Introduction

1. What is Silicon Valley?

   1. General SV is “many things” today (Owen Thomas)

   2. Began as a geographic expression (linked to an industry)

   3. Santa Clara County – 30 miles south of San Francisco

2. “Silicon Valley is a strip of land in Santa Clara County to the south of San Francisco, stretching from Palo Alto to San Jose (Figure 3.15). In the 1940s and 1950s, this was a sparsely populated agricultural area focused on fruit production.” [M&C]

   1. Yet geographic expansion of SV means that it no longer has a simple anchor in space, except for locals, who continue to link it to its place of origin

3. “People in the Bay Area see it as a geographical thing, while everyone else sees it as an industry” (Thomas)

4. “No one knows the boundaries of SV” (Scott Kildall in Thomas)

   1. An industr(ies)

   2. Center of innovation in silicon-based electronics hardware for four decades: IC, microprocessor, and microcomputer all developed in Silicon Valley

5. “Over the last half century or so, Silicon Valley in California has become probably the most renowned centre of high-tech industry in the world” (M&C)

   1. Yet no longer a single industry – but multiple industries

6. Saxenian: “SV is hardly an industry because it’s not silicon anymore”

   1. A myth

   2. Heavily mediatized and popularized, the stuff of legend and self-created myth, a uniquely great American success story that also has nearly universal appeal

7. Fred Turner: “For the last fifty years, SV has been shrouded in myth... [read]” (2)

8. Saxenian: There is the myth of SV. There is something that has become bigger than the place in people’s minds...”

   1. SV is widely emulated around the world

9. “Silicon Valley is no longer merely a place in Northern California....Hundreds.of places around the world have rebranded themselves Silicon Deserts, Forests, Roundabouts, Steppes, and Wadis as they seek to capture some of the original's magic.” (O’Mara, 2)

10. “People around the world continue to imagine SV as a kind of American utopia” (Turner, 1)

    1. As a result, SV is heavily aspirational

11. “Layer by layer, as chips begat hardware, as hardware begat software, as software begat networks, as networks begat apps, the label became less description and more aspiration”

    1. For Thomas, SV is forever trapped between the place and idea, the real and virtual

12. “... Silicon Valley will also be caught between place and idea, between the analog and the digital, the physical and the virtual.” (Thomas)

13. “Invisible and ubiquitous, you see [SV] in the traces.” (Thomas)

    1. Summary i. What will people mean by SV in future decades? Will SV endure?

14. Likely a tech hub, centered in SF (Thomas)

    1. Common denominator: accelerating pace of change tied to technological innovation

15. “... that quest for an ever-accelerating pace of change is the essence of SV” (Thomas)

16. SV involves twin revolutions

    1. SV is a product of the American Revolution

    2. American republican experiment

17. Nation birthed from encounter with frontier (the West); violence

18. Immigrant nation

    1. Stanford historian Fred Turner refers to SV as a “city on a hill for our time,” analogous to the Puritans

19. ”... in SV, the technologists were creating a culture rooted in some of America’s earliest ideals... the Protestant ethic that animated the seventeenth-century Pilgrims suffuses its high-tech industries... Day after day the Pilgrims worked to make themselves wealthy and so accrue evidence of their likely salvation. Day after day, they watched one another as they imagined God watched them all, to see who among them would be saved... the landscape of northern California becomes a new stage for the drama of salvation, and every company’s profit and loss statement an accounting of spiritual worth.... The same inherited Puritan logic... has driven us to celebrate the market’s elevation of men like Zuckerberg and Jobs...” (Turner, 3-4, 8)

    1. Mix of American individualism & entrepreneurship with a degree of self-promotion & hype

20. American story of “entrepreneurial innovation”

    1. “Ronald Reagan was right. The high-tech revolution was an only-in America story” (O’Mara , 5)

    2. “Silicon Valley seemed just like the latest and greatest example of the American Revolution in action.” (O’Mara, 4)

21. Ronald Reagan, Moscow State University, March 5, 1988 [cf. YouTube]

    1. Links technological revolution with American freedoms (from state)

    2. Yet US govt. played a central role in the development of SV

22. Positive role: Distributed enormous public investment funds in first two decades (Apollo Age)

    1. “From the Bomb to the moon shot to the backbone of the Internet and beyond, public spending fueled an explosion of scientific and technical discovery, providing the foundation for generations of start-ups to come.” (O’Mara, 5)

