How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
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How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
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Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#2The answer to the third question is great:
"A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You see that rhetoric leveraged when Google and other firms say, 'Don’t regulate us. We need to be creative. We need to be free to pursue our satisfaction because that’s ultimately what will provide a satisfying society.'
That’s all a way of ignoring the systems that make the world possible. One example from the ‘60s that I think is pretty telling is all the road trips. The road trips are always about the heroic actions of people like Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and their amazing automobiles, right? Never, never did it get told that those road trips were only made possible by Eisenhower’s completion of the highway system. The highway system is never in the story. It’s boring. What’s in the story is the heroic actions of bootstrapped individuals pursuing conscious change. What we see out here now is, again, those heroic stories. And there are real heroes. But the real heroes are operating with automobiles and roads and whole systems of support without which they couldn’t be heroic."
I find the individualist rhetoric in Silicon Valley to be puzzling. There is a huge emphasis on the wonderkid with the genius idea, not the team of dozens or hundreds that took a half-assed idea and turned it into a product. To steal some terminology from 'pg (without imputing to him any political leaning): Silicon Valley culture right now glorifies the hacker/painter designing organisms in Lisp over the pyramid builder building pyramids in Pascal. This is an elevation of the individual, the creative genius, over the institution, the organized team. But the internet is the product of an era when America was all about institutions, not individuals. The military-industrial complex built the internet. The federal government built the highways. NASA put a man on the moon. That era was all about the power of pyramid builders working in structured, hierarchical organizations.
So I find the "road trip" analogy particularly apropos. You have these guys going on heroic, individualist road trips, but they're riding on this infrastructure created by big institutions, infrastructure that only big institutions have the scale to create.
EDIT: My comment was really more about individualism versus institutions than libertarians, and has been edited accordingly.
Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#3The answer to the third question is great: "A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You s…
There's a lot of libertarian rhetoric, but are actual libertarians really widespread in the Valley? To me it comes across as a loud but very small minority— albeit perhaps also one that's disproportionately represented among those at the very top (perhaps part of why it's so loud). Someone like Peter Thiel might be a libertarian-conservative politically, but the average middle-class techie seems more like a middle-of-the-road to center-left liberal. Silicon Valley politically votes almost exclusively for center-left Democrats, and if it were only up to the region's votes, more funding for the UC system and science/technology research in general (NSF, NASA, etc.) would be easy to pass. Even ideas like a basic income are considerably more popular in the Valley than among the general American public (though a basic income does admittedly fit pretty well into an individual-empowerment worldview).
Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#4The answer to the third question is great: "A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You s…
I'm not seeing the connection between regulation today and the IHS or (D)ARPA decades ago. Both the IHS and the Internet were created in an era with dramatically fewer pages in the Federal Register.
Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#5The answer to the third question is great: "A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You s…
The traditional libertarian viewpoint isn't that the government shouldn't use the money it has to foster innovation, or that the government shouldn't have any money to use for anything, or even that the government should be tiny. It's that the government should be more decentralized.
And while the libertarians in the US today have a large number of differences with the more historic libertarians, some of the historic viewpoints can be seen in the contemporary US.
One of the main defining points for libertarianism, historically and currently, is individualism. Individualism isn't strictly anti-government, but anti-authoritarian. The government using its means to foster innovation is completely separate from most other points. Even small or distributed government should foster innovation if possible.
Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#6The answer to the third question is great: "A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You s…
There's a lot of libertarian rhetoric, but are actual libertarians really widespread in the Valley? To me it comes across as a loud but very small minority— albeit perhaps also one that's disproportionately represented among those at the very top (perhaps part of why it's so loud). Someone like Peter Thiel might be a libertarian-conservative politically, but the average middle-class techie seems more like a middle-of…
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Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#7The answer to the third question is great: "A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You s…
That's an odd argument to make against libertarians when libertarians support defense spending as a key role of government.
The Highway Interstate system was driven mainly by defense needs. It's also known as the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways"[1]
Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#8The answer to the third question is great: "A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You s…
There's a lot of libertarian rhetoric, but are actual libertarians really widespread in the Valley? To me it comes across as a loud but very small minority— albeit perhaps also one that's disproportionately represented among those at the very top (perhaps part of why it's so loud). Someone like Peter Thiel might be a libertarian-conservative politically, but the average middle-class techie seems more like a middle-of…
I can't help but think all the libertarian hating is an attempt to find a new scapegoat in those places where Republicans have been all but eliminated. Because let me tell you, "volume" from Silicon Valley or not, libertarians have almost no power. Conservatives pass laws, Republicans pass laws, Democrats pass laws, Liberals pass laws, Libertarians mostly post on the Internet.
Whatever's going wrong in SV isn't the libertarian's fault. Or, if it is, then the Democrats in power ought to take a serious look at how their wondrous plans manage to be scotched by such a small, low-power minority.
Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#9The answer to the third question is great: "A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You s…
I'm not seeing the connection between regulation today and the IHS or (D)ARPA decades ago. Both the IHS and the Internet were created in an era with dramatically fewer pages in the Federal Register.
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Re: How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of libertarian rhetoric, but are actual libertarians really widespread in the Valley? To me it comes across as a loud but very small minority— albeit perhaps also one that's disproportionately represented among those at the very top (perhaps part of why it's so loud). Someone like Peter Thiel might be a libertarian-conservative politically, but the average middle-class techie seems more like a middle-of…
I can't help but think all the libertarian hating is an attempt to find a new scapegoat in those places where Republicans have been all but eliminated. Because let me tell you, "volume" from Silicon Valley or not, libertarians have almost no power. Conservatives pass laws, Republicans pass laws, Democrats pass laws, Liberals pass laws, Libertarians mostly post on the Internet. Whatever's going wrong in SV isn't the l…
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