Artifacts

Silicon Valley, a small place with few identifiable geologic or geographic features,
has achieved a mythical reputation in a very short time. The modern material culture of the Valley
may be driven by technology, but it also encompasses architecture, transportation, food, clothing,
entertainment, intercultural exchanges, and rituals.Combining a reporter's instinct for a good
interview with traditional archaeological training, Christine Finn brings the perspectives of the
past and the future to the story of Silicon Valley's present material culture. She traveled the area
in 2000, a period when people's fortunes could change overnight. She describes a computer's rapid
trajectory from useful tool to machine to be junked to collector's item. She explores the sense that
whatever one has is instantly superseded by the next new thing -- and the effect this has on
economic and social values. She tells stories from a place where fruit-pickers now recycle silicon
chips and where more money can be made babysitting for post-IPO couples than working in a factory.
The ways that people are working and adapting, are becoming wealthy or barely getting by, are
visible in the cultural landscape of the fifteen cities that make up the area called "Silicon
Valley."