Silicon Valley contains multitudes. There is, of course, the physical place—the leafy office parks surrounded by parking lots and, beyond those, the sprawling suburbs of Santa Clara County and elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of them largely unchanged for decades, despite the ever-growing influx of workers. Less visibly, there are also the Superfund sites left over from decades of largely unregulated silicon-chip manufacturing—where Silicon Valley got its name—as well as the redlined neighborhoods marginalized from the tech world’s wealth, even as they must contend with its gentrification.Footnote 1 Also central to Silicon Valley are, of course, the workers whose labor constitutes the technology industry, many of whom live in those sprawling Bay Area suburbs. They come from all over the country and the world for these jobs, and while they are united by their draw to this industry and by the way of life its wealth enables, their backgrounds, worldviews, motivations, and lived experiences are as heterogeneous as the many cultures from which they hail.
Then there is the imaginary of Silicon Valley—the lavish high-paying jobs where work and play intermingle, where employees are encouraged to “bring their whole selves to work” (as long as their whole selves are also a “good culture fit” and do not rock the boat or affect the bottom line), and where massive wealth is amassed and squandered by scruffy guys (and, unfortunately, men are still a majority) in t-shirts and hoodies. This imaginary has spread far beyond the bounds of the physical office parks and suburbs: it has animated hit television shows and movies that dwell on its prosperity and quirks, and it has inspired a profusion of other “Silicon X” places around the world, all trying to capture the same elusive alchemy.
Finally, there is the ideological frame within the “Valley” itself, which often becomes invisible to many of the technology workers who perpetuate it, resist it, or simply exist within it. This one is the most slippery to understand and describe (as ideological frames tend to be) and the most prone to totalizing, neglecting that worker heterogeneity. Chen’s Work Pray Code is focused on this dimension of the technology world—in particular, on how Silicon Valley has co-opted some of the functions that religious belief has served in the past and turned it toward capitalistic ends.
While Silicon Valley continues to be a heterogeneous place with many cultural influences, Work Pray Code vividly documents many of the most dominant ones, illustrated with the personal stories of the workers themselves. Through these personal stories, Chen connects Silicon Valley to both the Protestant ethic and Eastern spiritual traditions, showing how technology workers—and the firms that employ them—embrace the elision between work, self-optimization, and enlightenment to make work the place people go to find belonging and meaning. She then discusses how this shift could be a vanguard for high-skilled white-collar workers across the Global North more broadly, a trend she terms the secular diffusion of religion.
Driving Chen’s narrative is the question she opens with: “What happens to us, and what happens to religion, when people worship work?” Chen’s first chapter establishes Silicon Valley as the apparent epicenter of the decline of traditional religious practice. Indeed, when people move there for work, they leave behind their established religious communities. Instead, faith and devotion are redirected toward work, and community is found among coworkers. Even when her participants made cheeky, self-aware references to “drinking the Kool-Aid,” Chen makes the case that faith sustains these workers to believe their products can change the world—that they are serving a higher calling through their capitalist labor. And when they invest their whole selves into their jobs, their coworkers become their communities. “In the end,” Chan explains, “tech workers are not so different from the Calvinists that Weber described in The Protestant Ethic. For both, faith in a tenuous salvation fuels their ceaseless work ethic” [37].
Of course, corporations encourage this worship, and the second and third chapters of Work Pray Code detail the practices of corporate maternalism and of spiritual growth toward the bottom line. Here, the firm takes on the role of parent, looking after the physical and mental well-being of its workers—who, in high-skilled fields, are companies’ most important assets. “The personal is the professional,” Chen summarizes [63]: when workers feel supported and able to bring their whole selves to work—and when work fulfills so many needs and provides so many amenities, from free meals and gyms to laundry and massages—work takes on a deeper meaning in their lives. The firm, moreover, takes on the role of pastor, institutionalizing spirituality in mindfulness coaching, “not simply caring for the spirit but growing the value of the spirit” [91] and camouflaging the alienation at the root of capitalism with a strong sense of an “authentic self” channeled toward productive ends. “In essence,” Chen sums up, “corporate maternalism aims to help employees cultivate a happy self with expansive energy. Long work hours, ambitious quarterly goals, continuous market growth—nothing needs to change so long as employees are happy” [85].
The fourth chapter of Work Pray Code explores an interesting emergent phenomenon: When work takes the place of religion, “religion takes on the instrumental logic of work.” Chen specifically examines how Buddhist mindfulness and meditation practices have become central to the technology world over the last few decades. These practices became part of a culture shift from the more freewheeling countercultural trends of previous generations toward “an ethos of self-optimization” [128], emphasizing emotional mastery, emergent creativity, and optimum personal productivity. In chapter five, Chen makes the case that this shift was facilitated by the practitioners themselves—who, to make ends meet, did the translation work needed to bring tenets of Eastern religions into corporate spaces as “meditation entrepreneurs” [154]. But “in order to sell meditation,” Chen finds, “entrepreneurs feel they must remove its religious qualities and replace them with nonreligious ones that align with the company’s goals,” a process of whitewashing, quantification, and secularization that she calls “killing the Buddha.” While “religion in the workplace is seen as divisive, unscientific, and illegal,” Chen explains, “strategies of hiding, Whitening, and scientizing Buddhism made meditation more palatable”—a kind of “bottom-line Buddhism” [177].
