I have to wonder about Rebecca Solnit

I just read Rebecca Solnit's article Google eats the world.

On her Amazon web page (I love the wonderful picture of her looking soulful and sensitive), Ms. Solnit is described as a "San Francisco writer, historian, and activist ... who has worked with Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist."

Her article is a virulent attack on Silicon Valley companies, in particular Google, and deplores the way in which those companies have "taken over" San Francisco neighborhoods like SOMA and the Mission (she seems to be particularly obsessed with the Google bus).

Her article makes me wonder what her positions are on various other political issues.

For example, she starts by attacking Silicon Valley companies for their cozy relationship with big government:

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece that startled me, especially when I checked the byline. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the fugitive in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, focused on The New Digital Age, a book by top Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen that to him exemplifies the melding of the technology corporation and the state.

It is, he claimed, a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of our leading "witch doctors who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the twenty-first century." He added, "This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley."

If Ms. Solnit is so opposed to "the ever closer union between government and Silicon Valley," what, I wonder, is her position on Obamacare? After all, Obamacare will work only if the IRS is allowed to use sophisticated software to examine everyone's sources of income to determine who is eligible for premium support. Ms. Solnit is worried that Google scans all the emails stored in Gmail. Does she have similar misgivings about the IRS using software supplied by Silicon Valley to dig ever deeper into our personal income information?

Ms Solnit then goes on to attack Silicon Valley companies for lobbying for an increase in the number of H-1B visas:

Adding newcomers might not be so bad if it didn't mean subtracting a lot of those of us who are already here. By us I mean everyone who doesn't work for a gigantic technology corporation or one of the smaller companies hoping to become a global monolith. ... Teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, librarians, firefighters - consider them representatives of the middle class under siege, as well as the people who keep a city viable and diverse. Friends of mine - a painter, a poet, a filmmaker, a photographer, all of whom have contributed to San Francisco's culture - have been evicted so that more affluent people may replace them. ... This year, [Mark] Zuckerberg formed a politically active nonprofit, FWD.us, that sought to influence the immigration debate to make it easier for Silicon Valley corporations to import tech workers.

If Ms. Solnit is so opposed to the arrival of "newcomers," what, I wonder, is her position on immigration reform in general? Is it the case that she supports immigration reform except when it threatens to raise the cost of apartments for liberal writers, artists, and public service union workers ("teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, librarians, firefighters") in San Francisco?

Her Amazon web page describes Ms. Solnit's shopping habits on Amazon:

She shops regularly at Amazon for books she can't get at her local independent bookstores, but she loves the local independents, frequents them constantly, particularly the Green Arcade and City Lights.

Does Ms. Solnit ever worry about what Amazon does with all her shopping information? If she is troubled by the fact that companies like Amazon gather, store, and analyze this data, would she be willing to stop shopping for books on Amazon?

Ms. Solnit's behavior points up one of the great dilemmas of modern life (a dilemma I have been struggling with a lot, lately): it is quite possible to stop large companies from gathering data on her: all she needs to do is stop browsing the web, making cell phone calls, using Gmail, and shopping on Amazon, and enter into a kind of Osama-bin-Laden-like isolation. The problem is that Ms. Solnit is likely not willing to stop doing any of these things. Ms. Solnit probably never stops to think that the main economic incentive for Google to create the best search engine in the world and to offer Gmail is so they can gain access to data about the interests of their users and monetize that data. Unless they harvest this data, there is no reason for Google to spend so much money providing these services. Like all liberals, Ms. Solnit probably believes that companies like Google and Amazon should provide these wonderful services without getting anything in return.

I have to wonder exactly how much Ms. Solnit really knows about the high-tech industry anyway. For example, she shrilly repeats the charge that Silicon Valley companies are racist:

Here's something else you should know about Silicon Valley: according to Mother Jones, 89% of the founding teams of these companies are all male; 82% are all white (the other 18% Asian/Pacific Islander).

Pacific Islanders? If Ms. Solnit knew anything about Silicon Valley, she would know that Samoans are much more common on our beloved 49ers (think Jesse Sapolu, Mike Iupati, and Isaac Sopoaga) than on the campuses of our software companies.

Contrary to Ms. Solnit's insinuations, Silicon Valley is one of the most diverse workplaces on the face of the planet. Silicon Valley workplaces are populated by people from all over the world. Why, my small engineering group alone consists of two Chinese, one Thai, and one Russian, in addition to two Caucasians. Alas, Ms. Solnit has probably never had the privilege of setting foot inside a Silicon Valley engineering office and meeting some of the brilliant individuals who work there. Instead, filled with suspicion of new people that she does not understand, she labels them "newcomers."

Ms. Solnit wants to keep San Francisco "viable and diverse." As I have written before, progressive activists seem to think that diversity consists of allocating a quota of privileged positions for blacks, Latinos, women, and public service employees. An influx of highly skilled young male geeks from India or China or Russia, on the other hand, is viewed by these activists not as diversity, but as a cancer destroying liberal and artistic paradises like San Francisco.

This is the face of liberal prejudice.