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

Adam Souzis adamsz at gmail.com
Sun Apr 24 15:47:27 PDT 2005


On 4/24/05, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> Lance Murdoch wrote:
>
> >The idea that the counterculture spawned the PC and the Internet is
> >ludicrous. As I said before, there is no real story of computer gurus
> >who are left-wing, the story is more the few leftists who are computer
> >gurus. There has been a ton of hype about how computers are
> >empowering, how it was spawned by entrepreneurs in their garages and
> >so forth, and a lot of people swallow the hype. They were the
> >creation of either decades of government R&D (the Internet), or a
> >government-granted monopoly to a massive corporation, or both
> >government money and a monopoly (the PC). That a few left-wing
> >hippies made some money out of it is a sideshow. And the real story
> >of the left-wing hippies, or even apolitical techies who did not have
> >the hard-nosed evil businessman mentality, is that they usually got
> >screwed out of their inventions.
> >

the fact is that the PC and the internet were commercialized in the bay area. There's a lot a theories at why this happened here and not, say, in the boston/cambridge area where the "material conditions" were just as good -- including historical accidents such as the fact that noncompete clauses in employment contracts are not enforcable in california -- but most focus on the corporate culture. Rosak make the connection between 60's counter-culture and the techno-utopianism that helps drive silicon valley -- and you can still see this connection today among the burning man crowd.


> Agreed. I have worked in hi-tech for twenty years and I have met very
> few radicals there -- none of them engineers, though software engineers
> are the best part of my job. By and large they are humble, patient,
> knowledgeable, competent, and friendly lot. Mostly good plain folk. Most
> of them run the gamut of democrat to liberterian. The real problem is in
> the layers and layers of management above them.
>
> Joanna
>

hmm, I work in the tech industry in san francisco and mostly a sort of liberal libertarian mindset (basically equivalent to the dean faction of the democratic party i guess), but i'd say 20-25% are to the left of the democratic party, mostly green and anarchist types. But obviously there's self-selection going on here, i've pretty much only worked with start-ups that attract young, non-career oriented types.

-- adam



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