7 ms·

How Silicon Valley became "The Man"

103 points by jenningsjason 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago
The 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.
- _delirium 13y ago
  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).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jerf 13y ago
    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.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - msutherl 13y ago
      You don't think Peter Thiel has power?
  - Futurebot 13y ago
    It's possible that part of the confusion around some this is both what's meant by Libertarian in this context and whether we're talking about actual political affiliation or /cultural attitude./ First, I think if the article was more specific in naming the kind of Libertarianism involved (by this reading, Libertarian Socialism aka Voluntary Regional Collectivism, particularly of the 1960s America New Left inspired Libertarian Socialism) it would be helpful. Second, it seems like what's being referred to here is more about outlook and ethos vs actual voting patterns, especially if you don't dig very deep in terms of positions. You can "think commune and hate hierarchy" and still "vote Democrat" because of social issues; perhaps thought of as a kind of counterpart to the Republican "what's the matter with Kansas?" phenomenon (vote against your personal economic interest on the basis of cultural issues.) That's my reading. Overall, I think the article was quite good (terminology and title aside.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
jamesmiller5 13y ago
If you found this article interesting I highly recommend the documentaries "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" and "The Century of the Self" both by Adam Curtis. A number of points in the article were covered in the documentaries such as 40's & 50's era mass media concerns and early valley cultural experiment failures.
sigil 13y ago
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. That's interesting. Because Cassady and Kerouac's road trips in "On the Road" happened in 1947, 1949, and 1950 [0]. Construction of the Interstate Highway System didn't begin until 1956, and didn't finish until 1992 [1]. However, if we conspicuously omit the name "Kerouac" and that most famous of American counterculture roadtrips, then like Fred Turner, we too can conclude that no fun ("heroic!") roadtrips happened prior to intervention by the Federal Government. [0] http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Const...
- kaonashi 13y ago
  Why is government activity labeled 'intervention' and private sector activity not labeled as such?
  - privong 13y ago
    Because government activity is generally mandated (both in the sense that they can compel people to change their behavior or that people can't refuse to contribute money towards government endeavours), while private sector activity is generally optional.
    - kaonashi 13y ago
      You are by no means forced to participate in any government activity (at least since the draft ended).
      - privong 13y ago
        People in the US are now forced to buy health insurance (or pay a fine/tax).
cothomps 13y ago
The first part of that article - the discussion of culture / counter-culture sounded like it could have come from the pen of Thomas Frank: http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consumerism/dp/0226260127 http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consu...
jinushaun 13y ago
I think my big take away from this article is that nearly everyone in the Bay Area, techies included, are liberal or votes Democrat. So the irony is that some of these liberals are doing better (financially) than others, which is causing unforeseen problems. Startups are born out of the same counterculture principles, but focused on economically tangible solutions. You say revolution, we say disruption. You can probably say the same thing about Whole Foods or REI. I think the underlying problem here is that some in the left can't cope when a part of their culture becomes big, popular and corporate. The ideas are nice when they're outside the box, but oppressive when it's the establishment and highly profitable.

103 points by jenningsjason 13y ago

The 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.

_delirium 13y ago
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).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 13y ago
  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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - msutherl 13y ago
    You don't think Peter Thiel has power?
- Futurebot 13y ago
  It's possible that part of the confusion around some this is both what's meant by Libertarian in this context and whether we're talking about actual political affiliation or /cultural attitude./ First, I think if the article was more specific in naming the kind of Libertarianism involved (by this reading, Libertarian Socialism aka Voluntary Regional Collectivism, particularly of the 1960s America New Left inspired Libertarian Socialism) it would be helpful. Second, it seems like what's being referred to here is more about outlook and ethos vs actual voting patterns, especially if you don't dig very deep in terms of positions. You can "think commune and hate hierarchy" and still "vote Democrat" because of social issues; perhaps thought of as a kind of counterpart to the Republican "what's the matter with Kansas?" phenomenon (vote against your personal economic interest on the basis of cultural issues.) That's my reading. Overall, I think the article was quite good (terminology and title aside.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

jamesmiller5 13y ago

If you found this article interesting I highly recommend the documentaries "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" and "The Century of the Self" both by Adam Curtis. A number of points in the article were covered in the documentaries such as 40's & 50's era mass media concerns and early valley cultural experiment failures.

sigil 13y ago

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. That's interesting. Because Cassady and Kerouac's road trips in "On the Road" happened in 1947, 1949, and 1950 [0]. Construction of the Interstate Highway System didn't begin until 1956, and didn't finish until 1992 [1]. However, if we conspicuously omit the name "Kerouac" and that most famous of American counterculture roadtrips, then like Fred Turner, we too can conclude that no fun ("heroic!") roadtrips happened prior to intervention by the Federal Government. [0] http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Const...

kaonashi 13y ago
Why is government activity labeled 'intervention' and private sector activity not labeled as such?
- privong 13y ago
  Because government activity is generally mandated (both in the sense that they can compel people to change their behavior or that people can't refuse to contribute money towards government endeavours), while private sector activity is generally optional.
  - kaonashi 13y ago
    You are by no means forced to participate in any government activity (at least since the draft ended).
    - privong 13y ago
      People in the US are now forced to buy health insurance (or pay a fine/tax).

cothomps 13y ago

The first part of that article - the discussion of culture / counter-culture sounded like it could have come from the pen of Thomas Frank: http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consumerism/dp/0226260127 http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consu...

jinushaun 13y ago

I think my big take away from this article is that nearly everyone in the Bay Area, techies included, are liberal or votes Democrat. So the irony is that some of these liberals are doing better (financially) than others, which is causing unforeseen problems. Startups are born out of the same counterculture principles, but focused on economically tangible solutions. You say revolution, we say disruption. You can probably say the same thing about Whole Foods or REI. I think the underlying problem here is that some in the left can't cope when a part of their culture becomes big, popular and corporate. The ideas are nice when they're outside the box, but oppressive when it's the establishment and highly profitable.