Silicon Valley: A Machine Engineered for Technocracy

Written by Jenna Marvet | May 2021 |

Silicon Valley, a technological utopia located south of San Francisco, California, has been built by the technology industry, for the technology industry. Before the technology boom, Silicon Valley, known then as Santa Clara Valley, was a cornucopia of agriculture.[1] Today it is the heart of the technology industry and home to the densest concentration of technology companies in the world.[2] Due to the high density of technology corporations in the region, the structure of space and community in modern Silicon Valley is shaped by the industry, corporations, and technological elites. Leaders speak of the region as though their understanding of community is filtered through a high-tech lens, with problem-solving perspectives guiding their understanding.[3] Corporate cultures have blended with the culture of the community, blurring the line between the technological and not, effectively erasing any distinction.

Through utilization of the company town model and sophisticated interventions on both physical and social space, technological elites have taken their place at the helm of Silicon Valley. Technology corporations are at the center of not only work life, but also social and political life. Thus, a neoliberal technocracy takes the place of democracy, altering political structure through corporate authority over space.

Silicon Valley’s Corporate Town Model

Plans to revitalize and construct urban spaces in the Silicon Valley region have been announced by technology giants Facebook, based out of Menlo Park, and Google, headquartered in Mountain View.[4] These plans proposed developments of corporate villages with mixed-use public and private space. For example, in 2017, Facebook proposed a new development project combining corporate and residential space dubbed Willow Village. As of 2019, the proposal included both public and private work campus sections. The proposal illustrates sections indicating residential, mixed use and office campus space. Overall, the plan includes offices and retail locations, a large public park and field, a “town square,” community center, hotel, dog park and residential apartments, as well as Facebook employee amenities and an employee health center. The campus is equipped with parking garages and transportation between the Willow Village campus and the main Menlo Park campus for employees.[5] The proposed layout encompasses all aspects of Facebook employees’ lives, from where they sleep and eat, to where they play, shop, and participate in their community.

Technology giants’ desire to incorporate residential and public life within their corporate workplaces is reminiscent of the company towns of the American Industrial Revolution (Garfield).[6] Company towns were a popular corporate organizational scheme during the nineteenth century that constructed spaces which went far beyond factories or farms that acted solely as workplaces for employees. Instead, these company towns consisted of multi-purpose company-built structures where workers spent most of the working year.[7] In essence, workers lived in and worked on company property.

The company town model emphasizes the importance of drawing in and retaining human capital by designing spatial architecture to fulfill most daily needs of a specific pool of people. Companies provided housing as well as amenities such as stores, recreational facilities, libraries, churches, taverns, restaurants, post offices, schools, and barbershops. Employees of the company lived in the town, were paid wages by the company, and then typically paid the company rent, as well as for services and goods purchased in town.[8] The purpose of many of these company towns was to facilitate production in isolated areas and to manage labor and resources effectively.[9]

Although the workforces of the Industrial Revolution era company towns and the campuses of modern Silicon Valley differ greatly, they share the financial reality that people play a central role in corporate economic success. Both recognized an obstacle in recruiting a sufficiently large labor pool to meet a profit-maximizing output. Isolation burdened hiring a sufficient workforce in the Industrial Revolution company town, while Silicon Valley is challenged to entice highly skilled members of the Creative Class. Silicon Valley technology companies require a unique labor market consisting primarily of members of the Creative Class, a social class of highly paid knowledge workers and creative individuals in fields such as science, technology, business, and management. Creativity has become the driving factor of economic growth, giving this class dominant influence over society,[10] which is especially true in Silicon Valley. Social and physical spaces are crafted to not only draw these individuals to the region, but to encourage them to be highly innovative and productive, mirroring the drive and purpose of the Industrial Revolution company town.

The Silicon Valley model pushes beyond the confines of a small company town to create a massive corporate regional structure. Geographies in which high-tech firms agglomerate like Silicon Valley become incubators of creativity, innovation, and industry, built up to provide the ideal environment for the high-tech Creative Class to thrive. Firms concentrate spatially for economic efficiency. Spatial closeness is financially lucrative because it facilitates knowledge flow between companies and people and concentrates industry resources. The most powerful influencer of corporate clustering is people, and to Silicon Valley, the Creative Class is the most valuable economic resource. Companies cluster to draw from concentrations of highly talented and educated people who innovate and influence economic growth.[11] Regional clustering mimics the spatial order of the company town, widening the boundaries to envelop the region in an ecosystem whose purpose is to attract human capital to attain financial success.

