# Culture as a universal variable opportunity flow and selection process in Silicon Valley

Olivier Alexandre

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Olivier Alexandre. Culture as a universal variable opportunity flow and selection process in Silicon Valley. Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, 2022. hal-03835604

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CULTURE AS A UNIVERSAL VARIABLE
OPPORTUNITY FLOW AND SELECTION
PROCESS IN SILICON VALLEY

OLIVIER ALEXANDRE

CNRS (France)

olivier.alexandre@cnrs.fr.

*Abstract:* in Silicon Valley, new technology is considered to be second nature. Techies from all over the world go there to develop companies, solutions or projects related to it. To do this, they need to manage two processes simultaneously: first, to integrate a growing flow of entrants and possible partners and, secondly, to select limited options between multiple opportunities and potential matches. This article analyzes the way Silicon Valley professionals handle this double bind. Based on a survey in the region and conceptual tools inherited from the sociology of globalization, it sheds light on how they build up, use and communicate about “culture” as a measurable and assessable variable. On the one hand, promotion of Silicon Valley’s “culture codes” increases the flow of entrants. On the other hand, from the techies’ point of view, acceptance of these codes by newcomers makes the selection process easier and more rational.

*Keywords:* Silicon Valley, culture, technologies, world, conventions, networks.

Discussion between two men, in their 30s, in shirts, sitting side by side on the Caltrain (the commuter rail line serving the San Francisco Peninsula), one saying to the other: "much talk about the Valley presents common cultural traits and pushes you to adopt them".

Field Notes, June 2016

INTRODUCTION

In the preface to *Technoculture*, the authors warned against two drifts about technology: first, demonization, and second, blind enthusiasm (Penley, Ross 1991: XII). If we had to find a place on the planet where enthusiasm for new technologies is a “second nature” (Penley, Ross 1991: XII), it would be Silicon Valley. The “techies”, an indigenous category that designates

ISSN 2283-7949
GLOCALISM: JOURNAL OF CULTURE, POLITICS AND INNOVATION
2022, 1, DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2022.1.8
Published online by "Globus et Locus" at https://glocalismjournal.org

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Some rights reserved
professionals working for new technology companies, with var-
ied though relatively high standards of living, describe it in in-
terviews as the Tech “Mecca”, “paradise”, “Disneyworld” or
“center of the world”. All these qualifications identify a locality
with an economic and symbolic power. They raise the question
of the relationship between territory and power, and the role of
culture and new technologies in that connection.

Several authors refer to the notion of “center” to account
for the way in which spheres of economic influence have been
structured over the past centuries from a city or a region. His-
torians Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein have nota-
bly emphasized that the development of economies and world
systems is based on “world cities” on the basis of their eco-
nomic, legal, military and political supremacy (Wallerstein
1979). AnnaLee Saxenian and Christophe Lécuyer analyzed the
rise of Silicon Valley (Saxenian 1994; Lécuyer 2005) as the epi-
center of the innovation economy. The geographer Michael
Storper compared the growth dynamic of Silicon Valley with
the declining economy of Los Angeles (Storper 2015). In a dif-
ferent perspective, Silicon Valley has been described as the cen-
ter of a larger network of economic activities, materials and in-
formation, including silicon mining quarries in Africa, assembly
plants in Taiwan, and moderator outsourcing services in South
Asia (Roberts 2019; Crawford 2021).

These studies remained relatively discreet about the cul-
tural implications within this center. One could say that this is
due to the diffusion of a global culture, linked to the domina-
tion of Silicon Valley, through its applications and services. Af-
ter all, Stuart Hall considered that the domination of represen-
tations conveyed by the media tended to make “all forms of di-
versity” disappear because economic capital “would not care
about where it operates” (Hall 1997: 29-31). In this extension,
Anthony Giddens remarks that “the place is increasingly phan-
tasmagorical: the various social theaters are completely penep-
trated and shaped by very distant social influences” (Giddens
1991: 25). However, the sociology of globalization has provided
analytical frameworks that make it possible to interweave the
issues of power, space and culture through the prism of new
technologies. Space of flows and local practices have been
articulated through the concepts of “global circuits of goods” and “territorial embedding” (Dicken 1986). Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes noted important differences in terms of perception and understanding of TV dramas broadcasted worldwide, such as *Dallas* (Katz Liebes 1990). Multiple cultural “collisions” have been observed (Robertson 1992: 131), which invites us to pay particular attention to “local cultures”, including when these are influenced by media operating at international scale (Robertson 1995). To tackle this question, Arjun Appadurai emphasizes how migration and information technologies have transformed the composition and scale of these localities, both in terms of cultural identity and geographical boundaries (Appadurai 1996). From a different point of view, Saskia Sassen has shown that geographical dispersion of production is accompanied by a concentration of management, supervision, coordination, financing and service activities in “global cities”, ensuring the coordination of global production networks (Sassen 1991). Manuel Castells develops three concepts – “informational capitalism”, “networked society”, “space of flows” – to explain how societies are increasingly dematerialized, internationalized and focused on communication activities (Castells 1998). He sees in the invention of the transistor and the creation of Silicon Valley the starting point of a new industrial age based on innovation, information control, flexibility and network organizations.

These works deal with two contradictory phenomena: the growing flow of people and information circulation at large and international scales, and the reinforcement of cultural differentiation in local spaces. This article aims to explore this contradiction based on a Silicon Valley survey in which Tech industry professionals were asked how they develop the flow of information, people and capital on the one hand, and select them within a territory on the other hand. The thesis is that to do so they intentionally build up “culture” as a variable, easily communicable, universally understandable, to facilitate measurements and comparisons in a growing stream of opportunities.

The first section presents the literature on Silicon Valley and how it explains its success through four types of arguments: the concentration of visionaries, special institutions, innovative organizations and the culture of the region. Noting the
usefulness and certain limitations of this type of argument, the
second section focuses on how “culture” has been promoted in
Silicon Valley and more generally in Tech as an intentional so-
cial construct through three different lineages. The third sec-
tion presents the data on which the article is based. The article
then examines the way in which techies are confronted with a
double bind: the need to integrate an increasing flow of people,
capital and information, and the desire to select opportunities
within a local space. Faced with this challenge, a logic of flow
confronting a logic of space, tech professionals leverage collec-
tively “culture” as a variable, both communicable and measur-
able, in order to optimize their time and capital allocation with
newcomers and their matches. They build up and use “culture”
to simultaneously increase the flow of people as potential and
commensurable entrepreneurial opportunities.

