THE BIG READ: Silicon Valley’s transformation from suburban bliss to technology superhighway

THE surprise is how long a backlash took to come. When I was a child in a heat-hazed suburb to the north of Palo Alto, almost no one had heard the term Silicon Valley.

In common with the hamlets scattered around it like points on one of my join-the-dots colouring books — Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Woodside — it was an unassuming place, with pretty, straw hills and decent schools; a good, honest incubator for the aspirant lower middle class; benign spot for Hispanic incomers to land.

Now Palo Alto is the spiritual epicentre of Silicon Valley, the Detroit of the 21st century. An average home costs $2m, despite an eastern flank still mired in poverty, even as rich young “tech” workers glide in from nearby San Francisco aboard white, smoked-glass, Wi-Fi equipped buses, shielded by headphones and shades — a target for resentment that could only be improved if they wore handlebar moustaches and snatched kids’ iPods on the way past. Is the resentment fair?