The Cultural and Spiritual Context of Silicon Valley

The third literature category was Silicon Valley.

I looked at Silicon Valley from a few different perspectives for the purpose of this dissertation. The first was to get a high level view of the cultural ethos of Silicon Valley. Needless to say, Silicon Valley is acknowledged as the technology hub of the world. I looked at how the unique combination of people, ideas, experiments, and failures along with a spirit of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship (plus a healthy dose of good weather and good fortune) allowed for the seeds of the Personal Computer Revolution to be planted in this geographic area. Vivek Wadhwa, in an MIT Technology Review article entitled, "Why Silicon Valley Can't Be Copied," said that this unique cultural context allowed for an ecosystem to emerged that “supported experimentation, risk-taking, and sharing the lessons of success and failure. In other words, Silicon Valley was an open system—a giant, real-world social network that existed long before Facebook.”

Much has been written about the history, culture, and future of the Silicon Valley but my primary interest was to look at the cultural context of Silicon Valley from a theological and missiological perspective. Bruce Baker, of Seattle Pacific University, was one of the few scholars who attempted to look a the cultural ethos of Silicon Valley from this perspective. He argued that the spirit of creativity and innovation that was evident in Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ethos came from the imago Dei in human nature. He stated:

We may presume that creativity in general points to God as the ultimate and primordial Creator and as the source of all creativity. The arts and crafts are the most obvious expression of this creative element in human nature, yet these are by no means the only forms of creativity attributable to the imago Dei. Creativity is required to the daily functions of life— decision-making and adaptation to each new circumstance demands some sort of creative response. (Baker, Bruce. 2014. "Silicon Valley and the Spirit of Innovation: How California's Entrepreneurial Ethos Bears Witness to Spiritual Reality." In Theology and California Theological Refractions on California's Culture, edited by Fred Sanders and Jason S. Sexton. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.).

The final perspective that I wanted to look at was how technological advances have adversely affected the spiritual lives of those who live in a high-tech cultural context such as Silicon Valley. Sara Robinson insightfully observed, in an article published in Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/), how the modern push to expand the work week beyond the normal 40 hours a week has its roots in Silicon Valley. Although her description of the "typcial" Silicon Valley worker may be a bit stereotypical, her historical and cultural observation is still worth considering. She wrote:

The first is the emergence of Silicon Valley as an economic powerhouse in the late 1970s. Since WWII, the valley had attracted a unique breed of worker — scientists and technologists who carried with them a singular passion for research and innovation. Asperger’s Syndrome wasn’t named and identified until 1994, but by the 1950s, the defense industries in California’s Santa Clara Valley were already drawing in brilliant young men and women who fit the profile: single-minded, socially awkward, emotionally detached and blessed (or cursed) with a singular, unique, laser-like focus on some particular area of obsessive interest. For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care. The popular stereotype of the geek was born in some real truths about the specific kinds of people who were drawn to tech in those early years.

The scope of my research was not to do a full cultural analysis of Silicon Valley. Instead, I hoped to look at how technological innovation and economic growth have lead to new opportunities as well as new spiritual challenges to residents of this region. The existing research gives a clue to the cultural and spiritual challenges that residents of Silicon Valley face. According to a study by INRIX in 2016, the San Francisco Bay Area suffered from the 4th worst traffic in the world (http://inrix.com/resources/inrix-2016-global-traffic-scorecard/ ) with the average San Francisco Bay Area driver sitting in 83 hours of commute traffic. Traffic is typically a good indicator of a healthy and growing economy, but it can also lead to other ancillary problems such as driving up the cost of living, rising housing costs, and economic pressure. In another study in 2017, the San Jose metropolitan area (the heart of Silicon Valley) was rated as the 5th least affordable global housing market (http://blog.pacificunion.com/bay-area-housing-markets-are-among-theworlds-10-least-affordable/).

I point to this combination of traffic and rising housing costs as factors that adversely affect the financial, personal, and spiritual pressures that many individuals in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is clearly not alone in having these types of lifestyle challenges. But it does serves as a unique cultural forerunner for the rest of the society regarding how individuals utilize technology to manage or potentially overcome some of these cultural pitfalls and pressures. I hope to share some of the points of integration between the three literature categories of spiritual formation, technology, within high-tech enabled cultural contexts such as Silicon Valley.