There's a lot of passive voice in Tech™, and Voices from the Valley doesn't like it. "Tech companies have many reasons to pretend that their products run themselves," the very first page says. "This book will introduce you to the people behind the platforms." And it does—Voices' seven anonymous interviews (which might be familiar if you've read the "Anonymous Conversation With" series in Logic) are all rich provocations. The book's central theme is the diversity of the "tech worker," a term that is coalitional almost by definition. One interview explicitly cites the union meetings that brought cooks and PMs in the same space, and organizations like the Tech Workers Coalition have been explicit about building this kind of cross-functional power. And while Silicon Valley often wields the term “technical” to exclude people, it's “technique” that ties together the engineer who wrote reCAPTCHA, the massage therapist kneading knots from her coworkers' backs, and the writer preparing instruction manuals for complex software. All labor is skilled, and all labor exists on a spectrum of precarity and humiliation. Voices presents Silicon Valley as simultaneously a place, a mindset, a collection of multibillion dollar corporations, and the people who comprise it. This expansive frame—of an assemblage, not a monolith—becomes especially salient when skimming tech's latest headlines. Microsoft's decision to make remote work permanent is no longer just about Zooms—er, Teams—and lost perks, but rather losing the workers who provided those perks in the first place. The fact that the pandemic has sent Uber and Lyft stocks into a tailspin provokes concern for the hundreds of thousands of contract drivers choosing between their health and their income. Yet while Voices implores readers to acknowledge Silicon Valley’s hierarchies, the authors' obfuscation of their own identities can feel like the view from nowhere that plagues modern journalism: How much does this founder represent all founders? What was cut from the interview, and why? What do Tarnoff and Weigel want us to do, exactly? Without this context, it becomes too easy to read the interviews, check our privilege, and go — to fall into what New Yorker writer Katy Waldman dubs the reflexivity trap: the "idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance." So certainly, pick up a copy of Voices. But keep asking: Where do we go from here? originally written for Reboot here - subscribe for author events, book reviews, and original writing :)
(oct 22, 2020)
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