War Bros Didn’t Always Rule Silicon Valley

On September 2015, the Founders Fund hosted a retreat at an eco-resort in British Columbia. Attendees included VCs, employees of the companies they were backing, and a few outsiders like computer pioneer Alan Kay, writer Neal Stephenson, and the reporter. At breakfast, Kay, who devised the concept of the Dynabook, the precursor to today's modern computers, began recounting his experiences.

This was when Peter Thiel, the head of Founders Fund, interrupted Kay with a demand to explain who he was, prompting Kay to admit that he was just an old has-been. This meeting marked an encounter between two distinct worlds that failed to connect.

Recently, an op-ed in The New York Times, titled "Silicon Valley Was Right From the Start" by Sharon Weinberger, argued that the image of Silicon Valley as driven by counterculture values and a desire for positive change is a sham. The op-ed claimed that today's aggressive pursuit of wealth, collaboration with an authoritarian leader, and embrace of lethal military technology reveal the industry's true nature.

Weinberger stated that the industry's current enthusiasm for military tech is not a result of political alignment but market adaptation. This perspective asserts that the hippie values of free expression and democratization during the PC revolution and Internet boom were merely opportunistic ploys to drive sales and generate profit.

The reporter disagrees with Weinberger's claim, arguing that the story of Silicon Valley is different. He contends that beginning in the late 1970s, a new generation of technologists identified with the counterculture and developed a set of values that fostered innovation. This group embraced a hackerish spirit, disdain for conventional practices, and a desire to build things.

This mindset reshaped not only the computer industry but also the broader American business culture. The reporter argues that denying the existence of this idealism is inaccurate and lets recent defense contractors off the hook for shifting toward deadly technologies.

According to the reporter, the shift from a defense-oriented industry to one driven by counterculture values originated from three pivotal computer labs: Stanford's AI pioneer John McCarthy's lab, the Stanford Research Institute, which hosted Douglas Engelbart's groundbreaking GUI innovations, and Xerox PARC, which established the foundation for today's computers.

These institutions were known as hippie havens. Many of the researchers in these labs joined to avoid the Vietnam War, with money not being their primary motivation. The reporter cites John Markoff's book What the Dormouse Said, which highlights the countercultural influence on the Valley during its growth years. Markoff notes that the Valley's transformation from a defense-oriented industry to a counterculture-driven one emerged from a fusion of these hippie hackers and engineers, who believed technology could change the world, and the traditional semiconductor culture that quickly detached from its military roots.