A response to The Harper Review’s Autumn 2025 proposition, “we should still believe in progress.”
Dear editors,
Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley and my home county, has the densest concentration of National Priorities List superfund sites—the EPA’s most urgent designation for toxic waste contamination—in the United States. When confronted with the county’s toxic past, officials stammer about the grandeur of AI and the wealth brought in from preppy Stanford undergrads and tech magnates. But this wealth papers over decades of rampant, unthinking pollution. The “clean” tech boom came at an unthinkable chemical cost. These sites exist because of the naïveté or apathy of microchip companies who have prioritized progress over consequence.
Big tech’s appeal to limitless progress soaks into the groundwater of the city, the public school curriculum, and the sidewalks bordering burgeoning startups. Here, machines are revered like gods and “progress” is deployed like a thought-terminating universal truth. Here, we “move fast and break things” so we don’t have to look in the rearview mirror. The future arrives sooner when we don’t have to clean up the past.
Silicon Valley readily and habitually appeals to the ideal of an objective, inhuman progress that can wipe away our biases, our corrosively human touch, like fingerprints from a computer screen. This narrative traces Thomas Nagel’s philosophical “view from nowhere,” the ideal of a sterile vantage point stripped of history, experience, unconscious predispositions, and intimately human design. As far as AI development and marketing is concerned, this is not only an ideal but the public-facing truth. Progress looks quick and algorithmically driven. Progress looks machinic.
I have lived here almost all my conscious life. I have played in the clipped grass and bounded through the dry creekbeds. I have camped in my backyard at night, holding my breath, hoping to see a single star in this light-scorched county’s sky.
I know it’s not an easy lifestyle to leave. Tech companies dangle infinite Topo Chico and Tartine pies, promises of stable and stupefying wealth. It’s a rare workforce for these times, where you can afford to buy a house and rub elbows with people who have three or four. Questioning the ideological tenets that underlie and enable this structure becomes impossible when the structure itself is normalized, when the walls of the house start to look like the starless sky. When your community orbits around the fantasy of a supremely optimized world, it is no longer an anomaly to scrutinize. It is the world, the grass crunching beneath your feet.
Under Silicon Valley’s panoramic ethos, progress relies on the total disintegration of the self as an independent body and its transformation into a laboring technological product. You must believe in a technosolutionist answer to the future on a molecular level, until your body reorients itself toward the poles of AI, until your cells vibrate to the pulse of a keyboard.
But we are still mopping up the toxins of the past; history spilled microchip chemicals across my county like a warning. When we blindly barrel toward a vaguely fleshed out vision of a technoutopian future, we neglect its human cost: the employees working 9-to-10s to quicken an app’s deployment; the ex-engineers running spiritual retreats in the woods to fill whatever spiritual crater Silicon Valley left in their souls; the EPA workers still cleaning up chemicals in hazmat suits. We are moving too fast and breaking ourselves.
Cautiously,
Rowan Smith
Image: Ida York Abelman, Man and Machine, lithograph, ca. 1939 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY).