Every city has a landmark that celebrates what its people love. France has the Eiffel Tower, which is both astonishingly beautiful and admittedly a bit penisy. New York has the Empire State Building, which is the same but bigger. Rome has the Colosseum, to celebrate an oiled-up Russell Crowe.
Now Silicon Valley power-brokers want to honour the thing they truly love, by building their own massive monument to themselves. The San Jose Light Tower Corporation has raised $1m to create a statue that honours Silicon Valley itself. They hope to raise up to $150m for a “great idea”, according to the New York Times.
But how can you sum up such a complex, world-changing place in a simple monument?
While the Valley has given us wonderful things, such as everything on the internet, it has also given us horrifying nightmare fuel that will one day destroy us all – such as everything on the internet. To reflect this, it’s going to take a lot more than your usual gargantuan penis-shaped building favoured by just about every maker of a major landmark on earth.
Like the place itself, the statue will have to innovate and disrupt, pushing at the boundaries of what defines a monument. Here are a few suggestions.
Your search history
Every few seconds, a tech guru with way more data on you than you realise claims they’re going to make their data storage more transparent, even though they’re not.
As a token show of good faith and transparency, they should make a giant Amazon Alexa that reads out your internet search history to a crowd of tourists.
Think of the boon to the tourism industry, and the brand recognition. Even if you aren’t anywhere near Silicon Valley, you’ll sure as hell be thinking about whether a giant monument out there is yelling to everyone nearby about that time you spent four hours Googling “why is my poo red?” before realising you had (OK, I had) eaten beetroot for lunch.
The Eiffel Tower
In 2017, Silicon Valley company Lyft came up with an idea for a shuttle service where you “get in a shared car that follows a pre-designated route, and drops you (and everyone else) off at the same stop” – unwittingly dreaming up the bus a full century after the bus was invented.
In 2018, Uber Health invented “transportation for patients to get to and from the care they need” – unwittingly dreaming up an ambulance without the hassle of carrying qualified paramedics on board.
There’s nothing Silicon Valley loves more than taking an old idea and inventing it again without realising, so why not do a France and get themselves a massive Eiffel Tower.
A monument to that time Elon Musk baselessly called that cave-diver a paedophile
Silicon Valley hasn’t just created a whole host of tech titans, it has created a way of getting to know those titans in far more detail than is enjoyable.
What better way to mark this weird new age than with a statue depicting the time Elon Musk offered to rescue some Thai boys from a cave using cutting-edge technology, then called a diver a “pedo” after he had the audacity to save them first.
Sure, Elon has done a lot of good stuff we could create a statue in commemoration of, like that time he shot a car at Mars for no discernible reason. But here on Earth, a car in space would just look like a car.
A statue of a team of Tesla PRs desperately trying to snatch a smartphone out of his hand while he does a big old internet libel is much more interesting and emblematic of our times.
A giant statue that says “sorry this cannot be viewed from your location”
Fairly self-explanatory, this one, and something that would really sum up where the tech industry is as a whole.
Online commenters entangled in a six-day argument underneath a cat video
The internet is a wonderful place, if your idea of “wonderful” is getting called Hitler on day six of an argument underneath a video of a cat wearing people clothes, long after you’ve forgotten why you were arguing in the first place.
The statue should appear confused about how they got here, but grimly determined not to back out until they’ve explained in full why the internet stranger is a virtue-signalling lefty soy-boy cuck.
That robot that tells you your cancer is terminal
Last week a doctor told a man he was going to die via a video-link robot, highlighting how impersonal the world is going to be when the robots finally take control. As pioneers of this tech, Silicon Valley should prepare the population by building a roaming medical bot statue that wheels itself around telling strangers how long it reckons they’ve got left. “Beep-boop-beep,” it’ll tell tourists minding their own business. “Don’t book any more holidays – you’ve got six months tops.”
A gigantic boob
If there’s one thing Silicon Valley is famous for, it’s creating new, innovative and convenient ways to enable people to see a boob. A gigantic breast would let tourists do this without the hassle of having to look down at their phone. To make it authentic, you would only be allowed to look at the boob if you tell a security guard who doesn’t really care about his job that you are over 18.
And for even more authenticity, after 1 April when the porn block comes in, UK visitors will only be able to view the boob if they are carrying a licence to crank one out, or are able to Google “what is a VPN?”
• James Felton is a TV and radio comedy writer
