I think it's fascinating to listen to baby boomers — not just in tech but in almost every realm — when they talk about the naive optimism of the '60s and '70s.

I think it's fascinating to listen to baby boomers — not just in tech but in almost every realm — when they talk about the naive optimism of the '60s and '70s. Free love, hippy communes, drug use, tech-as-democratizing force and widespread anti-war sentiment eventually gave way to The War on Drugs, terrorism-fueled paranoia, #MeToo, income inequality and hypercapitalist tech monopolies. They weren't just profoundly wrong about the future, a lot of them unwittingly helped to create what we have now. And to this day none of the boomers I've talked to seem to understand their role in that series of cultural and economic shifts. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it's a pattern I keep seeing when it comes to the legacy of that particular generation.