371 Review essay

REVIEW ESSAY

The Code. Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara (2020) Penguin
Books, New York, 512pp., $US20.00 paperback, ISBN: 9780399562204

ABSTRACT
Silicon Valley has emerged as the key metaphor of the innovation-led economic development in the
21st century. As the Valley’s technology monopolies and utopias expand, there is a growing need for
critical histories that help to ground and contextualize the futures that are spreading from San Francisco
Bay. In this review essay, I suggest that a settler-colonial approach offers interesting possibilities for the
creation of such histories. To demonstrate how such an approach works, I develop a settler-colonial
reading of Margaret O’Mara’s recent book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019).
By critically analysing the key metaphors in O’Mara’s celebrated book, the global and violent face of the
Valley becomes visible. The settler-colonial approach, I conclude, offers one possible analytical approach
to breaking the stranglehold of America-centred understanding typical of the histories of Valley.

Introduction

Marketed as the ‘definitive history of Silicon Valley’, Margaret O’Mara’s The Code: Silicon Valley
and the Remaking of America (2019) is quickly becoming the go-to book in narrating the story of
the nerve-centre of techno-capitalism. By uncovering the webs among Valley, Wall Street and
Washington, O’Mara skilfully connects the Valley to its modern American context. Despite the
merits of The Code, O’Mara’s framing of Silicon Valley as a modern ‘only-in-America story’ (pp.2,
7, 389) erases the systemic violence that is integral to the history and contemporary reality of the
Valley. O’Mara’s version of the Valley begins in the 1940s, remains largely within the borders of the
United States and dwells on the elite stories of high-technology professionals, politicians and bil-
lionaires. Underneath this story, however, there is another valley, a valley of violence filled with
indigenous and non-white protagonists whose histories O’Mara’s narrative conceals. My purpose in
this review essay is to make this expelled valley visible through a critical reading of some of The
Code’s key metaphors and slips of the tongue. These slippages take us into alternative origin points,
geographies and protagonists that go beyond O’Mara’s enclosed histories. Beyond the enclosed val-
ley of innovation, I argue, lies a valley of settler-colonial expansionism.

O’Mara’s modern American enclosure

O’Mara’s structures her book as a chronological narrative. Starting from World War II and ending
in 2018, O’Mara explores the role of the key individuals and institutions that gave birth to the networks
of capital, technology and politics that created the Valley. Importantly, O’Mara demonstrates how
the ‘new economy was deeply intertwined with the old’ (p.7), explaining how the technological
revolutions ‘from the Valley’ were financed through defense funding, pension funds and gilded-age
fortunes. O’Mara, like Mazzucato (2013), argues that it was ultimately the taxpayers’ money –
channelled into Stanford and startups – that produced digital revolutions, later commercialized by
‘big technology’ (pp.310, 352).
O’Mara’s work is helpful in fleshing out the American institutional context of Silicon
Valley. She challenges the libertarian self-image of the Valley by narrating how high-technology

DOI:10.13169/prometheus.37.4.0371
 Prometheus 372
leaders from Steve Jobs to Peter Thiel and the founders of Google have actively lobbied for deregu-
lation and commodification of the internet in Washington, and benefitted a great deal from generous
government subsidies, tax policies and low interest rates (pp.76, 124, 162, 220, 217, 352, 385, 391).
O’Mara also emphasizes the crucial role of military interests in the makings of the Valley and helps
to contextualize the emergence of the CIA’s and the Pentagon’s venture capital activities (p.385).
The historical symbiosis between the US state and big technology becomes clear. Her work, how-
ever, fails to bring forth the systemic ‘othering’ that this symbiosis was founded upon in the 1940s.
Indeed, from the Second World War to the Cold War and from the ‘War on terror’ to Trump’s war
on refugees and migrants, enemy images have shaped and directed the march of American
innovation. Marginalizing this history, O’Mara reproduces these enemy images in her final pages
(pp.398–403). For O’Mara, the authoritarianism, populism, racism and violence spreading through
the digital networks of the Valley come from outside America, specifically from Russia and China.
In her analysis, it is the lack of political understanding among the boy wonders of the Valley and
their naivety that allow these bad actors to manipulate the Valley’s wonders. Indeed, O’Mara seems
rather blind to the anti-democratic forms of surveillance capitalism that thrive between big technol-
ogy and the US government (Lyon, 2003; Zuboff, 2019), and to the systemic violence hidden in the
very designs of big technology’s digital networks (Bridle 2018; Ali 2017). In O’Mara’s world, the
authoritarian impulse of the innovation economy lies beyond America.
Importantly, O’Mara’s enclosed modern temporalities and America-centred geographies
are not unique, but characterize both critical (Walker, 2018; Bridle, 2018; Cohen, 2018) and cele-
bratory (Berlin, 2017; Fisher, 2018; Lewis, 1999) narratives of the Valley. Indeed, the works that
systematically link the Valley to global and connected histories and geographies have been few and
far between (Pellow and Park, 2002; Spencer, 2019; Noble and Roberts, 2019). American excep-
tionalism emerges as the foundational myth from which the story of the Valley becomes retold.
O’Mara’s individualist and upper-class focus – featuring entrepreneurs, governors and presidents
– is also typical of the enclosed histories of the Valley. Sometimes, following the liberal idea of
‘diversity’, she tells the stories of women and non-white ‘techies’. Race, class and gender as ana-
lytical categories do not feature in O’Mara’s work. Using The Code’s keywords and insights as a
point of departure, now I move to a settler-colonial and global reading that, perhaps, is better
equipped to form a systemic image on the roots and current expansions of the Valley.

The allegories between settler-colonialism and Silicon Valley

As an alternative to O’Mara’s modern America-centrism, I join with Noble and Roberts (2019,
p.10) in suggesting that the linkages between the rise of the Valley and earlier and ongoing (settler)
colonial and imperial processes are worth exploring. To read a text from a settler-colonial point of
view is to focus on the returns and transformations of settler-colonial practices and stories that
facilitate the dispossession, exploitation and appropriation of non-white territories, bodies and
knowledge. While the analysis of settler-colonial continuities is particularly relevant in the context
of settler-colonial states, such as the US, I approach settler-colonialism not as a fixed unique struc-
ture, but as one of the background literatures for understanding the continuations and transforma-
tions of colonial imaginations and practices in contemporary globalization. I particularly follow
McElroy (2020a) who, by analysing the technology term ‘digital nomad’, demonstrates how trans-
national allegorical structures connect Silicon Valley to (settler) colonial fantasies and practices.
O’Mara’s work, unconsciously perhaps, reproduces such allegories and – as I suggest later –
normalizes the material settler-colonial practices of dispossession on the ground.
The settler-colonial idea of the frontier is one of the key metaphors that finds a new home
in O’Mara’s narration on the expansion of the 21st-century digital economy in Silicon Valley.
While O’Mara rightly observes that Silicon Valley finds frontier metaphors ‘irresistible’ (p.286)
and carries ‘plenty of John Wayne and very little native American history’ (p.287), her narration of
the Valley reproduces the white frontierism of the Wild West (Slotkin, 1973; Pippin, 2010). Thus,
373 Review essay
she portrays Silicon Valley as an ‘endless frontier’ (p.17) where venture capitalists emerge as ‘con-
vention-bucking cowboys’ (p.70) and entrepreneurs are ‘high-technology cowboys and cowgirls’
(pp.185, 317–18) riding into the ‘terra incognita of consciousness’ (p.128). O’Mara’s affinity to
settler-colonial metaphors is, however, nothing new in the imaginations of techno-capitalism. As
previous research has discussed, in both the classical settler-colonial frontier and the novel digital
frontier, innovation and creativity are imagined to belong to the white brain and body that repre-
sents civilization and the future in a clash against savagery from the past (Slotkin, 1973; Pellow and
Park, 2002; Thatcher et al., 2016; Kwet, 2019; Noble and Roberts, 2019; Tarvainen, 2021).
O’Mara’s narrative of Silicon Valley also reproduces the Messianic, dualistic worldview
characteristic of settler-colonial fantasies (Raz-Krakotzkin, 2000; Salaita, 2006; Drexler-Dreis,
2018). Thus, Silicon Valley appears as the ‘the object of ‘exodus1’ (p.15) where ‘technology-
evangelistas’, boy wonders’ and ‘missionaries’ (pp.130, 147, 155) spread the ‘Valley’s magic’
(p.304) on their ‘computer crusades’ (p.119). This eschatological drama, complete with crusades and
civilization missions, is not unique to O’Mara’s narrative, but at the very heart of Silicon Valley’s
mythology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996; Geiger, 2020). The world is on the brink of techno-
heaven or hell (the story goes) and the keys to salvation lie in the hands of the entrepreneurs (Farman,
2019). Interestingly, the idea that Silicon Valley is the portal to resurrection stems from an earlier
settler-colonial origin story of California. The Spanish colonists named the lands of the indigenous
nations ‘California’ according to a 16th-century novel written in Seville (Niederland, 1971). In this
novel, California is imagined as a Christian space between exodus and redemption, located right next
to the biblical paradise (Niederland, 1971, pp.486–90). To turn their utopia into reality, the Spanish
colonists started bringing images of paradise and hell (printed in Seville) to the missions in California
in order to remind the natives – the demonic savages – that it was they who had now reached the
white shores of salvation (Haas, 2014). O’Mara’s eschatological metaphors and personifications
evoke these settler-colonial roots of California. The technologies in her tale are located in a colonial-
Christian genealogy where particular divine bodies work at the forefront of a universal resurrection.
Supported by such a colonial metanarrative, it is not surprising that the labour markets in Silicon
California, as in Spanish California, are (crudely) white- and male-dominated (Wills and Rangarajan,
2017; Twine, 2018; Rangarajan, 2018). Behind these universalist crusader metaphors looms the
reproduction and reimagination of a highly personal Eurocentric hierarchy of race (Bottici and
Challand, 2019), a hierarchy that travels from the bodies and icons of Spanish missionaries to the
technologies and their machines now creating homes and homelessness under the California sun.
While O’Mara also discusses the Valley’s myths from a more critical perspective, the discussion
ignores settler-colonial histories and violence. Reproducing the colonial spatial imaginations of California
as the virgin and promised land of white American manifest destiny (Smith, 1950; Horsman, 1981;
Slotkin, 1973), O’Mara portrays Silicon Valley as ‘remote’, ‘young’ and ‘lightly settled’, a place ‘des-
tined by geography for innovation’, a ‘place not bound by the past’. This imagined remoteness and
youngness is all too similar to visions of indigenous territories as ‘empty lands’ destined to blossom
under settler-colonial control (Benvenisti, 2000; Ramirez, 2007; Piterberg, 2008; Veracini, 2010; Fields,
2017). As Fields and Piterberg discuss elsewhere, the discourse of the empty land stands at the heart of
settler-colonial projects, repressing the indigenous past and present into invisibility. In Silicon Valley’s
case, this past includes extraordinarily violent labour regimes and the dispossession of indigenous occu-
pants from their land to satisfy progressive techno-visions (Pitti, 2018; Walker, 2018; Spencer, 2019).
The attributes that O’Mara gives to her entrepreneurs are also worth noting: we learn that Valley’s entre-
preneurs are ‘extraordinary and smart people’ (p.19)’ with ’elite brains’ (p.21). O’Mara’s entrepreneurs
thus echo the imagined biological-cognitive superiority of the European colonists that became the self-
fulfilling prophecy of colonial expansions and racialized regimes of labour (Miranda, 1988; McCormack,
2007; Toscano, 2018).

