By Chidalu Emy-Munonye
When I arrived in Silicon Valley for Duke in Silicon Valley, I thought I knew what I was walking into. Two hours of class each morning, then site visits to some of the most powerful companies in the world, Oracle, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google, Anthropic. A front-row seat to the industry shaping the future.
What I didn’t expect was how much the city itself would become part of the lesson.
San Francisco is a city of many faces. Coming in at just 50 square miles, it boasts a GDP higher than Singapore, Thailand, and Norway. It’s a tech mecca, hosting some of the world’s most powerful companies, and walking through it, you feel that. Every billboard, lamppost, and bus stop was advertising some new AI technology, with the boldest ones proclaiming “Don’t hire humans.” The flashing lights of a passing Waymo gave the city a futuristic feel straight out of a 2000s sci-fi movie. But as the program went on, I started noticing a tension between what I was seeing inside those offices and what I was seeing outside of them.
The City the Tech Industry Built
San Francisco has always been a city of reinvention. It built its first identity on Gold Rush money in the 1850s, then rebuilt itself almost entirely after the 1906 earthquake By the 1970s and 80s, the Castro had become one of the most visible LGBTQ+ communities in the world, and the Mission District was established as a beating heart of Latino culture, its murals and taquerias stretching for blocks. Then came the dot-com boom, and the ground started shifting. The second wave, beginning around 2010 with the rise of Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, and Salesforce, hit harder and faster. Between 2010 and 2020, the median rent in San Francisco nearly doubled. The Black population, which had peaked at around 13% in the 1970s, fell to under 5%, one of the steepest demographic declines of any major American city. Latino families in the Mission were displaced by the thousands. Working-class communities that had defined San Francisco’s character for generations found themselves priced out of the city.
Learning this didn’t surprise me. Over 10+ site visits and conversations with 30+ Duke alumni working across the Valley, only 2 were Black or Hispanic. At companies actively building tools that will shape how billions of people live and work, that kind of homogeneity is hard to ignore. It may not be intentional, but it definitely does shape the outputs of these companies. I found myself returning to the question of what technology is actually for and who it actually serves. Visiting Oracle, I found myself thinking about how AI and surveillance tools get framed when deployed by powerful institutions and how the incentives baked into those systems shape what the tools become. Tools aren’t neutral. They carry the histories and priorities of the people who built them. And when the people building them come from similar cultural or economic backgrounds, it shows.
Across the Bay
So I went out of my way to visit Berkeley and Oakland. Oakland absorbed wave after wave of displaced residents, Black families from the Fillmore and Bayview, Latino families from the Mission, artists from SoMa and the Tenderloin. With a population of around 440,000 and no single ethnic majority, it remains one of the most racially diverse cities in the country. I even spoke with some Duke alum living in Sunnyvale who told me they were actively looking to move to Oakland. Not because it was closer to work, but because that’s where the culture is. San Francisco, they said, is just too expensive and too sterile. It struck me as a telling sign: someone working at the center of the tech world, seeking out the community that tech had pushed to its edges.
This pop-up I visited in Oakland was exactly the kind of space I’d been missing. It was the opposite of the environments I’d been spending my mornings in. It was a space for creatives from every background and to come together and celebrate one other. Though I may have spent a bit too much on vintage clothes, I don’t regret the moments I spent talking to new people or learning about how artists take up space in Oakland. One of the most honest moments of the program came during a class discussion about how communities quietly shape what kinds of ambitions feel desirable, what counts as success, what counts as impact. I’d been sitting in rooms where scale and growth metrics were the primary language, and I kept feeling a friction I couldn’t fully name. Coming from activist and policy spaces, I was used to environments where accountability to affected communities was central. Here, I kept wondering: can you have genuine accountability to people when you’re moving at the speed and scale that Silicon Valley celebrates?
Visiting Anthropic was the first time that tension eased. For the first time in the program, I was in a room where the ethical questions, about AI, economic justice, societal impact, were treated as central to the work rather than distractions from it. It wasn’t that I thought Anthropic was perfect. It was that I realized I’d been spending a lot of energy just defending the legitimacy of those questions. Here, I didn’t have to.
Duke in Silicon Valley gave me a front-row seat to one of the most powerful industries in the world. But the most lasting lessons weren’t inside the office buildings, they were in the gap between who the tech industry says it’s building for, and who actually gets to live in the city it’s built. San Francisco is a complicated place: breathtaking and infuriating, capable of extraordinary things and troubling ones. The question I’m leaving with isn’t whether tech can change the world. It clearly can. The question is which world it’s building, and for whom.
Chidalu is a Robertson Scholar and rising junior from Maryland, where she is double majoring in Computer Science and Public Policy. On campus, she founded The Collective, Duke’s student-led modeling and fashion organization, which grew to 30+ members and hosted multiple fashion shows in its first year. She also serves as Publicity Chair for StreetMed, Duke’s hip hop dance team, and as a Duke Presidential Ambassador. A 2024 Ron Brown Scholar, she has also participated in Bain Consulting Kickstart, SEO Career, and MLT Career Prep programs. For Chidalu, Duke in Silicon Valley is an opportunity to explore the intersections of technology, policy, and creative entrepreneurship, and to gain the tools to bridge the gap between engineers and policymakers. Hobby-wise, she loves fashion, travel, poetry, and building community through creative projects. She has even taught herself Pure Data for audio programming experiments!
