Cultures@Silicon Valley (review)

Though buffeted and tarnished by economic turmoil, Silicon Valley remains the sine qua non symbol of emergent, information society, the centerpiece of gushing, rhapsodic paeans to technocracy in Wired magazine and, we're continuously reminded, the embodiment of our post-Fordist future. But what makes life and work in Silicon Valley different? And, if this indeed represents the vanguard, what's in store for the rest of us?

English-Lueck's Cultures@SiliconValley is the product of a decade-long, longitudinal study, the "Silicon Valley Cultures Project," that began in 1991 and included anthropologists Charles Darrah and James Freeman along with numerous San Jose State University students (See the Web site www.sjsu.edu/ depts/anthropology/svcp). Results from this ethnographic survey have already been (partially) disseminated in numerous articles and conference papers from English-Lueck, Charles Darrah, James Freeman and others. Future publications will analyze potentially intriguing material from "twenty-five hundred hours of observation, shadowing twelve middle-class, dual-career families in Silicon Valley" (13).

The present volume is in some ways a précis of this wealth of qualitative data and seems targeted at a variety of audiences in addition to anthropologists: academics from other disciplines together with their undergraduates and the many groups who collaborated on this research, notably the Institute for the Future, software companies, Silicon Valley non-profits and civic groups. This may account for the curiously uncritical presentation of informant voices, leaving us to connect the dots, as it were, of a "critical theory" of information society.

The ethnography is divided into two, thematically distinct but inter-related parts: first, notes on the "technological saturation" of Silicon Valley and second, the "identity diversity" by which its denizens characterize themselves.

"Technological saturation" is manifest in the complex spaces created by the interlacing filaments of communications technologies that enfold work and social life—fax, e-mail, cell phone, laptop and the personal digital assistant (PDA). Indeed, one of English-Lueck's central arguments is that people utilize all of these technologies to order their lives into flexible networks. In a supremely flexible environment characterized by Schumpeter-ian "creative destruction," people rely less on companies and institutions than on fluid congeries of co-workers, college friends, professional contacts and other family members, all of whom are flexibly ordered with the help of a nested hierarchy of communications technologies. Whom do you call? E-mail? Fax? Who's on your listerv? Your weblog?

Liberated from the shop floor and the cubicle, work interpenetrates family and leisure. English-Lueck's ethnography is filled with people who wake early to telecommute from their bedsides and who manage childcare and shopping from their company workstations. And while English-Lueck is clear that the interpenetration of "paid work" and "un-paid work" goes both ways, it seems equally clear that it can only do so to the extent that production and the relations of capitalism have thoroughly penetrated self, family and social life, as when informants "described their homes as 'platforms' for various media, and the number and integration of devices within the platform was clearly an important issue" (98).

That is, life in Silicon Valley, with its familiar tensions of family, work and social obligations becomes, for many of English-Lueck's informants, a task to be managed, with technologies as part of the post-Fordist toolkits people utilize to turn their lives into "corporations" to be ordered, delegated and planned with partner, children and innumerable service workers becoming the co-workers and subordinates in this incorporation of the Self. "Cell phones are given to wives to demonstrate husbandly attitudes—and ensure that they will not be out of touch when needed" (60).

As people become CEO's of their own worlds, they also "manage" Self and subjectivity, shifting foci and reskilling with a flexibility ultimately tethered to the ratiocinations of the workplace. Whatever the needs of the job—e.g., the "crunch time" that comes at the end of...