The thread that Chen follows in Work Pray Code is a thread I know well myself, as a former technology worker and now social scientist who, for almost two decades, has been studying the ideological underpinnings of the complicated place, industry, and belief system colloquially known as Silicon Valley. And while Chen’s account builds most directly on the sociology of religion and organizations, it echoes the contributions of a number of scholars hailing from communication, information science, anthropology, media studies, and beyond who have similarly turned their analytic eye to this fascinating and fraught site of inquiry.
Most notably, communication scholar Fred Turner has similarly traced the intermingling of work practices and spiritual belief systems in the technology world. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, he documents the key influences, like the Whole Earth Catalog, and the network entrepreneurs, particularly Stewart Brand, that bridge the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s and the “hacker” culture of the 1980s and beyond.Footnote 2 (This influence, in fact, extends to the present: Brand continues to play a central role in defining not only the history of the technology industry but its future through organizations like the Long Now Foundation, which he co-founded.) Turning to the contemporary, Turner also writes about how many of the tech workers who attend Burning Man experience the festival as a kind of religious experience, and this experience contributes to an ethos of work-as-life, which he terms the Bohemian Factory.Footnote 3 Connecting this world with the famous work ethic that helped define the European Enlightenment, Turner states, “Burning Man is the Protestant Church of Silicon Valley.”Footnote 4
Though Chen does not draw on Turner, she also finds that this generation of technology workers has appropriated a mishmash of Eastern religious concepts and turned them toward spiritual fulfillment—and, of course, financial gain—via technical tinkering. Likewise, sociologist William Stahl, in his book God and the Chip : Religion and the Culture of Technology, shows how religious tenets have long been appropriated by the technology world, not just for its workers but also for its consumers.Footnote 5 Indeed, the cult-like followings that certain companies and their leaders—Apple and Steve Jobs, Tesla and Elon Musk—have built up, not just in Silicon Valley but around the world, have strong parallels in religious experience.Footnote 6 As Chen explains, “Hagiographies aren’t just fanciful legends. They offer stories through which the faithful interpret and craft their own lives” [34]. Moreover, the technologies themselves can become charismatic along the same lines, fostering the same kind of devotion through the promises they make to change the world.Footnote 7
Others have also documented similar ideological and quasi-religious threads within Silicon Valley. Communication scholar Douglas Thomas is one such scholar: His book Hacker Culture charts the development of two intermingling, but nonetheless distinct, cultural histories of the contemporary technological world.Footnote 8 One of these cultures was based at MIT in Boston and centered on games and open-source software. The other was located in the Bay Area and focused on the hardware tinkering in the now-famous garages of the Peninsula’s suburbs, with many overlaps into the hippie counterculture. While both exhibited libertarian sensibilities, the West Coast culture had a particularly strong market focus, as Chen also finds.
Douglas’s work, in turn leans on that of not an academic but a journalist: Steven Levy, whose book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Footnote 9 breathlessly documented the core tenets of the “hacker ethic”—an early but explicitly encoded instantiation of Work Pray Code’s central construct of work-as-religion. And like Thomas, media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron also captured the Silicon Valley zeitgeist of the mid-’90s—though with a focus on critiquing its darker underpinnings—in their essay “The Californian Ideology.”Footnote 10 A decade later, sociologist Vincent Mosco historicized these ideological analyses in his book The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace, which connects this same cyber-utopianism—anchored by beliefs that “with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual”—to more than a century of (racialized and gendered) techno-utopianism.Footnote 11 While Chen’s account primarily connects to literature on the sociology of religion and the workplace rather than these communication scholars, she documents many of the same patterns and practices of Silicon Valley ideologies.
Also building on Thomas’s work, media anthropologist Gabriella Coleman studied the contours of contemporary hacker culture, including the technological activism of the collective “Anonymous,” a group that exemplifies the fluid boundaries between work, activism, belief, and life—at least for a certain segment, and generation, of technology workers.Footnote 12 (More chillingly, some of the same tactics that Coleman documented as being used by Anonymous were later taken up by the neofascist “alt-right” as a particularly violent form of the casual sexism and racism that continue to define tech culture, biases that have also been documented by Janet Abbate,Footnote 13 Nathan Ensmenger,Footnote 14 Zoe Quinn,Footnote 15 Christina Dunbar-Hester,Footnote 16 and many others.) While Chen’s account doesn’t focus on the sexism and racism of the technology world, her analysis of how self-optimization becomes a kind of belief system among technology workers has roots in the all-consuming and often exclusionary passions of these earlier waves of hacker culture.
