Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu review – rebooting our reality

A software developer's epiphany inspires this admirable critique of capitalism, starting with the west coast tech tyrants

A month ago, when I began reading Wendy Liu's polemic, I felt inclined to dismiss her as a millennial flibbertigibbet, motivated by a grudge against an industry that seemingly had no use for her. Liu grew up as a computing whiz-kid in Montreal and moved to San Francisco to develop software that aspired, a little tackily, to be "Tinder for advertisers". When her entrepreneurial scheme fizzled out she transferred to the London School of Economics to study inequality, which turned her into an evangelising radical. In her book, she attacks the depressing doctrine of "capitalist realism" and its assumption that our current social and economic arrangements are unchangeable; with born-again zeal, she chastises her own "petty and narcissistic" nature and even laments "the tragedy of the human condition". A bit excessive, surely, as a response to the failure of a startup?

But as I read on, everything changed. We now have good reason to question the pursuits of the vaunted innovators with whom Liu consorted in California - the blissed-out cultists at Google, whose only worry is over "the wrong kind of sparkling water in the microkitchens", or the manic experts who specialise in "envisioning hyperplanes in n-dimensional space". As Liu came to see, techies like these were already living extraterrestrially, having opted out of the earthly, bodily necessities that currently weigh us down. A colleague of hers said he would happily volunteer to join Elon Musk's projected colony on Mars, the "backup" planet for menaced humanity. "You know you can never come back," warned another of Liu's friends. "I'd work remotely," grinned the would-be Martian.