Rebecca Solnit: In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 582 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rebecca Solnit has lived in San Francisco since 1980, but the city she used to know is fast disappearing, ‘fully annexed’, as she puts it, by the tech firms from Silicon Valley. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Solnit reads her piece from the 8 February issue of the paper, both a eulogy for the city that’s been lost and a dissection of the dystopia that’s replacing it, ‘returning us’, as she puts it, ‘to a kind of feudalism’. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/solnitpod Find out more about Coram Boy at Chichister Festival Theatre here: https://www.cft.org.uk/events/coram-boy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This episode of the LRB podcast is supported by Chichester Festival Theatre, where Helen
0:05.2	Edmondson's play Coromboi will be on from the 24th of May to the 15th of June.
0:10.3	Based on Jamila Gavin's Whitbread Award-winning novel, and set in 18th century England with
0:14.4	music by Handel, among others, the play premiered at the National Theatre in 2005 and won a time-out
0:20.2	live award before transferring to
0:21.8	Broadway. This new production, sponsored by the Portsmouth Grammar School, is directed by
0:26.3	Anna Ledwich, who describes Coromboi as epic, rich and theatrical. Tickets start at £10.com,
0:32.6	book at cft.org.uk.
0:52.3	Music dot org.uk. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. This week we have Rebecca Solnit reading her piece on losing San Francisco from the 8th of February issue of the paper.
1:01.3	Rebecca Solnit is the author of 20 books, including Orwell's Roses, Wonderlust, Men Explain Things to Me, and Infinite City, a San Francisco Atlas.
1:10.8	In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit.
1:16.4	Seeing cars with no human inside move through San Francisco streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian,
1:23.4	but when I'm on my bicycle, I often find myself riding alongside them.
1:28.3	And from that vantage point, you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand.
1:35.0	Since August, driverless cars have been available as taxis, hailed through apps.
1:40.9	But I more often see empty cars than once with backseat passengers. These robots in the shape of
1:47.8	cars don't move like those with human drivers. While I waited next to one at a busy intersection,
1:55.6	the vehicle first halted at the yellow light, then rolled into the intersection, where it stopped when the light
2:02.4	turned red, confounding the traffic around it. Still, I've become somewhat used to driverless cars
2:10.1	in the years they've been training on the city streets, first with backup human drivers,
2:15.7	and then without. They are here despite opposition from city officials, including the fire chief.
2:22.5	And San Francisco recently sued the California State Bureau that gave companies licensed to use the streets as their laboratory.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from London Review of Books, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of London Review of Books and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.