When I worked as a professor at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, after being there for a few months, during a conversation with the chair of the computer science department he asked me “have you found a church community yet?” I had not. I had, however, found a synagogue. The choice wasn’t difficult: there were only two. Nobody asked me a question like that after I moved to San Jose, which describes itself as the heart of Silicon Valley.
Why is Silicon Valley so non-religious is the question that sociologist Carolyn Chen seeks to answer here. As a tenured faculty member at UC Berkeley, Chen is a Bay Area resident herself. Like so many of us here, she’s a transplant: she grew up in Pennsylvania and Southern California, and first moved to the area in 2013 to do research on Asian religions in secular spaces.
Chen soon changed the focus of her research from Asian religions to the work culture of tech companies. She observes that people tend to become less religious when they move to the area, and are less engaged in their local communities. Tech work is totalizing, absorbing employees entire lives. Tech companies care for many of the physical needs of their employees in a way that companies in other sectors do not. Tech companies provide meditation/mindfulness (the companies use these terms interchangeably) to help their employees stay productive, but it is a neutered version of the meditation of its religious, Buddhist roots. Tech companies push up the cost of living, and provide private substitutes for public infrastructure, like shuttle busses.
Chen tries to weave these threads together into a narrative about how work substitutes for religion in the lives of tech workers in Silicon Valley. But the pieces just don’t fit together. Instead, they feel shoehorned in to support her thesis. And that’s a shame, because, as a Silicon Valley tech worker, many of the observations themselves ring true to my personal experience. Unlike Nebraska, Silicon Valley really is a very secular place, so much so that it was a plot point in an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley. As someone who sends my children to religious school, I’m clearly in the minority at work. My employer provides amenities like free meals and shuttles. They even provide meditation rooms, access to guided meditations provided by the Mental Health Employee Resource Group, and subscriptions to the Headspace meditation app. The sky-high cost of living in Silicon Valley is a real problem for the area.
But Chen isn’t able to make the case that her thesis is the best explanation for this grab bag of observations. And her ultimate conclusion, that tech companies behave more and more like cults, just doesn’t match my own experiences working at a large tech company in Silicon Valley.
Most frustratingly, Chen doesn’t ever seem to ask the question, “are there other domains where some of these observations also hold?” Because so much of the description of the secular and insular nature of Silicon Valley tech workers applies to academics, the culture that Chen herself is immersed in!
Take this excerpt from Chen:
Workplaces are like big and powerful magnets that attract the energy of individuals away from weaker magnets such as families, religious congregations, neighborhoods, and civic associations—institutions that we typically associate with “life” in the “work-life” binary. The magnets don’t “rob” or “extract”—words that we use to describe labor exploitation. Instead they attract the filings, monopolizing human energy by exerting an attractive rather than extractive force. By creating workplaces that meet all of life’s needs, tech companies attract the energy and devotion people would otherwise devote to other social institutions, ones that, traditionally and historically, have been sources of life fulfillment.
Work Pray Code, p197
Compare this to an excerpt from a very different book: Robert Sommer’s sardonic 1963 book Expertland (sadly, now out of print), which describes itself as “an unrestricted inside view of the world of scientists, professors, consultants, journals, and foundations, with particular attention to the quaint customs, distinctive dilemmas, and perilous prospects”.
Experts know very few real people. Except for several childhood friends or close relatives, the expert does not know anybody who drives a truck, runs a grocery store, or is vice-president of the local Chamber of Commerce. His only connection with these people is in some kind of service relationship; they are not his friends, colleagues, or associates. The expert feel completely out of place at Lion’s or Fish and Game meeting. If he is compelled to attend such gatherings, he immediately gravitates to any other citizen of Expertland who is present… He has no roots, no firm allegiances, and nothing to gain or lose in local elections… Because he doesn’t vote in local elections, join service clubs, or own the house he lives in, outsiders often feel that the expert is not a good citizen.
Expertland pp 2-3
Chen acknowledges that work is taking over the lives of all high-skilled professionals, not just tech workers. But I found work-life balance to be much worse in academia than at a Silicon Valley tech company! To borrow a phrase from the New Testament, And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?