I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

Of course, Silicon Valley has never been all flowers and psychedelic. “For all this, he could flatter himself with counter-culture roots, to earn money and the accumulation of power has always been in the dominant current,” explains Kapor. And of course, the valley policy has always adopted strong libertarian tension.

But even the venture capital seemed to vibrate with the feeling of revolution – as if the weather went from the manufacture of bombs to emissions on the IPO road. When the Internet arrived like a thunderclap, the ideological soundtrack became guilty of the ear. In his famous “declaration of cyberspace independence” of 1996, my friend John Perry Barlow argued that the Internet transcends laws and borders. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us,” he wrote.

Oh my God, have we published our hopes on the internet. When I met them for the first time, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were idealists with wide -eyed eyes. Jeff Bezos came as a friend, eager to emphasize that the employees of Amazon, himself, himself put their computers on reused wood doors instead of expensive office. After my first conversation with Zuckerberg, he went home to a small apartment without furniture.

And then the Internet giants extended their companies to impose their own concepts of expression, identity and context. These humble leaders have collected unimaginable rewards. Now they cannot display their wealth enough – houses, yachts, planes.

On a typically pleasant day in July, I met Russell Hancock, who runs a reflection group called La Cocentreprise Silicon Valley, in the living room of his house Palo Alto. He caught it during the technological crash of 2000; Now you can’t buy a paly cabin without almost generational wealth. Page and Zuckerberg, dissatisfied with a single family property, have picked up the nearby properties, once transforming the idyllic streets into supervillain compounds.

“People who are fabulously doing well, they really spend a great moment,” says Hancock. For everyone in Silicon Valley, the gap of wealth becomes more punitive, more absurd. When Apple had its IPO in 1980, Steve Jobs’ net value exceeded almost $ 100 million. Now Zuckerberg offered IA researchers as many molah for a single year of work. Hancock evokes the Gini coefficient, a measure of popular inequality among the crowd of the World Bank. Since the 90s, “we have gone from 30 to the Gini to 83,” he said. “These are the conditions of the French Revolution.”

Another big change was the course. During the longest, notes Chris Lehane, a former member of Bill Clinton staff who worked for companies like Airbnb and Openai, the software “was almost a fourth dimension”. Technological leaders could afford to stay outside the west and avoid politics. But software products have started to break down whole sectors of activity. “These products were physically manifested in taxis, short -term rentals and food delivery,” says Lehane, “accumulating against political systems, beliefs, existing laws.” Sometimes people died of this foray. The old beloved companies have closed. Local politicians have gone mad. To play the system, the Silicon Valley jumped to the Marais. As a technologist from the current administration says, “the valley now realizes that it cannot ignore politics, because politics will not ignore you.”