In September 2015, the Founders Fund hosted a retreat at an eco-resort in British Columbia. Most of the attendees were VCs and people from the companies the firm was backing, but they also invited a few outsiders, including computer pioneer Alan Kay, writer Neal Stephenson, and me.
One morning at breakfast I was sitting across from Kay at a long table. The man who conceived the Dynabook—basically the modern computer that we all use—was expounding on his exploits when Founders Fund leader Peter Thiel plopped down next to him. As Kay, in full raconteur mode, spun stories of optimizing the mouse and advising Steve Jobs, Thiel listened with increasingly visible incredulity. Finally, he couldn’t take it. “Who ARE you?” he demanded of Kay.
The mustachioed legend was stunned. He began stumbling out his bona fides, but quickly realized that for someone unacquainted with his résumé, it would have sounded ridiculously overblown. It was like asking Einstein or Mick Jagger to explain themselves. Kay stopped mid-sentence and sighed. “I’m just an old has-been,” he said and went back to his breakfast. Two worlds had collided, and failed to connect.
I thought back to that moment a couple of weeks ago while reading an op-ed in The New York Times headlined “Silicon Valley Was Right From the Start,” by Sharon Weinberger. The essay claimed that the portrait often painted of the Valley as driven by the counterculture and a desire to make the world better was a sham. Today’s bare-knuckled approach to accumulating massive wealth, kowtowing to an authoritarian leader, and embracing lethal military technology simply exposes the industry for what it always was. (Weinberger’s essay was promoting her new book Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War.)
“Silicon Valley’s values haven’t changed, just its customers,” she wrote, calling the industry’s current love affair with military tech “less a story of political conversion than of market adaptation.” In that reading, all that hippie stuff about free expression and democratization during the 1980s PC revolution and the 1990s Internet boom was a mirage, an opportunistic feint by Big Tech to push its wares and garner the loot.
I disagree. The story as I see it is that beginning in the late 1970s, a new generation of technologists, identifying with the counterculture, operated with a set of values that unleashed innovation and ironically set the stage for the industry’s current wealth. Yes, that movement carried a torch from the field’s defense industry roots. But even as DOD funding kept fueling innovations (Darpa grants provided dough for the GUI, the internet, and Google Search), that new generation was characterized by idealism, a hackerish love of building things, and disdain for conventional practices.
That mindset changed not only the course of the computer industry, but the culture of American business. (Before Apple Computer, a CEO wouldn’t dare come to work in anything but a suit.) Denying the existence of that idealism is not only inaccurate, but it conveniently lets the new generation of defense contractors off the hook for their pivot toward deadly materiel.
When I shared my views with Weinberger, she acknowledged that I’d probably studied tech culture more than she had from her perch in Washington, DC. Still, she gamely defended her op-ed. “We’re all products of what we grow up in,” she says. “If you were growing up in the peace-dividend era, with defense tech jobs disappearing, the money from defense was less important, and you start to have different values.”
By that standard, the market shift from missile control modules to Macintoshes was driven not by values but by greed. Likewise, she says, the recent return to high-tech weaponry doesn’t represent a philosophical repositioning but a fortuitous opportunity to sell to a Pentagon eager to exploit the Valley’s innovations. “It's not like everybody in the workforce in Silicon Valley woke up and went, like, ‘Defense is cool,’” says Weinberger. That impulse to go where the money is, she argues, is the defining ethos of Silicon Valley. “Your prime directive is for your company to succeed,” she says. “Why didn't Apple work with the military? Because they didn't need to. They had the consumer marketplace.”
Actually, Apple and its cohorts invented the consumer marketplace for computers. And the shoulders that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others stood on were not those of pocket-protector-wearing nerds clocking into jobs at Lockheed, but young and freaky computer scientists. My friend John Markoff’s book What the Dormouse Said is all about how the counterculture set the tone for the Valley during its tremendous growth years. When we spoke this week, Markoff noted that the Valley’s transition point from a defense-oriented industry to one shaped by counterculture values rose from three pivotal computer labs—AI pioneer John McCarthy’s Stanford lab, the Stanford Research Institute, which hosted Douglas Engelbart’s groundbreaking GUI innovations; and Kay’s Xerox PARC, which essentially set the foundation for the computers that we all use today.
These influential institutions were hippie havens. In fact, says Markoff, many of the researchers in those labs worked there in order to get draft deferments to avoid the Vietnam War. “Money was not the motivating factor for these people,” he says. “The Valley’s entrepreneurial culture emerged from a fusion of the counterculture hackers and engineers who believed that technology would change the world, and the more traditional semiconductor culture, which quickly escaped its military roots.”
While those labs were thriving, a ragtag group of engineers met at the Homebrew Computer Club, hosted by a political radical named Lee Felsenstein. That was the bunch that invented the personal computer industry, notably Apple. When I first became exposed to the computer world in the early 1980s, the countercultural nature of the enterprise blew my mind, and drew me into covering that world full-time. I saw for myself how, working within the infrastructure of big business, techno-idealists like the early Macintosh team built the products of their dreams.
No, the Valley did not turn from defense to consumer products because that’s where the money was. Well into the ’80s and ’90s, Apple in particular had to fight the image that their products were like toys, because they eschewed the macho industrial vibe of previous machines in favor of a friendlier look and feel. It took decades for the company to significantly break into the corporate market. (It’s ironic that the current War Bros that Weinberger writes about in her book are obsessed with masculinity.) Google was founded by iconoclasts who thumbed their noses at Wall Street even as their company pursued its IPO.
The most nuanced study of the relationship between the Valley’s military past and the counterculturists who built the modern industry is historian Margaret O’Mara’s book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. When I spoke to her this week, she agreed with me that the Valley's counterculture shift wasn’t a mercenary pivot but a genuine movement toward making the world better. The market’s move from defense tech to consumer, she says, was a reflection of a generational political shift. In the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984, the Valley voted decisively for Reagan. But as the Valley increasingly tilted toward the counterculture, that all changed, and for many recent cycles those tech-heavy zip codes have been tattooed in deep blue hues. While Trump-affiliated War Bros are currently getting attention, they represent only a small cohort of self-interested multibillionaires. Essentially, they’ve hijacked the values of the Valley.
“I feel like the wealth and the concentration of power has warped everything so profoundly,” says O’Mara. “When you’re in a bubble, whether you’re a president or a billionaire, you have a very hard time understanding how the rest of the world is receiving you.”
I’m sure that the War Bros themselves believe they are acting out of patriotism—though at least some of them have fetishized cool war movies and shoot-’em-up computer games to the point where they get a kick out of making products with spectacular kill functions. But for the past 40 years or so, Silicon Valley typically wanted nothing to do with killing, even though there was always money to be tapped from the Pentagon budget. Ignoring that history or, worse, denying it, takes the War Bros off the hook.
It’s too bad that Peter Thiel didn’t bother to understand what made Alan Kay tick or even know who he was. Thiel himself is a beneficiary of Kay’s idealism, as well as the ethos of countless hackers and founders. They strived for something more lofty than a Valley of Death. Don’t pretend otherwise.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s and Lauren Goode's Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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