Bloomberg Businessweek | Sooner Than YouThink June 10, 2019their services would work in the rest of the world. Money
is hard to come by, too. Arab culture tends to favor tradi-
tional family businesses rather than high-risk startup ven-
tures. While failure is celebrated in Silicon Valley, it comes
witha realcostherebothintermsofloweredsocialsta-
tusandinmakingendsmeet.
Youmightthinkbeingpartofthe21stcentury tech gold
rush would feel like an impossible goal under such con-
ditions. And yet the people I met reminded me how tech-
nology can still inspire optimism. Wherever Collison went,
young entrepreneurs pumped him for information, and you
could see that they imagined they might end up just like
him. They might make something that people in far-off
lands would use every day. They might get ahead.F
or the past two years, I’ve visited technology hubs
in places such as Palestine, Israel, China, Russia,
Australia, Iceland, and Chile. The story is the same the
world over. There’s a degree of Silicon Valley mimicry.
But there’s also an impressive number of fresh ideas and
approaches to sculpting the future. The monoculture that’s
arisen in the Bay Area is being challenged by something
new, diverse, and perhaps more powerful.
The energy overseas is reminiscent of what used to
exist in the Valley. Dial all the way back to the early 1900s,
and you find the San Francisco Bay Area already full of
hobbyists pushing the limits of what radio, vacuum tubes,
and other mind-blowing new technologies could do. They
werefollowedbyphysicists,chemists,andelectricalengi-
neerswhomanipulatedmattertomakeit comealiveand
thinkforus.Andthencamethebuilders—the people who
created the vast, complex communications infrastruc-
ture on which the modern world runs. All of this bubbled
up from what used to be known as “the Valley of Heart’s
Delight,” because of its endless farms full of pears, apples,
and nuts, and it did so in an historical instant.
The undercurrents of Silicon Valley’s hope and idealism
still linger, though these concepts have been perverted.
Somewhere along the way, the Valley lost sight of tech-
nology as a tool, or what Steve Jobs liked to describe as
“a bicycle for the mind.” The notion of unlocking human
potential faded, and things tilted much more toward enter-
tainment, filling people’s free time with diversions, and
seeing how much money could be made off convenience.
This didn’t happen all at once. The Valley felt a lot dif-
ferent after Netscape went public in 1995, ditto after the
dot-com boom and bust a few years later. But for me,
the Valley’s new, post-idealism era really took hold with
the arrival of Google. The company had a noble mission
of making the world’s information accessible to every-
one, and it did a remarkable job at exactly that. People
can now tap into an infinite stream of knowledge. But it’s
what pays for all of this that feels like the underlying flaw
of the modern Silicon Valley.Australian biohacker
Meow-Ludo Disco
Gamma Meow-Meow
took his name from
these glowwormsA Japanese android
that speaks its own
language and interacts
with humansAn exoskeleton made
by New Zealand’s
Rex BionicsPREVIOUS SPREAD: COURTESY ESA. THIS SPREAD: STILLS FROM
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