In September 2015, I found myself at an eco-resort in British Columbia for a retreat hosted by Founders Fund. The setting was beautiful in the way that expensive nature often is: towering cedars, misty mornings, a long wooden lodge where everyone gathered for meals. Most of the people there were venture capitalists, founders, and engineers from the firm’s portfolio companies, but there were a few outsiders too, writers and thinkers who had been invited to sprinkle a little intellectual dust over the proceedings. One of those outsiders was Alan Kay, the computer scientist who had conceived the Dynabook back in the late 1960s—essentially the blueprint for the modern laptop and tablet. Another was Neal Stephenson, the novelist. And I was there too, mostly as a witness to the strange collisions that happen when different eras of Silicon Valley sit down at the same breakfast table. One morning, I was sitting across from Kay, who was in full raconteur mode, spinning stories about optimizing the computer mouse and advising Steve Jobs. He was charming, theatrical, a little irreverent. Then Peter Thiel, the head of Founders Fund, dropped into the seat next to him and started listening. At first Thiel said nothing. He just watched Kay with the kind of polite confusion you might show when someone starts speaking a language you don’t recognize. Kay kept going, telling tales from the early days of personal computing, from the labs at Xerox PARC, from the moment when the future first appeared inside a glowing screen. Finally, Thiel couldn’t hold it in any longer. He interrupted. “Who ARE you?” he demanded. There was no malice in it, I think, just genuine astonishment. Here was a man who had helped create the very machine Thiel now used every hour of every day, and Thiel had no idea who he was. Kay was stunned. He began to explain, stumbling over his own résumé, but quickly realized how ridiculous it would sound if he actually listed his accomplishments. It would be like asking Einstein to explain relativity. He stopped mid-sentence, sighed, and said, “I’m just an old has-been.” Then he went back to his breakfast. The two worlds at that table had collided, and failed to connect.
I thought back to that moment a couple of weeks ago when I read an op-ed in The New York Times called “Silicon Valley Was Right From the Start,” by Sharon Weinberger. The essay was adapted from her book Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War, and it made a bold, unsettling argument. According to Weinberger, the cozy origin story that Silicon Valley tells about itself—that it was born from the counterculture, from the Whole Earth Catalog, from a sincere desire to democratize information and make the world a better place—is a sham. The industry’s current behavior, she argued, should not surprise us. The bare-knuckled pursuit of vast wealth, the willingness to kowtow to an authoritarian leader, the enthusiastic embrace of lethal military technology—these are not betrayals of the Valley’s values. They are the natural expression of what Silicon Valley has always been. “Silicon Valley’s values haven’t changed, just its customers,” she wrote. She described the industry’s new love affair with military tech as “less a story of political conversion than of market adaptation.” In that reading, all the hippie rhetoric about free expression, open systems, and democratization during the 1980s PC revolution and the 1990s Internet boom was just a convenient mask. Big Tech wore it to sell products and accumulate loot. The op-ed was crisp, confident, and deliberately provocative. It reduced the history of an entire culture to a single cynical equation: wherever the money goes, the industry follows. And it struck me as deeply, even dangerously, incomplete.
I disagree with that portrait. Not because I think Silicon Valley is pure, and not because I think the industry’s current behavior is acceptable. But because the story I lived through, the story I witnessed from the inside, was more complicated and more human than Weinberger’s market-based determinism allows. Beginning in the late 1970s, a new generation of technologists emerged who genuinely identified with the counterculture. They were shaped by Vietnam, by the civil rights movement, by a deep distrust of centralized authority. They saw the computer not as a tool of control, but as an instrument of liberation. Yes, they were standing on the shoulders of the military-industrial complex—DARPA grants had funded the development of the internet, the graphical user interface, and, indirectly, Google’s original search technology. You can’t erase that history. But the people who actually built the personal computer revolution were animated by something different than the desire to sell weapons to the Pentagon. They were animated by idealism. They believed, with a kind of religious fervor, that putting a computer on every desk would empower ordinary people, break the monopoly of big institutions, and create new forms of community and expression. They loved building things for the sheer joy of it. They had a hackerish disdain for conventional practices, for suits and ties, for corporate hierarchies, for the whole gray machinery of mid-century American business. The Homebrew Computer Club, where Steve Wozniak showed off his prototype Apple computer, was not a chamber of commerce luncheon. It was a bunch of hobbyists and weirdos who thought the future should belong to everyone. They were not simply greedy. They were, in many cases, trying to create something beautiful.
