Author and Salon editor Keith A. Spencer's new book "A People's History of Silicon Valley,", details how the tech industry has created inequalities and keeps figuring out new ways to underpay and exploit.

"The car industry or the snack foods industry are not really fundamentally different than the tech industry in what they want to do," Spencer told Salon's Andrew O'Hehir on "Salon Talks." "Their goal is to make money."

According to Spencer, Silicon Valley has always been a place that sells itself as creating the future, and as a result, benefited from this idea of itself as being synonymous with progress., even as it chips away at democracy.

Spencer's book traces the industry's historic rise and its impacts on culture and geography along the way, both good and bad, through the eyes of the workers that made its products and the people displaced in the process of its creation.

Watch the full episode to learn how Spencer's own family, who traveled across America by covered wagon and settled on the West Coast, affected his critical exploration of the tech industry.