Analysis: “Change the world” idealism is dying in Silicon Valley and will be missed
During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, I edited a news magazine in San Francisco called The Industry Standard, which both lived and chronicled the birth of the internet economy. Across the city, there was excitement in the air, fueled by an idealistic belief that the emerging internet would empower people in unimaginable ways and make the world a better place.
We knew it was a bubble moment and that those lofty ideals carried contradictions that would end up bringing us back to reality. But in the magazine — and at the crowded, boozy Friday parties we hosted on our terrace — we celebrated being part of the internet revolution, confident that we were on the right side of history.
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Today, the effervescent, counterculture-influenced techno-optimism of that era, which defined the internet industry for the better part of 30 years, is rapidly fading. In part, he is a victim of his own unfulfilled promises. But he is also an unfortunate victim of the country’s political wars.
Now it’s become fashionable in technology circles to treat the old idealism as naïve and self-centered. The influential group of right-wing technology executives who rose to power in the second Trump administration treat him as something even worse: a manifestation of the “woke radical left,” as the president recently declared when criticizing the artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
They defend a very different version of techno-optimism, one that abandons inclusive humanist values in favor of a militarized nationalism and a harshly Darwinian vision of capitalist competition.
Still, the idea that technology can help us “change the world”, as the old mantra went, is far from being left-wing. On the contrary, internet culture has always been a mixture with a strong libertarian influence that celebrates individual freedom, social tolerance and collective empowerment through technology and free markets.
At its best, it is a broad space of hopeful ideas about the future and a beacon for creative thinkers of all kinds. Its more positive side is sorely missed today, amid the often dark conversations about the impact of AI.
It is worth remembering that the creative and spontaneous culture of San Francisco in the 1990s was the laboratory for an extraordinarily rich crop of innovations.
At Wired magazine, co-founder Louis Rossetto preached a libertarian gospel of technological revolution in the publication’s pages, while an unlikely group of young writers and programmers practically invented the website as we know it today — including the still-ubiquitous banner ad.
Craig Newmark, a socially awkward young programmer from New Jersey, ended up diving into the early tech party scene, where people experimented with ideas like virtual reality, and wanted to share tips; would end up creating a new type of community market and the idea of the “sharing economy”.
The open source software movement, in part a political project to protect the freedom to experiment and prevent corporate oligopolies from stifling innovation, would become a mainstay of the technology industry.
It was on the rooftop of Industry Standard that a young technology enthusiast from Nebraska named Ev Williams met with colleagues and decided that his startup should focus on a tool they would call Blogger. It was a precursor to social media, and Williams would later co-found Twitter.
A central tenet throughout this period was that New Economy entrepreneurs could prosper financially and also generate positive impact. From its earliest days, Google’s guiding principle was “don’t be evil,” even as it built a history-making money-making machine. It was common for startups to have a mission beyond financial success.
It was no coincidence that the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began attending Burning Man, the famous annual event held in the Nevada desert, even before their research project at Stanford became a company.
The shared values of the internet age, brilliantly celebrated by Wired, can usefully be understood as the “Burning Man Pact.”
Just as the event brought together alternative campers and billionaires to build a utopian city in the desert, the New Economy driven by the internet would also bring less hierarchical organizations and communities, as well as more innovative, satisfying and productive ways of working.
Politically, the industry was equally liberal and libertarian, perhaps best represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, created to protect the inhabitants of cyberspace from an invasive government. It was a question of freedom: “hands off our internet” was the rallying cry, echoing ancient struggles for civil rights.
That pact began to unravel in the 2010s, when the small insurgents of the early days turned into global giants with incalculable power and influence.
Social media has come to reward conflict over community connection, and people’s trust in technology has eroded as the big platforms have become misinformation machines and tools of political manipulation.
Young employees immersed themselves in progressive politics and the social justice movement, and talent-hungry companies responded to a growing list of political demands from the left.
Then came the shocks of the Covid era, which destroyed the fragile consensus — a rupture symbolized by Elon Musk, who was a Burning Man enthusiast while also becoming a fierce critic of many of the values the event represented.
Now a new version of techno-optimism is on the rise, perhaps best encapsulated in a 2023 essay by Marc Andreessen. When I met him in the mid-1990s, Andreessen was a cheerful, optimistic internet idealist; today, he is among the richest venture capitalists in the world and has abandoned his former liberal positions.
