Abolishing Silicon Valley with Wendy Liu
Upstream
Upstream
4.9 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2020
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
The idea of Silicon Valley means many things to many people. The most prominent associations with this region and culture probably have to do with the tech industry — but that's not the whole story. Not even close. There's a dark side to Silicon Valley that doesn't always make it into mainstream conversations and popular assumptions. Beneath the image there is a stark reality. In this Upstream Conversation, we spoke with Wendy Liu, an author and Silicon Valley insider turned critic. Her debut book, Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism, is a memoir and a manifesto on how to transform the tech industry from the hypercapitalist culture of inequality, gentrification, and greed that it is to something more equitable, accessible, and supportive of the real disruptions we need today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. When I kind of took a step back and started paying attention not just to the tech industry |
| 0:26.2 | but also to the underlying economic and social principles of capitalism, it became clear that whatever |
| 0:31.6 | Silicon Valley is doing, it wasn't exogenous. |
| 0:34.0 | It wasn't like some alien force coming out of nowhere to impose a weird set of principles |
| 0:38.5 | that had nothing to do with capitalism. |
| 0:40.0 | Silicon Valley was just taking the core operating tenets of capitalism and just doing |
| 0:46.4 | them really well. The companies that we revere in the industry are the ones that |
| 0:50.3 | have scaled so quickly and have grown to just these massive sizes in a very short period of time |
| 0:58.0 | and they've done it in a way that allows them to maintain power in a very |
| 1:01.6 | concentrated hyper-capitalist way. |
| 1:04.0 | And so, yeah, like once I looked at it, I was like, oh, well, it's not actually about the tech industry, right? |
| 1:09.4 | Like the tech industry is just concentrating the most fundamental principles of capitalism. |
| 1:15.0 | You are listening to upstream. |
| 1:18.0 | Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. |
| 1:21.0 | I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation |
| 1:25.4 | we're speaking with former insider turned critic Wendy Lou, author of |
| 1:30.7 | Abolish Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. |
| 1:35.6 | Upstream is a labor of love. |
| 1:38.0 | To help us produce more content, consider making a one-time donation |
| 1:42.2 | or a monthly contribution at upstream podcast.org |
| 1:46.1 | forward slash support. Thank you. |
| 1:49.4 | Thank you so much again Wendy for joining me on Upstream. Welcome. |
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