Silicon Valley’s Tech Culture: ‘We Just Want to Be Alone’

Silicon Valley is home to social outcasts, radical libertarians and nerdy geniuses who just want to be left alone. But their isolationist tendencies go beyond just wanting some space from the rest of the world. They dream of fleeing society completely and building tech-utopias. Seriously. We’re not making this stuff up: Signs of such isolationist behavior are rampant, from self-contained campuses to virtual-world PC games to escapist events such as Burning Man. There are even cries for outright secession.

Every year San Francisco Bay Area denizens scramble to get tickets and head off to the Nevada desert to be a part of a hedonistic community that values radical art and self-expression above all things. It is escapism at its finest. The week-long event culminates with the bonfire of a wooden man. It’s not just free spirits who attend, either. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google Co-Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, and venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs have made the journey to Burning Man.

Silicon Valley workers want to live in their own snow globe, and tech companies have bent over backwards trying to accommodate them. No company is better at this than Google. The Google campus is a world unto itself, with free gourmet food and services such as haircutting, laundry and exercise equipment. Google also provides free transportation, in the form of Wi-Fi-equipped busses, for employees commuting from San Francisco. It’s a Google world after all.

[ Inside Google at Work and Play ]

There is no doubt that Elon Musk is a man of vision and action. He brought PayPal and electric cars to the masses. He’s also CEO and CTO of a company called SpaceX, which made history in the spring of 2012 as the first privately held company to send a cargo payload aboard its spacecraft to the International Space Station. But this is just the beginning. SpaceX’s ultimate goal is to enable people to live on other planets. Think: Mars colony.

Apple’s “spaceship” campus, The Seasteading Institute’s floating city, and Elon Musk’s dreams of outer space all conjure the image of Elysium. In the movie, two classes of people exist in 2154: the rich and smart people who live on a luxurious space station called Elysium, and the poor souls who toil on an over-populated and run-down Earth. Perhaps this is what Silicon Valley techies had in mind all along.

The movie “Office Space” has become a cult classic among Silicon Valley digerati, probably because they can relate to the lonely cubicle life, oddball co-workers, out-of-touch management and, of course, those damn TPS reports. But the hero for most techies wasn’t Peter, Michael Bolton or Samir, rather it’s Milton, the abused employee cast off to the basement to work with no pay. In the end, we’re cheering for him as he finally escapes to a tropical beach on the company’s dime and finds his utopia (although with bad customer service).