According to tech futurists like Gregory Stock, the only function biodiversity had was to entertain humans. “There is an immense roster of species,” he noted, “that neither affect nor interest the vast majority of humankind.” This was in 1999 and these tech bro views have only accelerated and hardened since then as, unsurprisingly, biodiversity has collapsed all around us. Not because of some accidents. Because of Valley design and culture. Because of the triumph of technology, chemicals and plastics, of engineers, chemists and scientists. The Valley is not finished yet, by any means. It has big dreams of extending its surveillance capitalism world, while crushing any competition from our environment. By the 2010s, the “best minds” of what had now become the Valley of Pimps and Pushers were relentlessly focused on designing for engagement and addiction. By the 2020s, they were openly calling for ethnic cleansing and the building of a new and more secure Valley away from the working-class riffraff and the homeless, where the tech elite could live out their fantasies of world domination in quiet and comfort, surrounded by big screens of super clean nature.

I asked Aaron Sachs in 2023 if experience had led him to change his thinking since he published his article back in 1999. “I don’t have much to add except to recommend the writings of Lewis Mumford,” he replied. “I recently published a book partly about Mumford, and one of the subtexts was simply his warning that in this country the conversation about HOW we ought to use technology has almost always come too late—long after the technology has been hailed as the next great gift to humankind. Just part of the love affair with capitalistic innovation and consumerism…”

Even in the greenwashed Valley there were limits. By the 1970s, the concentration of toxic dump sites, of polluted water and soil, was concentrating minds. More and more people were getting sick, the US Environmental Protection Agency had been established in 1970, and regulations were tightening. There is opportunity in adversity, they say. Some bright spark wondered why bring these riffraff Mexican and Filipino illiterate women to the vaunted Valley, when you could outsource the harm to their dirtbag country? There, you could keep dumping toxins straight into the soil, air and waterways—in even larger quantities—and nobody would complain, so desperate were they for progress, modernity, development. You could exploit workers too in a way that was no longer possible in a namby-pamby government-interfering USA that was losing its raw capitalist bleeding edge. Didn’t everywhere desperately want to be Silicon—Silicon Isle, Silicon Glen, Silicon Delta, Silicon Heartland, Silicon Forest, Silicon Savannah, Silicon Oasis, Silicon Desert? The bright green silicon machine was marching and conquering everywhere it went. It would now be “Designed in The Valley”, with the manufacturing, worker abuse and pollution disappearing even further into the cloud of poor countries scrambling for crumbs of the future.