Silicon Valley has successfully attracted a significant population of the Creative Class through the company town model centered on the procurement of human capital. Three Silicon Valley cities, Cupertino, Palo Alto and Mountain View, topped the list of leading Creative Class cities based on Census data and the share of the workforce doing Creative Class work. All three have a Creative Class share of the workforce over 61% and topping off at over 76%.[12] Additionally, over 50% of Silicon Valley residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, with 24% having attained a graduate or professional degree,[13] making the labor pool well-educated and preferential for recruitment by the technology sector.

The high-tech Silicon Valley company town modeled by Facebook’s land development proposal is not a distant future, but a reality for the region today. Corporate space has enveloped the entirety of the region with the organization of social and physical space essential for the recruitment of human capital to the technology sector. The agglomeration of firms has drawn in a burgeoning labor pool consisting significantly of the elusive but lucrative Creative Class.

Silicon Valley’s Corporate Architecture

Financial success and profit maximization are at the center of the organization of space and resources in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Silicon Valley has become an organized machine, constituted of elements meant to promote and sustain innovation and entrepreneurship.[14] People, and the information and knowledge they are able to produce and transfer, are a central economic asset to the system. Relations between economic actors for economic gains are prioritized, transforming members of the Creative Class into homo economicus. The central focuses of homo economicus are economic relationships and working to optimize economic outcomes.[15]

In the world of information technology, the transfer of knowledge is a highly valuable resource, and the regional social order has been affected by this notion. The sharing economy, exemplified in the business models of Silicon Valley-based companies such as Lyft and Airbnb, is emphasized in the organization of social space as well as physical space. The sharing economy model is characterized by the sharing of resources, enabled by social networks and community.[16] This idea is injected into the architecture of the workplace, with shared workspaces such as incubators, accelerators and coworking spaces being pioneered and perfected in Silicon Valley. This use of space is meant to “oil the sharing of ideas”[17] through proximity to other human capital at work. Sharing is common between anyone in the Silicon Valley technology industry, as it is meant to strengthen ideas, offering flexibility, feedback and quick responses to opportunities and challenges.[18] The transferring and transformation of information and social capital between people is treated as an economic exchange between members of the Creative Class for the betterment of corporate profits. Corporate space and social norms are therefore manufactured to foster information transfer.

The line between work and social life is blurred in Silicon Valley, making many interactions of social capital a financially motivated trade. The economic activity in the technology industry shapes the community and the social order serves the technology industry.[19] Because the high-tech Creative Class often horizontally moves between jobs in Silicon Valley, social-financial capital must be retained, even in uncomfortable situations. For example, layoffs are treated especially gingerly to ensure that bridges between members of the Creative Class are not burned. At the heart of relationships between members of the high-tech Creative Class in Silicon Valley is the motivation to preserve industry connections.[20] Social networks are constructed around professional networks.

Structuring social community around work requires that work becomes life. Silicon Valley has instituted a culture of work which prioritizes the flow of economically valuable resources over all else. To succeed in the technological world, workers must be constantly available and with their attention focused primarily, if not only, on their work.[21] Work is not isolated to the workplace, but is completed in other places as well[22] and late-night sessions with little to no sleep are glamorized by the Silicon Valley culture.[23] Thus, the workplace is not a single location or a place that is inhabited from 9:00 to 5:00, but a persistent concept without particular spatial or temporal constraints. Expectations of commitment to work extend beyond a “work-life balance” into a grey area in which the two are constantly mixing.