SILICON VALLEY LITERATURE: AMBIVALENCE BETWEEN INTEGRATION AND DIFFERENTIATION

In the literature on Silicon Valley, we find four types of ar-
guments explaining its growth and success. Despite their differ-
ences, the four subsets reflect an ambivalence between the uni-
fied character of Silicon Valley, and more generally, of high tech
and differentiation logics. After a summary presentation of each
of them, this section underlines how the notion of “culture”
crystallizes more specifically this ambivalence.

The first type emphasizes the role of visionaries (McCray
2012; Berlin 2005; Berlin 2017). From Leland Stanford,
founder of the eponymous university and governor of Califor-
nia in the mid-19th century, to Steve Jobs, identical traits are
invoked: prescience, a mix of authority and charm, hard work
and hard demands on partners and staff, thwarted parentage,
and a messianic discourse presenting innovation and technol-
ogy as the tip of the temporal arrow of progress. Journalists,
most often from the West Coast, have fueled this narrative
through portraits of internationally renowned local figures from
Robert Noyce to Elon Musk. Even when it was with an acid
tongue, they have nourished the Silicon Valley mythology, in
the anthropological meaning of the word, i.e., a story of the origins in which “fathers”, “godfathers”, “princes”, “kings”, “gienuises”, “masters”, and “gods” made history. By focusing *a posteriori* on selected “visionary” successes, these analyses also tend to legitimize the Darwinian view often expressed by tech workers, reducing the sum of past initiatives and failures to a few present successes. Moreover, the successes are presented as the singular expression of an innovative norm and a commonly shared entrepreneurial mentality within the region.

Trying to avoid this tropism, a second type of argument focuses on capital, economic and financial investment, and human and scientific capital circulating within a growing community of workers. In 2019, Silicon Valley accounted for 15 per cent of patents, 46 per cent of the country's “unicorns” and 40 per cent of investments in startups in the United States. An estimated 380,000 engineers and scientists lived there, 62 per cent of whom were born outside the country. One third of the region's 9 million inhabitants worked in the new technology sector at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2019, making it the leading industrial cluster in the world in terms of innovation. Since radio and transistors in the 1910s, historians shed light on how, over multiple technological waves, a transmission of knowledge and technical skills has been processed (Lécuyer 2005) thanks to a favorable institutional context. Some studies have emphasized the role of military funding, pointing out how Stanford has been an interface between different professional worlds such as academia, business, traditional industries and government agencies within a “military-industrial complex” (Leslie 2005). Further, the State of California encourages startups by keeping the cost ($200) and number of administrative filings (one document) required for a company launch at particularly low levels (O'Mara 2019). California's ban on non-compete spurred the rise of California's Silicon Valley and the comparative decline of Massachusetts' high technology corridor known as Route 128 (Gilson 1999). Legal rides governing employee mobility influence the dynamics of high technology industrial districts, encouraging rapid employee movement between employers and to startups. Indeed, California does not enforce post-employment covenants not to compete. As a
result, high technology companies in Silicon Valley gain from
knowledge spillovers between firms. To explain the develop-
ment gap between Silicon Valley and the Boston area, Kenney
and Von Burg analyzed the economy of the existing firms and
a separate economy of institutions that evolved to nurture new
firm formation (Kenney, Von Burg 1999). To them, path-de-
pendent and dominant design explanations are the key ele-
ments of these dynamics. This combination of factors would
explain Silicon Valley's ability to reinvent itself, under the con-
trol of venture capitalists (Granovetter, Ferrary 2009). Despite
their richness, however, these studies provide little information
about production processes.

Attention to organizational forms may contribute useful el-
ements to that particular inquiry. Indeed, some studies have ex-
plained Silicon Valley's success by the region's concentration of
universities, technology parks, laboratories, hackerspaces and
other organizational entities geared towards innovation. Taking
the Xerox PARC research center (Turner 2006), the Y Combi-
nator incubator (Stross 2012) or the Noisebridge hackerspace
located in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District (Lalle-
ment 2015), these organizations would be to advanced capital-
ism what the factory was to Karl Marx, bureaucracy to Max
Weber, or assembly lines to Charles Taylor. That is to say,
modes of organization where value is created, where rationality
resides, and where the dominant model of the advanced econ-
omies is invented and diffused. Work is said to be "collabora-
tive", "agile", "fast", "liberated", "network-based"; learning is
achieved by doing, versioning and projects; the "startup com-
pany" is emblematic. Beyond the few names often mentioned
in the press, more than 14,000 companies were working in new
technologies in 2019 (source: Crunchbase). Despite the empir-
ical evidence, a contradiction can be found in this demonstra-
tion: in Silicon Valley, the actual work often extends beyond
the boundaries of the organization, whatever its form (com-
pany, lab, incubator, etc.). The "network" that is so often cele-
brated and mobilized leads professionals to transcend the
framework of their employer on a daily basis (Saxenian 1994).
Working on external side projects and jumping from one job to
another are quite frequent. The case of Twitter and its work
organization between developers and users is one striking example. Ignacio Siles shows the importance of feedback loops between developers and users over time, calling this a “remediation” process and “user agency” (Siles 2013). This production mode is based on networking relations that reach beyond the walls of a single organization (Powell 1990). From this point of view, Silicon Valley can be described as an organizational network, an innovative market or even a social field (Fligstein 2021; Windeler and Jungmann 2022). In this respect, the analytical solution could be to focus less on a certain type of organization and more on spirit, ethos (Weber 2002), and culture.

When questioned about the reasons for the region's uniqueness, people who work there often point precisely in this direction, the so-called “Silicon Valley culture” (Piscione 2013). Some studies lend empirical support to this indigenous argument, underlining the importance of collaboration systems between workers and small companies, within a decompartmentalized and non-hierarchical professional world, at the origin of the region's productive superiority over other industrial districts (Saxenian 1994). However, this culture has been reinforced and spread by back-and-forth movements of the numerous diasporas between Silicon Valley and their home countries, especially China (Wong 2003) and India (Saxenian 2006). This culture has been defined by the valorization of individual initiative, risk-taking, de-dramatization of failures, and creativity, in the continuity of counter-culture influence whose links have been studied by the media historian Fred Turner (Turner 2006, 2009, 2018). In the region, professional recognition thus proceeds from performance (Kenney 2000) but, in addition, people benefit the collective, a kind of legacy of back-to-the-land communities (Turner 2009). These approaches are in line with the works that have emphasized the growing importance of culture in management since the 1980s (Barley and Kunda 1992).

