Silicon Valley’s Sociocultural System Emerges

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Out of Silicon Valley have come a wave of technologies that have helped transform the world over the past half century. We are connected as a species unlike ever before. Able to share ideas, innovate in fascinating ways and overall, improve the human condition. It hasn’t all been perfect, but then that is the nature of humans and the evolution of the technologies we create.

When humans come together in groups, we form certain behaviours to create what we call today culture. The larger we gather and the more we do and the more complex we get, we form sociocultural systems. I believe we are beginning to see such a sociocultural system emerging out of Silicon Valley. It’s taken nearly seventy years to emerge.

My theory of this emerging sociocultural system comes from spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley and its geographical surrounds over the past 25 years. My observations as a cultural anthropologist working with small startups to well established technology giants and launching a number of technologies into global markets. Work I continue to do.

This is not meant as a critique and I am trying my best to avoid inherent biases. A truer, more nuanced and structured analysis would need a longer study, a lot of ethnographic work and the combined skills of sociologists and anthropologists. So this is a very brief…