The normality of such an arrangement of work and life is made possible by the influence of corporate culture on Silicon Valley’s Creative Class. The heroes of the area are technological innovators, and companies craft images and cultures “transcending mere employment.” Work is instead a “level of social transformation.”[24] Silicon Valley corporations have extended their influence beyond creating products, instead, they “intend to save the world.” Silicon Valley leaders have high ambitions and want to solve the problems they believe others have created, whether it be Wall Street or Washington.[25] High ambitions and a view of one’s work as not only important, but paramount to the betterment of society is a direct effect of corporate culture’s influence on the worker to improve financial outcomes. Without such a grandiose vision of work, technology workers would be less willing to engage with work outside the spatial boundaries of the workplace. However, a corporate identity and culture of serving as agents of social change and the ambition to improve the world, make the invasion of work into other life not only tolerable, but an imperative.

The technology industry’s corporate cultures which have shaped visions of work for the Creative Class workforce have similarly structured the physical architecture of the workplace to optimize financial success. Activities and services which would typically be completed outside of work or at home are relocated to the confines of the corporate campus. Companies use perks and amenities to draw talented employees in. These perks range from free meals and drinks, gyms and fitness centers and beach volleyball courts to dry cleaning and laundry rooms, massages, haircuts and on-site car washes and oil changes.[26] Such a range of amenities appears generous, however, the purpose of structuring the physical space in this way is to keep employees at work for longer hours. If employees can take all their meals on site, there is no reason for them to go to the grocery store or eat at a restaurant. If they do not have to leave the campus to get their monthly haircut, there, again, is no reason for them to leave the corporate campus. The more time they are on site, the more likely it is that they are functioning as a producer of economic gains for the corporation.

Silicon Valley’s Technocracy

As the architects of both public and private physical and social space, technology corporations have implemented a system of governance and control in Silicon Valley. Technocracy, or the rule of the skilled elite, has replaced democracy in the region. Plato’s writings on technocracy emphasized the need for moral experts as rulers, rather than rule by the public.[27] In the Silicon Valley technocracy, it is not moral experts at the helm, but the technological elite with neoliberal objectives.

The technological elite’s behavior alteration of the Creative Class is central to the success of the Silicon Valley technocracy. Technocrats make adjustments to the environment to alter “choice architecture,” not taking away individual choice entirely but nudging the individual towards behaviors that are deemed ideal by the elite.[28] In the case of the Silicon Valley technocracy, ideal behaviors are ones in which the Creative Class performs as homo economicus, prioritizing economic optimization over all else. The influence of corporate and regional work cultures on the worker adjusts their choice architecture, facing them with a skewed choice of whether to fit in the neoliberal social network or to live their lives, both work and otherwise, outside of the network. The culture tells the worker that it is desirable to be an efficient economic actor, because it is beneficial for society and fitting in. This framework is necessary for the success of the technocracy and is implemented through sophisticated interventions on both physical and social space.

Technocrats in Silicon Valley derive authority from scientific and engineering prestige and attempt to legitimize their tight hold on power by offering innovative proposals seemingly unaffected by subjective biases and interests. They see themselves as the only leaders skilled enough to overcome inefficiencies common in democratic government, because their process is focused on optimization of resources. The framework of a technocratic model replaces the decisionist model of politics with the “scientification of politics.” A scientific process is applied to problem solving, from recognition of the problem to the determination of the most realistic and efficient solution. This ultimately produces an authoritarian political framework,[29] putting the people at the mercy of the outcomes of algorithms, rather than democratic processes.

In essence, technocratic leaders assume that all important problems facing human communities are technical and can be solved with existing or attainable knowledge. The technocratic domination view insists that the average citizen is not capable of coping with and understanding today’s complex policy challenges, because the way they understand problems is not as objective or methodical as the technocrat’s approach. Therefore, most issues require deference to skilled elites who believe they know what is best for society.[30] The technocratic approach places the technological elite in paternalistic positions, faced with making the “best,” most realistic, efficient decisions for the misguided bulk of humanity who is bogged down by subjectivity.

In its best form, technocracy can effectively combat incompetence and inefficiency common in democratic governance. However, it is less able to address larger and more emotionally and philosophically complex issues involving justice and fairness. In democracy, the people have the power to bring attention to societal issues, and a public forum is provided for possible solutions to be discussed and debated. When a scientific approach is applied to these deeply political problems, ignoring societal concerns or believing that the correct technological solution will eventually address them perpetuates the spread of injustice.[31] Such issues are not merely algorithmic and solvable by an optimization problem. What is gained in efficiency by the technocracy is lost in nuance.