However, this way of framing the issue of work and organization frequently raises a paradox: from a theoretical point of view, culture, one of the most commonly used notions in literature and social sciences (Williams 1958), blends different analytical scales and repertoires, borrowed from organizational culture frameworks, neo-institutional analysis, sociology of
culture, or social movement theory (Morrill 2008). As an indig-
enous category, culture is partly reified, while at the same time
being referred to a community of workers striving for perma-
nent change. To speak of Silicon Valley culture, we need to
specify, in addition to the description of its components, its
modes of diffusion and socialization, especially since the region
is not a homogeneous anthropological isolate: it is a differenti-
ated social space, formally opened, where professionals from all
over the world come to work. Sometimes they succeed, but at
least half of them are going to fail from an investor perspective
(which means creating value in their portfolio), and only an ex-
treme minority will enter the elite group of 70 billionaires
known in the region at the end of the 2010s. The issues in this
literature are twofold. First, we can spot an indetermination of
the notion of “culture” in these references. Culture has been
used to define organization, work, mentality, etc. But on the
one hand, “Silicon Valley culture” seems to have the capacity
to integrate newcomers, and even to establish a professional
identity (Delbecq, Weiss 2000). At the same time, tech workers
are regularly subdivided on a cultural basis (English-Lueck
2017), both within the region – because of differentiated alumni
network culture, diaspora (Wong 2006), company (Finkle
2012), technological or generation cultures – and outside the
region, because of geographical cultural distinctions, starting
with the classic opposition between Silicon Valley and the Bos-
ton area technological districts. In fact, the expression “Silicon
Valley culture” is presented both as an integrative factor and as
a differentiation argument. This being so, the dual question of
socialization into this Silicon Valley culture, of the way it is en-
dorsed locally and disseminated beyond the region’s borders
remains open. The following section aims to clarify these inde-
terminacies by specifically addressing how the notion of “cul-
ture” in Tech has been specifically framed through three dis-
tinct but related lineages.
CULTURE IN SILICON VALLEY: ART, FREEDOM AND
COMMUNICATION

Based on the literature on “Silicon Valley culture”, we can
spotlight three underlying thematic subsets, each of which is
based on an identification relationship between culture and a
second term: culture and art, culture and freedom, culture and
communication. This section presents these three subsets in or-
der to understand how “culture” has been used for social con-
structs in the Bay area.

Curiously, however, culture has rarely been associated with
artistic activities in Silicon Valley. Unlike New York with jour-
nalism (Christin 2020), Los Angeles with cinema (Pow-
dermaker 1950), Miami with music (Rossman 2012), Silicon
Valley has not been identified historically with a cultural indus-
try. On the contrary, it has since the late 1990s been presented
as underlying an economic crisis in cultural industries. Also, it
is a second meaning of the term “art” that is historically and
socially meaningful in Silicon Valley, as an art of craft (Sennett
2008). C. Lécuyer, in a history of Silicon Valley, highlights how
groups of hobbyists manipulating, hacking and developing de-
vices, overlapped technical and aesthetic criteria during the
1910s (Lécuyer 2005). The historian Leslie Berlin remarks how
R. Noyce, notably co-founder of Intel, was praised since his
childhood by friends then peers for his technical talents (Berlin
2017). More broadly, the maker movement has been an im-
portant part of the history of Silicon Valley since the 1970s, no-
tably through the Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), an
American performance group created in 1978, including Apple
employees. From the beginning, its members have assembled
giant machines together for performance purposes. The several
hacker and maker spaces active in the region show that this tra-
dition is still much alive. These spaces, like Noisebridge (Lalle-
ment 2015), an emblematic hacker space in San Francisco, are
do-ocracy oriented: each member of the collective “makes”
whatever he wants, according to his (or her) will. But legitimacy
and social status within the group are related to “virtuosity” and
the technical achievement of the product design. The Burning
Man festival is also conceived as a do-ocracy. The founding

ISSN 2283-7949
GLOCALISM: JOURNAL OF CULTURE, POLITICS AND INNOVATION
2022, 1, DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2022.1.8
Published online by "Globus et Locus" at https://glocalismjournal.org

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

Some rights reserved
members of the leading organization have defined it as a “com-
munity of the arts” and a federation of “makers” from the end
of the 1990s (Chen 2009: 34). There are multiple links and in-
tersections between makers and tech workers, notably at Face-
book and Google (Turner 2009). Employees attend the festival
in large numbers every year and replicate within the company
the ways of communicating and collaborating derived from the
counterculture legacy: organizing by small communities,
through projects, with symbolic rewards based on contribu-
tions for the good of the community. In this perspective, the
arty-crafty pieces exhibited in the different buildings at Face-
book headquarter are the incarnation of a specific management
style in which the celebration of openness, creativity and free-
dom aims to develop employee productivity (Turner 2018).

This latter way of framing and using culture in workplaces
overlaps with the second tradition, identifying culture and free-
dom at work. This theme has already been the subject of several
works related to the new economy. Based on an analysis of the
most popular management handbooks since the 1970s, L.
Boltanski and E. Chiapello have revealed the stakes of a man-
agement reorientation: to preserve the capitalist system from
critics, cultural antinomies and global collapse (Boltanski, Chia-
pello 1999). Andrew Ross (Ross 2003) studied over eighteen
months Silicon Alley companies in New York. He described
them as “maverick in their organization and permissive in their
culture”, because these workplaces allowed personal freedom
and seemed to industrialize bohemia, encouraging employees
to think outside the box and allowing companies to claim their
most creative thoughts and ideas. These modes of production
and work organization are directly linked to networks and com-
munication service development, which have thus engendered
a market economy considered as more open, wealthier and full
of opportunities (Benkler 2006). Beyond this rhetoric, this cel-
ebration of “free culture” implies social mutations. Boltanski
and Chiapello noted that the affirmation of the “New Spirit of
Capitalism” marks the prevalence of an artistic critique valuing
freedom over a social critique focused on economic exploita-
tion. Andrew Ross points out that this increase of freedom at
work has its drawbacks: 70-hour workweeks, lack of managerial
protection, oppressive shouldering of risk by employees, an il-
lusory sense of power sharing, no end of emotional churning,
and so on (Ross 2003). For Tiziana Terranova, the culture of
freedom in the digital industry is in reality the manifestation of
a “late capitalism” (Terranova 2000). In a well-known mani-
festo, Tim O’Reilly has explained the rewards for entrepreneurs
who promote new cultural norms of freedom associated with
the Internet, in terms of increasing profits and benefits from
free work and free advertising (O’Reilly 2005).

The paradox is that this culture has diffused from localities,
within intermediate spaces, where different categories of pro-
fessionals (entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers, developers,
sellers, data analysts, designers, etc.) interact. Gina Neff, in her
study of networking spaces, has shown in particular how the
multiplication of networking sessions reflects changes in the in-
dustry and the work organization (Neff 2005). Networking ac-
tivity – and the will to develop new social network ties – are
concentrated within narrow geographic clusters. Her study sug-
gests that the networking events within the industry, such as
cocktail parties, seminars, ceremonies and the like, are a means
of accessing crucial resources within an industry where work-
ers, independent and autonomous, confront uncertainty.

