Yes, the loss of the Aaron Schwartz-style hacker has altered Valley fundamentally.
IMHO, the first cultural shift in the valley was from the early slide-rule-in-the-pocket engineers of the semiconductor industry (1960s-70s) to the homebrew computer club hackers of the pc era (1980s-90s) to the blitzscaling PayPal mafia of the early 2000s (Thiel, Hoffman, Musk, Sachs.) Graham started YCombinator in 2005 so is firmly in that generation.
While hacker culture still exists in niches, they were the guys who messed around with computer hardware when systems were still open and could be flexibly recombined. By the 2010s the main action was in software and access was increasingly locked down by the giant internet companies. With strictly enforced copyright and DRM and other IP restrictions, it’s impossible to be a hacker (to reverse engineer or even repair most devices and software).
Graham is as smart as they come, and his "Hackers and Painters" book was devoured. I can't find it now, probably pressed it into somebody's hands eagerly.
But I got to his essay on income 'distribution' and how he hates that the statistics term implies to some people that money is *distributed* by some decisions, and should be distributed more fairly by these powers. How wrong a view this was, how wrong to re-distribute by force.
He'd been so smart up to that point, and suddenly was clueless than Reagan's tax changes had indeed changed the "distribution" of society's benefits by force. Totally clueless that all the wealth of the web depended upon a rich, literate society to even use it, much less create new wealth with it, that schools and hospitals had to keep going for his business models to work at all.
It was quite a reminder about how limited intelligence can be (and made me wonder what I was blind to, while imagining myself smart and informed). Not to say the rest of the essays about computer languages and so on were not great.
But the book to read is Cory Pein's "Work work work die" about the Valley. By the end you realize that no smart programming has ever beaten the company that got there first, with a billion behind them.
Behind the disingenuous attempt to turn a very factual discussion into a pointless quacking about words, it's really crazy how fond they are of "woke" reasoning when they can cast themselves as the oppressed class.
Like, saying that talking about income distribution (the same way we talk about distribution of height or fish or volcanic explosion) betrays some secret nefarious purposes is pretty much the level of the almost self-parodic pondering on the intersectional valence of using "the dark side" to denote the villains lol. They re-invented the silliest part of Tumblr 2020, but in defense of Reaganism Forever
Pretty much the bad guys won. I'm not entirely sure if that's structural (capitalism) or contingent-cultural (Aaron died, the people representing other branch points got pushed off the grid). The continuing interest I have in the culture of tech, big and small, in the making of digital culture, is that it contains such multitudes of possibility but also raises the question of whether any of those possibilities could ever have manifested within the architecture of financialized capitalism. It was painful even back then to read someone like Negroponte who just thought the tech was magically just and good and utopian, but it's even more painful now, because they either enabled Graham, Altman, Musk, etc. by being as remarkably stupid as they were about the world or they were in on the game. But it's equally painful to read someone like Clifford Stoll, who was always and absolutely sure that there was no possibility at all in any of it, that a hacker sensibility couldn't be adroitly enabling to making the infrastructure underpinning work and life better in some fashion.
After reading From Counterculture to Cyberculture and the Californian Ideology I'm pretty sure you were right in the latter part of your second sentence and the whole thing was cooked from the start. But - I also think it's worth remembering that post-Eternal September the Internet was going to become something like it is today. After a point, the majority of users were never going to be "hackers" (well-educated, technically astute, first-world Westerners who want to do things like access academic papers) but ordinary people who want to use the internet as a utility, source of entertainment, and means of self-expression. VCs were actually pretty great at responding to those demands.
One thing I think is underrated about the contingent development of the internet is just the GFC in general. I think it could have turned out genuinely differently if money hadn't been free for a decade and VCs couldn't just throw anything at the wall to see what stuck.
Really true that an incredibly important part of the story is the combination of the financialization of the global economy and a long period of time where money cost nothing to borrow and there was no place to put the vast seas of cash sloshing around in corporate accounts besides speculative start-ups. At some point in that process, you stopped having to actually build a product that worked really well for those majority consumers.
