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The recent downturn of the stock market evidenced the volatility of the new economy, and allowed those without the speed, courage, or resources to make buckets of money on tech stocks to smile smugly at investors with their now droopy portfolios.  

As bottoming-out gives way to re-examination, a new documentary about the economic explosion in Silicon Valley offers a look at the underbelly of the industry. “Secrets of Silicon Valley,” by Berkeley-based filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, examines the labor base and community impact of an economy propelled by hype. 

“Secrets of Silicon Valley” screens for a week beginning today at the Fine Arts Cinema, the first of a series of documentaries presented as Circa Now, a four-week program highlighting the aesthetic and social legacy of the documentary genre. 

“For most people, if the NASDAQ is rising, if people are getting really rich, then that is all the proof you need that they are right about their entire worldview,” Snitow said. “It’s as if the entire society had suspended critical faculties during the time the stock market was rising." 

The film opens with a montage sequence of the language the technology industry has been cooing itself with for years: revolution, unbounded growth potential, evolutionary development. Synergy. 

“We even went so far as to meet with a linguistic professor here at UC Berkeley to talk about some of the metaphors that people are using,” Kaufman said. “Particularly the one that says the market is a force of nature, as if it’s this uncontrollable thing that people have no power over.” 

Kaufman, who built the Jewish Film Festival in 1980 and left to pursue filmmaking in 1993, said that although a lot of the salesman-speak of the New Economy insists it is creating something new, the practices are comparable to very old ways of doing business. 

“When we asked people for analogies to previous eras we thought people would be talking about the industrial revolution, these sweatshops; except you’ve got these high-tech sweatshops,” said Kaufman. “But one person said, ‘no, no, it’s like the Feudal era. It’s like the castle. You’ve got the brand, and if you’re protected you’ve got the knights inside doing the designs for Hewlett-Packard and doing the sales, and outside are all the serfs that are unprotected outside the moat.”  

“And that’s all the working people who live all over the rest of Silicon Valley but don’t live in Atherton or Woodside, but live in Milpitas and Fremont and Union City and everyplace else.” 

Kaufman and Snitow found Raj Jayadev, a factory-line worker packaging Hewlett-Packard printers for shipping. Jayadev is one of the thousands of Silicon Valley temporary laborers who haven’t felt the stratospheric successes of the companies they work for 

Jayadev has no job security or benefits, and suffers from respiratory problems associated with the cardboard packaging he handles daily. In the film he takes part in an organizational effort to unionize Hewlett-Packard’s temporary work force. 

The film also follows Magda Escobar, the director of a community service organization called Plugged In, assisting low-income East Palo Alto residents with computer training and online technology. A portion of Plugged In’s budget comes from fund-raising events like the Sand Hill Challenge, a downhill soapbox derby for the area’s high-tech companies. 

“What was kind of startling about the race was the companies – we’re talking about enormous wealth here – they pay about $3,000 to join the race, and that’s the money that goes to the charities,” Kaufman said  

The Challenge’s participants include engineers from Lockhead and the Stanford Linear Accelerator. “But some of them are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build their soapbox cars.” 

The disproportionate distribution of funds can be explained by a company’s need to network with other technology companies during the race, and an unbridled competitive drive for bragging rights. 

“A lot of these people who participated in the film are quite brilliant but also quite cut off from the daily realities of the people working in the Valley, working two or three jobs and living in apartments with two or three other families,” Kaufman said. “It’s a completely different reality.” 

“Secrets of Silicon Valley” was shot over the last three years, and completed before the NASDAQ plunge. Snitow and Kaufman captured the technology industry at the height of its success and it could do no wrong. In the film Avram Miller, former vice president of Intel who now works as a venture capitalist, said the speed of business favors intuition over analysis. It’s an economic vision Snitow does not condone. 

“If you have no time to think and no time to analyze, then you have no time to analyze what’s going on behind the curtain…It may be for a lot of people they didn’t have time to look because things were going so fast in this flexible, 24/7 economy. But you lose a great deal if you don’t take the time to stop and look and think about it.” 

Peter Crimmins is the producer of "Film Close-Ups on KALX radio in Berkeley.