The answer to the third question is great:<p>"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.'<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.<p>EDIT: My comment was really more about individualism versus institutions than libertarians, and has been edited accordingly.
<i>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.</i><p>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].<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm</a><p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Construction" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Const...</a>
If you found this article interesting I highly recommend the documentaries "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" and "The Century of the Self" both by Adam Curtis.<p>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 my big take away from this article is that nearly everyone in the Bay Area, techies included, are liberal or votes Democrat. So the irony is that some of these liberals are doing better (financially) than others, which is causing unforeseen problems. Startups are born out of the same counterculture principles, but focused on economically tangible solutions. You say revolution, we say disruption. You can probably say the same thing about Whole Foods or REI.<p>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.
The first part of that article - the discussion of culture / counter-culture sounded like it could have come from the pen of Thomas Frank:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consumerism/dp/0226260127" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Conquest-Cool-Counterculture-Consu...</a>