Your mention of Clifford Stoll is both spot on and makes me sad. As I think I've mentioned before, I read _Cuckoo's Egg_ as a teenager and that was what I wanted to be when I grew up -- biking to work and getting absorbed in interesting problems.
I've never heard of Clifford Stoll, but I'm just going off of a quote from Silicon Snake Oil on his Wikipedia page:
"I'm mainly speaking to people who feel mystically lured to the Internet: lotus-eaters, beware. Life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you'll ever find on a computer screen." Stoll later acknowledged that the book was a mistake.
From a 2024 perspective - was he really wrong here, at all? I suppose what he mainly underestimated was the economic power of the internet...
Note entirely wrong, but I think he also underestimated the creative power of the internet.
I occasionally think about Ze Frank's TED talk which feels very dated (I posted it at one point with the comment "2010 seems like a long time ago), but also captures part of what makes the online world compelling and interesting: https://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_my_web_playroom?subtitle=en
So, this is a genuine question, because I can’t wrap my head around it: we lionize Swartz for his efforts to provide open access to copyrighted material (honestly, what I miss the most about leaving an R1 university for the private sector is the loss of access to a real research library); but we are pissed about openai/google/msoft using copyrighted material to train their generative models. I’m not sure how to square this circle, other than saying that it’s about the power asymmetry (open access as public good vs private resource). But then how should we deal with the concept of intellectual property at all?
If intellectual property is important for reasons of acknowledging who did the work - Swartz did not remove the attributions of authorship when he downloaded articles from JSTOR. Using the same articles to train generative models, by virtue of the ways in which they function, do not preserve attributions in any sense.
If intellectual property is important for reasons of compensation - Most academic publishing does not involve the proceeds being distributed directly to the authors in any meaningful sense. However, at least the publishers do have a role in supporting the knowledge ecosystem. The extent to which Swartz’s actions undermined this are limited. Since 2013, many publishers have open access journals (which often function by academics paying to publish). In Australia at least, some government funding of scientific research requires researchers to agree that their findings will be published in journals accessible to the public.
Attribution also has a direct impact on funding research as citations increase the status of researchers, meaning that they are more likely to get successful grants and positions at research institutions.
Finally: Swartz did not seek to directly profit from his actions, whereas Altman et al. are aiming to generate as much personal wealth as they can through this interaction with research publications. Feels like Altman just wants to frack the libraries of human knowledge for his own gratification and success. Or, I suspect, to build some kind of ”logical“ “god“ to worship.
Andreessen at this point is basically trying to topple the government (or at least the useful parts of it that protect the citizenry from all the frauds a16z has backed or is involved with).
It kind of had to happen. All That Money, owned by some reasonably bright (as distinguished from intelligent) guys, enabled a cult of the only thing they understand and value, running a startup. And at least in their minds, they have to erase the guys who grew Apple from a cute boutique computer niche company into the behemoth it is today, for example, because Founders don't need anybody. Their powers are far beyond those of mortal men.
There was a quote I read a long time ago about Silicon Valley (maybe the Media Lab?) that basically says its dream is a world of capital without labor. I think about that a lot.
The magic of software makes it plausible to them. You sit at a computer, write a program, and sell it for millions of dollars. Who needs labor? Kind of like when someone asked Abbie Hoffman who would pick up garbage in a Yippie utopia, he said there would always be some losers, like Republicans, who would want to do that. Details are for little people, not Founders.
This is now way more than plausible. It is the Way It's Done. Money making money. It is why no matter how highly valued a (non-financial) company is, the finance companies will always dwarf them when the crunch comes. Capital Unbound!
The big tech companies are finance companies as much as they can be, because they've seen how the money flows, and they've stuck their hands in the current.
Very interesting, I think it gives structure and context to some hunches many nerds had w/o being able to fully articulate them.
But I'd go a bit beyond: it's only resentment of C-suits and 100x programmers (or technical prodigies in general) to drive the Graham spiel. It's resentment for rank-and-file workers as well. His burning hatred and contempt for the "laptop class" includes pretty much *everyone* toiling to make him money.
The deranged reactions to all those "a day as project managers", the social conservativism, cantankerous old guy tone etc reveal how much it hurts for them, who feel special and entitled to blind loyalty, to be told "look, I'm going to ask for X and demand a modicum of respect, or I'm going to FAANG", as many of their employees are able to do.
