Kim Phillips-Fein writes:

For many years, Silicon Valley and the machines that came out of it were presented as personally, economically, and socially transformative, agents of revolution at both the level of the individual and the whole social order. They were democratizing, uncontrolled, anarchic, and new. Most of all, they were supposed to be fun—to open up a space of play and freedom. How is it, then, that just a few decades in, we find ourselves trapped in a dreary spectacle that seems to replicate the old patterns of exploitation and dominion in almost every sphere, but with a creepy new intimacy?

Margaret O’Mara’s book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America traces just how our uneasy present deviated from what was promised at the outset. O’Mara embeds Silicon Valley in the sweep of American political history, offering a vision of the social landscape that produced the modern technology industry. She shows how Big Tech did not simply spring Athena-like from the brain of Steve Jobs, but rather took shape out of the dilemmas and possibilities of the Cold War, the particular culture of Northern California, and the economic debates of the 1970s and 1980s. What comes through most powerfully in her narrative are the wild social hopes once projected on to computers. These magical machines were supposed to provide a solution to the economic and political problems of the late twentieth century, a way to transcend and break free of the confining aspects of postwar capitalism. This was a feint, a way of imagining a miracle fix to tensions and conflicts that had no easy resolution. Computers, O’Mara suggests, have long been metaphors as much as machines.

At the end of World War II, nothing seemed particularly special about Silicon Valley. It was a predominantly agricultural community, known for growing cherries, apricots, and plums. In the 1950s, it developed into a distinctly unglamorous suburb dotted with bungalows, similar to dozens of others around the country. “Mid-1950s Santa Clara Valley was merely a smaller-scale Los Angeles, home to aerospace companies, light manufacturing, and some smart academic scientists,” O’Mara writes. Boston looked far more likely to emerge as the technological capital of the future: It had MIT, Harvard, and easier access to the pools of money and investors needed. Computer experimentation was happening all over the United States.

But even in the early postwar years, some aspects of Northern California gave it a distinct advantage. Most important was Stanford University. Stanford was an institute of higher learning that had never been committed to an abstract intellectualism but had long pursued connections to private industry. For example, it dispatched a faculty member to the first semiconductor company in the Valley, founded by the mercurial William Shockley, co-inventor of the silicon transistor and a Palo Alto native. When in the early 1950s Stanford opened a 350-acre industrial research park, the university was able to provide a space to entrepreneurial Stanford graduate students: people such as Bill Hewlett and David Packard, who moved their electronics company to the park in the early ’50s. Hewlett-Packard’s corporate culture served as a prototype for the later ideal of the Silicon Valley firm: putatively non-hierarchical and idealistic, giving out stock to employees to encourage their loyalty, and certainly not tolerating unions. Packard, the more politically interested of the pair, joined these management practices to a bruising critique of the “socialism” he thought pervaded the Kennedy and Johnson administrations: “They would take our wealth and distribute it as they see fit!”

Despite HP’s skepticism about government, public investment was crucial to the rise of Silicon Valley. [Continue reading…]