How Silicon Valley became "The Man"
blogs.hbr.org
blogs.hbr.org
"A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You see that rhetoric leveraged when Google and other firms say, 'Don’t regulate us. We need to be creative. We need to be free to pursue our satisfaction because that’s ultimately what will provide a satisfying society.'
That’s all a way of ignoring the systems that make the world possible. One example from the ‘60s that I think is pretty telling is all the road trips. The road trips are always about the heroic actions of people like Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and their amazing automobiles, right? Never, never did it get told that those road trips were only made possible by Eisenhower’s completion of the highway system. The highway system is never in the story. It’s boring. What’s in the story is the heroic actions of bootstrapped individuals pursuing conscious change. What we see out here now is, again, those heroic stories. And there are real heroes. But the real heroes are operating with automobiles and roads and whole systems of support without which they couldn’t be heroic."
I find the individualist rhetoric in Silicon Valley to be puzzling. There is a huge emphasis on the wonderkid with the genius idea, not the team of dozens or hundreds that took a half-assed idea and turned it into a product. To steal some terminology from 'pg (without imputing to him any political leaning): Silicon Valley culture right now glorifies the hacker/painter designing organisms in Lisp over the pyramid builder building pyramids in Pascal. This is an elevation of the individual, the creative genius, over the institution, the organized team. But the internet is the product of an era when America was all about institutions, not individuals. The military-industrial complex built the internet. The federal government built the highways. NASA put a man on the moon. That era was all about the power of pyramid builders working in structured, hierarchical organizations.
So I find the "road trip" analogy particularly apropos. You have these guys going on heroic, individualist road trips, but they're riding on this infrastructure created by big institutions, infrastructure that only big institutions have the scale to create.
EDIT: My comment was really more about individualism versus institutions than libertarians, and has been edited accordingly.
Whatever's going wrong in SV isn't the libertarian's fault. Or, if it is, then the Democrats in power ought to take a serious look at how their wondrous plans manage to be scotched by such a small, low-power minority.
That's my reading. Overall, I think the article was quite good (terminology and title aside.)
The Highway Interstate system was driven mainly by defense needs. It's also known as the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways"[1]
Driven, maybe, but that's not how it's used.
The Internet itself was developed mainly for defense needs too, but now people see it as a rallying point for world citizenry, human rights, etc.
Is that what we'd have to hope for with libertarianism, that enough "defense needs" pop up to allow for adequate public goods to still be created and later be mis-used for a purpose, for which it'd never have been initially funded at all?
It is not necessary to understand libertarianism to bash libertarianism. All you need to know: they're against government doing certain things, therefore they're against government doing any and all things.
Not sure where you're getting this from... even though I'm not a libertarian myself, it seems like most libertarians believe in drastically reduced defense spending. [1]
Deleted comment
It's a great argument against someone who demands no regulations or laws, sure.
No, not really. Playing Devil's advocate, if a thief robs a lot of money along the years, and the donates part to charity, must you hate charity to oppose the thief?
That argument is only valid if we assume that ends justify the means.
And while the libertarians in the US today have a large number of differences with the more historic libertarians, some of the historic viewpoints can be seen in the contemporary US.
One of the main defining points for libertarianism, historically and currently, is individualism. Individualism isn't strictly anti-government, but anti-authoritarian. The government using its means to foster innovation is completely separate from most other points. Even small or distributed government should foster innovation if possible.
But most right-wingers consider property something like a god-given right (usually called "natural rights"), which makes discussion as impossible as trying to convince an young-earth creationist of evolution.
(Though to be fair, not everyone in that side of the field believes the same. Mises is particular wrote that property is just an human device, "it is not sacred". Which makes for a good laughs when you point it out, along with the fact that Ron Paul is a supporter of the Von Mises Institute, in one of those right-wing discussion forums).
Yes, but it turns out that big governments are much more effective at some kinds of innovation and expertise than small governments. There is no Missouri Institutes of Health, or if there is, you have not heard of them, but you sure know of and expect the best from the NIH.
So in effect, decentralization implies the a retrenchment of the scope of government.
That's interesting. Because Cassady and Kerouac's road trips in "On the Road" happened in 1947, 1949, and 1950 [0]. Construction of the Interstate Highway System didn't begin until 1956, and didn't finish until 1992 [1].
However, if we conspicuously omit the name "Kerouac" and that most famous of American counterculture roadtrips, then like Fred Turner, we too can conclude that no fun ("heroic!") roadtrips happened prior to intervention by the Federal Government.
[0] http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Const...
Which is a complete misnomer, as US numbered highways were and still are maintained by state and local governments [1].
I grew up near the "birthplace of Route 66" so yeah, I've heard of it. It was maintained and improved by a private organization (imagine that!) [2] until the federal interstate push of the 1950s.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highways
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Highway_66_Association
"Behind the scenes, the federal aid program had begun with the passage of the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, providing 50% monetary support from the federal government for improvement of major roads. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 limited the routes to 7% of each state's roads, while 3 in every 7 roads had to be "interstate in character". Identification of these main roads was completed in 1923.[1]"
Also according to your source it looks like the U.S. numbered highways developed in spite of the numerous private organizations existing at the time:
"The new system was both praised and criticized by local newspapers, often depending on whether that city ended up on a major route. While the Lincoln Highway Association understood and supported the plan, partly because they were assured of getting the US 30 designation as much as possible, most other trail associations lamented their obsolescence. At their January 14–15, 1926 meeting, AASHO was flooded with complaints."
I feel like the reasonable middle ground here is simply what Fred Turner is insisting: the two components are intertwined and symbiotic. Why is that so hard to accept?
It's like saying that so much is made of Leonardo's artistry, but no one talks about how that Mona Lisa only exists because of the great genes of the Gherardini family.
To make it painfully obvious: When was the last time you heard somebody characterize the existence of limited liability companies as 'intervention'? Who out there consistently calls copyright law an 'intervention'?
It would be possible to use the term 'intervention' consistently. In actual practice, it is (typically) only used as a rhetorical device to support the speaker's preconceived political position. That causes the term to become loaded.
Then you're not forced into one course of action.
You're being forced into parting with your money. So, yes, you are being forced into a course of action.
A number of points in the article were covered in the documentaries such as 40's & 50's era mass media concerns and early valley cultural experiment failures.
I think the underlying problem here is that some in the left can't cope when a part of their culture becomes big, popular and corporate. The ideas are nice when they're outside the box, but oppressive when it's the establishment and highly profitable.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consu...