That mindset changed not only the course of the computer industry, but the culture of American business as a whole. Before Apple, a CEO would not dare show up at work in anything but a suit. The office was a place of rigid hierarchy, secretarial pools, and corner offices with closed doors. The hacker generation blew all that apart. They introduced the idea that work could be playful, that information should flow freely, that a good idea could come from anywhere, not just from the top of the org chart. They made it acceptable to be weird, to be passionate, to be obsessive about the details of the thing you were making. They celebrated failure as a step toward breakthrough. They believed in rough consensus and running code. That ethos spread far beyond Silicon Valley, into every industry, every boardroom, every startup in every country. You can see the fingerprints of that idealism in the open-source movement, in the fight for net neutrality, in the belief that technology should be a force for good. To deny that this idealism existed is not only historically inaccurate. It also conveniently lets the new generation of defense contractors off the hook. If Silicon Valley was always greedy, then the industry’s recent pivot toward military technology is just a logical extension of its true nature. There is no betrayal, no fall from grace, no moral reckoning. It’s simply business. But if the idealism was real—and it was—then the pivot toward weapons of war is something that needs to be accounted for. It is a choice. And choices carry responsibility.
When I shared my views with Weinberger, she was gracious. She acknowledged that I had probably studied tech culture more closely than she had from her perch in Washington, DC, where the dominant frame is national security and the defense budget. But she gamely defended her op-ed. “We’re all products of what we grow up in,” she said. “If you were growing up in the peace-dividend era, with defense tech jobs disappearing, the money from defense was less important, and you start to have different values.” That is a fair point. The people who came of age in the 1990s, after the Cold War ended, didn’t experience the same gravitational pull of Pentagon funding that earlier generations did. For them, the consumer market was the obvious path. The shift from missile control modules to Macintoshes, in her telling, was not driven by values but by the sheer fact that the money had moved. And now that the Pentagon is eager to exploit the Valley’s innovations again, the industry’s recent embrace of high-tech weaponry is not a philosophical repositioning. It is, in her words, a fortuitous opportunity to sell to a customer with deep pockets. “It’s not like everybody in the workforce in Silicon Valley woke up and went, like, ‘Defense is cool,’” she said. That impulse to go where the money is, she argued, is the defining ethos of Silicon Valley. “Your prime directive is for your company to succeed,” she said. “Why didn’t Apple work with the military? Because they didn’t need to. They had the consumer marketplace.”
There is truth in that. I would be naive to pretend that the countercultural technologists of the 1970s and 1980s were pure-hearted saints with no interest in money. They wanted to be rich. They wanted to be famous. They wanted to prove themselves to the world. The desire to change the world and the desire to get rich were not opposites; they were braided together into the same restless, ambitious personality. Steve Jobs wanted to put a ding in the universe, and he also wanted to sell millions of computers. The two ambitions fed each other. That is part of the human messiness that Weinberger’s argument smooths away. By reducing everything to market adaptation, she misses the texture of lived experience: the late nights in garages, the arguments about whether information wants to be free, the utopian dreams that drove some of the smartest people I have ever known to spend their lives building things they believed would matter. Those dreams were not a mirage. They were real, even if they were always entangled with ego and money and the next round of funding. And the fact that they were real makes the current moment more tragic, not less. It means something precious was lost. The same industry that once produced the Dynabook and the Macintosh is now producing autonomous drones and surveillance systems. The same culture that preached openness is now building walls of proprietary data. The same people who wanted to democratize knowledge are now happy to sell it to the highest bidder. That is a story of betrayal, and you cannot tell a story of betrayal unless you first acknowledge that the thing betrayed existed.
Maybe that is why Alan Kay’s answer resonated with me so deeply. When Peter Thiel asked, “Who ARE you?” and Kay sighed, “I’m just an old has-been,” I heard something more than frustration. I heard a man who had watched his dream transform before his eyes. The Dynabook was supposed to be a tool for human expression, a way to amplify the creative potential of every person who touched it. And in some ways, it became exactly that—the modern computer is everywhere, and it has given billions of people access to knowledge, art, communication, and creation. But it has also become a surveillance device, a weapon, a source of endless distraction and manipulation. The two worlds at that breakfast table represented two moments in the same story. Thiel’s world was the world that had inherited the technology without inheriting the values. Kay’s world was the world that had imagined the future but could not control how it would be used. They failed to connect, and that failure is with us still. If we accept the cynical view that Silicon Valley was always about power and profit, we lose the ability to call out what has gone wrong. But if we remember that this industry was once animated by a real, if imperfect, hope, then we can measure the distance between that hope and today’s reality. We can ask the people in charge not just “Who are you?” but “Who did you used to be, and what happened to you?” The old has-been who sits at the breakfast table, ignored and forgotten, is not a relic. He is a reminder. The dream of a computer that empowers the individual is still worth fighting for, even if some of its descendants have built a different machine. And until Silicon Valley can remember that, it will keep mistaking the money for the mission, and the has-been for the one who never mattered.
