Secrets of Silicon Valley

Narrator: So this is it, Silicon Valley.

There's Google just down here,

Tesla, Apple's headquarters, Facebook.

And over there in the distance

you've got San Francisco -

Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, all based over there.

It's absolutely unbelievable.

The tech gods here

are selling us all a brighter future.

Voiceover:

Voiceover:

Narrator: But Silicon Valley's promise

to build a better world

relies on tearing up the world as it is.

They call it disruption.

My name is Jamie Bartlett.

I'm a tech writer.

I want to discover what the reality is

behind Silicon Valley's utopian vision.

Narrator: Across the world,

some communities are fighting back

against Silicon Valley's disruption.

Narrator: But what are the consequences

for the rest of us?

Man: If the world really does end,

there's not going to be a lot of places to run.

Narrator: This former Facebook insider

fears for the future.

Within 30 years, half of humanity won't have a job.

And it could get ugly. There could be a revolution.

That's why I'm here.

This is the story of the disruptors of Silicon Valley

and whether their promise to build a better world

could end up destroying everything.

The tech gods are promising us a sunny utopia.

But could the forces they're unleashing

actually herald a much darker future?

Man: In the post apocalypse,

the 5.56mm round

will be the currency of the new America.

I guarantee you.

It's not at all what I expected.

Up close, Silicon Valley looks so normal.

Even a touch boring.

What is it that makes this place

such a force for change in all our lives?

That's it.

Wow.

So this place here...

..is Rainbow Mansion.

It's an intentional community of people

working to optimise the galaxy.

So it seems like a pretty good place to start.

The mansion is home to a bunch of global nomads

who've come to Silicon Valley to pursue their dreams.

- Jeremy? - Hey.

- I'm Jamie. - Welcome to Rainbow.

Narrator: Jeremy Swerdlow is a virtual reality

hardware designer and my guide.

So could you show me a little bit around?

Yeah.

There are people working on stuff all over this house.

Technology has been democratised in a way

that it never has been before.

People just need a laptop,

you can start an entire company

just on a laptop.

Let me take you into the garage.

- Or the lab. - The lab?

You can't have a garage in Silicon Valley,

it's got to be a lab.

So the rule here is if your car isn't broken,

it can't be in here.

This is, this is for building,

this is for start-ups.

This is for hardware and making prototypes

and building stuff.

Garages play a crucial role in the mythology

Silicon Valley weaves around itself.

Everyone remembers how...

..Hewlett-Packard began in this one.

Apple started in this one...

..and Google's early days were here.

What is it that you're doing?

So I'm working out how to do CO2 conversion

using ultraviolet energy from the Sun.

You can reverse climate change,

you can terraform Mars...

Jamie: Reverse climate change!

Yeah.

Chemically, it's totally possible.

Man: This is called the Hyperloop.

Hyperloop is a new type of transportation system.

You shoot at very high speed inside a tube

and you can connect cities

in a very short amount of time.

Jamie: But you must believe

that technology like this is, in the end,

it's going to help people,

it's going to help the world?

- Yeah, of course. - Yeah.

We are explorers, we are pushing boundaries,

discovering new worlds.

Every Sunday night,

the mansion hosts expert speakers.

People come from all over Silicon Valley

to share ideas.

You can't move without falling over a plan

to solve one of the world's pressing problems.

Our hamburger, the impossible burger,

made from plants,

uses a small fraction of the land,

the water, and the greenhouse gas emissions

that a traditional burger would use.

We're looking to change the whole food system in the US.

And the world.

Among this slightly cultish crowd

I found a man who scaled the heights

of Silicon Valley.

Bill Hunt created five start-ups

he sold for half a billion dollars.

What do you think the attitude here is to change

and to changing things,

changing how industries work, changing how society works?

There's a lot of that.

There's a lot of focus on...

..disruption.

Narrator: Here it is. The most potent idea

at the heart of Silicon Valley's ideology.

Disruption.

There is a mind-set here

that's very focused on disruption.

What can you do such that you're not just talking about

how we can make money,

but how can we do things in a new way, in a better way,

that makes the world better,

both financially and socially?

It's not thinking about incremental improvements.

It's not thinking about how can we drive this price

from a dollar down to 95 cents?

It's thinking about, like,

how do we get rid of this previous industry,

this previous architecture, this previous system

and find a new way to do it, a way that's better?

The quantum properties of different matter

can be in a superposition,

meaning that they are...

This place is kind of

what the dream of Silicon Valley is, I suppose.

The... The idea that just armed

with a bit of technology

and a thought about how to change the world,

you can actually make it happen.

You can completely transform the way things are done.

And that you can use technology in a way

that will radically improve

the lives of millions of people.

And I think they really all believed in that as well.

The same fervour can be heard from the tech gods too.

Voiceover:

Narrator: It all sounds so hopeful.

But behind Silicon Valley's ideals of disruption

is a more traditional business reality.

Cold, hard cash.

Start-ups are drawn to Silicon Valley

because of another vast industry -

venture capital.

Financiers who gamble billions of dollars

on young companies

in the hope of finding another Facebook or Google.

But investment has a consequence.

The founders of the two most valuable start-ups here,

Airbnb and Uber,

have attracted billions of dollars

of venture capital.

Even though Airbnb has only just begun to turn a profit

and Uber has been losing billions.

Maybe more than profit,

venture capitalists want to see

the potential for profit.

And that creates a huge pressure

on these companies to show that

they're always growing.

Increasing the number of customers

as quickly as possible -

"killing it", as they say here -

is the start-up mantra.

But what does it mean for Silicon Valley's mission

to build a better world?

San Francisco, home of tech's newest disruptors,

Uber and Airbnb.

It is a city of extremes.

Private buses take tech workers

to Silicon Valley.

Not far away,

food queues and the very different lives

of those left behind.

I'm here to meet the tech company

that has raised more money than any other,

more than $16 billion.