Abolish Silicon Valley
The aim of abolishing Silicon Valley is to reclaim our world from capital, which means diminishing the power that money holds over our lives. Getting there would require decommodifying essential goods while also radically transforming the way we think about work — so that people work not because they need to pay the bills, but because they want to
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Advertising is a key component of capital’s control over culture. When corporations add their names to sports arenas, or embed their commercials as YouTube pre-roll, or pay for product placement in television shows, it’s an attempt to ensure that capital is inseparable from any sort of social or cultural space.20 You’re not supposed to enjoy anythi
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Once a product gets enough traction, it should be unbundled into a series of open protocols and standards to permit alternative implementations, analogous to the way web browsers are developed today (though without the corresponding corporate dominance19
Wendy Liu • Abolish Silicon Valley
For products and services where meaningful competition is important, the lever of intellectual property reform offers an alternative to antitrust efforts to break up tech companies, which would have limited success in restoring competition due to intellectual property hoarding and high start-up costs in the sector. Rather than breaking up companies
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Data currently captured by ridesharing or scooter or housing-related startups should be anonymously aggregated for use by urban planners, and any personal data should be easily portable for export to another platform. The latter would also have the effect of increasing worker mobility between gig platforms.
Wendy Liu • Abolish Silicon Valley
Overall, instead of technology being privately owned and developed in secret by multiple competitors, we should aim to have more open protocols and decentralised services. Secret development makes sense for small entities working on technology not yet shown to be in the public interest, but once a form of technology is mature enough, there should b
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Instead, we should see data as belonging to the people who created it and to the public at large.
Wendy Liu • Abolish Silicon Valley
Data portability is another important avenue for tackling corporations’ hold over intellectual property.
Wendy Liu • Abolish Silicon Valley
Mobility in particular needs to be reclaimed from VC-backed startups. Take scooters, for instance: instead of five different tech companies littering them indiscriminately with minimal public oversight, imagine a system that’s municipally owned and free at the point of use.