Northern California looks nothing like the rest of the world.
What drives he who sees only perfection? Rarely is it social change. Most tech investors inhabit a utopia that tells them precisely nothing about the struggles of the world at large. And this matters, because seeing is believing, and believing is doing.
I recently welcomed 91 Indian students to my adopted home in California. My advice to them was simple, but stark. Do learn as much as possible from the tech bros of Silicon Valley. Do not become them.
When your daily bread is the manicured lawns of NorCal tech complexes, when your weekend existence comprises hiking state parks, skiing impeccable mountains, surfing the Pacific, and enjoying every comfort and luxury life has to offer, it is too easy to forget that the world outside your window is rarefied and abnormal: alien to most.
An ignorance of the world’s challenges is why tech entrepreneurs waste so much cash on nonsense. Billions of dollars every year are siphoned into silly apps and other meaningless vanity projects when they could be used to address humanity’s greatest challenges. My Indian compatriots see such problems at close quarters. Thus, they are better placed than America’s tech-rich to solve them.
The Valley is not universally reprehensible. Much of what happens there is worthy of spreading to the world. It has a wonderful culture of openness that prizes the sharing of information and learning, believing the advancement of technology will benefit everyone, at least in Santa Clara and – perhaps – beyond. Yet it also has a malign obsession with greed and making money. The accrual of dollars has become little more than a crude and vacuous way of keeping score.
When I met with the budding Indian entrepreneurs, we considered an alternative to the dismal status quo. I told the students that they have opportunities unimaginable to their parents. As the tech elite in the world’s most populous nation, they can build a future in which we worry more about sharing prosperity than fighting over the few scraps we have. Our period in human history is unique: only now do entrepreneurs have the clout to do what governments and big companies could do before.
While Valley bros luxuriate over their latest gimmicks, epoch-shifting technology is emerging that can transform the human existence. Crispr is a new gene-editing system derived from bacteria that enables scientists to edit the DNA of living organisms. It promises to eradicate hereditary diseases and design plants that are far more nutritious, hardy and delicious than those we have now. Banana and mango varieties that can thrive in the harshest corner of the Rajasthan desert are no longer the preserve of outlandish Star Trek scripts. Science fiction is becoming science reality: tech can be used to feed the world, and make it greener.
It was Pierre Mendès France, when president of France in the mid-1950s, who noted that “To govern is to choose.” Tech capitalists are, increasingly, the world’s governors. What they choose to do with their power will literally shape the world’s future.
In Silicon Valley there are few visible problems, so tech bros seek solutions for problems that do not exist. Yet tech excellence extends outside North California, as my Indian visitors know.
To govern is indeed to choose. Those that see the real world’s problems should choose to solve them, rather than fix some imaginary challenge that is defined only by an arbitrary profit motive.
Vivek Wadhwa is author of The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent.