"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values."
— Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter
"In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles—micro-robots—has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive."
— Michael Crichton, Prey
"I will turn your face to alabaster
Then you will find your servant is your master."
— Sting
| Rob Argento conceived the sillyConValley(); project after an exhilarating career in Silicon Valley spanning three decades, from 1986 to 2003. He spent most of that time hammering away as a technical communications specialist for Valley heavyweights like Microsoft, Oracle, Xerox and VeriSign, never leaving the fast lane. He saw the erstwhile home to Oracle world headquarters—hilly Belmont, California, also his own home of more than ten years—transform from sleepy small town to bustling center of Valley commerce. He saw the Information Age rocket from the desktop to cyberspace, and from millions of computer instructions per second to billions. During that same period he saw Global Communism collapse, the Harmonic Convergence and the Global Market emerge, and the Global War on Terror trump both as Ultimate Concern.
Through all it many Valley tekkies hardly noticed. C++ and Java code fueled their tunnel vision without a blink.
Sometimes as consultant, other times as staff writer Rob researched, developed and edited innumerable technical documents and whitepapers elucidating "bleeding-edge" technologies ranging from electronic collaboration and human-computer interfaces to exotic e-commerce and bioinformatics. He arrived in the Valley in 1986 an enthusiastic believer in the Information Revolution. But by 2003 the excitement of the Revolution had somehow become trite, a mere fossil. "Marcom" (Marketing Communications) was still shouting Revolution! this and Revolution! that but it had become mostly hype. The Valley had set out to change the world. But by the dawn of the new millennium it was the world that had changed the Valley.
Maybe it was all that Y2K ballyhoo; maybe it was the Dot Com Dot Bomb. Or maybe it was Bin Laden's Magic Carpet ride through the Twin Towers making them appear to collapse just like a computer-controlled demolition. More likely, though, it was simply a steadily rising sense that Her Highness Technology, unfurling faster than any single human mind could possibly track, was gradually turning a revolution all Her own. It seemed to Rob that our Servant was inexorably becoming our Master; our human aspirations were becoming indentured to Her ruthless craving for Technocratic dominance and total control. Status, image, money, and power were the signal magnets of the Valley now. Old world sentiments were slowly becoming antiquated, replaced by what some were calling Techno-fascism.
And so in August 2004 Rob finally decided to commit treason against Her Highness Technology and flee what had by then become sillyConValley(); Having migrated to the Coastal Carolinas, he then took up work on his first nonfiction book, exposing the intrinsic dangers of over reliance on high technology to remedy the human condition. Many of those dangers will be explored right here in sillyConValley(); | more on sillyConValley(); |
Early Career
Curriculum Vitae
The New Economy: And What It Means for America
Carolina Civic Voice Feature Article
True Patriots
Carolina Civic Voice Exclusive Interview with Iraq War Veterans
I Left My Bleeding Heart in San Francisco
Carolina Civic Voice Editorial
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