In our study, we’ve observed many times that to access
these places and to interact and develop social capital effi-
ciently, professionals need to learn, respect and master certain
communication codes, codes that appear to be broadly shared.
This article proposes to examine these codes by considering
their ambivalence. They enable tech workers to develop flows
of opportunities and at the same time to make comparisons be-
tween different potential allocations and apparatus. This am-
bivalence can be analyzed more precisely from the third subset
previously mentioned about culture in Silicon Valley.

To better understand this ambivalence and the way in
which culture is identified with communication, we can look at
the development of communication and information theories
within Silicon Valley. Robert Wiener has had a lasting influence
on several generations of technologists (Turner, Larson 2015),
originally because he distinguished himself from the mathemat-
ical theories of information developed by Ralph Hartley, C. E.

ISSN 2283-7949

GLOCALISM: JOURNAL OF CULTURE, POLITICS AND INNOVATION

2022, 1, DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2022.1.8

Published online by "Globus et Locus" at https://glocalismjournal.org

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Some rights reserved
Shannon and W. Weaver. His book *Cybernetics or Control, and Communication in the Animal and Machine* (Wiener 1961) tackles the mathematical apprehension of signals circulating in communication systems. According to him, the sum of information in a system is the measure of its degree of organization, whereas entropy is the measure of its disorganization, the former being the positive of the other. In Wiener's eyes, the Second World War is the paroxysm of the entropy phenomenon: development of better communication systems could have been a means of preventing it. This belief, which will have extensions in the field of computer science and biology, is a common principle of a group of theorists known as the “Palo Alto School” or the “Invisible College”, bringing together Ray Birdwhistell, Gregory Bateson, Edward T. Hall, Erving Goffman and Paul Watzlawick. They worked on the basis of the retroactive circular model developed by Norbert Wiener. According to the members of this informal group, communication must be studied by social scientists, following a systemic and multidisciplinary approach, open to linguistics and logic, in order to understand, describe and theorize interaction systems. They indeed considered communication as a process of interaction; human behavior corresponds to a resource in terms of information; and attention to the horizontal and vertical contexts of interaction reveals communication logics. This orientation has found concrete applications in Silicon Valley, based on several linages and entry points (Daub 2020). The first one was the Esalen Institute in Big Sur founded by Dick Price in order to create a “religion without religion” (Kripal 2011). Price has regularly invited “local” theorists such as F. Spiegelbel, Stanford University professor and historian specialized in eastern religions, G. Bateson, anthropologist and theorist of the “ecology of the mind”, German psychotherapist Fritz Perls, father of the “gestalt therapy”, Aldous Huxley to contribute to his reflections on drugs and ways to push back consciousness boundaries. Their discussions became the starting point of the “human potential movement”, which takes as its premise the belief that through the development of their “potential”, people can experience a life of happiness, creativity and fulfillment, and release their full potential (Anderson 2004). People linked to Esalen lie at the origin of
what has turned out to be the very influential Stanford *d.school*,
which has played a determining role in the way “design think-
ing” has been conceived and enforced by large tech companies
over the last decade (Miller 2017). The Ted conference organi-
zation, founded in 1984, is another intermediate space where a
specific culture, equally sharable and differentiating, has been
locally produced.

Even if this genealogy is too schematically and partially ex-
posed, it affirms that in Silicon Valley, *culture* isn't just a com-
mon notion or even an indigenous category. It sheds light on
local social construction and collective endeavor to promote
special traits, such as art as technical craft, freedom as work or-
ganization, and communication as a system. This section does
not aim to follow the different ramifications of these three tra-
ditions, but aims to resituate “culture” in its local context as a
making process exploited by tech workers to associate and sort,
integrate and select people as creative, social and economic op-
portunities.

DATA

To understand this paradox, this article is based on a sur-
vey conducted in Silicon Valley. Even if Silicon Valley is often
presented as open and welcoming to innovators, the conditions
of investigation are quite difficult: the cost of living is among
the highest in the country, and access to companies is condi-
tional on the signing of “non-disclosure agreements”. Employ-
ees are instructed not to talk to outsiders without authorization
from the public relations manager, and they are usually bound
by confidentiality clauses when they leave their company. At the
same time, companies try to put on a good show during site
visits and “learning expeditions” open to executives from other
industries, countries and regions of the United States. Workers
are particularly enthusiastic about the Silicon Valley culture
and the positive role of technology.

Much is made of this enthusiasm: speedy corporate expan-
sion, the relative ease in meeting new and sometimes famous
tech personalities, the fluidity of relationships, the fortunes
amassed by thirty-somethings, the tolerance of lifestyles and ways of thinking sometimes repressed in the rest of the country or abroad, such as LBTQIA+ rights, polyamory, recreational drugs, libertarianism, and transhumanism. The open, anything-goes mindset in the Valley engenders social conventions such as addressing new acquaintances by their first name and referring to people as “friends” after a single meeting.

To understand the specific role played by culture, observations were made in companies (43), meetups (38), pitch contests (28), hackatons (3), bootcamps (2), and conferences (5). These investigations were conducted respecting the demographic and organizational balance of the region, in other words according to Silicon Valley funding categories (crossed with information presented on the Crunchbase platform which compiles data on new technology companies): seed companies (most often without employees), Series A companies (optimization phase of developing traction levers, which implies technical recruitments, with a few dozen employees), Series B companies (focusing on business development with a team of 50 to 100 people), Series C companies (rapidly perfecting the business with a view to return on investment, with 100 to 500 employees), unicorns (companies valued at more than a billion dollars following fundraising, with 500 to 5,000 employees) and large companies (stock market listed, with several thousand employees).

On this basis, 147 in-depth interviews were conducted with entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers, developers, designers, data analysts, journalists, public workers and researchers residing and working in Silicon Valley. It is interesting that the meetings proposed by people working in tech conform to strict time standards: 15, 30 or 60 minutes. This way of doing things reveals the orientation of sociability modes in the region: techies are indeed looking to expand their network and to select opportunities at the same time based on a strict and commonly known set of conventions, despite an expanding flow of newcomers.

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SILICON VALLEY AS AN EVOLVING WORLD

Silicon Valley is known as an industrial district specialized
in the production of new technologies. In this sense, from a so-
ciological perspective it can be described as a “world”, that is
to say a network of interacting people making, supporting and
distributing goods on a regular basis (Becker 1982). However,
the world of Silicon Valley has the particularity of being fed by
an expanding population flow, with crisis cycles and demo-
graphic contractions every ten years.