In their warped and self-centric view, the entire society is conspiring to put hurdles on their most righteous quest for greatness: why do decent programmers have good outside options? Why do we need to comply with the law (and hire people checking that we do)? Why can't those ingrates be my do or die gang and work tirelessly for my dream out of the sheer importance of it? Why do they insist in having lives and individual needs when *my* future is at stake?
Social proof and sycophantry have turned them into spoiled brats, who despite having everything, ask for more, and the tantrum they throw when the word finally tells them "no" is taken to be some profound reflection on social malaise
I appreciate this, and had a similar view as I was reading founder mode. Though I think you don't give proper credit where it's sometimes due. Musk really is a special guy. It comes with many bad things, including his micromanaging being often harmful, but this guy is exceptionally unique, smart, determined, and special. I'm not saying his effect is net-good on the world. But he has done net-good things that only a very small group of people could have achieved.
More broadly, big-vision founders do have many unique characteristics that many people do not. Like Jensen Huang being terribly scared of falling behind others, despite having such huge wealth. What sort of person is so motivated to push and push and push despite being one of the richest people in the world? That is special and unique.
Also, the general thesis that "founder mode will create and grow VC-scale companies better than non-founder modes" is somewhat reasonable given the information that Graham has gleaned. The true problem is what to value. Is growing a company as fast and as big as possible the #1 goal (over things like building a net-good product, caring about employee wellbeing, building smaller sustainable companies etc). Graham implies that this is true, and that's the core of where I differ.
Said another way, if SV was more drawn to the "cult of the Woz", less big and disruptive companies would be made. The cult of the founder, I think, causes these grand successes. But there are many negative side effects, often including the grand successes themselves being harmful for the world.
Yes, the loss of the Aaron Schwartz-style hacker has altered Valley fundamentally.
IMHO, the first cultural shift in the valley was from the early slide-rule-in-the-pocket engineers of the semiconductor industry (1960s-70s) to the homebrew computer club hackers of the pc era (1980s-90s) to the blitzscaling PayPal mafia of the early 2000s (Thiel, Hoffman, Musk, Sachs.) Graham started YCombinator in 2005 so is firmly in that generation.
While hacker culture still exists in niches, they were the guys who messed around with computer hardware when systems were still open and could be flexibly recombined. By the 2010s the main action was in software and access was increasingly locked down by the giant internet companies. With strictly enforced copyright and DRM and other IP restrictions, it’s impossible to be a hacker (to reverse engineer or even repair most devices and software).
Graham is as smart as they come, and his "Hackers and Painters" book was devoured. I can't find it now, probably pressed it into somebody's hands eagerly.
But I got to his essay on income 'distribution' and how he hates that the statistics term implies to some people that money is *distributed* by some decisions, and should be distributed more fairly by these powers. How wrong a view this was, how wrong to re-distribute by force.
He'd been so smart up to that point, and suddenly was clueless than Reagan's tax changes had indeed changed the "distribution" of society's benefits by force. Totally clueless that all the wealth of the web depended upon a rich, literate society to even use it, much less create new wealth with it, that schools and hospitals had to keep going for his business models to work at all.
It was quite a reminder about how limited intelligence can be (and made me wonder what I was blind to, while imagining myself smart and informed). Not to say the rest of the essays about computer languages and so on were not great.
But the book to read is Cory Pein's "Work work work die" about the Valley. By the end you realize that no smart programming has ever beaten the company that got there first, with a billion behind them.
Clueless, or disingenuous?
Behind the disingenuous attempt to turn a very factual discussion into a pointless quacking about words, it's really crazy how fond they are of "woke" reasoning when they can cast themselves as the oppressed class.
