TV Reviews : The Quiet Chaos of Silicon Valley

Videomaker Todd Darling’s “High Tech Families” (today at 5 p.m., Channel 28) arrives on the wake of the just-passed San Francisco municipal ordinance requiring strict guidelines in all work places with video display terminals. The timing is interesting. While San Francisco workers, organized through Communication Workers of America, pushed for the ordinance’s passage, non-union workers in high-tech Silicon Valley south of the city continue to flounder in dead-end drudgery--or worse.

Darling wants to strip away the glossy veneer of the techno-economy based in Silicon Valley, home of Intel, Apple and a host of firms that rose on the 1980s wave of the microchip boom. He does this most amusingly by inserting vintage clips of Monsanto’s futuristic model home once on display in Disneyland--an icon of scientific and familial bliss. Alas, Rosana De Soto’s stiff, grave narration drowns out this ironic take on events.

Because of the microcomputer industry’s two-tiered structure of well-paid managers on the top and poorly paid assembly workers on the bottom, with an unstable pool of part-time consultants and temporary people in between, parents of Silicon families live in a state of quiet chaos. Darling shows designer/consultant Dave Main stuck in a nasty lawsuit with a company that refused to pay for his services. Consultant and single mother Chris Munson never knows if she’s working from one month to the next. Assembly worker Diane Regelado doesn’t even see a job in her future.

That is because the automated work place drastically reduces a plant’s work force, and the non-union work force left is always threatened with the threat of a company moving its operation abroad. Darling’s look at the economic structure may not be new, although it’s informed by a more radical political perspective than normally appears on the airwaves. His look at that economy’s effect on the family certainly is.