1
Referring to the biblical story of the Israelites escaping from Egypt to the promised land.
 Prometheus 374
The only mention of indigenous people in The Code is in the colonial techniques of appro-
priation and fetishization (Bhabha, 1999). The Silicon Valley entrepreneur is hence described as a
‘high-technology nomad’ (p.391) and part of a ‘techno tribe’ (p.117). In this tamed and post-industrial
form, the indigenous are appropriated to accommodate white American belonging and expansion
(Byrd, 2011; McElroy and Werth, 2019).

White stories, white matter

As the literature on settler-colonialism has long emphasized, the settler-colonial project is not
merely symbolic or allegorical. Rather, the dramas and images of settler-colonialism interact with
the material realities of dispossession and exploitation of the indigenous and the racialized (Piterberg,
2008; Veracini, 2011). In line with McElroy’s (2020b) term ‘double dispossession’, I propose that
the allegorical connections between O’Mara’s version of Silicon Valley and the settler-colonial
expansions should be seen not only as cultural curiosities, but as entry points to studying the specu-
lative materialities of the ‘innovation economy’. Indeed, a materialist reading of the stories of inno-
vation is much needed as the whole growth model of Silicon Valley is based on speculative
techno-financial imaginations where white spaces, knowledge and subjectivities are regarded as
more ‘creative’ and promising than others (Noble and Roberts, 2019; Sassen, 2017; Ali, 2017; Bear,
2020; Tarvainen, 2017). While O’Mara recognizes the fact that Silicon Valley is a ‘business of sto-
rytelling’ (p.191) in which a venture capitalist invests with astronomical returns, she fails to recog-
nize the colonial undertones of this story. I will illustrate the thread between the speculative stories
and materialities of Silicon Valley by exploring the settler-colonial dispossession that is evident
throughout O’Mara’s imaginations on territory.
First, O’Mara’s mental images of the original Silicon Valley as ‘virgin’ and ‘empty’ contrib-
ute to the Eurocentric and colonial logic of seeing indigenous territories as land without an owner
(Fields, 2017). The problem with O’Mara’s narrative is that, while she rightly recognizes that the
existence of vast territories of ‘dirt cheap land’ was the key factor enabling the creation of Silicon
Valley (pp.80–2), she forgets to ask how such cheap land came about. Emptiness was the competitive
advantage of the Valley in O’Mara’s story – ‘there wasn’t anything there to be displaced’, she argues
in her YouTube talk (O’Mara, 2019). This erasure of indigenous relations with the land is not just
discursive but is also at the heart of the colonial-capitalist price mechanism – something that Jason
Moore (2016) has described as the production of ‘cheap nature’. In the Bay Area, this ‘cheapness’
was produced through dispossessing and appropriating the precolonial – indigenous – systems for
organizing the reproduction of social life, land and labour. While O’Mara notes that large rancheros
from Spanish and Mexican rule made it easy for future developers to occupy the region (p.65), the
creation of the California mission system (involving ethnic cleansings, forced labour and the destruc-
tion of indigenous social and cosmological structures for governing and cultivating the land) is
invisible in The Code (Pitti, 2018). O’Mara hides the whole destructive history of creating cheapness.
The critical role of the US government in the creation of California as terra nullius (no-man’s land
up for grabs for privatization) is never mentioned (Margolin, 1978; Bauer, 2016). This is particularly
striking since many of the places O’Mara highlights as the beginnings of Silicon Valley stand upon