Despite the narrow approach of technocrats in understanding and solving societal issues, big technology corporations have found their footing in social institutions, from health care to public education and housing. In these instances, technology corporations usurp established democratic governance efforts to solve regional problems. While their problem-solving power is often applauded for overcoming the inefficiencies and slowness of government, the technology companies’ objective is primarily financial. Because power has been placed in the hands of the technological elite, a proxy of profit-driven businesses, social good interference is profit-driven.[32]

Political interference by technology corporations is typically driven by the protection of profits and hidden behind the guise of betterment for society. While their public stance for interfering may be their goal of protecting people’s privacy rights or bettering their local communities, political gain is almost always tied to private economic betterment. Between 2005 and 2018, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft spent more than half a billion dollars lobbying Congress. Facebook lobbied for data breach legislation, Google for competition laws and Apple for tax legislation.[33] All three of these politicized issues directly affected the financial outcomes of the companies. Though most industries do the same, big technology firms tend to use their extensive online communities to support their battles by spinning issues to fit into their image of innovation for the good for the people.

However, neoliberal technocratic political interference does not stop at mere lobbying. Technology corporations will sometimes lead political movements themselves, calling on their community of users to protest policies which negatively impact their business practices.[34] Airbnb has often resorted to this method as it fights occupancy taxes and short-term rental legislation in localities across the United States. In one case, a local ordinance proposal in Boston requiring hosts to register with the city and restricting short-term rentals to owner-occupied units made Airbnb turn to its users to mobilize. The email aligned the ordinance with “big hotel interests” and called the proposal “anti-tenant,” “anti-middle class,” and “overly restrictive.”[35]

Airbnb’s utilization of political language is designed to appeal to the economic interests of the working and middle class. The reality is that short-term rental legislation like that proposed in Boston poses a threat to the corporate bottom-line, which is of primary concern since economic optimization is the key to corporate success. Though these corporations may attempt to appeal to the social good, their political involvement in communities is driven by neoliberal intentions to seek greater profit.

Though they may insist their corporations are “saving the world,” the technological elite are focused on objective economic optimization. The incorporation of this approach to the solving of social issues poses a detriment to democratic society. Technocratic and democratic rule tend to be at odds with one another. Technocrats are particularly skillful but can assume goals not shared by the wider public, especially when influenced by financial gain. Thus, the technocrat’s presentation of truth can easily be swayed by other factors[36] and not represent the desires of the people.

In fact, when social problems are outsourced to technocrats, entry points for any form of democratic intervention are blocked. Instead of political processes of debate and compromise being central to the policy outcome, they are minor externalities to the technological elite. Tenets of democratic governance and civic discourse are antithetical to the view of society as an “optimizable machine”.[37] Thus, with the rise of technocracy, democratic society is severely dismembered. There is no rule by the people, only that by the technological elite and the corporation with neoliberal drives.

In many instances, technology corporations and the skilled elite have usurped democratic governance, giving a view into how the Silicon Valley technocracy operates. In 2019, technology giants including Apple and Google pledged billions of dollars to fight the affordable housing crisis in Silicon Valley, including promising large swaths of company land to be opened up for affordable housing projects.[38],[39] The ironic aspect of this technocratic solution to a societal issue is that the conglomeration of tech firms and the arrival of hordes of the Creative Class to the region contributed significantly to the fueling of the affordable housing problem.[40] Still, in a technocracy, the inefficiencies of government can seem to be overcome in solving issues like the affordable housing crisis. While the government was unable to create sufficient housing projects, technology firms were able to move quickly, sinking substantial levels of cash assistance into the problem.

While the contributions made by the big technology firms appear generous, these pledges are not donations, but investments which the companies plan to profit off.[41] This illustrates the central dilemma of the influence of the Silicon Valley technocracy. If technological elites are the ultimate decision-makers in the region and are proxies of profit-seeking corporations, governance is tainted with private economic gain. In this technocracy, there is no separation between the two. While this particular investment in affordable housing may be a partial fix to the problem, the primary considerations are not societal, but economic. Perhaps there was a better solution available, but the optimization algorithm of the technocracy did not consider the variables they deem unworthy of attention.

