"Silicon Valley" was only mentioned in maps of California maps, but soon emerged as a unique space of speculation, both distinguished by its consumer products and able to attract investment and attention unlike most areas of the national economy: the change in Silicon Valley from a site of manufacturing to one of speculation has created unique problems in its mapping, and indeed in the dissonance or balance between defining an "insider" perspective on Silicon Valley and a mapping of its economy or material conditions. While the term Silicon Valley has played a useful role in illustrating its coherence, naturalizing the loosely defined network as center of a new form of industry with clear connotations of its fertility, the actual region of the Santa Clara Valley has been remade in multiple ways we are less likely to see. While we have considerable data about the performance of companies in this trading zone between coders, capital, and government organizations, but the mental geography of Silicon Valley has taken over the region that we might map in material ways--which compels us to seek more ways to comprehend the heterotopia linking spaces of work, rivers of capital, highways of commuting and portals to the internet, as a unique "non-space" through which increasing numbers of consumer products and capital moves world-wide, but whose coherence is quite hard to map objectively.
"Silicon Valley" has always existed much more as a "non-place" and a network than a workplace--it remains a matrix of clusters of start-ups, IPO's, and venture capitalists feeding from over-crowded pools of start-ups and coders who live at a relative remove from its corporate campuses. But it's an especially hard region to see in a map, or to use a map to see through to locate its center or embody the region as a whole. This post maps Silicon Valley as a confusion of spaces of investment, coding, and corporate campuses, whose focus is directed to the flow of information on computer screens: its metaphorical mapping embodies an archipelago of the internet-linked, not bound by lines determined by land-surveys or maps, but allow us to match Silicon Valley as a space of investment and valuation against how it actually occupies space
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