DateInstitution:
One of the most iconic writers of her time, Rebecca Solnit has travelled into difficult territories and reported back her findings and ideas. She can be described as an environmentalist, an activist or public intellectual. Storming the gates of paradise is one of her more famous works, a collection of essays from the previous ten years of travel and reporting. It is due to these vast findings and experiences that this essay finds it useful to pay attention to the different contexts on which this book was based. She takes the reader on a journey from the Mexican border to San Francisco. From the open skies to some of the deepest mines in the world. But her journeys are not just physical but also chronological. She contrasts various aspects of modern street protests to the two hundred year old antislavery movement, for instance. The book is a collection of nearly forty essays, but perhaps the most striking will be the ones that touch on San Francisco and on Silicon Valley. Storming the gates of paradise, through its illustrations of life in San Francisco and The Silicon Valley, attempts to bring the attention of the reader to the fact that the world is changing, and even though the elements of change are not immediately discernible, their effects run deep.
The garden of the merging paths
This section of the book begins by describing a protest attended in the late eighties at a nuclear company in San Jose, a company that made fuel for Trident II nuclear warheads. The corporate headquarters is described as nothing special. She notes, “The usual glass walled building, with nothing in sight standing out other than security guards”. The visible image of the United Technologies headquarters, the companies they were protesting, is described as bland and closed off like a mask. Even then, there were various other facets of the United Technologies, some visible, some invisible and some only potential. Potential facets include such aspects as the military bases where the trident missiles were to be kept and the targets where the missiles were bound to hit (Solnit, p 52).
Solnit also gives an insight into divine powers and how they are manifested in people’s lives. She blends the political scene with the quest to seek pilgrimage anointing among the divinities. She writes, “in the last half century or so, a wide variety of secular and non-traditional pilgrimages have evolved that extend the notion of the pilgrimage into political and economic sphere, from appealing for divine intervention or holy miracle to demanding political change, making the audience no longer God or the gods, but the public.” (Solnit, pp. 56).
One invisible element of the company was the underground workplace. This is where the company had its fuel plume, and what it seems was the primary cause of the protest. The industries in Silicon Valley are almost always thought of as clean because they lack the traditional signs of pollution. They do not have the visible smokestacks like the industrial era companies, or any other visible signs of pollution, yet many, like United Technologies, contain high tech toxins that almost always find themselves in the water table in the area. This is just but one of the analogies used to describe Silicon Valley. She notes, “The tech boom here and its effects on the country and the world. The most profound element of the story of the United Technologies protest” This was what the company chose to project as its public image; a collection of American Paintings, mostly landscapes, heroic and idyllic images showing pleasant possibility and interlude (Solnit, p 52).
A lot of what she says about the Silicon Valley stems from analogies and connections made from stories about the past of the place. It used to be a region that had a particularly unique identity, with orchards and live oaks, a paradise that has since fallen. Then there is the more recent description of Silicon Valley as a technology hub, but this carries with it the Utopian promise of endless possibility of technology. As Sir George Vancouver after a visit in 1792 describes the area as one that has seen itself eroded. He says, “The whole area for almost 20 miles looked like a park that had originally been planted with the true English oak and underwood.” However, it had the appearance of having been cleared away and leaving stately forest lords to control the land, covered with pleasing eminences and valleys. This planting of orchards represents a reduction of the complex ecology off Silicon Valley to a monocultural grid of modern farming, transforming the area into a place of labor for profit. This, at least on the surface, seems well and good, but it has tremendous social consequences, as highlighted by the slave population that was kept busy in the farms. The social consequences are visible in the European colonization history of the valley. The missionaries are described as prototypes of Silicon Valley, proponents of information colonization, and the only way to escape is through access to the right information (Solnit, p 54).
Silicon Valley is depicted here as having a lot of promise, physically attractive but underwhelming when looked at closely. It wields a lot of power, but that power is neither here nor there, intangible, ye it has a lot of consequence, both good and bad. The essay attempts to pin down the source of power onto the pages of the book, and in so doing, provide an understanding of the wider problem of the social consequences of the power of technology. The whole essence of Silicon Valley is the usefulness of technology. However, as the book describes in the words of Capital,”technology is the primary means of improving productivity by shortening the working time.” However, in the hands of capital, it becomes the most powerful way of making the working day longer, far beyond the bounds of human nature. It creates two parallels, one in which it opens up possibilities, and another in which there are new motives for the labor of others (Solnit, p 53). The author holds, “With this in mind, the danger of the placelessness of the power in Silicon Valley begins to make sense. When there is nothing to face, like the emptiness of the United Technologies in the 1989 protest, then confronting the power becomes frustrating.”(McKibben). Silicon Valley has become the image of postmodern control, where power, though available, is virtual and in a gated community. It is a maze that has its roots in the web, yet when tracked all over the globe, has real victims, like third world peasants affected by the rise of Agribusiness.
Another perfect illustration, on a wider scale, of what Silicon Valley now represents is the story, mentioned in passing, of the nuclear program. Nuclear weapon manufacturing plants are traditionally scattered all across the outrun. This way, almost every state has an economic interest in the perpetuation, which has real victims and consequences, yet no single individual is responsible for the making of the weapons (Solnit). Silicon Valley here, is represented as a huge, almost criminal potential for control through virtual power, but one where the crime scene is non-existent, only freeways and industrial parks visible.
Another interesting point raised later in the chapter, is that there is a difference between the actual physical artefacts and the effect that the Silicon Valley stands for, or the visions of the implementation of these artefacts. The Silicon Valley is a blueprint for a future, a future where the outside has disappeared; a maze that has no exit. The world of online communication and information access that Silicon Valley stands for has been hailed as technological advancement, but it is also a social retreat, where one can do almost anything without having to go outside. This is well and good, until one realizes that the loss of the perceptions garnered from the public and social space to a disembodied generation connected to the world only by internet and computers can be dangerous. “The possibilities go in either direction when this information is mediated by the entities that control the flow of information that flows through these media.” (Solnit, p 52).
The Heart of the City
In another fairly similar essay in the book, she says, “the transformation of San Francisco, another city whose rise to fame is based on the tech boom, the consequences of which are more than just the incredible promise of technology.” Unlike the descriptions of Silicon Valley, which are somewhat impersonal, Rebecca Solnit describes San Francisco in a somewhat nostalgic tone, showing a deep personal connection, perhaps because she lived there most of her adult life (Goh). The chapter begins by describing how every summer, she goes out to a friend’s house in Rural New Mexico, and comes back joking that she feels closer to her car than she does to nature.
San Francisco, in this book, is described as a city that has heart and character, or at least had, and is now being slowly corrupted by the excesses of the world and its development. It is depicted as a shell of its former self, because while many of the symbols that once marked the greatness of the city, both in the country and in the world, still exist, they are now just that, symbols. They no longer inspire the kind of feeling they once did, and have been slowly reduced to shells of their former selves.
In the heart of the city, a lot of the golden symbols of San Francisco are mentioned. That many of them are described from the point of view of the flying bird gives them a somewhat glorious feel. The Golden Gate Bridge, the poetically named Baptist church, the city hall, the Civic Center plaza, among others to the west. That she inserts the description of featureless grass from which the mayor removed benches a few years before is not a coincidence. This is a subtle indication that although a lot of what made San Francisco famous still remains, much of what made it great, at least in the eyes of the people who live there, has now gone sadly lacking. Once there were benches but now all that remains is featureless grass, beautiful from a flying bird’s point of view, but lifeless nonetheless.
The story of the United Nations is another that is profound in building her narrative about the state of San Francisco. The UN was founded there in 1945, and with it the promise of saving the world from war, reaffirming the basic human rights and the collective dignity of every individual. These form part of the statements that are inscribed in the processional space on the street at the plaza, which was redesigned by the city. On either side of this space are blocks made of cement, on which the joining years of the nations are inscribed. Even though the right to shelter is one of the biggest guiding principles of the UN, on most days one will find homeless people in and around the fountain. This is one of the more profound symbols of the decline of the city.
Solnit describes a letter to an editor in which the homeless are described as junkies and crack heads who have turned the city into a sewer. While she recognizes that this might be true, since there are miscreants among them, just like there are among even the most upright in society, it is not this that is an issue. The fact that these people have turned the city into a sewer is, arguably, and in relative measure, true. However, nobody complains when, say, a range rover runs a light. Solnit complains about the general direction that the city is going towards; people complaining that their city is being turned into a sewer by the homeless. It should be that the presence of the junkies and crack heads, some of whom are genuinely damaged should be seen as an opportunity to help, not as a problem that should be removed. Both paths will, however, lead to the salvation of the city (Solnit, p 343).
According to Solnit, at least in this book, all the events in our lives are interconnected. Looking at the structure of her essay and the overall structure of the book, one might understand and put into perspective her way of thinking. For instance, when she speaks of what the Silicon Valley stands for, she speaks about a world where people are connected to each other and the world through the internet, a world which has been celebrated in the world as being efficient. However, when one does not have the freedom to learn lessons for themselves, there is always the danger that the very people who provide the technology that is supposed to be efficient can attempt to reap detrimental benefits from their moderation of the information. It is quoted, “She travels far and wide, and from her travels brings stories of different corners of the country and the world. It is in bringing these stories that she attempts to not only entertain but also educate and radicalize.” (Solnit, p 345).
On a wider scale, this book is about caution, in the eyes of promise and progress. For instance, in describing San Francisco, she describes how the city renovated the plaques that show when countries joined the UN and the founding statements. However, it seems much of this was for the sake of the city itself, and not for what the UN, and the city should stand for. Homeless people live and mill around the vary symbols that show the commitment of mankind to providing shelter and dignity.
The two cities have many differences and similarities with each other. Both represent ideas and corporations that are world famous and impact many people across the world. It is a warning that even as we grow accustomed to the benefits that come from what many regard as progress, we should not fail to point out the gaps. The perfect analogical illustration is the apple logo. Apple, which produces phones and computers used across the world, is indistinguishable in the valley except for its security levels. The apple logo, the apple with a part bitten off, seems to indicate the move of the valley from agriculture to technology, but the bite denotes temptation in Eden. The Apple emblem is, therefore, essentially reassuring, denatured and threatening, all at once. The author writes, “Yet many people are so used to the apple products that they do not ponder about its symbolic nature of the, a tree of information along a world of merging paths in a large garden of consumer choices.” (Solnit, p 350).
Works cited
Goh, Teow Lim. The last book i loved, storming the gates of paradise. 15 June 2012. <http://therumpus.net/2012/06/teow-lim-goh-the-last-book-i-loved-storming-the-gates-of-paradise/>
McKibben, Bill. 'Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics' by Rebecca Solnit. 7 March 2016. <http://www.latimes.com/books/la-bk-mckibben17jun17-story.html>.
Solnit, Rebecca. Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscape for Politics. California: University of California Press, 2007.
