{"id":1008,"date":"2011-12-06T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2011-12-06T13:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=1008"},"modified":"2011-12-07T18:48:34","modified_gmt":"2011-12-08T01:48:34","slug":"reading-steve-jobs-labor-race-and-growing-up-in-the-bay-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/reading-steve-jobs-labor-race-and-growing-up-in-the-bay-area\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Steve Jobs: labor, race, and growing up in the Bay Area"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
"Silicon Valley," by Revolweb<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not long ago I read Walter Isaacson’s biography<\/a> of Steve Jobs. Or I should say I listened to it, as an audiobook, on my iPhone. The experience was riveting, though not always pleasant.<\/p>\n

Like Steve Jobs, I grew up in the Bay Area. In fact, I was growing up in the Bay Area while Jobs was building Apple. Like Jobs, I was accustomed to hearing old-timers describing how before the boom, there used to be apricot orchards, just down there, “far as the eye could see.”<\/p>\n

What fascinated me, though, was how far away Apple’s Cupertino headquarters seems from East Side San Jose, where I grew up. Jobs might as well have been living in a different Bay Area.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It reminded me of what it was like to read the San Jose Mercury News <\/em>when I was a kid. I understood that, on some level, these designers and venture capitalists were part of our lives, but this world seemed a planet away from the largely immigrant, working-class place where I was growing up. I wondered why we didn’t show up in the newspaper.<\/p>\n

I had a similar experience not too long ago, when This American Life<\/em> ran a piece<\/a> on the erstwhile gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner, and in particular his (execrable) book Mt. Pleasant: What Happened When I Traded a Silicon Valley Board Room for an Inner CIty Classroom<\/a><\/em>. In Mt. Pleasant<\/em>, the millionaire tech entrepreneur details his experience (substitute-) teaching at a high school in East San Jose, right around the corner from Overfelt High School<\/a>, where I went to school. Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

As the crow flies, Mt. Pleasant High is only about fifteen miles from my home. But in terms of economics, the gap is vast. Heading east to meet Purcell for the first time, I passed nearby my neighborhood French bakery and the local Ferrari dealership. Several miles and a couple of highways later, I took the Capitol Expressway exit and drove into what felt like another planet. Signs advertised janitorial supply stores and taquerias. Exhaust hung over ten lanes of inner-city traffic. Yellowing, weedy gardens fronted many of the homes, as did driveways marred by large oil spots or broken-down cars. These were the neighborhoods I could see, anyway. Giant walls obscured some of the blocks I passed. Were they keeping out the city’s grit and noise? Or hiding profoundly sad lives?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I heard this, I nearly threw something at the radio. I certainly did yell, “That’s where we live<\/em>, you asshole!” For one thing, the description isn’t even accurate; the East Side, as This American Life<\/em> points out,\u00a0is perfectly safe and perfectly pleasant, a good place for a kid to grow up.<\/p>\n

But what makes an entire community apparently invisible? Particularly a community that performs much of the labor on which Silicon Valley depends?<\/p>\n

I think a lot of the answer has to do with the sweeping, often utopian rhetoric<\/a> of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, in which a complicated history<\/a> of race, power, and labor is relegated to the distant past, courtesy of a new device or business model. It’s why I’m so skeptical of people who promise that technology can usher in a new era of economic justice and enlightenment. We saw it, on the East Side, again and again, and we’re still here<\/em>, messy as we are, and the world’s a better place for that.<\/p>\n

As I listened to Steve Jobs<\/em>, I began mentally assembling a list of works that might serve as a corrective to his history of the digital age, one composed mainly of entrepreneurs, designers, and venture capitalists. I’m far from alone (and far from the first) to note that much of the rhetoric of the digital age seems custom-designed to elide the material relations of race and labor that undergird it: “the cloud,” “wireless,” even the airy, soft-focus graphic design that’s characterized Web 2.0. In fact, a lot of this work is emerging right now; I’m eagerly awaiting Lisa Nakamura<\/a>‘s book on race and labor in the digital age. And Jason Farman at the University of Maryland has a great syllabus for a related class called Materiality in Networked Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I started thinking about what a syllabus on this topic might look like, one I’m provisionally titling Labor and Materiality in the Digital Age. I’d love to hear what I might add.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Addelman, Ben, and Samir Mallal. Bombay Calling<\/a><\/em>. National Film Board of Canada, 2006.<\/p>\n

Alexander R. Galloway. \u201cThe Unworkable Interface.\u201d<\/a> New Literary History<\/em> 39, no. 4 (2008): 931-955.<\/p>\n

Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization<\/a><\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n

Ascher, Kate. The Works: Anatomy of a City<\/a><\/em>. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.<\/p>\n

Baichwal, Jennifer. Manufactured Landscapes<\/a><\/em>. Zeitgeist Films, 2006.<\/p>\n

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things<\/a><\/em>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.<\/p>\n

Blanchette, Jean\u2010Fran\u00e7ois. \u201cA Material History of Bits<\/a>.\u201d Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology<\/em> 62, no. 6 (June 1, 2011): 1042-1057.<\/p>\n

Brown, Bill. \u201cThing Theory<\/a>.\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 28, no. 1 (October 1, 2001): 1-22.<\/p>\n

Center for Land Use Interpretation. \u201cThe Center for Land Use Interpretation Land Use Database<\/a>\u201d, n.d. http:\/\/ludb.clui.org\/.<\/p>\n

Center for Land Use Interpretation and Matthew Coolidge. Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation<\/a><\/em>. New York: Metropolis Books, 2006.<\/p>\n

Ceruzzi, Paul. Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005<\/a><\/em>. Cambridge\u00a0 Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2011.<\/p>\n

Frank, Thomas. Boob Jubilee: The Cultural Politics of the New Economy<\/em><\/a>. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2003.<\/p>\n

Funari, Vicki, and Sergio De La Torre. Maquilapolis: City of Factories<\/a><\/em>. Independent Television Service, 2006.<\/p>\n

Graham, Stephen. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails<\/a><\/em>. New York: Routledge, 2010.<\/p>\n

Gulati, Sonali. Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night<\/a><\/em>. Women Make Movies, 2008.<\/p>\n

Hayles, N. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts<\/a>.<\/em> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.<\/p>\n

Historypin. \u201cDreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto<\/a>\u201d, n.d. http:\/\/www.dreamsofacity.org\/.<\/p>\n

Hustwit, Gary. Objectified<\/a><\/em>, n.d. http:\/\/topdocumentaryfilms.com\/objectified\/.<\/p>\n

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs<\/a><\/em>. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.<\/p>\n

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination<\/a><\/em>. Cambridge\u00a0 Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.<\/p>\n

Light, Jennifer S. \u201cWhen Computers Were Women<\/a>.\u201d Technology and Culture<\/em> 40, no. 3 (1999): 455-483.<\/p>\n

McPherson, Tara. \u201cU.S. Operating Systems at MidCentury: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX<\/a>.\u201d In\u00a0The Visual Culture Reader<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 2012.<\/p>\n

Mendehlson, Ben. Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors<\/a><\/em>, 2011. http:\/\/vimeo.com\/30642376.<\/p>\n

Montfort, Nick and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System<\/a><\/em>. Cambridge\u00a0 Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.<\/p>\n

Nakamura, Lisa. \u201cDon\u2019t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.\u201d<\/a> Critical Studies in Media Communication<\/em> 26, no. 2 (June 2009): 128-144.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. Race after the Internet<\/a><\/em>. New York: Routledge, 2011.<\/p>\n

Pitti, Stephen. The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans<\/a><\/em>. Princeton\u00a0 N.J.\u202f; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.<\/p>\n

Ross, Andrew. \u201cTechnology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property<\/a>.\u201d American Quarterly<\/em> 58, no. 3 (2006): 743-766.<\/p>\n

Smith, James Allen. Floored<\/a><\/em>. DVD, Documentary. Typecast Releasing, 2009.<\/p>\n

Smith, Ted. Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry<\/a><\/em>. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n

Starosielski, Nicole, and Craig Dietrich. \u201cSurfacing<\/a>,\u201d n.d. http:\/\/vectorsjournal.org\/projects\/surfacing\/.<\/p>\n

Terranova, Tiziana. \u201cFree Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.\u201d <\/a>Electronic Book Review<\/em> (June 20, 2003).<\/p>\n

Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents: A Memoir<\/a><\/em>. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.<\/p>\n

Virno, Paolo. \u201cGrammar of the Multitude<\/a>.\u201d Text<\/em>, 2004. http:\/\/www.generation-online.org\/c\/fcmultitude3.htm#%20GrammarOfTheMultitude-div1-id2866923.<\/p>\n

Weber, Steve. The Success of Open Source<\/a><\/em>. Cambridge\u00a0 MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long ago I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Or I should say I listened to it, as an audiobook, on my iPhone. The experience was riveting, though not always pleasant. Like Steve Jobs, I grew up in the Bay Area. In fact, I was growing up in the Bay Area while Jobs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-humanities","category-history-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}