appeared as the shorthand on networks, the disembodied platitudes of electoral politics, and the starkly denatured language of inner-city rap with its license-plate number-letter combos, police codes, and so on.
All those metaphors are ways of navigating the way things span both difference and similarity; without metaphor, the world would seem threateningly amorphous, both identical with ourselves and utterly incomprehensible. The anthropological theorist Paul Shepard writes, “Humans intuitively see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.” The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the larger territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning.
Finally, even nowhere has its twin: everywhere. Silicon Valley has become a nowhere in the terms I have tried to lay out—an obliteration of place, an ultimate suburb, a maze in which wars are designed, diversions are generated, the individual disembodied. But the physical landscape of Silicon Valley is now everywhere, not only in the attempts to clone its success but in the spread of its products and its waste throughout the globe, the outside world being ravaged by the retreat to the interior.
If you imagine a computer not as an autonomous object but as a trail of processes and effects and residues, which leave their traces across a global environmental maze, then it is already everywhere. The clean rooms in which poorly paid chip makers were exposed to toxic chemicals are now subcontracted out in the Southwest, Oregon, and the third world, so there’s a little of the valley there. The waste that was leaching through the once fecund earth of Silicon Valley is leachingstill, and more of it is leaching around the globe. Some of the chemicals used to clean the chips have been peculiarly potent ozone-depleters (though most Silicon Valley firms have switched over to other compounds), so think of the upper atmosphere too; and the landfill where the packing and shipping material goes; and the electrical generating station your computer is plugged into and its energy sources (coal, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal, natural gas?); think of the networks it may be hooked into; think of the corporations whose pockets it lined—but don’t picture pockets, the money is in imageless cyberspace—and the stock markets where their shares are traded; think of the forests the manuals are printed on; think of the store that sold it; think of where it’ll be dumped when it’s rendered obsolete, as all computers have been.
These are the tentacles, the winding corridors, the farthest reaches of Silicon Valley, and the hardest to imagine. It is the scene of the crime that has vaporized, and resisting an unlocatable and unimaginable crime is difficult. One of the principal challenges for environmentalists is making devastation that is subtle and remote seem urgent to people with less vivid imaginations. Another is finding a site at which to protest (which is why Greenpeace has largely relocated from actual sites to wherever the media can be found). And the ultimate problem of the landscape of Silicon Valley in its most abstruse, penetrating, and symbolic forms is that it is unimaginable.
Apple Computer, which is headquartered in six buildings, indistinguishable but for their security levels, on Infinity Loop in Cupertino, is a key landscape for Silicon Valley, one that apparently displaced real orchards. When I was there, the Olson orchard across Highway 280 in Sunnyvale was selling Bing and Queen Anne cherries, and Latino workers were cutting up apricots to dry. But a third of the orchard was bulldozed this past spring [1994] for
All those metaphors are ways of navigating the way things span both difference and similarity; without metaphor, the world would seem threateningly amorphous, both identical with ourselves and utterly incomprehensible. The anthropological theorist Paul Shepard writes, “Humans intuitively see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.” The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the larger territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning.
Finally, even nowhere has its twin: everywhere. Silicon Valley has become a nowhere in the terms I have tried to lay out—an obliteration of place, an ultimate suburb, a maze in which wars are designed, diversions are generated, the individual disembodied. But the physical landscape of Silicon Valley is now everywhere, not only in the attempts to clone its success but in the spread of its products and its waste throughout the globe, the outside world being ravaged by the retreat to the interior.
If you imagine a computer not as an autonomous object but as a trail of processes and effects and residues, which leave their traces across a global environmental maze, then it is already everywhere. The clean rooms in which poorly paid chip makers were exposed to toxic chemicals are now subcontracted out in the Southwest, Oregon, and the third world, so there’s a little of the valley there. The waste that was leaching through the once fecund earth of Silicon Valley is leachingstill, and more of it is leaching around the globe. Some of the chemicals used to clean the chips have been peculiarly potent ozone-depleters (though most Silicon Valley firms have switched over to other compounds), so think of the upper atmosphere too; and the landfill where the packing and shipping material goes; and the electrical generating station your computer is plugged into and its energy sources (coal, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal, natural gas?); think of the networks it may be hooked into; think of the corporations whose pockets it lined—but don’t picture pockets, the money is in imageless cyberspace—and the stock markets where their shares are traded; think of the forests the manuals are printed on; think of the store that sold it; think of where it’ll be dumped when it’s rendered obsolete, as all computers have been.
These are the tentacles, the winding corridors, the farthest reaches of Silicon Valley, and the hardest to imagine. It is the scene of the crime that has vaporized, and resisting an unlocatable and unimaginable crime is difficult. One of the principal challenges for environmentalists is making devastation that is subtle and remote seem urgent to people with less vivid imaginations. Another is finding a site at which to protest (which is why Greenpeace has largely relocated from actual sites to wherever the media can be found). And the ultimate problem of the landscape of Silicon Valley in its most abstruse, penetrating, and symbolic forms is that it is unimaginable.
Apple Computer, which is headquartered in six buildings, indistinguishable but for their security levels, on Infinity Loop in Cupertino, is a key landscape for Silicon Valley, one that apparently displaced real orchards. When I was there, the Olson orchard across Highway 280 in Sunnyvale was selling Bing and Queen Anne cherries, and Latino workers were cutting up apricots to dry. But a third of the orchard was bulldozed this past spring [1994] for
Similar Books