The Next Silicon Valley

Abandoned company towns dot the map of the United States, uninhabited and without purpose. In addition to resource depletion, these towns failed as transportation became increasingly accessible, giving jobseekers more employment options and removing the necessity of living adjacent to the workplace, and welfare-state policies grew in the Western world, designating company-provided welfare as inessential.[42] The realities of a transforming economy made the company town organizational structure moot, if not entirely unprofitable.

The fate of many of the company towns of the Industrial Revolution poses concern for Facebook’s Willow Village mixed-use campus development. In an era in which lives are becoming increasingly digital, and digital workplaces more popular,[43] Facebook is pushing for a return to the spatial proximity of the company town model. Since technology corporations are motivated by profit maximization, the fate of Willow Village is at the hands of the shifting realities of the national and world economy. What was the automobile for the company town may be the digitization of the workplace for corporate technology villages? Once the nature and structure of the village becomes unprofitable, Facebook may abandon it, mirroring the company towns of the past.

The problem of the rise of technocratic rule by the technological elite in Silicon Valley will not stay tidily contained to the region. The question is not whether a new Silicon Valley will emerge, but where it will be located.[44] Cities strive to possess the title of “the new Silicon Valley,” as was manifested in the competition to host the home of Amazon’s newest headquarters, or “HQ2.” Cities were drawn to this beacon of the Creative Class and dreamed of subsequent economic development and flourishing like that of Silicon Valley.[45] While cities strive to become the next Silicon Valley, however, they make themselves vulnerable to the institution of a system of spatial reorganization by the technological elites. Physical and social space will be shaped to serve corporate neoliberal interests, work and social life will be merged and residents will become economic resources for the technological elite.

The interference of the technological elite with physical and social space in Silicon Valley acts as a warning while technology corporations exponentially grow their power in society. With alterations to work and social life come changes to the foundations of political life and citizenship. Democratic governance will be replaced with technocratic will. The rule of the technologically skilled will bring efficiency but at the cost of societal justice and democracy, as human capital is central to financial optimization. Urban space will transcend its current form, transformed into an optimizable machine at the hands of the corporate technological elite.

[1] Sam Whiting, “Ag Plan strives to preserve Silicon Valley’s farming heritage,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 2018, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Ag-Plan-strives-to-preserves-Silicon-Valley-s-12623666.php.

[2] Kimberly Amadeo, “Silicon Valley, America’s Innovation Advantage,” The Balance, August, 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-silicon-valley-3305808.

[3] J. A. English-Lueck, Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017), 86, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wlu/detail.action?docID=5013692.

[4] Ingrid Burrington, “Who Gets to Live in Silicon Valley,” The Atlantic, June 25, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/who-gets-to-live-in-silicon-valley/563543/.

[5] Emily Mibach, “Updated: Facebook unveils new plans for massive Willow Village development,” Palo Alto Daily Post, February 10, 2019, https://padailypost.com/2019/02/10/facebook-unveils-new-plans-for-massive-willow-village-development/.

[6] Leanna Garfield, “Facebook and Amazon are so big they’re creating their own company towns — here’s the 200-year evolution,” Business Insider, March 26, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/company-town-history-facebook-2017-9#lowell-massachusetts-by-the-merrimack-manufacturing-company-1823-1.

[7] J. D. Porteous, “The Nature of the Company Town,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 51 (1970): 127, https://doi.org/10.2307/621766.

[8] John Driscoll, “Gilchrist, Oregon, a Company Town,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 85, no. 2, (1984): 130, 140, www.jstor.org/stable/20613968.

[9] Zach Mortice, “What Facebook Can Learn From Company Towns,” CityLab, 19 Jul. 2017, https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/07/what-facebook-can-learn-from-company-towns/533832/.

[10] Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), ix.

[11] Ibid, 219-220.

[12] Richard L. Florida, “America’s Leading Creative Class Cities in 2015,” CityLab, Apr. 20, 2015, https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/04/americas-leading-creative-class-cities-in-2015/390852/.

[13] Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies, “Snapshot of the Region,” Silicon Valley Indicators, https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/snapshot/.

[14] Peter Ester, “Innovation and Startups in Silicon Valley: An Ecosystem Approach,” in Accelerators in Silicon Valley (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 37, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1zrvhk7.7.