Since the first hobbyist clubs created there in the 1910s
around a shared passion for radio (Lécuyer 2005), the Valley
has experienced a demographic surge, interrupted by crises.
Plus, the demographics reveal regular worker turnover. Before
World War II, the Peninsula was home to only a few tens of
thousands of engineers and technicians, mainly in Santa Clara
County. It represented a technological employment pool five or
six times smaller than the Boston area in the 1950s (Saxenian
1994: 2). Between 1975 and 1990, the number of jobs in the
area grew three times as much as in Boston's Route 128 district.
In 1992, there were 56,724 jobs in computer and data pro-
cessing services, 45,590 in computer and office equipment,
26,297 in electronic computers, 16,105 in computer program-
ming services, and 15,247 in pre-packaged software, mainly in
Santa Clara County (Scott 2001: 139). Between 1990 and 2000,
an average of 2,100 new technology companies were created
every year (Zhang 2003). Three million people were employed
in new technologies before the Covid pandemic (Lehman-
Frisch 2019). Although the media employ homogeneous labels
such as “tech workers” and “techies” (formerly “dotcomers” or
“IT guys”), the population working in tech is actually quite het-
erogeneous, whatever the criteria used to analyze it (activity,
standard of living, etc.): entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers, ac-
countants, data analysts, designers, developers, product manag-
ers, sellers, customer support, PR and human resources people,
service and gig workers, ranging from billionaires to people liv-
ing near the poverty line. Yet, in the interviews and day-to-day
observations, people act as if they are part of a professional

ISSN 2283-7949

GLOCALISM: JOURNAL OF CULTURE, POLITICS AND INNOVATION

2022, 1, DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2022.1.8

Published online by "Globus et Locus" at https://glocalismjournal.org

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>
system in which interactions can engender opportunities and career evolution.

Since the 1970s, Silicon Valley has been seen as a job-hop-
pers' bastion, both for people regularly moving from one com-
pany to another and for a growing number of entrepreneurs
from all over the world seeking financing. At the turn of the
2000s, the most sought-after venture capitalists reported receiv-
ing two hundred project applications and funding requests per
month, about 2,500 per year (Ferrary 2001). In the mid-2010s,
they were receiving about 100 requests a day, a four- or five-
fold increase over 15 years. In the 2010s, the proportion of tech
workers in the San Francisco workforce grew by one percent
per year, a figure that concerns contractors, skilled tech work-
ers, and hired service personnel. These workers come not only
from the USA, but also and mostly from other countries: mainly
from China, India, Europe. Moreover, business failure is par-
ticularly high: the various sources consulted indicate a mortality
rate for companies of 50 per cent to 92 per cent after 5 years of
activity. Among our respondents alone, one third of workers
had left the region after 5 years. Silicon Valley workers must
therefore manage human flows and professional opportunities.
This flow management also extends to capital and information
(Castells 1998), since techies are at the heart of an information
ecosystem. Finally fully one third of venture capital in the
United States is invested in the area.

Professionals perceive this influx of people, capital and in-
formation as potential “opportunities”, in the economic sense
of the term. Like the Wall Street traders studied by Abolafia in
the 1980s, they try to optimize this flow, and draw benefits from
it, through a centrality position in a growing chain of infor-
mation (Abolafia 2001). However, like traders, techies have to
sort and select a limited number of apparatus and investment
options from this growing flow.

SORTING AND SELECTING OPPORTUNITIES LOCALLY

Indeed Silicon Valley professionals leverage three types of se-
lections: geographic, organizational and technological. Regarding
these three dimensions, techies adopt a mode of representation
and social strategies that intermix holistic philosophies and social
Darwinism.

What's good here is that you're in a sector with this social Dar-
winist aspect, but we know that those who succeed could have failed.
So you are part of this ecosystem. When you fail, you are part of the
cells that failed, but you still belong to the system. So you can go on;
you can go back; if you've sacrificed for the system, we're going to
help you; if you've succeeded, you give back... Luck is a huge factor.
In 2000, I had the vision of Facebook. But because I didn't meet the
right persons, I didn't make it. I didn't take the chance to the end,
because the secretary told me "Sorry, [x] can't see you". The guys
who succeed, they are perseverant, for sure, but also lucky (interview
with a serial entrepreneur and investor, in Silicon Valley since 1998).

From a geographical perspective, the inertia of “big play-
ers” and the entry strategies of “new players” fuel the physical
elasticity and hierarchies within the region. On either side of
the urbanized spine which is Caltrain and the 101 road, tech
companies have spread out from the historic south to the north:
San Jose (Intel founded in 1968), Palo Alto (PayPal in 1998),
Redwood City (Oracle in 1977), San Mateo (YouTube in 2005),
and so on, all the way to San Francisco where the latest wave of
big companies (Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, etc.) is located. As a re-
sult, the industrial momentum internally feeds processes of
both ascendancy and decline. At a time when the north of Sili-
con Valley became a rallying point for technological entrepre-
neurship in the 2010s, media investors such as Peter Thiel and
Danny Rimer were pointing to the emergence of an IT “rust
belt” in the south, the historical cradle of regional activity: “The
closer you get to San Jose, the more of a Rust Belt it has be-
come” (Rimer 2013). In addition to the question of where they
want to be geographically based, workers need to decide into
what type and size of organization they should move. Out of a
total of 14,500 companies, a large majority employ fewer than
10 people; smaller proportions have less than 50 employees, or
between 50 and 300, or between 300 and 1,000; only a handful
employ more than 1,000. Employees of the “digital giants” cap-
ture most of the media attention even though they represent less
<table><caption>Tab. 1. Breakdown of Silicon Valley new technology companies according to workforce size</caption><thead><tr><td>EMPLOYEES</td><td>COMPANIES</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1-10</td><td>4,338</td></tr><tr><td>11-50</td><td>4,931</td></tr><tr><td>51-100</td><td>1,318</td></tr><tr><td>101-250</td><td>801</td></tr><tr><td>251-500</td><td>358</td></tr><tr><td>501-1,000</td><td>267</td></tr><tr><td>1,001-5,000</td><td>177</td></tr><tr><td>5,001-10,000</td><td>76</td></tr><tr><td>10,000+</td><td>105</td></tr><tr><td>NA's</td><td>2,197</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>14,568</td></tr></tbody></table>

Source: Crunchbase.

than 10 per cent of jobs in the region. An overwhelming majority of the companies in Silicon Valley exist in relative anonymity from which only a breakthrough (usage boom, fundraising, buyout, IPO, etc.) is likely to release them. For the others, visibility is driven by work, networking, tweets, blogs, posts, and almost daily presence at events organized in companies or universities, with the aim of attracting the attention of investors and technology journalists. Whether they are entrepreneurs or employees, professionals have to arbitrate between these different options: working for a small startup with large (but uncertain) profit potential, or opting for an established company that will impose severe activity constraints and limited profits.

