“A lot of that design was about deliberately placing industrial infrastructure out of sight,” scientist Josh Lepawsky explained to me. “Literally putting it underground. Things like chemical storage tanks needed to store the chemicals for the manufacturing process. So, it was a deliberate urban design process, and I think it has been with us since at least the 1950s. Why does it all matter? One of the ways that it matters is that it is very useful for the marketing and the industrial interests out of which digital technologies emerge, that they can trade on these images of being light, green.

Think of all of the metaphors that go with the digital technologies we use, like ‘The Cloud’, for example. This myth of digital as ethereal can be very useful as a way to divert attention from the many classic problems that come along with industrial production, that is the use of energy and materials and the pollution that pretty much always results.” Put the chemical storage tanks and pipes underground. Think about that for a moment. Underground, these tanks were much harder to maintain. They were much more likely to leak, and the chemicals they leaked were some of the most toxic known to man. It didn’t matter. The health of people didn’t matter. The soil and water didn’t matter. What mattered was the branding.

Silicon Valley had other secrets. Like the overall computer industry, it was born from war. Its first design challenge was how to kill more efficiently. The cold and warm wars nurtured the digital seeds, with the Second World War giving birth to the semiconductor industry. It grew quickly, fed by military contracts. Early invention and innovation was focused on improving guidance systems for missiles to make them more effective killing machines. Sputnik and the arms race were the seeds from which the Internet would blossom as a result of generous military research grants, with the objective of creating a network that would be robust enough to withstand multiple nuclear strikes.

In the nascent Valley, the bright green new world order needed to “attract a better class of workers,” as Stanford University business manager, Alf E. Brandin, stated in 1956. They wanted engineers and thinkers, marketers and branders, and fewer of those unkempt working-class riffraff, those illiterate and disposable female migrant workers coming from Mexico and the Philippines to steal the jobs nobody else wanted to do. Or at least that was the impression Alf E. Brandin and his modern marketers wanted to present, and as we all know, when it comes to marketing, impressions count more than reality. Thus, the Stanford Industrial Park got renamed the Stanford Research Park. Companies that located there “had to follow strict building codes, which included ‘complete concealment’ of things like smokestacks, generators, transformers, ducts, storage tanks, and air conditioning equipment,” writer and philosopher Aaron Sachs explained. The buildings were kept low lying, hugging the ground, blending into the landscape, becoming the landscape.