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Comment by electricwater | Hacker News Reader

Wasnt' Silicon Valley born as a military R&D cluster? DARPA, Cold War defense contracts, and space race funding built the region. To me, the consumer internet phase from the late 1990s to early 2000s was actually the anomaly. The so called pacifist tech culture was a product of “peak liberalism” roughly 1991–2001 (fall of the soviet union to 9/11), the unipolar moment after the Cold War but before 9/11. US tech companies operated in a geopolitical environment without military rivals, so they could afford to frame themselves as apolitical, globalist, and focused on connecting the world. That cultural posture began to collapse after 9/11, and it has been eroding ever since under the pressures of great-power competition, terrorism, and the realization that software/chips are strategic assets. The pendulum is swinging... We aren't at McCarthyism yet but we are on a path to it.

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It predates Cold War and comes from WWII when US Navy was throwing money around to get better code cracking, radar, gunnery computers and so forth.

Steve Blank's 'Secret History of Silicon Valley' is great background here. [0]

[0] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

I don't know; my neighbors never talked about it.

But one guy came back from retirement after 9/11 and moved into a trailer in the Lockheed parking lot.

From the article:

>Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots.

>Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia’s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley.

>The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology — such as the internet — that became the basis for Silicon Valley’s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from Darpa and other government agencies to create Google.

What do you mean we aren’t at McCarthyism yet? We have blown well past McCarthyism. The US is a bona fide fascist dictatorship RIGHT NOW. Anonymous state agents are kidnapping US citizens off the street for deportation to third world countries. This is wildly and transparently illegal, but there is nothing in place to enforce the law because they’ve corrupted the DOJ, which is supposed to enforce the law.

They haven’t destroyed every vestige of liberal democracy — the states can fight and there are still courtroom battles — but the fascists own the enforcement mechanisms for justice, and don’t feel bound by the outcomes. The guardrails are gone.

Do not harbor illusions that we’re going to return to normality in our lifetimes. It’s possible something new and better will take over once the Trump regime is somehow ended, but I doubt it; they’re trashing the place pretty thoroughly.

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