[lbo-talk] Yahoo! News Story - 'Dormouse' Retells SiliconValleyHistory

[Adam Souzis]

On 4/23/05, Leigh Meyers <leighcmeyers at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---- Original Message ----
> From: Adam Souzis
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 3:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Yahoo! News Story - 'Dormouse' Retells
> SiliconValleyHistory
> 
> > Back in 1985 Theodore Roszak published a little pamphlet called "From
> > Satori to Silicon Valley" about how the bay area hippie ethos evolved
> > into a technophilic utopianism that spawned silicon valley... and a
> > google search reveals it's now online at:
> >
> > http://library.stanford.edu/mac/primary/docs/satori/
> >
> > its quite insightful if i remember correctly and probably reinforces
> > much of markoff's history.
> >
> > i'm sure his book is some sort of morality tale, that's how you sell
> > books in this country, so i can understand why you want to react
> > against it, but i thinking you'd be missing something to just dismiss
> > it.  The potential for social change is bound up with a culture's
> > fantasies of liberation, that's one reason to pay attention.
> >
> > -- adam
> >
> 
> That's all well and good, and I think "making of a counterculture" is a premier
> analysis of how Marxism as practiced in the western world is totally futile, but
> at a social level, I'd like a reply from a Marxist "planner" type as to how the following situation is somehow productive in the long run. I think we are now seeing the long
> run of "...a culture's fantasies of liberation,", which can also be called wishful thinking.
> A psychological syndrome.
> 
> How could the following benefit anyone but a small elite?
> 
> > And lets not EVEN get into the sociology and ecology of having a cowtown
> > like San Jose and evirons become a major international city within a 50
> > year time frame. Anyone my age who grew up there watched their community
> > crumble as the city grew with total sprawling abandon, to provide for an
> > industry that only supported the native citizens begrudgingly, and secondarily.
> >
> 
> Unless someone would care to dispute that?
> 

I'm not following your point -- who's making the claim that what
happened in silicon valley was beneficial to the average resident
there?

there's two stories here:
1. the rapid growth of an industry leads to unchecked suburban sprawl
and gentrification.
2. a counter-cultural movement apparently in direct opposition to
capital not only gets co-opted but actually spawns capital's most
important end-of-the-century innovation (i.e. the pc and the internet
and associated realignments of the creation and flow of capital).

I don't see how these two stories contradict each other.

-- adam