Ask HN: What happened to our collective ethos?

I’m an outsider to both Silicon Valley and enterprise IT; I’m just a freelance consultant and web host plying my trade in the suburbs of Charlotte. But I have generally presumed that we all share a common nostalgic ideal rooted in the memories and stories of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and their unbound, open-ended exploration of science, technology, and the limits of their imaginations. I’ve been told that the economic and regulatory conditions that allowed these monuments to human endeavor ultimately shifted, monopolies were broken up, assets were sold off, and it ultimately served as the incubator for the modern technology industry.

But we’ve since seen companies emerge with market dominance and wealth that the Bell Group could only dream about, who presided over a decade and a half of near-zero interest rates. None of whom elected to establish/fund public-facing research campuses stuffed with Nobel laureates conducting their own frontier research departments. What’s worse, most of them instead chose to turn their oligopolies towards seeking to control the media and political process, privatizing what was left of America’s public aerospace programs, gatekeeping research and development, and subsidizing their further encroachments with the resulting government contracts.

How are these the people we granted so much power and influence to? Was it simply that Silicon Valley was captured by the financial industry? Was the origin story always a convenient myth, that nobody ever actually took seriously, or objected to when it was cynically exploited by the patently disingenuous and greedy CEOs who have, without exception, acted in the worst interests of their users, society, and the planet? Just the base selfishness of human nature?

Were the research and development labs of the post-war American era just a flash in the pan, or could Silicon Valley someday rediscover its lost soul? I’d reckon we’d all be better off for it, but I am also concerned that I simply fell the for the marketing hype, and there never was the altruistic spirit of innovation I’d always imagined.