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.”