What goes around does eventually come around. The outsourcing of harm and the pursuit of the very cheapest labor was too wildly successful for Silicon Valley. By the 2020s, China was rising and nearly all the best chips were made in Taiwan. Security and dominance fears grew and a major push began to bring back chip manufacturing to the drought-stricken deserts of Arizona and the lush jungles of nearby “friendly” countries, such as Costa Rica.

“Who wants to carry bunches of bananas rather than go to work in a microprocessor factory producing the world’s most in-demand technology?” Costa Rica president Rodrigo Chaves asked a group of local teenagers. How could any ambitious teenager resist that sort of offer, especially in a country struggling with high unemployment? Who wants bananas anyway when you can have chips? Business-friendly Chaves had been relentless in pushing what he termed “economic reactivation” as his government rolled back environmental protections and refused to ratify the Escazú Agreement, a treaty seeking to protect environmentalists in the most dangerous continent on earth for such activists. “It’s paradoxical that a country as emblematic as Costa Rica, recognized worldwide for its environmental commitment, is only interested in the economic benefits that a company like Intel can generate for its gross domestic product,” Pablo Gámez Cersosimo, a Costa Rican researcher specializing in technology and biodiversity, told me. “In Costa Rica, there is an absence of critical thinking, of national-level debate, about the environmental impact derived from the semiconductor industry.”

The first time I experienced the Valley was around 1999, as one of those gung-ho tech bro entrepreneurs eager to make a fast buck. Three years earlier, I had published a report for the Irish government called Ireland: the digital age, the internet. Nua, a company I had co-founded, had in 1996 won the Best Overall World Wide Web Business Achievement Award from the European Union. It had become one of the first companies in Europe to win significant Web contracts in the United States. When we exhibited in the Javits Center in New York in 1999, it felt like everyone knew our name because of a very popular Internet trends blog we published. We had designed a social media platform called Local Ireland that had received millions in funding from Ireland’s national telecom company. Nua would soon be valued at $250 million by some of Wall Street’s finest investment banks, only to crash, sizzle and burn in the dotcom bust of 2001. I was in Silicon Valey to sell silicon dreams.

This was Mecca for someone like me. I had built up this image of a fantastical, wondrous place, something out of a fairytale, a place with a pathway to a better and more prosperous world, a shining, broad, majestic valley, a pure and clean place great for the environment. I arrived in San Francisco airport and got a taxi south towards San Jose. The relentless traffic was the first thing that hit me. The traffic jams, though, simply fed my expectation. Soon, it would be soon. I began to see low box warehouse-type building after low box warehouse-type building, like a continuous series of Walmarts and Ikeas. I was waiting and wondering when the real Valley would begin.