When Silicon Valley comes to stand for wolves of Wall Street

By Uttara Choudhury New York: Tech bigwigs like to think of themselves as very different creatures from the wolves of Wall Street. They are Zen, create cool devices, and wear hoodies, not banker’s suits. But Silicon Valley’s latent arrogance, sexism and elitism have fueled a tech backlash.   For more than a decade now Manhattan has been gussying itself up and pushing out the artists, hipsters, and other folk for the rich Wall Street bankers. Now the same thing is happening in San Francisco where there is an influx of well-paid geeks. Rising tech salaries and IPO riches have pushed the cost of living in the Bay Area to the breaking point for ordinary folk.   Like Google buses before it, this year’s tech industry awards ceremony, the Crunchies co-hosted by Gigaom, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch became a lightning rod. Comedian and satirist John Oliver who hosted this year’s Crunchies roasted the assembled Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires.   “You already have almost all the money in the world,” said Oliver. “Why do you need awards as well?”   Oliver then went for the jugular: “You’re no longer the underdog! You’ve become so powerful that you are pissing off an entire city – not just with what you do at work, but how you get to work!”   Activists have been protesting fleets of luxury buses that Google uses to ferry its employees to and from Silicon Valley clogging up bus stops. The public transport agency, which had previously allowed Silicon Valley firms to operate their buses free of charge, agreed last week to introduce a tariff for use of city bus stops. But protesters say paying just $1 per bus per bus-stop is too modest a tariff for fat cats like Goggle who are taking advantage of the investment taxpayers made in public infrastructure.   Oliver suggested that the sequel to Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street, should be set on the West Coast with “all the money, all the opulence and about 10 percent of the sex.”   Outside San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall where the awards ceremony was being held, protestors held their own mock ceremony, the “Crappies,” bequeathing a golden toilet brush for “Tax Evader of the Year” to Twitter’s boss Dick Costolo, who won a controversial 56-million-dollar tax break from City Hall.   As the rest of the US economy struggled, tech bigwigs repeatedly proved themselves to be out of touch. For his wedding, Napster creator Sean Parker shelled out $10 million to turn a hotel into a movie set, equipped with outfits for wedding guests designed by the costume designers for the Lord of the Rings movies.   Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla bought a massive beachfront house and then made it impossible for surfers and beach lovers to access crescent-shaped Martins Beach, one of California’s historically public beaches. With his background in solar power and biofuels, you wouldn’t expect to find Sun Microsystems co-founder Khosla in a showdown with environmentalists, but that’s how it’s playing out with Khosla’s privatisation of Martins Beach.   Google’s corporate mantra may be to do no evil, but to a band of activists the company could just be the devil incarnate. Protestors stalked Anthony Levandowski, an engineer at Google X, the company’s research lab, outside his Berkeley house. They unfurled a banner and handed out fliers detailing the engineer’s work on Google’s driverless car technology, Street View and Google Maps. The flier read: “Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation. He is also your neighbour.”   There are some visible, high profile women leaders in technology such as Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, Virginia Marie “Ginni” Rometty, Carol Realini and Padmasree Warrior, yet women are under-represented in the tech industry.   “In most industries, discriminating on the basis of gender, race, or age would be considered illegal. Yet in the tech industry, venture capitalists routinely show off about their “pattern recognition” capabilities. They say they can recognise a successful entrepreneur, engineer, or business executive when they see one. The pattern always resembles Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or them: a nerdy male. Women, blacks, and Latinos are at a disadvantage as are older entrepreneurs,” writes Vivek Wadhwa in The Washington Post.    Women make up only 23 percent of computer programmers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is a male-dominated industry unwelcoming to women engineers. The industry famous for its bravado about changing the world still lags decades behind other industries in its treatment of women, many of whom say they routinely confront sexism in the companies where they work and at the tech conferences they attend.   Many blame the industry’s growing gender gap on a “brogrammer” culture, a hybrid of “bro” and “programmer” that’s become a tongue-in-check name for engineers. Recently, Twitter was slammed for having a board comprising of members of the Silicon Valley Boys Club. One of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is being sued by a former partner, Ellen Pao, for sexual discrimination.   Critics say Silicon Valley CEOs display an incredible level of arrogance, demand tax cuts for themselves, and have a generally don’t-care attitude. Gone are the days the world romanticised them as “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes.” The current protests symbolise a growing recognition that tech is an industry mostly run by “square pegs in square holes.”