The End of Silicon Valley: Tim O'Reilly

The cover of a book that changed my life

Predicting the end of dominant paradigms or places is a cottage industry among “thought leaders,” so Tim O’Reilly’s recent post on “The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It”, came across my way with a large grain of salt. Nevertheless, his books business, and now more broadly electronic education business, has been a part of my life for the entire length of my career, so, a deeper look is certainly warranted.

Two key points:

Failure to Self-Regulate Means the Feds are Coming

In the case of social media platforms, manipulation of users for profit has frayed the fabric of democracy and the respect for truth. Silicon Valley, which once harnessed the collective intelligence of its users, now uses its deep knowledge of its users to “trade against them.”

The fatuous arguments from 1995 taken and reapplied in 2020 hearings for Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are finally finding lawmakers who aren’t apt to be played. These companies are not “platforms” and their insufficient action against purveyors of disinformation needs to be registered and unacceptable in the future.

SV’s Tech-for-it’s-own-sake has Chased Small Potatoes Apps

SV has often pursued tech-for-it’s-own-sake and has often implemented it (or “sleeved”^* it) into businesses where it’s good, but not game changing. For all the graph traversal brilliance in Google or Facebook, the “sleeve” is still finding that person you lament you didn’t hook up with or that bully whose impecunity you want to verify and bask in from your veranda in Palo Alto.

But those same algorithms can be sleeved into science in a way that can make our lives better. The COVID-19 pandemic makes clear that the latent, under-rewarded leaps in life science have been literally civilization-saving. What would happen if the playing field for technology advance were not disinformation peddling, but gene research? Why would SV eschew life science sleeves for technology versus social networks? Simple. It’s easier.

Doing so would require:

deep knowledge of relevant science. The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province of Silicon Valley, suggesting that other regions may take the lead. Second, many of the markets where fortunes will be made are regulated; navigating regulated markets also takes skills that are conspicuously missing in Silicon Valley. Finally, as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon Valley has prospered. Many Silicon Valley investors have been lucky rather than smart. They may not do so well in a world where capital must be directed toward solving hard problems rather than toward winning a popularity contest.

Reading that, I could hear the technologists of Boston cackling with delight. The hub of life science research (peer to South San Francisco), home of MIT, and a short train ride from Manhattan’s ocean of cash might well call her children back to the Northeast.

Footnote

*: “Sleeve” as a term from sci-fi referring to the “body” of a being. The implementations vary, but once computers can map a “brain,” the essence, the “soul” of a person and can re-inject it into a different body, bodies become little more than sleeves. Ugly? Get a pretty sleeve. Weak? Get a strong sleeve? Need to be a robot? Inject yourself into a mechanically powerful cyborg.