A dispute over whether Silicon Valley's current embrace of military technology reflects a longstanding pattern or a break from its past has drawn in participants from the technology and journalism worlds. Sharon Weinberger, author of Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War, argued in a New York Times op-ed titled "Silicon Valley Was Right From the Start" that the industry's countercultural image was always a sham. She wrote that the Valley's values have not changed, only its customers, and described the current interest in military tech as market adaptation rather than political conversion.
That account is contested by a first-hand observer of the Valley's growth years, who cites a 2015 encounter at a Founders Fund retreat in British Columbia. Computer pioneer Alan Kay was describing his work when Founders Fund leader Peter Thiel sat down beside him and, unfamiliar with Kay's record, demanded to know who he was. Kay responded that he was just an old has-been, and the two failed to connect. Kay conceived the Dynabook, the basis for the modern computer.
The counterargument holds that beginning in the late 1970s a generation of technologists identifying with the counterculture operated on values that unleashed innovation and set the stage for the industry's present wealth. Weinberger, speaking from Washington, DC, told the observer she had likely studied tech culture less and defended her position, saying people are products of what they grow up in and that when defense tech jobs disappeared during the peace-dividend era, defense money mattered less and values diverged. She said the defining ethos of Silicon Valley is to go where the money is, and that Apple avoided military work because it had the consumer marketplace.
John Markoff, author of What the Dormouse Said, traced the Valley's shift away from a defense-oriented industry to three labs: John McCarthy's Stanford lab, the Stanford Research Institute, where Douglas Engelbart developed GUI innovations, and Kay's Xerox PARC. Markoff said many researchers there sought draft deferments to avoid the Vietnam War and that money was not their motivation. He described the Valley's entrepreneurial culture as a fusion of counterculture hackers and engineers with the more traditional semiconductor culture, which quickly escaped its military roots.
The personal computer industry, notably Apple, emerged from engineers who met at the Homebrew Computer Club, hosted by political radical Lee Felsenstein. Into the 1980s and 1990s, Apple fought the perception that its products were toys because it rejected the macho industrial look of earlier machines, and it took decades to significantly break into the corporate market. Google was founded by iconoclasts who defied Wall Street even as the company pursued its IPO, and before Apple Computer a CEO would not come to work in anything but a suit.
Historian O'Mara said wealth and the concentration of power have warped everything profoundly, and that people in a bubble, whether a president or a billionaire, struggle to understand how the rest of the world receives them. The observer argues the War Bros likely believe they act out of patriotism, though some have fetishized war movies and shoot-'em-up games, and that denying the Valley's idealistic history excuses them. Thiel, described as a beneficiary of Kay's idealism, did not know who Kay was.
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