Like, saying that talking about income distribution (the same way we talk about distribution of height or fish or volcanic explosion) betrays some secret nefarious purposes is pretty much the level of the almost self-parodic pondering on the intersectional valence of using "the dark side" to denote the villains lol. They re-invented the silliest part of Tumblr 2020, but in defense of Reaganism Forever
Pretty much the bad guys won. I'm not entirely sure if that's structural (capitalism) or contingent-cultural (Aaron died, the people representing other branch points got pushed off the grid). The continuing interest I have in the culture of tech, big and small, in the making of digital culture, is that it contains such multitudes of possibility but also raises the question of whether any of those possibilities could ever have manifested within the architecture of financialized capitalism. It was painful even back then to read someone like Negroponte who just thought the tech was magically just and good and utopian, but it's even more painful now, because they either enabled Graham, Altman, Musk, etc. by being as remarkably stupid as they were about the world or they were in on the game. But it's equally painful to read someone like Clifford Stoll, who was always and absolutely sure that there was no possibility at all in any of it, that a hacker sensibility couldn't be adroitly enabling to making the infrastructure underpinning work and life better in some fashion.
After reading From Counterculture to Cyberculture and the Californian Ideology I'm pretty sure you were right in the latter part of your second sentence and the whole thing was cooked from the start. But - I also think it's worth remembering that post-Eternal September the Internet was going to become something like it is today. After a point, the majority of users were never going to be "hackers" (well-educated, technically astute, first-world Westerners who want to do things like access academic papers) but ordinary people who want to use the internet as a utility, source of entertainment, and means of self-expression. VCs were actually pretty great at responding to those demands.
One thing I think is underrated about the contingent development of the internet is just the GFC in general. I think it could have turned out genuinely differently if money hadn't been free for a decade and VCs couldn't just throw anything at the wall to see what stuck.
Really true that an incredibly important part of the story is the combination of the financialization of the global economy and a long period of time where money cost nothing to borrow and there was no place to put the vast seas of cash sloshing around in corporate accounts besides speculative start-ups. At some point in that process, you stopped having to actually build a product that worked really well for those majority consumers.
Your mention of Clifford Stoll is both spot on and makes me sad. As I think I've mentioned before, I read _Cuckoo's Egg_ as a teenager and that was what I wanted to be when I grew up -- biking to work and getting absorbed in interesting problems.
I've never heard of Clifford Stoll, but I'm just going off of a quote from Silicon Snake Oil on his Wikipedia page:
"I'm mainly speaking to people who feel mystically lured to the Internet: lotus-eaters, beware. Life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you'll ever find on a computer screen." Stoll later acknowledged that the book was a mistake.
From a 2024 perspective - was he really wrong here, at all? I suppose what he mainly underestimated was the economic power of the internet...
Note entirely wrong, but I think he also underestimated the creative power of the internet.
I occasionally think about Ze Frank's TED talk which feels very dated (I posted it at one point with the comment "2010 seems like a long time ago), but also captures part of what makes the online world compelling and interesting: https://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_my_web_playroom?subtitle=en
So, this is a genuine question, because I can’t wrap my head around it: we lionize Swartz for his efforts to provide open access to copyrighted material (honestly, what I miss the most about leaving an R1 university for the private sector is the loss of access to a real research library); but we are pissed about openai/google/msoft using copyrighted material to train their generative models. I’m not sure how to square this circle, other than saying that it’s about the power asymmetry (open access as public good vs private resource). But then how should we deal with the concept of intellectual property at all?
If intellectual property is important for reasons of acknowledging who did the work - Swartz did not remove the attributions of authorship when he downloaded articles from JSTOR. Using the same articles to train generative models, by virtue of the ways in which they function, do not preserve attributions in any sense.
If intellectual property is important for reasons of compensation - Most academic publishing does not involve the proceeds being distributed directly to the authors in any meaningful sense. However, at least the publishers do have a role in supporting the knowledge ecosystem. The extent to which Swartz’s actions undermined this are limited. Since 2013, many publishers have open access journals (which often function by academics paying to publish). In Australia at least, some government funding of scientific research requires researchers to agree that their findings will be published in journals accessible to the public.
Attribution also has a direct impact on funding research as citations increase the status of researchers, meaning that they are more likely to get successful grants and positions at research institutions.
Finally: Swartz did not seek to directly profit from his actions, whereas Altman et al. are aiming to generate as much personal wealth as they can through this interaction with research publications. Feels like Altman just wants to frack the libraries of human knowledge for his own gratification and success. Or, I suspect, to build some kind of ”logical“ “god“ to worship.
