Silicon Valley's Deep History Of Communalism

This brilliant interview with Silicon-Valley journalist and professor Fred Turner starts at the beginning of it all. Where does the idea so endemic to contemporary tech culture, that “technology is always a force for good”, come from?

Turner is exactly the right person to ask this kind of gigantic, to-the-heart-of-the-matter question. He explains with blunt simplicity his own view of how Silicon Valley came to be the techno-utopian haven it is today, via 1960s Californian “Communalism” and a certain brand of apolitical idealism.

As he says, companies like Google and Facebook are “imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics”. And yet they have “co-opted a series of the emblems of the counterculture” in order to market subversion to consumers. Along with politics has gone the ethics of design beyond the question of “does it work”, which is, Turner says, the engineer’s only barometer of success.

“If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object.”

This has led to a laissez-faire system where the product is the plan, and what’s good for the company producing the product is seen as good for the public.

This in-depth interview is a fantastic read for its clarity and simplicity on a set of nuanced cultural questions. And then there are Turner's humorous perspectives on Burning Man, Elon Musk … the quotable quips go on and on.