[lbo-talk] Yahoo! News Story - 'Dormouse' RetellsSiliconValleyHistory

[Adam Souzis]

On 4/24/05, Leigh Meyers <leighcmeyers at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 

recall that my initial reply was a pointer to an essay by theodore
rosak. From the introduction:

"[we] are left with many questions, not least of all how we got from
the heady idealism of the counter culture to Reaganomics and the Moral
Majority, Nine Inch Nails and the dot.com feeding frenzy.
I'm not sure I know. But I have these thoughts about the line of
descent that led from satori to Silicon Valley."

And you've just described some snapshots in this process of cooption:
from 70s beer bashes in santa cruz to "houses built for status not
comfort".

-- adam