    2. “... ongoing public investments in research and education trained and subsidized the next generation of high-tech innovators’” (6)

23. Negative role: Light regulatory hand of federal govt. in Wash., DC

    1. “Deregulation and tech-friendly tax policies, lobbied for and especially benefiting computer hardware and software companies and their investors, helped the Valley grow large;... Despite the millions in federal investment coursing through its veins, the region's tech cluster was allowed to grow organically, over time, largely off the political radar screen.” (O’Mara, 5-6)

24. Note: What mattered was how the federal govt. distributed funds in order to encourage competition between private firms (O’Mara, 5)

    1. SV has spearheaded a technological revolution

    2. SV largely (though not single-handedly) invented the information age

25. new ecosystem – or “code” (O’Mara)

    1. business environment– companies designed and run primarily by engineers

    2. innovation model - continuous, cutting-edge technological innovation

    3. digital infrastructure - spread easily around the world and provided the basis for a global networked, information-based society

    4. a “world eaten by software” (O’Mara, 2)

26. future orientation – inventing the future

    1. Companies and sites like Intel, Xerox PARC, Apple, Google, and Facebook have worked to deliberately build (and control) the future

    2. “What kind of society does the relentless pursuit of technological innovation and wealth produce? And what kind of a future does it suggest for the rest of us?” (Turner)

27. We will adopt a critical historical approach in our class

    1. Critical thinking has two meanings in our class: Examining the history of SV from multiple perspectives

28. Exs: labour, gender and race relations, spatial development and inequality, environment, etc.

29. Note: “critical” means questioning, but does not require a negative or antithetical attitude

    1. Questioning the dominant narrative of SV as the heroic entrepreneur, linked with mythical elements and techno-utopianism

30. Study of history helps us understand origins, thereby showing the mutability (vs. immutability) of the present

31. Ages of Silicon Valley [Unit II]

    1. We can divide the development and transformation of SV into four main ages:

    2. Origins

       1. historical roots of technological innovation in electronics in Santa Clara County

       2. technology: vacuum tube (1912, Federal Telegraph Company)

       3. companies: Stanford start-ups (1920s)

    3. Apollo Age (1950s/1960)

       1. high-tech industry developed around Stanford Industrial Park under leadership of Frederick Terman

       2. technology: Integrated circuit (Robert Noyce, 1957)

       3. military provided around 50% of market demand for semiconductors in 1960s (Castells and Hall 1994: 17)

       4. Companies

          1. William Shockley, Palo Alto Shockley Semiconductor (1954)

          2. Fairchild Semiconductors (1957)

          3. spin-off electronics companies (‘fairchildren’) Intel and National Semiconductors

    4. Hippie Age (1970s)

       1. network of computer hobbyists, the Home Brew Computer Club (Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak)

       2. technology: PC era

       3. Companies

          1. Apple Personal Computer (1976)

          2. Sun Microsystems (early 1980s)

    5. Libertarian Age (mid-1990s)

       1. technology: internet-based technology

       2. multimedia operations in area south of Market Street (movie special effects, video games and electronic publishing)

       3. Companies

          1. dot.com start-ups

          2. Netscape (IPO, 1995)

          3. Yahoo and eBay

          4. Cisco Systems (internet hardware; surpasses Microsoft as most highly valued company in world in March 2000)

    6. Surveillance Age (mid-2000s)

       1. rise of social media and electronic arts companies

       2. [Source: Castells and Hall (1994) and MacKinnon and Cumbers, (2019)]

          1. “layered” history of Silicon Valley

          2. Each historical stage in the growth of industry in Silicon Valley builds on the preceding ones, from fabrication of discrete electronics components (silicon transistors) to integrated circuits and hardware devices (PCs) to the convergence of computing with communication platforms (internet and internet-based devices; cellular) and higher-end digital applications (social media, entertainment, etc.)

       3. Companies

          1. Google

          2. Facebook

          3. Twitter

          4. Netflix