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I just spent the week in Silicon Valley for work. It's work that I find important, and that I'm excited about. And yet, on this trip something was different for me. For the first time, it felt like a trip to the past. The era of Silicon Valley, it appears, is over.

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I remember coming to San Francisco felt inspiring. There was a rich legacy of what came of hippie culture, and the new tech that was reshaping our world—mostly for the better, or so it felt to me. No doubt, this reflects as much my personal journey as it does this region's and the industry's. My experience with tech San Francisco was shaped in the mid-2000s; after the dotcom crash, during the early days of the social web. It was genuinely exciting, positive, inspiring—and in hindsight, maybe naive.

There had of course always been issues—the insane traffic because everybody commutes by car, homelessness and poverty. But it seemed like overall, despite its weaknesses, this is where the future was made.

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Inspiring? This time, in early 2018, it was anything but. If anything, it felt... decrepit? From the hotel's creaky water pipes to the pot-holed highway our Brazilian Lyft driver complained about, there were signs of legacy issues and crumbling infrastructure and neglect everywhere. The worst, of course, are the hundreds of homeless people and addicts that society has just given up on and doesn't care for. In downtown SF, they are everywhere, and it doesn't appear as if anyone is working on helping them. Or if anyone is, someone please give them a hand, and a budget.

Now these things shouldn't be conflated, but it's hard not to—they combine to impress a clear picture, and it isn't pretty. Here we have the region in the world that is home to the wealthiest, most wildly successful companies in the world, and the epicenter of tech investment. And yet, due to the US's focus on lowering taxes to keep companies happy rather than holding them up to their responsibility, and the total neglect of social security policies, we see these people out on the street as a constant reminder that human dignity isn't a priority if you're not wealthy enough.

This may be my German background speaking: The German constitution opens with the protection of human dignity, and after WWII one of the founding principles of the Federal Republic was that of the so-called social market economy which explicitly puts capitalism in the service of society, not the other way round. But I digress.

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One of them talked about the hustle and pitched us his startup. It had to do with disrupting the club flyer industry by bringing flyers for night clubs from paper to an app. This isn't the future—it's mopping up in forgotten niches. (I wish him all the best; he seemed a genuinely nice guy.)

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Even the one thing I hadn't had anywhere else and that feels decidedly futuristic, the Impossible burger (a vegan, meat-like burger patty), feels like a defensive move against a worse future. It's a defensive eco play, if anything. A responsibility play. That is the thing that made it feel futuristic: "Oh wow, this is amazing, it's not extractive or exploitative!"

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In the same vein, the people I spent most of my time with were also working on responsibility with tech mixed in: They came from non-profit and policy backgrounds, from civic tech, from activist backgrounds. Only a few were based in Silicon Valley, the rest came from all over the world. People working on civic tech, public good, better infrastructure rather than the next billion dollar startup. This felt exciting.

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This lack of excitement, the overall feeling of tech industry, meh was a recurring theme in conversations. Is it a question of personal journey, experience, and age? Is it about the global narrative playing out all around us, and the unsavory role the web and tech in general are playing in it?

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For the first time, Silicon Valley felt like a thing of the past. Where are the exciting futures playing out? Brazil, Kenya, India, China, Estonia? Or maybe it's a more decentralized story? I sure will keep my eyes and ears open this year, and carefully recalibrate my radar. Because one thing feels clear: The era of Silicon Valley is over.

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Have a great week.

Yours truly,
Peter

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