Silicon Valley Has Always Been This Way

Over the past year, we’ve faced something of a reckoning in the tech capital of America. With the abrupt platforming of Elon Musk’s general idiocy, Marc Andreessen’s support for Trump, and Meta doing away with fact-checking, to give a few examples, Palo Alto’s thought leaders have seemingly gone off the deep end of the proverbial political pool.

More interesting, though, is the surprise this seems to have generated. In a slightly melodramatic bit of pearl-clutching, the New York Times called it a “cultural sea change” for Silicon Valley. This San Francisco Standard article about Stanford graduates’ newfound passion for national security quotes a student saying that “the pendulum is swinging.” I’ve also noticed a rabid slew of online hatred for San Francisco on the grounds that it’s some kind of anarchist, feces-filled hellhole thanks to the woke radical state government. Other than Fox News, I have to assume this impression comes from vague ideas about California as a whole — certainly the Bay Area has a notable history of progressive activism, and its soy-loving, well-educated residents have a pretty decided preference for Democrats. Combine this with legal marijuana and the useful catchall “coastal elites,” and it’s easy to end up with a mental image of California as a blue-haired boogeyman toting a hammer and sickle.¹

And yet, right in the middle of the coastal-elite bastion Stanford University was the first time I encountered An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, an essay penned by neoreactionist thinker Curtis Yarvin (or, pseudonymously, Mencius Moldbug). He wrote An Open Letter in 2008 and it “remains the most comprehensive self-contained exposition of Moldbug’s thought,” according to the blog’s home page.

I don’t think a direct response to Yarvin’s arguments is within the scope of this piece, but here’s a TL;DR for the sake of convenience. Basically, Yarvin (Moldbug) asserts that progressives are a ruling caste in the United States; that democracy is evil and that countries should be run as corporations by a dictator/CEO; and that this whole assemblage of progressive/democratic structures, which he calls “the Cathedral,” is approaching inevitable collapse.

This might sound insane to you, but the Overton Window moves fast. Yarvin has been cited as an influence on the philosophies of JD Vance, and he appeared on Tucker Carlson Today in 2021. Yarvin also bears the dubious honor of coining the term “red pill,” which is now pervasive among the online right wing and even spawned its own meme format.

And, believe it or not, Yarvin is bona fide made in the Bay — a Berkeley dropout and startup founder who still lives in San Francisco.

So, in true Moldbug spirit, here’s a red pill for you: Silicon Valley has always been this way.

Even before Yarvin sat down to write in 2008, we can look to one of his ideological BFFs, Peter Thiel, the billionaire who created the conservative Stanford Review as an undergraduate and later founded a little startup called PayPal. There, he ascended to “don consiglieri” of the PayPal Mafia, where he buddied up with everyone’s favorite evil Sim, Elon.² Thiel went on to bankroll various conservative causes and found Palantir Technologies,³ which mines your data to help the U.S. government fight terrorists. Palantir was first venture-backed by the CIA, and its clients also include the NSA, FBI, DHS, SOC, Air Force, and Marine Corps. (Someone get them on a family plan!)

I bring this up because Palo Alto entrepreneurs have never been strangers to the military. If you’re not familiar with the history of Silicon Valley, here’s a question for you: how did a provincial, sunny suburb become the tech capital of the nation? There’s a long and complicated answer that involves culture, geography, colonialism, & etc. going back centuries, but a shorter answer would point you to Frederick Terman, provost of Stanford University from 1955-1965.⁴ Freddie spearheaded the creation of the Stanford Industrial Park, now the Stanford Research Park — home to Hewlett-Packard, the original garage startup, and from which you can draw a straight line to Apple and Google.

But long before SRP was churning out microchips, the cash for its construction came straight from the Department of Defense (which, incredibly, once funded more of Stanford’s physics program than Stanford.) One of its first tenants was the one and only Lockheed Martin, and its very first was Varian Associates, who were working on fuses for atom bombs.⁵ Thus kicked off a long and cozy (and profitable) relationship between Palo Alto and Washington.

While this is probably not surprising to anyone who’s ever heard of the military-industrial complex, what’s more unusual is the attitude that prevails in spite of it. Although what we now recognize as Silicon Valley basically owes its existence to federal dollars, the culture at large is loath to acknowledge outside involvement.⁶ As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron put it in their 1995 essay “The Californian Ideology”:

Capitalist entrepreneurs often have an inflated sense of their own resourcefulness in developing new ideas and give little recognition to the contributions made by either the state, their own labour force or the wider community.

And as journalist Paulina Borsook puts it, somewhat more colorfully:

We [tech companies] are delicate rebel blooms of skunk work goodness, so easily trampled by the big bad powers that be — when none of them could have come into existence without the blessings of Big Capital and the fanciest of intellectual property law firms.

Our favorite founders’ political leanings fall into what Barbrook and Cameron describe as a “bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism,” what we could more broadly term technolibertarianism⁷ — a direct contradiction to the reality that big tech is, and has always been, deeply entwined with the state.

Instead, startups love to feel like scrappy underdogs. As an example, just look at the myth of the young genius founder. Fixated on the legends of Gates and Zuckerberg, culture loves CEOs with unfinished frontal lobes; Peter Thiel even offers a fellowship to entrepreneurs who drop out of school. We can point fingers at The Social Network, but I’d argue that the tradition goes further back — all the way to the Lone Ranger, the liberal ideal of the self-sufficient individual. It’s more than just youth; it’s anti-establishment moxie (even backed by $90 billion of venture capital).

It’s this same line of individualist hacker/punk thinking that lets engineers divorce themselves from the establishment, even generating the truly bewildering quote “My most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir.” The Stanford student behind that gem also doubled down with this:

The thought of my decisions leading to lives lost terrifies me. But these same concerns extend to almost every field pushing the boundaries of innovation. Generative AI has the capacity to manipulate a person into harming themselves. Bioengineered diseases can create pandemics that permanently alter our lives.

Her words eerily echo the April 3rd Movement’s Song of the SRI Researcher circa 1969, more than half a century ago:⁸

I have never killed a man.
I have never seen him die.
These formulas: they could be
for jelly. I don’t think I know.
. . . a scientist can’t be blamed
for everything. I am highly moral.

I could go on, but the point is this: while the attitudes that have aligned big tech and Donald Trump might feel surprising, they have always been there. (Just look at Steph Curry’s NIMBYism, the Hoover Institution, or the Facebook Police.⁹) The problem isn’t that Silicon Valley has changed. It’s that the people here are uniquely good at benefitting from political power structures while simultaneously decrying them.

So, am I on the side of Fox News after all? Is California a coastal elite dystopia ruled by incompetent technocrats?

Well, no.

Like most places, Palo Alto has problems (both fundamental and numerous), but it’s also a land of optimism — America’s America’s America, as Malcolm Harris says. It’s hard to pretend there’s no hope here.

Instead, try to look past the unicorns and the celebrity CEOs. Embrace the complexity of the people who call this place home, and look to the ones who are actually doing the work: activists, open-source developers, and the vast blue-collar population on whose labor the entire Bay Area runs.

These are the people who have always made Silicon Valley what it is. They are also the people who will carry it into the future.