These accounts have centred mainly on the ideological level, charting the histories and proliferation of the dominant belief systems of the technology industry. Other accounts turn their focus toward, and adjust their mode of analysis to other structural questions about this region that Chen also discusses in her monograph. AnnaLee Saxenian broadens the frame of analysis beyond cultural norms to organizational and regulatory structures in order to understand what has enabled Silicon Valley to succeed for nearly 70 years when so many other promising technology regions have floundered. Saxenian’s foundational book Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 found that Silicon Valley is unique in how extensively its technology workers, even those from competing companies, freely exchange ideas and create cultures of regional collaboration.Footnote 17 When work spills over into life, transcends specific firms, and becomes all-consuming—when, using Chen’s framing, it becomes akin to a religion—it can also enable rapid adaptation and innovation. However, Saxenian’s account is at odds with the claims of Chen’s “Mystics” about career-long jobs in the early days of Silicon Valley [e.g. 127]: Saxenian shows that the flow of employees from company to company was foundational to Silicon Valley as early as the 1950s, when the “traitorous eight” left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild, whose employees, in turn, founded the next generation of technology companies, including Intel and AMD.
Saxenian’s later work turns to examining the important role that immigrant labor, particularly from East and South Asia, has played in the development of the technology industry. Chen also describes these immigrant communities, documenting how their religious and cultural ties weaken once they move to Silicon Valley, even as some of the tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism are co-opted for capitalistic ends by the firms that employ them. In contrast, in her book The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy, Saxenian describes how those sociocultural connections are often renewed as these immigrants circulate between Silicon Valley and their home countries.Footnote 18
Building on this work, other scholars like Silvia LindtnerFootnote 19 and Shinjoung YeoFootnote 20 are charting the deep interconnections—of both labor and capital investment—between Silicon Valley and centers of innovation and manufacturing in China like Shenzhen. This scholarship, all hailing from information science and drawing heavily on political economy, points to one missed opportunity in Work Pray Code: it neglects to unpack the implications of this “brain circulation” in terms of its spreading this intermingling of spiritual and capitalistic practices around the world—or possibly of its pushing back against the religious appropriation that Chen documents.
Finally, technology companies themselves play a role in promoting the connections between spirituality and work, which Chen describes throughout her account and particularly in her chapter on “corporate maternalism.” Shinjoung Yeo, an information science and media scholar focused on Marxist political-economic analyses of the technology industry, connects the famous perks of the technology world that Chen describes in glorious detail—the mindfulness training, free yoga classes, onsite massages, meals, laundry, commute buses, and more—to the corporate strategies adopted for the last (at least) 150 years in order to tame worker unrest, court loyalty, and encourage work to bleed over into the rest of life through (sometimes quite lavish) amenities. As Chen also describes, the technology world is far from the first to shape worker beliefs toward corporate interests and encourage their workers to find higher meaning in their jobs. Indeed, it takes a leaf out of the book of white-collar and even blue-collar manufacturing, where it has long been a capitalistic practice to seek to control not only the labor but the hearts and minds of the workers (2023). But despite this corporate maternalism, the technology world has very high levels of worker burnout—which may seem surprising, given the amenities tech workers enjoy. However—as Work Pray Code illustrates—when considered in the context of the consequences of investing one’s whole self into a corporate bottom line (however it might be camouflaged), this burnout makes a lot more sense.
Chen concludes that Silicon Valley is a “Techtopia,” “an engineered society where people find their highest fulfillment in the utopian workplace” [196], and that this trend is spreading as other institutions that used to provide meaning and community have faltered. But a dark side to this is revealed when these companies become more like cults, “channel[ing] the energy of their employees inward and cut[ting] them off from things outside” [200]. Those who are not part of these firms are left behind in an increasingly impoverished social, civic, and spiritual void. Chen argues that “Techtopia is corroding the collective capacity to build and sustain a common good” [200], though, at least in Silicon Valley, evidence suggests that it is NIMBY housing policies driven largely by retirees—not tech workers—that have led to social and infrastructural impoverishment even as housing costs have skyrocketed.Footnote 21
Still, there may be more challenges to Silicon Valley’s work-as-religion ideology on the horizon. The technology world has famously been overwhelmingly anti-union, focused instead on radical individualism and libertarian beliefs, and Silicon Valley’s corporate management techniques foster and encourage those anti-union attitudes. But these sentiments have recently been shifting away from radical individualism and toward collective action and political activism.Footnote 22 Indeed, several high-profile (if still nascent) technology unions have formed since 2020, many supported by the Communications Workers of America’s new Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA), including the Alphabet Worker’s Union. In this vein, a follow-up to Chen’s study could explore whether this shift illuminates some of the limitations of intermingling spirituality, work, and social life. To rephrase the question that opened Chen’s narrative: What happens to us, what happens to religion, and what happens to late-stage capitalism if people stop worshipping work?
