Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit

the working-day beyond all bounds set by human nature. It creates on the one hand, new conditions by which capital is enabled to give free scope to this its constant tendency and on the other hand, new motives with which to whet capital’s appetite for the labour of others.”
    The invisible counterweight to the elaborate uselessness of this monument to wealth and fear is the ruthless efficiency of the rifle that paid for it: between the two of them—military technology and diversionary folly—the valley might begin to be defined. The rifle’s pursuit of death in open, contestable space; the house’s sequestering from death and the dead in sequestered interior space. The implications of Mrs. Winchester’s acts are interesting: that guns do kill people; that technology does have a moral dimension; and that perhaps she could buy her way out of the implications, fend off the spirit world with unending consumption, build a literal nowhere in which she could become lost to the spirit world.
    What other stories can provide a thread through the labyrinths of Silicon Valley? The problem of understanding it seems to be the inadequacy of its stories and images. There’s the arcadian story, of paradise lately become limbo, of the world’s greatest prune orchard paved over to become the world’s greatest technology center; and there’s the utopian one, of the glorious future opened up by technology, the old Crystal Palace–World’s Fair rhetoric, which has become less credible for most people about most technologies. The two stories have some interesting things in common. The arcadian nostalgia of Wendell Berry or Jerry Mander has its counterpart in the feckless utopian enthusiasm of the
Wired
and
Mondo 2000
consumers for a brave new world of cyberspace and techno-wonders. Mander’s
In the Absence of the Sacred
is among the most recent attempts to assess technological progress, but the book bogs down in a refusal to engage social issues (as well asin a romanticization of his own early years, in which the Great Depression becomes Edenic). Technology becomes an inevitable march toward consolidation, control, ecocide—a kind of Big Brother Godzilla. By making technology autonomous, rather than literally and historically a tool of power, Mander avoids most questions about the social forces that control the development and use of machines and the social changes that might detour us from the current trajectory. What begins as a radical critique ends as a refusal to engage the powers that be. In this, Mander is not much different from the more widespread enthusiasts for the new technologies, who also imagine technology as autonomous and also leave out any social analysis, except for happy projections of empowerment through information access. Both these arcadian and utopian analyses insist on a straight line, backward or forward toward the good; but in a maze, straight is the quickest route to immobility, and the route may call for lateral moves, shifting perspectives.
    The maze becomes an inevitable metaphor for the moral tangles of technologies and social change; for the equivocal gains and losses; for arguments that can only lead deeper in, not outside the problem; for the impossibility of plunging straight forward or backing out altogether—that is, for simply embracing or rejecting the technologies and the visions of futures that accompany them. And the maze’s image is echoed in the circuit boards and silicon chips, in the suburban sprawls of curving residential streets and industrial parks, of centerless towns that melt into each other, in the limited choices of computer games, perhaps in the rhetoric of technological progress that avoids social and teleological questions. Silicon Valley itself is an excellent check on the technophiles’ enthusiasm, since the joyous liberation of the new technologies is so hard to find here, in a place known for its marathon work schedules, gridlock traffic, Superfund sites (twenty-nine,