As an English Literature and History of Art student, I’ve spent the past four years and most of my entire academic career thinking about the past. Studying abroad in the chaotic heart of Silicon Valley’s tech universe, I was living in a world singularly obsessed with the future.
If you’re an outsider, it’s easy for the inconceivable ocean of money sloshing around to mislead you to think that Silicon Valley is elitist. This is not the case. Yes, there are institutional Altman-esque superfigures, but the pyramid reshuffles fluidly with flying highs and plunging lows.
Silicon Valley is the world’s biggest game of snakes and ladders. Success is fragile but rechargeable, and never totally elusive. Tech titans mingle with college freshmen at networking events in the city. A prodigal 15-year-old might sell an app for millions. There are Icarus moments, but the celebrate-failure culture is a safety net.
A friend from a prestigious US college studying Computer Science, recently told me that she knows how to “network better than to code”. Many of her peers will agree. The work occurring outside their degree- submitting thousands of applications while balancing “cracked” internships, attending swathes of relentless networking events, 24-hour hackathons, bouncing between start-up ecosystems- is paramount. Their degree works in the shadow of this colossal activity, polishing their practical skills and labelling themselves as desirable graduates on applications.
The past that the tech industry considers is only the very recent. They learn from their own failures to keep moving and regenerating quickly. This is a very brief and very concentrated past. In an industry actively steering the world’s future, only examining short-term memory makes sense. The tech world of a year ago was totally different from now, let alone two or ten years ago. Reflecting on the long-term past just doesn’t seem efficient or practically productive. The British, on the other hand, love to sit with the past. Our past is revised, reshaped, reconsidered, and revisited. There is a perpetual return to history. We’re obsessed with it. The past surrounds us. Perhaps you’ve walked by a 900-year-old castle every day at university to go to the supermarket. Significant numbers of Brits spend their degrees ruminating on the past. I fear new America might think that this holds us back.
I experienced this for myself in a strange way during my year studying abroad at UC Berkeley, an epicentre of the tech world. When I told my peers that I studied English, their reactions were surprised. To most, an English degree was archaic, dusty, and oddest of all, un-useful. I had to explain that in the UK, humanities degrees are generally viewed as respected preparations for a swathe of careers- it’s not unheard of to enter a consulting career with a Philosophy degree, for example.
In America, if I studied English, “did I only want to become a writer?”. If someone “wants to go into Politics, shouldn’t they just study Public Policy?”. Meanwhile, our Prime Ministers (skillful or not) earned degrees in Classics, Geography, History, and famously, Philosophy, Politics and Economics. There is an ocean-divided cultural chasm in the understanding of humanities as genuinely leverageable. A huge part of this attitude is financial. Humanities degrees are viewed as more wasteful against the pressure of wildly expensive six-figure tuition costs, whereas vocational degrees are more “worth it”.
Something odd happened to me at Berkeley. Sitting in Shakespeare classes, debating and philosophising around a text, whilst other students swilled outside the windows, typing on laptops as they strode with purpose to networking events, I began to feel weird. Stagnant. My professors were incredible; seminars were stimulating. But I began to feel like I was sitting static in the past, where everyone around me was charging forwards. This sense seeped into social life. I’d stroll into the campus cafe, and bump into a suit-clad sorority sister holding coffee-chats (pre-interviews) for her consulting-club between networking Zooms. Friends crammed me into Google Calendars to hang out. Fraternity afterparties devolved into discussions of recruitment timelines and internships between bong rips.
I was encouraged to consider action more. I’d lived a lot more in my thoughts than those around me, who transpired their ideas immediately into activity. This wasn’t a degree thing, but a difference in motivation between UK and USA uni-culture. I began to look forwards, and in doing so, realised our study of the past isn’t motionless at all. I comprehended that my humanities background gave me unique skills. There is a distinct pattern-spotting involved in studying any discipline focused on the past. I have learned about the behaviour of people- the motivations of those who create the cultural products: authors, artists, playwrights, politicians. But almost more crucially, I have studied the behaviour of those who consume it: audiences, viewers, societies. If there is one thing the past tells us, it is the age-old maxim that “history repeats itself”.
In any field, but especially the hyper-futurist technology industry, zooming out and placing oneself in a timeline can cause warning signs to emerge from the past, that the expanding future hasn’t yet materialised. History doesn’t stay back, it flows with us. The past haunts and condenses into the present.
The UK and USA are two nations at two extremes. I wonder if the UK, and particularly humanities students, could learn more from America’s wildly careering, unabashedly work-pedal world. Sometimes we are too anxious to insist, to be forward or come across as unreserved. But I hope the USA and the new tech epoch could learn from our reverence of the past, our consideration of our many traditions and institutions, and our crucial determination to revise and reimagine them, and to never ignore them.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash.