How to speak Silicon Valley: decoding the tech bros from ‘microdosing’ to ‘nootropics’
- From the outside, Silicon Valley may appear to be socially progressive, but translate the hi-tech epicentre’s lowbrow lexicon and it becomes clear the corporate culture is anything but
What is Silicon Valley?
For Californians of a certain tenure, Silicon Valley is a location – an actual, geological valley nestled between two mountain ranges and the marshy southern dregs of the San Francisco bay. The titans of technology – Adobe, Alphabet, Apple, eBay, Facebook, HP, Intel and Oracle – are all headquartered in the valley itself.
But as the tech industry’s dominance has expanded, so, too, have Silicon Valley’s boundaries. The phrase has come to represent something that is both more and less than the tech industry as a whole.
If the name represents anything at all, it is a way of thinking and talking, a mindset expressed through a shared vocabulary: the vocabulary of bulls**t. Where Wall Street is capitalism unvarnished, Silicon Valley is capitalism euphemised.
Here is a lexicon of Silicon Valley: a map for travellers to find their way through the wilds of billion-dollar lies.
Airbnb (n) A hotel company that figured out how to avoid the expense of owning hotels or employing hotel workers. See “unicorn”; (v) To illegally convert an apartment into a holiday rental in a city with an affordable-housing crisis.