The end of the Silicon Valley dream

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable centre of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomised by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better.

In the early days of the tech revolution, some watchers imagined an almost utopian, communitarian society on the horizon. In 1972, the California writer and zeitgeist diagnostician Stewart Brand predicted in Rolling Stone that when computers became widely available, we would all become ‘Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators.’ It would be a new era of enhanced ‘spontaneous creation and of human interaction.’ The ‘early digital idealists,’ tech guru Jaron Lanier recalled in 2014, envisioned a ‘sharing’ web that functioned ‘free from the constraints of the commercial order.