Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.

For more than 20 years, Americans have celebrated technology as not just a business but a social good—a force that removed friction from communications, “disrupted” incumbent industries and lowered barriers to participation in politics and culture. Young billionaire-leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk stared at business travelers from their perches on airport magazine stands, our modern Mount Olympus.

Yet today it’s impossible to sustain the illusion that Silicon Valley offers anything like the salvation it has been selling. Holmes’ company, Theranos, turned out to be a spectacular fraud. Facebook seemed powerless to stop the wildfire of bogus information on its own network. YouTube is also the primary vehicle luring young men to the darker regions of the alt-right. The star companies of this firmament have been “disrupted” not just by Russian botnets, but also by their own false promises, sexual harassment, gender and racial imbalances, killer self-driving cars and massive privacy violations—to say nothing of the unimaginable wealth concentration that has been destroying the quality of life for much of tech’s home in Northern California.


Three intersecting ideas have driven the hubris of Silicon Valley since 1998, when Google was founded. The first is the almost evangelical belief that companies—as opposed to churches, civic groups or governments—can and should solve society’s needs. The second idea is the regulatory hubris of the industry itself—the faith of an entrepreneurial, “disruptive” business culture, in which companies should operate by asking the public sector for forgiveness instead of permission. The third, and perhaps the deepest, is techno-fundamentalism, the belief that there is no problem in the world that can’t be solved with the application of newer, smarter technology. As a result, “innovation” becomes not just something worth encouraging: It becomes a social imperative.

Can Silicon Valley recapture the hold it had on our imaginations? Probably not, and that’s for the best. A far better outcome would be for its leaders to shape up in time to stop the hemorrhaging of public confidence. It’s a daunting task: Toxic “tech bro” culture would have to be put in its place; cities like Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco would have to push companies to treat their neighbors better and to make living in them affordable for waiters, teachers and firefighters. We the public have a responsibility, too—to recognize that Silicon Valley can’t just fix itself, and to stop hoping that technology can solve the problems the public sphere exists to tackle. We will have to reclaim not just our data, but our dreams.