Darker side of the Silicon Valley exposed

In previous years, US Vice-President Al Gore spent so much time out in Silicon Valley rubbing elbows with the digital crowd that the technology company leaders who attended his round-table meetings and fund-raisers were known as the Gore Techs (a bit of wordplay on the high-tech waterproof fabric, Gore-Tex).

Now, they should perhaps be renamed the Ignore-Gore Techs. For whatever reason, the crowd that once wooed the VP is donating far more cash to the campaigns of his leading rivals, former senator Bill Bradley (his likely challenger for the Democratic Party nomination for president) and Governor George W. Bush (the likely Republican presidential candidate).

According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the San Jose Mercury News newspaper, Mr Bush leads with $74,792, Mr Bradley has picked up $49,650, and Mr Gore has received a surprisingly paltry $26,075. No one seems quite sure why the Valley seems to be snubbing Mr Gore, but then again, he claimed earlier this year to have been the inventor of the Internet.

THE Mercury News is considered to be one of the top 10 newspapers in the US and no other paper holds a candle to it in terms of consistently solid technology coverage. So many have been wondering how and why the paper could have been so thoroughly scooped by its rival to the north, the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Chronicle, which has been working hard to catch up to the Merc, outshone the paper in a superb, just-concluded series that examined what it termed "the dark side of the Valley". Over five days, the paper ran lengthy, frontpage articles that exposed the sleazy, corrupt and immoral doings of some well-respected companies and key technology personalities in the region. The articles, which were the topic of shocked conversations all around the Valley, were the result of 10 months of work by two Chronicle investigative reporters. You can click through to the full series from www.sfgate.com/technology/.

The reports examined everything from inventors who were allegedly cheated of their intellectual property by the technology companies they had partnered with, to company founders that discovered their venture capitalist supporters had stripped them of ownership of their own companies, to technology company executives accused of distorting sales figures to inflate their share price and then selling out before the price crash left investors in trouble. The reports highlighted the inability of law enforcement agencies and regulators - including a frustrated Securities and Exchange Commission - to prosecute, or even worse, to do anything at all. While outraged readers flooded the paper with letters, many observers wryly noted that many of the companies mentioned in the pieces suffered no damage in share price on the Street following the series. But perhaps that just proves the point the Chronicle was trying to make - nearly everyone accepts that the industry has become so powerful that companies are almost untouchable.

ASSUMING you've made your millions here, though, and want to blow some of them, you will still have a hard time finding any place to live. If you think Dublin is bad, consider Silicon Valley, where the median price of a home in October was $410,444 (€407,429). Valley estate agents expect that figure to rise to about $500,000 by year's end, mainly because only about 1,000 homes are currently on sale and buyers are panicked.

In a comment that has scary implications for Dublin, an estate agent noted in one newspaper that all the people who had decided to "wait out the market" were finding that prices just kept climbing. The agent noted that technology was not going to go away, and that the big tech companies weren't folding. In other words: welcome to permanent high prices - there's nowhere else to live and not enough homes for an endless stream of employees.

That's why this region has spawned a new term, which pops up in estate agent advertisements. The term is "tear down" is "tear down", and is used to refer to a house that is not grand enough for the now highly-valuable land it is built upon.

Thus one stumbles upon an advertisement for a $750,000 home which insists: "Move right in! Not a tear down!" If the house could be considered a tear down, the wary estate agent usually avoids using the word. The favoured euphemism is "build new" - as in one advert for a $615,000 "classic bungalow" in Palo Alto, which cajoles buyers to "enjoy as is, remodel or build new".

Of course, if you are a Valley tycoon and you're in search of that statement house, you'll probably be looking at the multi-million dollar properties in the hills above the silicon chip-producing flatlands.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie.