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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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