His “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” asserts that free-market technocapitalism is a miracle machine capable of solving all problems, as long as everyone works hard and eliminates the ideas of the “Enemy” such as “ethics in technology” and “trust and security”.
Over the past year, under Trump, this ideology has evolved into support for government-backed technocapitalism and “America First” nationalism, with private cryptocurrencies and the unregulated pursuit of artificial intelligence at the heart of this project.
The climate in San Francisco has already changed to reflect this worldview. Tech companies quickly abandoned their once-proud commitments to diversity and immigrant advocacy after the 2024 election and quietly accepted Trump’s attacks on issues once considered untouchable, such as higher education, free trade and the rule of law.
Military technology, long shunned in the startup world, is now the most sought-after sector by venture capitalists outside of AI. “Builders”, a term created to exalt leaders of for-profit startups while diminishing other initiatives, have become the new heroes.
Trae Stephens, co-founder of weapons startup Anduril Industries and protégé of far-right investor and provocateur Peter Thiel, recently gave a speech in Washington about the need for “patriotic” investment so that the United States can do the “hard things,” like building data centers, rockets and nuclear plants fast enough to outpace the Chinese.
But this set of ideas about how technology could change the world for the better doesn’t have the same appeal, whether as a collective value system or as a roadmap to personal success.
In San Francisco, the epicenter of the AI boom, the youth population is now growing only modestly after a sharp decline during the pandemic — a stark contrast to the arrival of tens of thousands of people in their 20s and 30s during the dot-com boom and then the rise of smartphones.
AI companies are hiring, but not as quickly as the champions of the internet age are cutting jobs; Tech employment in the city remains well below its peak. Money is flooding into the sector, but much of it goes to computing power, not people.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s two traditional art schools have closed their doors, victims of high costs, limited support from local tycoons and a lack of professional prospects for potential students. Fifteen theater companies closed their activities. It’s unclear how anyone other than a tech superstar would be able to participate in the AI race.
When I walk the streets of SoMa and the Financial District today, the sidewalks remain surprisingly empty most days compared to before the pandemic.
The entrepreneurs I meet are younger and more money-obsessed than ever, consumed as much by anxiety about fundraising, competition, and the uncertainty of AI as they are by excitement about the future. Even among teenagers and college students, financial success seems to be what matters most.
At the very least, pro-Trump tech elites have done a poor job selling the idea that AI — and technological progress in general — will be a boon for us all. Prominent executives including Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are among the least popular public figures in the United States. Opinion polls show little confidence in the technology industry and widespread fear about what artificial intelligence will bring — including among young people on the rise.
This rejection, for those on the other side of it, is misinterpreted as a communication problem — something Trae Stephens proposed solving by buying Wired. The suggestion received widespread praise from X followers, who shared their complaint that the magazine had become too critical of the industry and its leaders.
It’s telling that this group still desires the authenticity and credibility of Wired, forged in the idealism of an earlier period. They don’t seem to realize that their influence springs from the very values they are so determined to ridicule.
Their energy would be better spent reflecting more broadly — and less ideologically — on the impact of their projects on society. As we have clearly seen in the internet age, believing in the benefits of technological progress does not have to be a partisan issue.
Nor does trying to do what’s right for humanity stand in the way of entrepreneurial success: just ask Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist (of which he still retains much ownership) ended up generating a gargantuan fortune.
It is true that many of the grand aspirations of the past turned out to be empty talk; Internet giants, in fact, have probably caused as much social harm as good. Still, it’s sad to see this being used as proof that only the self-interested pursuit of financial wealth can serve as the guiding principle of technological progress.
Andreessen’s venture capital firm, which now manages more than $90 billion in assets, has become the United States’ biggest political donor this election cycle, spending more than $115 million so far in midterm elections as it seeks upside for its investments in cryptocurrencies and AI. There’s nothing especially entrepreneurial or inspiring about it.
The idealistic, ambitious, and joyful culture that gave us the internet can be treated as weak and naive by Trump-aligned technology leaders focused on a narrow agenda of deregulation and military buildup. But even today, believing that we can — and should — intentionally direct technology to benefit all of society is not the problem with Silicon Valley culture. It’s part of what’s best about her.