[15] Steven D. Levitt and John A. List, “Homo Economicus Evolves,” Science 319, no. 5865 (2008): 909, www.jstor.org/stable/20053364.

[16] Thomas Puschmann and Rainer Alt, “Sharing Economy,” Business & Information Systems Engineering 58, no. 1, (2016): 93, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1759903795?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=14882.

[17] English-Lueck, Cultures@SiliconValley, 88.

[18] Ester, 59.

[19] English-Lueck, Cultures@SiliconValley, 85-86.

[20] Ibid, 94.

[21] Ester, 60.

[22] English-Lueck, J.A. “Silicon Valley reinvents the company town.” Futures 32, no. 8, (2000): 763, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328700000264.

[23] Alison T. Wynn and Shelley J Correll, “Puncturing the Pipeline: Do Technology Companies Alienate Women in Recruiting Sessions?,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 1 (February 2018): 160, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718756766.

[24] English-Lueck, Cultures@SiliconValley, 91-93.

[25] Jathan Sadowski and Evan Selinger, “Creating a taxonomic tool for technocracy and applying it to Silicon Valley,” Technology in Society 38, (2014): 165 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X1400027X.

[26] Wynn, 159.

[27] Bruce Gilley, “Technocracy and Democracy as Spheres of Justice in Public Policy,” Policy Sciences vol. 50, no. 1, (2017): 10, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11077-016-9260-2.

[28] Sadowski and Selinger, 164.

[29] Ibid, 162.

[30] Gilley, 14-15.

[31] Sadowski and Selinger, 166.

[32] Steven Poole, “How big tech hijacked politics: The digital age was supposed to be democratic, but under Google, Facebook and Twitter it has become a quest for profit at any cost,” New Statesman 5 (Oct. 2018): 45, https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA558814386&v=2.1&u=vic_wlu&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w.

[33] AJ Dellinger, “How The Biggest Tech Companies Spent Half A Billion Dollars Lobbying Congress,” Forbes, 30 Apr. 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajdellinger/2019/04/30/how-the-biggest-tech-companies-spent-half-a-billion-dollars-lobbying-congress/#2e864afb57c9.

[34] Lucie Greene, Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2018), 38, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wlu/detail.action?docID=5205303.

[35] Paris Martineu, “Inside Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments,” Wired, 20 Mar. 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-airbnbs-guerrilla-war-against-local-governments/.

[36] Phil Ryan, “‘Technocracy,’ Democracy … and Corruption and Trust,” Policy Sciences 51, no. 1, (2018): 133-134, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-017-9305-1.

[37] Sadowski and Selinger, 165.

[38] Lori Lodes, “Apple commits $2.5 billion to combat housing crisis in California,” Apple, 4 Nov. 2019, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-commits-two-point-five-billion-to-combat-housing-crisis-in-california/.

[39] Sundar Pichai, “$1 billion for 20,000 Bay Area homes,” Google, 18 Jun. 2019, https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/1-billion-investment-bay-area-housing/.

[40] Dain Evans, “Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are spending money to address the affordable housing crisis they helped create,” CNBC, Dec. 1 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/01/amazon-google-apple-seek-fix-for-housing-crisis-they-helped-create.html.

[41] Connor Dougherty, “Facebook Pledges $1 Billion to Ease Housing Crisis Inflamed by Big Tech,” The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/technology/facebook-1-billion-california-housing.html.

[42] Porteous, 139.

[43] Brian Anderson, “Council Post: Transforming The Digital Workplace Through Employee Engagement,” Forbes, January 4, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2019/01/04/transforming-the-digital-workplace-through-employee-engagement/?sh=244416fa2d02.

[44] Nav Athwal, “5 Cities Posed to be the Next Silicon Valley Tech Hub,” Forbes, 12 Feb. 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/navathwal/2015/02/12/5-markets-poised-to-be-the-next-silicon-valley-for-real-estate/#24c8efd8703e.

[45] Joseph Parilla, “Amazon HQ2: How did we get here? What comes next?,” Brookings, Aug. 28, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/research/amazon-hq2-how-did-we-get-here-what-comes-next/.

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