Geographer Richard A. Walker digs deep into the recent rise of high tech electronics as an engine of wealth creation in Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area (PM Press, 2018). His three-part book situates this trend of a prosperous few and a restless many, historically, spatially and temporally.
The author uses standard data, statistics, plus helpful charts and graphs in his sprawling work. In my view, it is his sharp analysis versus the assumptions and conclusions of mainstream thinking and writing that delivers the goods. In particular, Walker’s radical take on capital accumulation, computerization and industrialization helps us to grasp the interlocking processes in the recent emergence of Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter as emblems of a modern-day Gold Rush.
That is a tall order, but the author, an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley, is up to the task. Fittingly, Walker’s book opens with a space photo of the 10-county bay metropolis. Its location on the Pacific Ocean’s coastline and inland bay is a blessing, for now. No good natural fortune goes unpunished, though, in our era of biosphere disruption.
With global warming and rising sea levels, damaging tumult is here. The lethal spate of California wildfires, e.g., fire tornadoes with flames 140 feet high tearing through the state, is a sign. One need not be a weatherperson to see. Walker addresses the environmental challenges now and ahead in part three of his book, contextualizing them with a detailed nod to past eco-victories. They are transitory under the logic of capital.
A premise that propels Walker’s book under review and his past writing is that capitalism disrupts the land and people. The dire outcomes are all around us, thanks to the system’s logic of grow or die via exploitation of humans and nature for reasons of private profit. That systemic drive is running up against environmental boundaries in and out of the SF Bay Area, as Walker documents thoroughly. In the SF Bay Area, for instance, workers’ commutes grow longer as housing prices rise higher, pushing carbon emissions up, which in turn speed up melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
In part one, “The Golden Economy,” Walker takes a deep dive beneath the surface of tech mogul soundbites and share price data. Instead, we get the social architecture of this wealth-accumulation process. Spoiler alert: the role of public money is central to the creation of the internet. That base undergirds the recent explosion of hi-tech millionaires and billionaires in SF and Silicon Valley.
The author sheds light on the mass of low-wage workers hidden from headline news generally in the bay region and abroad, e.g., China, the manufacturing base of Apple Inc. Some of these underpaid workers resist maltreatment, as their vital labor propels what some pundits and politicians call a New Economy of digital information.
How new is human exploitation to wealth accumulation? Not so much in and out of the SF bay region in Walker’s sober breakdown of who gets what and why in the tech boom. What do we gain from Apple’s first-ever-in-history $1 trillion market valuation?
A so-called new urbanism and the tech boom comprise part two. Here is a taste. “A striking aspect of the current transformation is the resurgence of the metropolitan core,” Walker writes. As the urban core of the bay region grows denser, it also sprawls outward. Such new urbanism is global in scope, a symptom of a socio-economic order that puts profits first and people last.
Walker’s book encapsulates a lifetime of study and scholarship as a Marxist geographer. Case in point is his bibliography of near 50 pages. To help us get our heads around what is happening and why in the SF Bay Area as an extreme case of urban accumulation and dispossession, Walker’s Pictures of a Gone City is a must-read book.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2018
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