burnt indigenous villages and colonial missions. Such sites include the thousands of acres of land
purchased by Stanford University’s founders, referred to as the ‘critical catalyst’ for the Valley
(p.17); and the Moffett field aviation hub (now belonging to Google) without which Lockheed
Missiles, the Valley’s largest employer, would not have entered the Valley.
O’Mara’s blindness to the earlier, settler-colonial mechanisms for producing ‘empty’ and
‘cheap land’, I suggest, makes her oblivious to their returns in novel and highly predatory digital-
ized forms. Instead of the imagined cheapness, it is now the extraordinary expensiveness of urban
central territories that pushes the racialized and the unwanted out to the frontiers of Silicon Valley
(Walker, 2018; McElroy, 2020a). In other words, the techno-capital now creates lebensraum for
white and ‘productive’ populations through speculating with the value of urban land and property
375 Review essay
(Walker, 2018; McElroy 2020b). Rather than blatant gentrification, it might be more realistic to see
the technology-expulsion as characterizing the long history of settler-colonial expansionism. In its
current form, expulsion occurs through the highly speculative valuations assigned to technology
companies that, in turn, attract massive capital and credit flows to real estate development (Walker,
2018; Iftikhar et al., 2020).2 In such cities as San Francisco, Seattle and Oakland, it is clear that the
innovation economy is physically moving, migrating from suburbia to the city centres (Iftikhar
et al., 2020). Mapping the waves of foreclosures in San Francisco between 2011 and 2018, McElroy
and Werth (2019) find that ‘69% of San Francisco’s evictions have occurred within four blocks of
technology bus stops’. This has led into shrinking share of Black and Latinx populations in the city,3
turning it into white and upper-class territory. One-third of Bay Area residents want to leave the
region that is becoming uninhabitable for them (Fimrite, 2016). The same developments are also
evident in the wider Bay Area and in new high technology cities, such as Seattle (see Noble and
Roberts, 2019, p.12). In the central district of Seattle, a historical centre for the Black community
since 1920s, the proportion of African residents has dropped 6% since 2010, when Amazon started
to take over the city centre (Morrill, 2013; McCartney, 2019). While the US technology giants are
quick to join the anti-racist imaginaries – as in the case of Black Lives Matter movement (Paul,
2020) – their urban practices seem to reinforce racial divisions. Importantly, both in Seattle and
California, local and federal government has paved the way for the colonization of the urban centres
through ‘competitive’ and ‘attractive’ tax policies and regulations (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000;
Walker, 2018; Foroohar, 2019). While O’Mara briefly mentions the sky-high rents that push people
out (p.271), systemic, racialized and classist expulsions remain at the margins of her analysis.
The settler-colonial myth of emptiness – the idea that the non-whites do not have valuable
knowledge of land – is essential for the material expansion of techno-capitalism (Benvenisti, 2000).
As Noble and Roberts (2009, p.15) put it, the myths of modern technology elites materialize into
‘racial and gender signifiers that disproportionately consolidate resources away from people of color,
particularly African Americans, Latino/as and Native Americans’. The disavowal of the non-white
relationships to the land travel from the early agricultural fields to techno-urban paradises of settler-
colonial capital. The dispossession of indigenous and Black people becomes entwined (Ramirez,
2007; King et al., 2020; Salaita, 2016) – the settler-colonial project now dresses in silicon.