The selection imperative also involves deciding which technology category to promote. If a generation of new technologies builds on previous ones (Rieder 2020), these then tend to be relegated in the specialized media, the minds of investors, and the socio-economic space of Silicon Valley – even if they are still used and in fact crucial for the ecosystem. During the 2010s, venture capitalists’ portfolio strategies lent high priority to artificial intelligence solutions, but low priority to hardware. Some sectors offer more financing opportunities, software for example, but these are also more competitive and more open to internationalization than a sub-sector such as energy. For

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>
professionals, it is therefore a matter of selecting specialization
categories and assessing the investment/potential success ratio
which varies depending on the technological categories being
considered: advertising, social media, fintech, edtech or
agritech. Technologies are also the source of implicit and ex-
plicit hierarchies. Highly technical profiles, including software
engineers, backend developers and data analysts, are the most
in demand on the job market and are offered higher salaries
than frontend developers and designers. Moreover, DevOp sal-
aries vary depending on the contract (employee/contractor/gig
worker), the company or the programming language skills,
ranging from JavaScript ($80,000 on average per year for a first
job) to C++ ($110,000 for an equivalent grade). At the same
time, the average annual income of entrepreneurs is around
$50,000 in a region where the costs of living, housing and
schooling are at an all-time high in the United States (a house-
hold with two children and an income of $80,000 is considered
to be living below the poverty line!).

Workers therefore try to sort and select options at three
levels: they choose geographic sub-areas perceived as more
promising and less pricy, types of companies by weighing po-
tential gains and risks of loss, and technological sub-sectors that
present different expectations and timeframes for profits. To
do so, they must deal with two contradictory orientations: on
the one hand, they seek to increase their number of encounters
and interactions in order to broaden the spectrum of their op-
portunities; on the other hand, they are obliged to select limited
options, because they cannot make an effective and lasting com-
mitment to every opportunity. In order to do these two things
in parallel, they work to build up, measure and evaluate "cul-
ture" as a variable.

CULTURE AS A VARIABLE

Professionals in the region try to increase the flow of op-
portunities while making choices within a territory that is
unique in that half its population is foreign (Saxenian 2006).
Newcomers frequently praise the quality of their welcome, and
indeed the welcoming process goes beyond the stereotype of
the “cookie plate” offered to new neighbors. As part of this wel-
come, professionals help newcomers understand the conven-
tions they must adopt in order to integrate successfully the so-
called “ecosystem”. And they do so in a free and seemingly dis-
interested manner, while in fact the diffusion of this culture
densifies the influx of people, capital and information and thus
their opportunity flow. The attention paid to conventions and
their respect provides them with indicators that make selection
process easier.

In a region where one in three people used to work in the
tech sector at the end of the 2010s, openness and a sense of
welcome are cardinal values. Workers say they are part of a
“community”. A European entrepreneur praises the quality
and the welcoming effort that is a standard for tech workers:

I live in Palo Alto. It's still a place that is used to welcoming peo-
ple. New people are really welcomed... the neighbors come with a
plate of cookies, the neighbors block the street on Sunday so that eve-
ryone meets. My daughter at Palo Alto public high school made paint-
ings with the kids in the corner so that they eat with her... It's really
nice (interview with an entrepreneur, in Silicon Valley for 5 years).

The community spirit is based on a series of factors: being part of the same technology production industry, similar migratory paths, access to a social ascension movement, shared suffering associated with geographical remoteness from home countries and relatives, the wealth gap between tech workers and people in other sectors in the region, civility of proximity, tolerance spirit, ease of meeting people, and the endless search for new collaborations. Foreign techies having experienced religious or sexual discrimination and even acts of violence in other parts of the world frequently declare that they value the spirit of inclusion, tolerance and multiculturalism (Kymlicka 1995) found in Silicon Valley.

Here it's very easy to be a foreigner. You don't care what color
your passport is; you don't care what color your skin is. It's easier to
be black or Muslim here than in London or Paris; it's easier to be gay
than in the rest of the country. Tolerance is even sometimes a bit rigid
in its implementation. But that's good. As for feminism. Companies
like Google are pushing these causes (interview with a former execu-
tive, in Silicon Valley since 1984).

Far from the aggressiveness of Wall Street and City traders (Abolafia 2001), the values of openness and empathy are defended and promoted, even in the managerial recommendations of large companies. Internally, Google has highlighted studies revealing the higher productivity of teams with a larger proportion of women and workers from “minorities”, and it praised empathy in management guide.

While minority expression is celebrated, ostentatious signs of wealth are uncommon and socially sanctioned. The menus of local restaurants where investors and entrepreneurs meet remains unsophisticated and moderately priced; sandals and cargo shorts have become the signature of renowned entrepreneurs such as M. Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook), R. Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) and P. Graham (co-founder of Y Combinator). Palo Alto's homes are still of the same standard as the rest of the country, even though immensely rich people such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jan Koum (co-founder of WhatsApp) have lived there.

This partial concealment of outward signs of wealth can be
seen as a desire to preserve harmony in a social world marked
by asymmetry of success and differences in origin and migratory
paths. In a detailed, scholar book about Silicon Valley, C.
Lécuyer recalls how wage differentials weakened team cohesion
and led to costly departures during the 1940s and 1950s from
companies whose development depended on highly qualified
workers, before management schemes such as stock options
were developed (Lécuyer 2005: chap. 5).

This concern for blurring differences also favors collabora-
tion both within and between companies (Saxenian 1994).
Newcomers and visiting observers are regularly struck by the
openness and collaborative practices in comparison to other
technological hotbeds, such as Boston or major European cit-
ies, which, according to respondents, are still marked by a so-
called “classic” business culture. Collaboration engenders
greater dynamism and reactivity than in other industries, while
establishing partnerships with the latter, notably with two dis-
tricts often presented as rivals: Wall Street (Hwang 2020) and
Hollywood (Scott 2006). Geographer Allen J. Scott refers to Sil-
icon Valley as a “locational cluster”: the comparative advantages
in terms of collaboration potential favors local productivity and
global integration into a broader exchange system (Scott 1995).
This argument echoes the work of A. Marshall who presented
inter-organizational collaboration as the main factor of dyna-
mism in the cutlery industry in Sheffield and the metal industry
in Birmingham (Marshall 1879).

