep. Today it is home to four of the ten biggest companies in the world by market capitalization: Apple, Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, and Meta (Facebook). Serious fortunes were made, and the valley overtook its rivals to become the global epicenter of high technology. Modern start-up culture was born, supercharged by Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms. In the 1980s and 1990s investment migrated from chips to personal computers and the Internet. Then, in the postwar period, the insatiable computing demands of the Pentagon, along with the invention of the transistor and the integrated circuit, enabled a semiconductor industry to sprout in the orchards around Stanford. In the first decades of the twentieth century the area became an early electronics hub. Yet within this suburban wasteland, Californians have constructed the most efficient capital-accumulation machine in history. Geographically the valley is unremarkable, a corridor of boring towns at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. Today the wealthiest part of California is Santa Clara County, which makes up most of Silicon Valley. In California, fantasy is a factor of production. Neither dream found much fulfillment, but dreams don’t have to come true to have an effect. The dream of middle-class stability drew hundreds of thousands of Black people to the state’s defense plants nearly a century later, during World War II. The dream of Gold Rush riches spurred large-scale white settlement starting in 1848. The region has always served as a powerful stimulant for the imagination, which in turn has helped propel its development. If there were ever a spot on earth that deserved to be named for somewhere imaginary, California is it. We don’t know for sure whether the first California inspired the second, but it would be fitting. For centuries they thought it, too, was an island. Some years later, Spanish settlers gave the same name to a section of the Pacific coast. A rocky island, inhabited by Black women, filled with gold-this was the first California, as imagined in Las Sergas de Esplandián, a popular Spanish novel published in 1510. Jake Longstreth: California Landscape, 2019īefore California was a place, it was an idea.
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