Dennis Hayes has seen the future and it doesnunderside of Silicon Valley provides a ’t work. His disturbing account of the powerful and much-needed antidote to the fantasy of a postindustrial utopia- a pastoral paradise touched by the miracle of enterprise and intervention, of material abundance and social harmony. Hayes describes the pursuit of wealth, power, and technical enchantment on the one side, and the human degradation on the other.
Taking the reader behind the promotional veil of the engineers and entrepreneurs, Hayes calls our attention to both the natural and human costs of their driving ambitions. He describes the cruel irony of the so-called “clean rooms,” the fume filled chip processing facilities where workers are “packaged to protect the product” rather than the other way around. And he explains how the clean room casualties multiply beyond the factory gates, as processing chemicals seep into the valley’s air, water supply, and food chain.
The desperation and alienation that characterize the Silicon Valley workplace carry over into the anomie of an atomized society beyond the workplace. Hayes recounts the social erosion in the valley, the closing of schools, the escalating housing costs, the inadequate child care. He vividly describes the banal horrors of the two-hour commute, the loneliness of lives. He probes the spirit of the new era and finds it dissolving in the solvents of Silicon Valley, leaving up to three-quarters of the working population victims of substance abuse, over half in therapy, and the highest divorce rate in the nation.
“An eloquent, inside account of
trouble in the ersatz paradise of Silicon Valley…The exposé
of the “clean rooms” will shock readers…Discussions
of computer hackers… and desperate entrepreneurs condemn the
corporate atmosphere…The documentation and… daring are
commendable.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“Absolutely must reading for
scholars, students, policy-makers, and all those who are
concerned with our technological and industrial future.”
--Economic Geography
“Probably the best radical book
about California’s ‘Silicon Valley’.”
--Libertarian Labor Review
“A superbly written indictment
of failed dreams and hollow promises that inspires… a
profane rage at what we’ve let ourselves become hostage to.”
--Montreal Gazette
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Introduction by David Noble
Mutation: The Electronic Colony
Lonely Trials, Itinerant Cultures: Work’s Diminishing Connections
Above the Crescendo: Cleanly as Deadly
Computer Builders and Hackers: Neurotic Romance?
The Cloistered Workplace: From Dungeons Come Dragons
Wayward Professionals
PsychoTherapeutico
Notes
Index
224 pages, index
Paperback ISBN: 0-921689-62-4 $18.99
Hardcover ISBN: 0-921689-63-2 $47.99
1990
