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Different time. It wasn’t a totalitarian zeitgeist. The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. The art and music was darker and edgier on the surface but the view of the future was optimistic.

Today you have authoritarian populist nationalism on the right and authoritarian technocracy on the left. The mood is pessimistic and everyone is arguing about who should be forced to think or do what. The music is trite and superficially happy and everyone is seething with hate.

Machines are tools. Technology follows the zeitgeist. Everything is being bent toward totalitarianism and surveillance because that is what we are doing with it.

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totalitarianism and authoritarianism should not be used interchangeably, they're opposites. Totalitarianism is mass mobilization and uninhibited violence, think Cultural Revolution, authoritarianism is, to quote Gibson given that we're in a thread about him, Singapore's 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. Radical depolitization.

People are more apathetic than hateful (today's 'riots' hardly deserve the label by historical standards) and there is more of an indifference than a pessimism. You're not told what to think (or compelled to action), but rather told what not to say (or how not to act), and otherwise left alone.

>The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe.

Looking back on it, it's hard to decipher. I explained to my son that once, a movie usher asked me to put out my cigarette at a midnight movie. This while the rest of the patrons were smoking pot, which was so commonplace at midnight movies that the authorities just ignored it. Those decades were a strange battleground between intellectual freedom (and hedonism) jousting with the establishment. This decade, I don't feel that promise of wholly unbridled intellectual freedom, and the excitement it caused. I suppose the establishment won.

> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe.

From 1993 on, Louis Rossetto heavily pushed the idea in Wired magazine that Silicon Valley was heavily libertarian[1]. I had not been to the Bay much at the time and actually believed this was true of the Valley.

> authoritarian technocracy on the left

Like who, the Kellogg's workers who were on strike? The GM strike in Mexico? Even the left in what remains of non-gentrified Oakland is different than the bubble of upper middle class Bay FAANG liberals.

[1] By libertarian I mean libertarian in the American sense, which nowadays is right-libertarian.

complicit with the "surveillance capitalism" model of profiling and tracking every adult with disposable income, and then some. That is in itself, enough to convict the American political class, to my mind. As said more than forty years ago in America and more true than ever, the "two party" system is not really.

You’re describing neoliberalism, not the liberals or the left. Surveillance capitalism in the tech sector arose with the rise of FAANG, which depends on monetizing personal data for its models. The American political class is guilty of not regulating this industry, which came about as a result of the influence of the libertarian right, not the left. While entirely fictional, Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" is an interesting overview of the surveillance zeitgeist and philosophy from a centrist POV. I wouldn’t really recommend the film as it’s terrible, but the book illustrates how every good tech idea is a slippery slope or double-edged sword. Every idea that has the potential to make us more free, also has the risk of enslaving us. The reason the tech sector requires regulation in this arena is because they aren’t willing to do it themselves as it impacts their profits. There’s nobody in DC looking out for the consumer or interested in protecting personal data, and that’s the most troubling part of the problem. Our representatives aren’t there to protect us, they are there to protect the donor class.

> The American political class is guilty of not regulating this industry, which came about as a result of the influence of the libertarian right, not the left.

How do you interpret this belief specifically with regards to the genesis of Facebook and Google and Apple, the biggest direct collectors of end-user data in the industry?

Are you talking about the military history of the development of SV, or the sources of initial capital for these ventures?

Who involved with the early stages of Google, Apple, or Facebook was a leftist? (I can't name any - no, Jobs's time as a hippy doesn't make him a leftist.)

Who was a libertarian? (I can name several. And they're mostly still around one way or another.)

IMO, any leftist influence in SV was killed (or carefully cordoned for marketing purposes) early in the first dot-com boom.

I was there and the political lense you are using, appears to be a retrofit, not real influences. The real influences are too many to list, no one can, but small companies routinely delivered products while larger, funded, probably conservative, companies were left in the dust, repeatedly. Jobs was not left or right exactly, he was 26 years old and they shipped products while giant companies had meetings. The lubricant for this small company action was certainly cash money, but the parts were sophisticated and non-trivial electronics with a lot of physics math involved, and inventory problems to deliver.

Political-lens descriptions of early Silicon Valley are telling only one corner of a large and active situation, IMO.

> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe.

Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill) done because he was right of center.

Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it from the words you used.

I am betting that meant that the tech scene had a stronger libertarian vibe then (a la John Perry Barlow, say). Of course, some critics (I'm thinking of Curtis' Hypernormalization[1]) would say that was more like a retreat from reality.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

Keep in mind that Barlow was heavily involved in the GOP. Libertarian yes, but also always on the right to a significant degree.

As a radical liberatory movement this was all doomed from the start.

You can find counterexamples, but the big difference is how people reacted. Almost everyone thought Waco was unjust and excessive. Today many people (especially on the left) would say they had it coming. Meanwhile the right now openly talks about the need to regulate business more and Trump’s whole message was more about cracking down on others than freedom for his base.

Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Today nobody cares. The right would never have tolerated January 6th. Now half of them think maybe democracy is a bad idea anyway.

If you’d released an expose back then of Facebook and its shadow profiles, people would have almost universally freaked out and boycotted Facebook. Today nobody cares.

Nobody would have gone for locked down devices and app stores then. Look up the reaction to Microsoft’s original “trusted computing” initiative and contrast it with today’s acceptance of walled gardens. Nobody cares.

Back then we built personal computers with the goal of serving the user. Now the shift is toward thin clients to get people into cloud silos to… uhh… serve the user in a different sense… more like that old “to serve man” Twilight Zone episode.

The biggest difference I see today is general public acceptance of technocracy, surveillance, and authoritarianism.

You make really good points, thanks.

I think the apathy is because we've been bombarded with evil for so many years, and the rise of the quiet minority (30+%), who have very different values than what we saw every day on TV and in newspapers. Those people previously had little to no voice, but because of Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, etc, etc, they were able to band together and elect a criminal and start to take control of local and state elections, to remake the progressive world that we all thought we lived in.

Btw, even back 20 years I was ringing the alarm bells of authoritarianism and surveillance, to my friends (most of whom are way smarter than I am) and not a single one of them gave any shits. I really don't understand it.

> Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors.

Back then, truckers wouldn't have been suspicious of a basic public health program. Reagan & Clinton (and similar conservative-to-third-way politics in other countries) did a fine job putting a wedge between liberals and labor. That the allegiances have changed doesn't necessarily mean any part of the political program has.

(Waco is also not as clear-cut as you make it; it was, let's say, bipartisanly popular at the time, then equally unpopular 5 years later which seems to be what you remember, and today I don't think anyone is thinking much about it at all.)

this is interesting and I agree with some of it, however, please "Nobody cares." is more drama than fact. I care and so do you. Saying its opposite is dramatic, but maybe not constructive. tough days to be optimistic,these days, I agree with that. still making things here though!

To me, the biggest difference is that people reacted as individuals or as two individuals interacting.

No one would send out a group email to talk about Bill Clinton and form some kind of group consensus opinion. I think the start of this though was conservative talk radio and the in-group that formed in relation to the "liberal" out-group it promoted. Before that people were individuals deciding their personal stance on an issue to issue basis.

There really should be no surprise that once 99% of interaction is in the context of a groups that everything becomes dominated by in-group and out-groups.

The conservative use of the pejorative "liberal" to form an out-group though was just so poisonous and set a process in motion that once started can't really be stopped. Then once social networks come about it was basically over for the individual.

Millions of individuals are impossible to control but groups no so much. So here we are and I don't see any reason for optimism other than to enjoy your life now.

The future is more and more suspicion and surveillance of the individual by the group.

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