Stuart Leslie and Robert Kargon's foundational essay, “Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman's Model for Regional Advantage,” published in these pages in 1996, outlined the origins of the Stanford Research Park, and the technological innovation and economic investment in and around Palo Alto, California, in the mid-twentieth century. The article detailed some of the historical processes that had made Silicon Valley such a fast-growing and profitable technology hub and how, perhaps, others might replicate its formula for success.

Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan's new book, Seeing Silicon Valley, looks outside and beyond the history of the technologies themselves “to try to see [the Valley] as it is. Who lives here, and how?” For Turner and Meehan, “Elon Musk could not have built Tesla without the fleshy, sweaty labor of thousands of riveters, packagers, and drivers. The founders of Google could have done nothing without legions of coders, cooks, janitors, and day-care workers. And none of those workers could have come together without the laborers who build and maintain the bridges across the bay, the highways across the valley, and the houses, shops, and factories on which life in the valley depends” (p. 6). This book aims to tell their stories and make their lives more visible. Like “Selling Silicon Valley,” Seeing Silicon Valley believes that the place is a microcosm of what the country is becoming, harbinger of what is to come, and where it is headed. But, unlike for Leslie and Kargon, for Turner and Meehan the news is not good.

Turner, the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and frequent writer on Silicon Valley set out to realize this project because he was troubled by the power of the region's mythology. In this book, he asks, “What kind of society does the relentless pursuit of technological innovation and wealth produce? And what kind of future does it suggest for the rest of us?” (p. 2). In answer, Meehan's series of alternatively probing, desolate, and affectionate photographs shows the reader what Turner calls a “fraying America” (p. 102).

Meehan, a distinguished photographer born and raised in a small industrial city near Boston and now based in Providence, Rhode Island, describes her approach to the book as ethnographic photography. At the inception of this project, Meehan moved into an Airbnb in Menlo Park with her camera and equipment, and for six weeks, she recalls, she “did what I do for every project: I introduced myself to strangers, asked questions, and sat in kitchens and living rooms and restaurants, listening. . . . Everyone had something to tell me about what it meant and how it felt to be living in Silicon Valley” (p. 102).

Between Turner's introduction and Meehan's photographs, what comes into focus is that to live in Silicon Valley is to live amid relentless inequality, and for most residents, immense precarity. As much as “seeing” Silicon Valley, Meehan urges the reader to stop “unseeing” so much of the human suffering there. Meehan's lens forces the reader to see the people the wealthy so often walk past or push out of mind. Her efforts to reverse this “unseeing” are particularly powerful when she photographs people in structures that have been converted into homes. No fewer than three of the book's chapters feature workers or families who live in trailers; yet another chapter shows a man living in what appears to be a backyard tool shed with no running water or cooking or sanitation facilities. Meehan quotes a University of California, Berkeley professor who became homeless after an unforeseen and financially devastating medical event, who warns that Silicon Valley “is the future . . . and it is a dystopia” (p. 103).

In seeing these photos in their totality, the reader cannot help but see a collective medical catastrophe as well. Evidence abounds: blown out shoulders and backs at the Tesla plant; water bottles stacked high in trailers whose residents have no running water; the loss of teenagers to suicide because all they saw ahead were lives of instability and brutal economic competition; elderly workers and young people living out of their cars because of a lack of proper housing; white-collar workers losing their homes because of brief lapses in health insurance. Poverty, these pictures seem to say, slowly kills.

The book's chapters represent the tremendous diversity of Silicon Valley. Each chapter features a photograph of a person or family, usually at home or at work, and is named for their respective stories. The chapters feature people of all ages, occupations, walks of life, and places of birth. As the reader pages through the photos, what emerges ever more starkly is the degree to which racism and racial hierarchies shape the labor market, the ability to secure decent housing, the economic relationships between workers and corporations, and the ideology of the place and its dominant industry. Against Meehan's backdrop of flat, bleached landscapes, we see how Silicon Valley's brutal housing crisis, collective health catastrophe, and pervasive racism desiccate community bonds and atomize people. Mary, a recent arrival to San José from Uganda, reflects, “This place is lonely. . . . It is lonely. Lonely” (p. 31).

And yet, the significant shared, common struggles weave each life and each chapter together. Nearly all of the Valley's residents grapple with the high cost of living, the precarity of employment, constant overwork, financial pressure, emotional isolation, and the deleterious health effects caused by the relentless grind of a punishing life in an unforgiving economy. And through this shared urban fabric there appear signs of solidarity: a church saved from real estate developers here, the beginnings of a union organizing campaign there. This mutual struggle is the shared  thread through the patchwork of the “fraying America” that Turner and Meehan set out to document.

This is a superb, pressing book. It will become a lasting reference in the field, emerge as a valuable teaching text, and make important, accessible contributions to the wider public conversation around technology corporations and workers' lives.