> 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?
The author... if he didn't believe it was a good thing would he be writing about it with such nostalgia? The typical "valley" resident wouldn't... unless they sold their family's property for 10 times what they paid for it 30 years prior and moved to the Central Valley like most of the Okies in Zayante and Lompico.
>
> there's two stories here:
> 1. the rapid growth of an industry leads to unchecked suburban sprawl
> and gentrification.
>
Unchecked URBAN SPRAWL... perhaps you've never seen before and after photos of the Santa Clara valley. There may have been a semi-urban stage in it's development... But it didn't last long.
What gentrification? San Jose/Santa Clara is mostly industrial and urban sprawl... The "gentry" doesn't live there, and the local symphony folded as rapidly as the camel races on Sand Hill drive when the easy money ran out and the "gentry" couldn't afford the dry cleaning for their "out on the town" Armanis.
You can find small towns with symphonies, but as soon as the operating costs started chipping away at the pocketbooks of the quasi-gentry of Silicon Gulch, they folded it up.
Confederate hicks from podunk had/have more class and culture.
There was no gentrification... just easy money pissed down the tube by a spectrum of callow, shallow people that didn't have the vaguest idea how to use it constructively for society's benefit, or their own.
Unless you consider buying Lamborghinis on credit that you can't afford to do the basic maintainance on, and houses for the sake of status, not comfort, somehow constructive for anyone.
> 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).
Show me ANY percentage of people who moved from the political counterculture to the software/hardware development world? Maybe a few, if you consider the Coke, Crank, and Alcohol party crowd as counterculture, or politically "active". I don't.
Anyone here hang out at The Albatross on West Cliff in Santa Cruz during the '70s when the *whole* Apple crowd used to get drunk there on weekends? That was the Woz's garage, tennis shoe, blue jeans stage.
It's loooooong gone.
But people still believe there's some difference between Apple Corp culture and Microsoft culture. Myths die hard, and the myth that computer culture was somehow a revolutionary act is Bullshit. Utter revisionist bullshit. The myth must die!
Right now, that same type of person is building better databases, and optical iris scanners for use by police states world wide. We get Yahoo! Voice Chat, and GTA 4. Who *do* these people work for? Where do *their* real interests lie?
$$$$$$, That's all... and that's all it's ever been.
I worked in the industry under Steve Jobs during his tenure at Seagate. Great in-person Marketer, intellectual waste. That's the computer industry in a nutshell 99% marketing and one percent creativity. The creative ones last... 10 years and then they get out according to a SJ Merc survey a few years ago. They also tend not to go back to the industry, but find something more constructive to do with their time.
The ones that remain? Shallow & Callow... Their so-called "social mobility" left them classless. Feel free to try organizing within their industry.
HAH HAH HAH.
> I don't see how these two stories contradict each other.
That may be because you are only utilizing the information contained in the author's story.... and it *is* a story, if not fabrication.
> -- adam
>
Leigh