Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit Page B

the Silicon Valley region is now also a capital of genetic engineering, with giant Genentech headquartered in South San Francisco and Stanford University again deeply involved.)
    Technological innovations continued in the region, including Philo T. Farnsworth’s invention of the iconoscope tube, a crucial TV component, in the 1920s, when the valley had nearly 125,000 acres in orchards; Charles Litton’s San Carlos labs, which did war work, laser research, and more; and the refinement of magnetic tape recording technology for Ampex and ABC soon after World War II. Moffet Air Field opened up in the 1930s and was for sixty years an important aviation research center. Silicon Valley environmentalist Ted Smith calls the place the greatest concentration of military-industrial sites in the country. Later, Stanford University became an ally of the electronics industry in much the way that nearby UC Berkeley took on nuclear weapons research and lab management; Stanford Research Park was built on university land in the early fifties as Stanford Industrial Park. Stanford electronics engineering students William Hewlett and David Packard invented the audio oscillator in 1938 and sold their first ones to Walt Disney for
Fantasia
. Long before Robert Noyce invented the integratedcircuit—the silicon chip that gave the valley its name—military technology and entertainment technology were already aligned on parallel paths.
    In 1958, the Santa Clara planning department published a report that jumbled its metaphors interestingly: “Santa Clara County is fighting a holding action in the cause of agricultural land reserves. We are a wagon train, besieged by the whooping Indians of urbanization, and waiting prayerfully for the US Cavalry.” The cavalry had already arrived, in the form of defense contracts that supported much of the research and development in the technology field, a connection that doesn’t fit with the image of the independent inventor or with the images of the planning department. The fruit orchards of Santa Clara, like the citrus groves of Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, are vestiges of a cleaner environment and lower property values. In a place such as Cupertino, with land prices up to a million dollars an acre, hanging onto farmland is difficult (though some farmers became wealthy enough by selling some of their land to cultivate the rest of it for pleasure). By the 1980s, more than four-fifths of the agricultural land had become industrial or suburban space, and only 8,000 acres of orchard stood, much of it between office buildings and clearly doomed. The peninsula and San Jose were developed with little more foresight than Mrs. Winchester’s house.
    In this, Silicon Valley is not unique but typical in contemporary America, a decentralized, diffused region: postindustrial, postcommunal, postrural, and post-urban—postplace, but for the undeveloped western slopes and the undevelopable bay. As Langdon Winner writes, “Perhaps the most significant, enduring accomplishment of Silicon Valley is to have transcended itself, and fostered the creation of an ethereal reality, which exercises increasing influence over embodied, spatially bound varieties of social life. Here decisions are made and actions taken in ways that eliminate the need for physical presence in any particular place. Knowing where a person, building, neighborhood, town, or city is located no longer provides a reliable guide to understanding human relationships and institutions.” As much as specific products—for the military, for business, and for entertainment,whatever that is—Silicon Valley seems to have generated prototypes of a more pervasive American future, one of dislocation. It has no center; rather than being a city radiating bedroom communities, which generates a coherent commute, it consists of myriad clusters of industry and housing, with commuters jamming in all directions at the beginning and end of every workday. As we