Abolish Silicon Valley

“There's no evangelism like the zeal of a recent convert” is a cliché with a lot of truth in it. The convert is the rare person that knows what it is like to believe A and to be persuaded to believe B. It's lonely, because they feel an affinity, a one-sided kinship with the A's, and however much they also feel connected to B's they are outsiders. Therefore they must find new converts because only they will understand the journey they have completed.

Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley is a memoir in which she looks back at her journey from being a founder of a startup at 19 to being a Marxist critic in her late 20's.

While she has some clearly expressed ideas and insights—I particularly loved the way that she drew a parallel between the structure of gig worker pay and the Amazon Web Services server credits that basically every developer uses—easily half of the book is skin-deep summaries of news events and startup culture ideas. The other half is a dull tick-tock of the saga of founding a startup and riding it into failure. It's just not that interesting, think: Abolish My Two Years Working at Kinko's.

If you misread the title, as I did, and inserted an unwritten How To at the beginning, please be aware that the sum total of the imagining a post-capitalism tech sector would fit in a not-very-long Medium post. It has one great idea about the possibilities of legislating code to be open-sourced after a certain period, the rest is banality.

I feel a little bad trashing this book because the sense of anger that Liu has at being hoodwinked and bribed into thinking that startup culture really was disrupting corporate evil and doing good doing well is alive. But kind of like the convert, in a world this upside down, if you have decided to maintain your belief that Silicon Valley is a force for good in 2020 (pub year), this book is not going to reach you, and if you have been there already, the naiveté of Liu's pre-conversion self is simply going to inflame your sense of injustice.