First class response. I wish I could like it twice!
Andreessen at this point is basically trying to topple the government (or at least the useful parts of it that protect the citizenry from all the frauds a16z has backed or is involved with).
some specifics on a16z, Uniswap, and North Korean sanctions evasion: https://cryptadamus.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/147604371
It kind of had to happen. All That Money, owned by some reasonably bright (as distinguished from intelligent) guys, enabled a cult of the only thing they understand and value, running a startup. And at least in their minds, they have to erase the guys who grew Apple from a cute boutique computer niche company into the behemoth it is today, for example, because Founders don't need anybody. Their powers are far beyond those of mortal men.
There was a quote I read a long time ago about Silicon Valley (maybe the Media Lab?) that basically says its dream is a world of capital without labor. I think about that a lot.
The magic of software makes it plausible to them. You sit at a computer, write a program, and sell it for millions of dollars. Who needs labor? Kind of like when someone asked Abbie Hoffman who would pick up garbage in a Yippie utopia, he said there would always be some losers, like Republicans, who would want to do that. Details are for little people, not Founders.
This is now way more than plausible. It is the Way It's Done. Money making money. It is why no matter how highly valued a (non-financial) company is, the finance companies will always dwarf them when the crunch comes. Capital Unbound!
The big tech companies are finance companies as much as they can be, because they've seen how the money flows, and they've stuck their hands in the current.
I appreciate this post, and it makes me want to write a post going on a tangent about the nature of meritocracy . . .
Love this. Thanks for writing, Dave.
Very interesting, I think it gives structure and context to some hunches many nerds had w/o being able to fully articulate them.
But I'd go a bit beyond: it's only resentment of C-suits and 100x programmers (or technical prodigies in general) to drive the Graham spiel. It's resentment for rank-and-file workers as well. His burning hatred and contempt for the "laptop class" includes pretty much *everyone* toiling to make him money.
The deranged reactions to all those "a day as project managers", the social conservativism, cantankerous old guy tone etc reveal how much it hurts for them, who feel special and entitled to blind loyalty, to be told "look, I'm going to ask for X and demand a modicum of respect, or I'm going to FAANG", as many of their employees are able to do.
In their warped and self-centric view, the entire society is conspiring to put hurdles on their most righteous quest for greatness: why do decent programmers have good outside options? Why do we need to comply with the law (and hire people checking that we do)? Why can't those ingrates be my do or die gang and work tirelessly for my dream out of the sheer importance of it? Why do they insist in having lives and individual needs when *my* future is at stake?
Social proof and sycophantry have turned them into spoiled brats, who despite having everything, ask for more, and the tantrum they throw when the word finally tells them "no" is taken to be some profound reflection on social malaise
Not a single woman mentioned among the 15 or so people referred to in this column also seems like something wrong with Silicon Valley.
I appreciate this, and had a similar view as I was reading founder mode. Though I think you don't give proper credit where it's sometimes due. Musk really is a special guy. It comes with many bad things, including his micromanaging being often harmful, but this guy is exceptionally unique, smart, determined, and special. I'm not saying his effect is net-good on the world. But he has done net-good things that only a very small group of people could have achieved.
More broadly, big-vision founders do have many unique characteristics that many people do not. Like Jensen Huang being terribly scared of falling behind others, despite having such huge wealth. What sort of person is so motivated to push and push and push despite being one of the richest people in the world? That is special and unique.
Also, the general thesis that "founder mode will create and grow VC-scale companies better than non-founder modes" is somewhat reasonable given the information that Graham has gleaned. The true problem is what to value. Is growing a company as fast and as big as possible the #1 goal (over things like building a net-good product, caring about employee wellbeing, building smaller sustainable companies etc). Graham implies that this is true, and that's the core of where I differ.
Said another way, if SV was more drawn to the "cult of the Woz", less big and disruptive companies would be made. The cult of the founder, I think, causes these grand successes. But there are many negative side effects, often including the grand successes themselves being harmful for the world.
The secret to my success? Exploitation.
I built myself an empire
From a load of useless garbage
Called the blood of the exploited working class...
I like your neat writing and the picture of nerds unearned at the time.