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	JULY 18, 2017 by: Hannah Kuchler
I arrived at the Internapalooza in San Francisco last month with no idea what a “palooza” actually was. Wading into a throng of excited backpack-clad computer-science students all filming on their iPhones, I got my first taste: a cross between Black Friday and an X Factor audition.

Tech-company interns attend this annual event, held in the city’s baseball stadium, ostensibly to hear esteemed speakers and make contacts. It is organised by Cory Levy, co-founder of teen social network After School, and attended by interns from Google, Facebook, Salesforce and more.

The interns come for free, while companies pay, setting out their stalls in the hope of recruiting these bright young things when they graduate. “We bring together the smartest kids in Silicon Valley, who go to school across North America, and magical things happen,” Levy said.

But by the time artificial intelligence expert Andrew Ng came on stage, the audience had dwindled. Instead of listening, the 4,000 interns made a mad rush for branded trinkets. As soon as the area with the stalls was opened, they ran and pocketed anything with a tech company logo on it, jumping for Amazon T-shirts and grabbing at Dropbox tote bags. “Wow,” was all the woman at the Quicken Loans stand could say, as she watched a herd scoop up pens from the online mortgage lender.

The crowd giggled and shrieked at Tinder caps, Tinder sunglasses and Tinder bottle openers. Valiantly, the man behind the stall tried to be serious, impressing on them that the dating site has the fewest engineers per user in the industry, so each one has a bigger impact. Meanwhile, I wondered if anyone has taught Silicon Valley’s next generation that the ability to get excited over a branded fidget spinner is not going to impress potential employers.

But there is a sense of entitlement that comes with earning the equivalent of up to $80,000 a year plus benefits for your summer internship. On the Blind app, an anonymous messaging board popular in Silicon Valley, interns share details of how much money they make: Facebook is apparently paying some software engineering students $8,000 a month, while companies such as Microsoft and Lyft add free housing or a housing allowance on top. I heard interns showing off about which companies had already offered them job interviews.

People used to come to Silicon Valley because they were geeks who couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Now, as one intern at cybersecurity company Symantec told me: “This is the place to go. It is not like 10 years ago. It is now recognised for being like NYC for investment banking or NYC and Chicago for consulting.” The number of new tech jobs in the Bay Area has risen between 4 and 7 per cent a year for the past five years.

Even recent scandals do not seem to have put off new recruits. I met three young male engineers who are spending the summer at Uber, where chief executive Travis Kalanick was recently pushed out amid allegations of sexism. “Uber 2.0 will work out, hopefully,” one of them said, as if the company simply needed a software update.

Not everyone enjoys this carnival of capitalism. On the other side of the Bay, in Oakland’s Jack London Square, stands the new Museum of Capitalism. Here, in a retail space that is otherwise empty despite its enviable waterfront location, 80 artists explore themes from immigration to land rights and police violence. Flags bearing the logos of banks that failed during the financial crisis hang from the ceiling; a podium displays a suitcase full of junk mail offering loans. There is even a display of corporate stash: a vast collection of pens given out by pharmaceutical companies to doctors to advertise their drugs.

The museum is sombre, despite the ridiculousness of many of its exhibits. It misses the way in which capitalism has excited generation after generation of hopeful students, luring them to New York, then Chicago and now Silicon Valley. Perhaps they should add a video of the Internapalooza — but maybe with the sound off.