https://archive.org/details/highfrontiers00rusi
https://archive.org/details/highfrontiers01rusi
Today you have authoritarian populist nationalism on the right and authoritarian technocracy on the left. The mood is pessimistic and everyone is arguing about who should be forced to think or do what. The music is trite and superficially happy and everyone is seething with hate.
Machines are tools. Technology follows the zeitgeist. Everything is being bent toward totalitarianism and surveillance because that is what we are doing with it.
People are more apathetic than hateful (today's 'riots' hardly deserve the label by historical standards) and there is more of an indifference than a pessimism. You're not told what to think (or compelled to action), but rather told what not to say (or how not to act), and otherwise left alone.
Looking back on it, it's hard to decipher. I explained to my son that once, a movie usher asked me to put out my cigarette at a midnight movie. This while the rest of the patrons were smoking pot, which was so commonplace at midnight movies that the authorities just ignored it. Those decades were a strange battleground between intellectual freedom (and hedonism) jousting with the establishment. This decade, I don't feel that promise of wholly unbridled intellectual freedom, and the excitement it caused. I suppose the establishment won.
From 1993 on, Louis Rossetto heavily pushed the idea in Wired magazine that Silicon Valley was heavily libertarian[1]. I had not been to the Bay much at the time and actually believed this was true of the Valley.
> authoritarian technocracy on the left
Like who, the Kellogg's workers who were on strike? The GM strike in Mexico? Even the left in what remains of non-gentrified Oakland is different than the bubble of upper middle class Bay FAANG liberals.
[1] By libertarian I mean libertarian in the American sense, which nowadays is right-libertarian.
How do you interpret this belief specifically with regards to the genesis of Facebook and Google and Apple, the biggest direct collectors of end-user data in the industry?
Are you talking about the military history of the development of SV, or the sources of initial capital for these ventures?
Who was a libertarian? (I can name several. And they're mostly still around one way or another.)
IMO, any leftist influence in SV was killed (or carefully cordoned for marketing purposes) early in the first dot-com boom.
Political-lens descriptions of early Silicon Valley are telling only one corner of a large and active situation, IMO.
Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill) done because he was right of center.
Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it from the words you used.
Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Today nobody cares. The right would never have tolerated January 6th. Now half of them think maybe democracy is a bad idea anyway.
If you’d released an expose back then of Facebook and its shadow profiles, people would have almost universally freaked out and boycotted Facebook. Today nobody cares.
Nobody would have gone for locked down devices and app stores then. Look up the reaction to Microsoft’s original “trusted computing” initiative and contrast it with today’s acceptance of walled gardens. Nobody cares.
Back then we built personal computers with the goal of serving the user. Now the shift is toward thin clients to get people into cloud silos to… uhh… serve the user in a different sense… more like that old “to serve man” Twilight Zone episode.
The biggest difference I see today is general public acceptance of technocracy, surveillance, and authoritarianism.
I think the apathy is because we've been bombarded with evil for so many years, and the rise of the quiet minority (30+%), who have very different values than what we saw every day on TV and in newspapers. Those people previously had little to no voice, but because of Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, etc, etc, they were able to band together and elect a criminal and start to take control of local and state elections, to remake the progressive world that we all thought we lived in.
Btw, even back 20 years I was ringing the alarm bells of authoritarianism and surveillance, to my friends (most of whom are way smarter than I am) and not a single one of them gave any shits. I really don't understand it.
No one would send out a group email to talk about Bill Clinton and form some kind of group consensus opinion. I think the start of this though was conservative talk radio and the in-group that formed in relation to the "liberal" out-group it promoted. Before that people were individuals deciding their personal stance on an issue to issue basis.
There really should be no surprise that once 99% of interaction is in the context of a groups that everything becomes dominated by in-group and out-groups.
The conservative use of the pejorative "liberal" to form an out-group though was just so poisonous and set a process in motion that once started can't really be stopped. Then once social networks come about it was basically over for the individual.
Millions of individuals are impossible to control but groups no so much. So here we are and I don't see any reason for optimism other than to enjoy your life now.
The future is more and more suspicion and surveillance of the individual by the group.
Back then, truckers wouldn't have been suspicious of a basic public health program. Reagan & Clinton (and similar conservative-to-third-way politics in other countries) did a fine job putting a wedge between liberals and labor. That the allegiances have changed doesn't necessarily mean any part of the political program has.
(Waco is also not as clear-cut as you make it; it was, let's say, bipartisanly popular at the time, then equally unpopular 5 years later which seems to be what you remember, and today I don't think anyone is thinking much about it at all.)
As a radical liberatory movement this was all doomed from the start.
source: organizing committee for pre-Mondo, did not get busted in that raid, you know which one I mean