Of course, the Silicon Valley has never been flowers and psychedillers. “Despite everything that can flatter counterculture roots, earning money and collecting power has always been in the mainstream,” says the Capor. And of course the Valley’s policy has always adapted a mighty libertarian load.
But even the Venture Capital capitalists seemed to be in a sense of revolution – just like the weather, they go from making bombs to making IPO shows. When the internet arrived like a thunder, an ideological soundtrack became an excruciating ear. In his renowned 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” My friend John Perry Barlow argued that the internet exceeded the rights and limits of the earth. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not concern us,” he wrote.
Oh my God, did we publish our hopes on the Internet. When I met them, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were idealists with wide eyes open. Jeff Bezos appeared like a buddy, willingly indicating that Amazon employees founded their computers on reproduced wooden doors instead of steep offices. After my first conversation with Zuckerberg, he returned home to a compact apartment without furniture.
And then the giants of the Internet increased their companies to impose their own concepts of expression, identity and context. Once these humble leaders collected unimaginable awards. Now they cannot flash with their wealth – houses, yachts, planes.
In usually pleasant in July I met with Russell Hancock, who runs a think tank called Venture Silicon Valley, in his salon of his house Palo Alto. He caught him during the technological disaster in 2000; Now you can’t buy a hut in Paly without a generation of wealth. Page and Zuckerberg, dissatisfied with one farm, took up nearby real estate, transforming the idyllic streets into Supervillain relationships once.
“People who do fabulously well have a great time,” says Hancock. For all others, in the Silicon Valley, the gap of wealth is becoming more and more absurd. When Apple had its public offer in 1980, Steve Jobs’s net value was almost $ 100 million. Now Zuckerberg reportedly offers artificial intelligence researchers so much moolah for one year of work. Hancock distinguishes a gini factor, a measure of unevenness, which is popular among the crowd of the World Bank. From the 1990s, “we have gone from 30 to Gini to 83,” he says. “These are the conditions of the French Revolution.”
Another great change developed. For the longest time, notes Chris Lehane, a former employee of Bill Clinton, who worked for companies such as Airbnb and Opeli, the software “was almost like the fourth dimension.” Technology leaders could afford to stay west and avoid politics. But then the software products began to unfold entire business sectors. “These products were physically manifested in taxis, short -term rents and food supplies,” says Lehane, “undermining existing political systems, beliefs, rights.” Sometimes people died after this invasion. Aged, beloved companies closed. Local politicians went crazy. To play the system, the Silicon Valley jumped onto the swamp. As one technologist from the current administration tells me: “The valley now realizes that he cannot ignore politics because politics will not ignore you.”