Darrah's research was based on a decade of interviews with workers in the Silicon Valley, an agricultural zone south of San Francisco that metamorphosed into the world's high-tech epicenter in the last quarter of the 20th century. One paper dealt with Vietnamese immigrants in Santa Clara County, Silicon Valley's ground zero, while another paper addressed the transformation of blue-collar chip assemblers in the region. A University of Chicago graduate student presented a paper that likened the free software movement, epitomized by the widespread Linux operating system, to the guild system of craftsmen apprentices in the Middle Ages. The researchers, including several who live and work in the region, conceded that quality of life in the Silicon Valley has substantially degraded and that workers' daily routines are relatively banal. Moving bodies through time and space still drives daily logistics, and it can be difficult to remember that one is bleeding on the cutting edge of innovation.
Dark humor abounds about the cruel ironies of living in a place that prides itself on efficiency.
But other than a few comments on the high financial and efficiency costs of life in the Silicon Valley, the technophilic researchers mainly extolled breathless enthusiasm for the Silicon Valley and its workers. Darrah interviewed an early Apple Computer devotee who had a minor religious epiphany when, as a computer engineer years later, he moved to California and lived in an apartment only a quarter mile from Apple's corporate headquarters on Infinite Loop in Cupertino. I couldn't imagine being anywhere else. Tech workers, they reasoned, are also able to channel information precisely across international and ethnic boundaries. The workers, and potential workers, use their various identities to recast technical work into socially charged causes.