It wasn’t always known as the Valley of Pimps and Pushers. Once upon a time, they called it the Valley of Heart’s Delight. From far and near, families would come on Springtime pilgrimages to participate in the famed “blossom tours” in Santa Clara Valley, California. “Miles and miles of fragrant orchards, spreading in a vista of never-ending loveliness under sunny Spring skies, hold promises of rich treats to come,” a promotional video from the 1940s stated. Up the road, in San Francisco Bay, they found rich harvests of the freshest oysters, while the soil of nearby San Jose was famous for its fertility, overflowing with prunes, apricots, cherries and apples.

Those times would pass. The valley of fruits would become the valley of silicon, while the man who used an apple for his company’s logo would keep a private orchard next to his house to reminisce on Nature and those pleasant times gone past. The soil and water would be soaked in a multitude of chemicals and heavy metals used in the making of silicon chips and other electronics. The e-waste sites would proliferate. Chemicals, ethers and gases used in the chip “clean rooms” would cause all sorts of health issues, particularly for the reproductive health of the mainly migrant female workforce. The high-tech sewage dumped freely in public drains, the leaky underground chemical tanks, laced the environment with cadmium, nickel, and lead, the nitrogen and phosphorous runoff from Green Revolution agriculture. It would all add up. There would be and a rash of deaths from food poisoning. Thus, the surge in oyster restaurants to satisfy the refined tastes of the tech bros of San Francisco could not meet their needs from local Bay-fished oysters anymore. For thousands of years, the local Indigenous had grown healthy and strong eating this abundant seafood. No more. Santa Clara County would move from being known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight to the Valley of Superfund Sites, as it attained the notorious reputation of having more toxic dumpsites than any other county in the USA. Luckily, the Valley had excellent marketing and branding. The pain and suffering of the female migrant workforce would remain well hidden, as would all the other stories of environmental degradation, well covered up by the brilliant shine of the ethereal Valley’s clean and bright green Big Tech brands.

As early as the 1950s, Big Tech began to master the fine arts of greenwashing. It would take an actual green valley and turn it toxic brown while branding it bright green. This new Valley would reflect a clean break from the dirty and polluting smokestack industries of the past. It was to be a digital world, insubstantial , almost invisible, light as a cloud. Its planners eagerly embraced the architecture of seemingly open spaces, campuses and parks, low-rise university-style buildings, soft, green landscaping, evoking sustainability and renewability. Underneath the slick branding, the chemicals bubbled in carefully hidden underground tanks, the gases rose, and the heavy metals stirred. The working environments of the female migrant workers were cruelly filled with cancer-causing gases.