While this valorization of collaboration is classic, the ques-
tion of socialization of workers to this collaborative culture re-
mains relatively enigmatic. It appears all the more remarkable
that, unlike in other cities marked by pluralism such as Dubai
(Le Renard 2021), the culture of Silicon Valley is characterized
by a form of normative consistency. Several authors have un-
derscored the cultural homogeneity of Silicon Valley (Saxenian
1994; Turner 2006; Marwick 2013). However, this culture is
also typified and disseminated through books, conferences,
courses, tweets, posts on blogs and social networks (Alexandre,
Coavoux 2021). Sometimes identified with the Web 2.0 move-
ment, this culture is found in Silicon Valley before and after the
age of the blog. More generally, it consists in making explicit
what is implicit in many social circles, codes that must be re-
spected in order to fit in.

Indeed, a series of studies have highlighted the way in
which access to social worlds by outside members is subject to
high entry and information costs. The “etiquette” of the court
of Louis XIV (Elias 2006), the “rules of the game” of the Paris-
ian literary space of the mid-19th century (Bourdieu 1996), the
“tricks of the trade” in social sciences (Becker 1998), the “laws
of the street” of Chicago’s South Side (Venkatesh 2008) and the
manners of the “super rich” in the 16th *arrondissement* of Paris
(Pinçon-Charlot, Pinçon 2007) constitutes the principles of
what Georg Simmel called “secrecy societies” (Simmel 1906).
The German sociologist emphasizes that secrecy has the effect
of giving value to their content, that revelations of this secrecy
tend to demonetize them and be perceived as a betrayal by the
secrecy group’s members. Simmel thus considers that there is a
fixed “quantum” of secrecy in every society. There is conse-
quently an impetus to acquire the entry traits necessary to be
fully accepted by others in a silent socialization process (Lahire
2002), partly naturalized, and controlled by insiders and gate-
keepers. If the rules remain implicit in many socio-professional
fields, it is because these secret social codes ensure the coher-
ence and solidarity of social worlds from the external point of
view, and they structure the hierarchies within them.
Knowledge of the game rules is the condition for entry, mainte-
nance and elevation within the milieu (Elias 2006), and for this
reason it constitutes a capital to be preserved, sometimes
fiercely. In Silicon Valley, the rules of the game are the object
of a collective communication and transmission effort, appar-
ently free and disinterested. Table 2 provides both a summary
and an example of how a set of basic principles is presented,
spread and referred to as “Silicon Valley culture”.

These conventions are based on practical knowledge of the
world of work, validated by half a century of economic sociol-
ogy studies, without the professionals in the sector ever refer-
ring to it or seeming to know it. The primacy of the strength of
weak ties for finding a job (meaning that people find a job indi-
rectly via a member of their network), is what makes network-
ing the cardinal activity of Silicon Valley (Granovetter 1973).
Selective pairing, or the tendency to peer-to-peer association on
the basis of quality of work or equivalent level of recognition
within systems of close collaborations such as a duo or trio of
company co-founders (Jovanovic 1979), is an example. This
eventually engenders a form of isomorphism whereby compa-
nies seek to imbibe the values of their reference sector (Hannan
Freeman 1988). These different elements constitute the “Sili-
con Valley culture”, which professionals sees as variables, un-
derstood as a fixed and objectifiable entities. As in the North
American sociology of the 1950s and 1960s, this “variables par-
adigm” or “language of variables” (Abbott 1991: 215), through
the analysis of causality based on the examination of the rela-
tions of dependence between variables, confers a “scientific”
dimension to particular, reductive and fixist divisions of the so-
cial world. The “Silicon Valley culture” is presented as universal
<table><caption>Tab. 2. Silicon Valley Culture</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>BE ON TIME</td><td>People don't know much about you, if anything at all. To mitigate this issue, they will use any signals to hint something about you. And people are hungry for signals. Late? In one fell swoop, you are sending three messages: 1) <i>You are not organized.</i> Would you do business with messy people? And don't pretend the traffic was awful on the 101. Of course, it was. Use Waze! 2) <i>You don't respect me.</i> "Sorry, my previous meeting was longer than expected". Which <i>actually</i> means: "You probably have a meeting right after me, but I don't care about your schedule". Not appreciated. 3) <i>I can't trust you.</i> When we scheduled the appointment, we had a deal. You just broke it.</td></tr><tr><td>SAME-DAY EMAIL</td><td>Signals: <i>You are on top of things; you are fast.</i> And that's good. What the senders had to say matters to you. You gave them a <i>feeling of importance.</i></td></tr><tr><td>INTRO</td><td>An introduction should be a <i>win-win</i> for all parties, the "introducer" (the nodes of a social network have value) as well as the "introduced parties" (successful people can only afford to exchange some of their limited time for value). You <i>cannot compel</i> someone to make an introduction, or to be introduced to someone else. It is counter-productive (you may bring <i>pain</i> instead of value).</td></tr><tr><td>COMMUNICATION RULES</td><td>People have very limited time. Your communication must be succinct (3 points, 5 lines max), crystal-clear (no PhD in philosophy required to understand you), and precise (data). A 3-bullet email rule (Michael Seibel): What do you do? (2 lines) Why is it exciting? (2 lines) What do you want? (1 line)</td></tr><tr><td>POTLACH</td><td>This is the essence of Silicon Valley's culture. It means that if you do something good, something good will happen to you. It's the foundation of the <i>Pay-It-Forward</i> attitude. It translates into this question that everyone you see for the first time will ask: "How Can I Help You?"</td></tr><tr><td>TEMPORAL FRAME</td><td>15/30/60. The difference lies in the substance of the item(s) to be discussed. If things and decisions can be wrapped up in 30 minutes, why should you request (and block) a 1-hour slot in the other person's agenda? If you request a "30-minute meeting", you show that you presumably <i>know</i> how the system <i>works</i>. You earn free points.</td></tr><tr><td>LANGUAGE</td><td>An accent is OK. Not speaking English is not OK. To thrive, you must be able to express yourself properly, with nuance and accuracy. Improving your English must be a priority from Day 1. Otherwise, you <i>will</i> face discrimination at some point of your journey (pretty quickly actually).</td></tr><tr><td>DATA</td><td>Nothing is better, clearer, more objective and comparable than data.</td></tr><tr><td>STORYTELLING</td><td>The most effective way to engage with people and raise awareness. Way to sell. A good story connects your point to something bigger. Could be a mission, could be an emotion, could be a journey. But whatever it may be, it must engage the other person. A story is a well-designed script. It is a missile with a precise target.</td></tr></tbody></table>

Source: Romain Serman, *Silicon Valley Etiquette*, Manners Matter Blog, 3 October 2016.

