SILICON VALLEY TOUR
Big Tech remains the secular sanctuary of a visionary world devoted to innovation
In 2025, 8.5 billion searches are made on Google every day, almost three billion users are active on Facebook, and Apple has sold over two and a half billion iPhones since 2007. In short, the Silicon Valley myth is more solid than ever and the numbers confirm it: south of San Francisco, California, thousands of companies and start-ups employ half a million people, with the highest average rents and salaries ($157,000) in America. Not only that: the famous valley has for years been one of the most visited destinations in California. Taking a selfie in front of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Facebook's in Menlo Park or Apple's in Cupertino has become a real trend, a secular pilgrimage that also leads to visits the Intel museum, the historic Hewlett Packard headquarters and Steve Jobs' famous garage.
If Big Tech was once a solid democratic stronghold, today most of its leaders (led by Elon Musk) have moved closer to Trumpian ultra-capitalism, with the hope (recounted by Kara Swisher in her recent Burn Book: A Tech Love Story) of becoming not only more innovative and visionary but even richer and more influential. Silicon Valley, however, goes beyond Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai or Jeff Bezos: their success is the result of the efforts of hundreds of engineers from dozens of different countries, and of whom no one has ever heard. The same engineers that meet up at Stanford University – the real incubator of Silicon Valley – or in the cafes of Palo Alto and Mountain View, where at this very moment two unknown nerds in t-shirts and flip-flops are probably inventing something which has never been imagined before.
Publications
We Demain (France) | Jesus (Italy) | Luoghi dell'Infinito (Italy)