Towards global readings of the Valley

O’Mara’s description of Silicon Valley as the ‘land of America’s future’ (p.203) and the ‘place of
new starts, new ideas and dreams’ (p.190) reproduces the myth of a purified beginning. a break in
time from where futures begin. The settler-colonial approach of this review essay adopts another
perspective: America and the model of Silicon Valley emerge as connected to Eurocentric and colo-
nial materialities and myths. There are no empty times or empty spaces, and the luxury of forgetting
pasts does not exist. By showing how O’Mara’s histories and geographies leak other histories and
geographies filled with violence, this approach strips the Valley of exceptionalism.
Most importantly, the settler-colonial approach puts the questions of territory and whiteness
at the centre of these entangled geographies and histories. Thus, Silicon Valley’s speculative imag-
inations of future abundance become connected to the earlier settler-colonial imaginations of
improvement and civilization that devalue non-white belonging and ownership and institute
Eurocentric hierarchies of labour and knowledge (Quijano, 2000; Fields, 2017; Bottici and Challand,

2
On the ways in which US government financial policies since 2008 have led to a Kafkaesque financial shell
game pumping up the valuation of big technology see Foroohar (2019).
3
The share of Black population in San Francisco city centre dropped from 17% to 6% between 1976 and 2015.
Nearby Oakland has become the new frontier for technology companies (Twitter, e.g., recently established its
headquarters there) and the share of Black population there dropped from 36% in 2000 to 25% in 2015 (Walker,
2018, p.207).
 Prometheus 376
2019). Alongside temporal connections, the settler-colonial approach looks at processes in other
settler-colonial frontiers. Thus, the whitening of American city centres in the name of innovation
would be connected to whitening geographies in other places. The extension of Silicon Valley from
the Bay Area to Israel/Palestine and to the startup nation of Israel (Tarvainen, 2017), for example,
could be brought into discussion of the tangled geographies of settler-colonialism. To the list of
Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, such a perspective would add East Jerusalem and the Naqeb/
Negev desert in Israel/Palestine. These two sites have long been the objects of the Israeli state’s
settlement project and have been considered future sites of Israeli innovation.
The arid areas in the southern Israel/Palestine (Negev/Naqeb), for example, provide illus-
tration of the global Silicon Valley. There, the Jewish National Fund – historically responsible for
organizing settlement and expelling the Palestinians from the land – is financing the construction of
an Israeli Silicon Valley.4 The aim of the plan is to attract 1.5 million new Jewish residents, from
within and outside Israel, to an area that Palestinians regard as their homeland. As the official website
states, the goal of the project is to expand the borders of a startup nation for the Jewish peoplehood
(Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael Jewish National Fund, 2020). In similar vein, East Jerusalem (the inter-
nationally recognized capital of Palestine) is now to be integrated into the startup nation through an
Israeli state-funded project, Silicon Wadi of East Jerusalem (Melhem, 2020). More than 200
Palestinian industrial buildings (in the occupied, economically deprived and physically enclosed
East Jeruslem) are to be demolished in the plan (Zoffre, 2020). These projects that at first seem
uniquely Israeli start to look rather like Israeli versions of the anti-indigenous and anti-Black geog-
raphies familiar in the American version of Silicon Valley. The transnational nature of this digital
settler-colonialism becomes even more evident in that the largest investor in Israel’s expanding
technology sector is the United States, and particularly Silicon Valley-based companies and inves-
tors (Israel Innovation Authority, 2016).
The settler-colonial approach is, of course, but one perspective on the larger project of dis-
mantling the temporal and spatial enclosures of the Valley. A whole array of critical-colonial
approaches (Challand, 2020) should be used when the Valley’s pasts and contemporary forms are
analysed. Alongside critical-colonial literature, world-ecological (Moore, 2015) and other trans-
formative and global perspectives (Gills and Hosseini, 2020; Santos and Meneses, 2019) should be
central to such global intervention. Rather than seeing the Valley as a simple repetition of colonial
history, the analysis should – without fetishizing the novelties of the Valley – remain open to the
creative and unforeseen dynamics that do not fit any pre-existing box. Perhaps a highly critical
reading of progressivist histories, such as O’Mara’s, offers one way of seeing through the America-
centred view of the Valley.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Benoit Challand from the New School for Social Research for offering comments
and guidance for this review essay.

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Antti Tarvainen
Global Development Studies
University of Helsinki, Finland
[email protected]
ttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-6545-7149
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