and rational by tech workers because they seek to develop integration. To do so, they decontextualize certain features of an object (meaning here cultural traits of newcomers), reduce historicity and diversity to measurable, comparable, and assessable indicators (Fabiani 2003).
Indeed, the explicitness and publicity of conventions offer a practical, cognitive resource for professionals in the region. As can be seen from table 2, the publicized principles tend to optimize the procedural efficiency of collaborations within an open professional group whose coherence is based on a common adherence to technological entrepreneurship: time savings, symmetry of communication formalism, attachment to objectification, role of data, emotional rhetoric based on chiseled life stories, etc. Professionals do not seem to consider them as secrets to be kept but as work conventions, understood in the sense given to this term by Howard Becker, i.e., rules that govern professional practices and that must be “known by all or almost all” within a collaborative production unit or social world (Becker 1982: 66). At the same time, professionals pay particular attention to how these conventions are, or are not, respected by the potential collaborators they encounter. At the most general level of analysis, as formalized by the economist Frank Knight in his book *Risk, Uncertainty and Profit* (Knight 2009), this attention corresponds to an evaluation process aimed at reducing the uncertainty surrounding the quality of a potential associate. Due to high personnel turnover and the influx of newcomers, they cannot use the indices commonly employed in social universes, such as reputation (Becker 1982: chapter 11). They therefore consider the formal respect of conventions as a quality indicator of the impetus insofar as it reflects different properties: seriousness, rigor, speed of understanding, etc.

In doing so, established professionals adopt two seemingly contradictory practices. First, they spend a significant amount of their time on blogs, conferences, and speeches delivering “Silicon Valley secrets” in a seemingly disinterested manner, in accordance with Web 2.0 principles. They thereby contribute to lowering the cost of information and socialization for newcomers. In parallel, they work to select partners and collaborators to maintain a preferential place in the production chain and maximize their chances of success. Publicizing agreements increases the volume of opportunities; evaluating compliance with these agreements is a rational way of deciding with whom to associate.
They contribute to the epistemological unity of Silicon Val-
ley marked by metrological realism. The common denominator
in Silicon Valley is indeed the belief in the ability of data to rep-
resent a reality. Professionals do seek the “right numbers”.
French sociologist A. Desrosières noted that this attitude is in
the tradition of the “realistic metrological model of the natural
sciences. Reality exists prior to its observation, just as the North
Star existed long before all astronomers” (Desrosières 2001). In
Silicon Valley, professionals tend to relegate constructivist epis-
temologies, starting with those conveyed by social sciences, and
to exclude conventionalist systems of representations, which
constitutes a paradox in a universe where the production of
conventions is a central activity. The constructivist taboo in Sil-
icon Valley states the strength of the historical mission that
workers collectively recognize: to establish universalist means
of communication, information, and organization.

The stability of the consensus surrounding its moral status
transcends the incessant wrangling, controversy, and value con-
flicts about what separates good and evil (tech, companies, peo-
ple, information, etc.) in the region. Indeed, the density of
moral oppositions within Silicon Valley, between technologies
(good tech/bad tech) or between companies (good com-
pany/bad company, dark startup/white startup), is transcended
by a logic of temporal threshold between what is (bad) and
what is to come (good). This temporalization of moral bounda-
ries confers a virtue and justifies the pursuit of solutions that seem
outside this universe as inconceivable, incongruous or immoral,
such as colonization of Mars, asteroid ore extraction, death of
death, or more prosaically work automation, data management
tools, performance measurement instruments, and so on.

Transhumanism is not debated here. Problems that humanity has
solved with religion or politics. Here we're tackling them with tech-
nology, and I have the impression that there is no debate about it. [...]
The other day, I was with a guy I really like and he said: I can't wait
to have my brain in the cloud. And the guy was serious. It wasn't a
provocation (interview with an entrepreneur, in Silicon Valley since
2014).
The universal dimension of this “Silicon Valley culture”, even as labor conventions, constitutes the lowest common denominator of the cosmopolitan population of workers. The universalization of the notion of “community” illustrates particularly the ambiguities of this local production system going global: the community is a privileged form of social organization within Silicon Valley (Turner 2006). The production of services with a global vocation tends to spread these formats whose practical meaning is understandable from a particular local context. The architecture of LinkedIn, for example, provides some features well beyond those of Silicon Valley users, yet based on their practices: “recommendations”, “celebrations”, “connections” to develop one’s network, “sharing” publications, and more. All of these are professional conventions in force in the region. More generally, the architecture of the various social networks that have emerged (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.) enforce ways of communication that respond to local motivations with universal prepositions: make encounters easier, make weak and ephemeral links predominant, see other people as opportunities, while at the same time facilitating selections via recommendations and validation by peers.

## CONCLUSION

Silicon Valley is a local industry promoting services, products, and values through them at global scale and with universal ambition. In this process, the “culture” of the region plays a determining role. Silicon Valley professionals must resolve the tension between the needs for integration and selection. They seek to increase the flow of information, capital, and people while expanding their spectrum of opportunities. They work to identify, objectify, and disseminate the work conventions that are most likely to favor the integration of new population flows, in order to increase the volume of opportunities. They use the term “culture” to designate a set of variables whose communication allows newcomers from other states or countries to adapt effectively and quickly to a previously unknown and changing
social world and technological environment. Integrated profes-
sionals seek to provide the communicative means for these out-
siders, with their heterogeneous ways of doing things, to inte-
grate them quickly and effectively. They therefore work in a
way that make “culture” an explicit product, a set of stable,
communicable, and measurable conventions. In this perspec-
tive, new technologies are not a central element of culture, but
an end in itself. The paradoxical character of Silicon Valley,
both supportive and selective, based on integration and selec-
tion, corresponds to a system of collectivization of immaterial
resources and individualization of material resources. A limited
series of principles ensures the coherence of an unstable and
heterogeneous social whole. If Silicon Valley can thus operate
as a factor of cultural homogenization, it is because of the em-
bedding of some of the local cultural properties in the services
promoted on an international scale. Silicon Valley thus repre-
sents both a space of integration that favors Durkheimian forms
of solidarity based on an increasing division of labor, and a
space of selection characterized by a form of social Darwinism
that justifies competition and selection effects. The products
and services tend to spread this universalist “culture” beyond
the frontiers of the region with technologies. In doing this, pro-
fessionals dialecticize the contradictory relationship between
flows and territory, which lies at the heart of the conflicting pro-
cesses of globalization.

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ISSN 2283-7949

GLOCALISM: JOURNAL OF CULTURE, POLITICS AND INNOVATION

2022, 1, DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2022.1.8

Published online by "Globus et Locus" at https://glocalismjournal.org

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