Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Silicon Valley Needs Washington After All by Chris Hughes
First, Silicon Valley’s founders believed they didn’t need government. Then they believed they could demolish it. Now they’ve decided to use it where they can and appease it where they must. This latest turn may usher in a new era of AI industrial policy.
The disdain came first. Robert Noyce famously ran Intel (founded in 1968) as an experiment in flat, anti-hierarchical management and viewed Washington as a distant irrelevance. The style became known as the “Californian ideology,” quasi-hippie bohemianism mixed with libertarian contempt for the state. That convenient self-image required ignoring an inconvenient history that the federal government was the semiconductor industry’s indispensable early customer. The Apollo program bought the chips that made Silicon Valley possible, the Defense Department built the first version of the internet, and the Reagan administration came to Noyce’s aid when Japan threatened to displace Intel. The disdain was real, but the independence was mythology.
By the 2000s, the anti-state mythology had grown more ambitious. If government was unnecessary, why not build civilization without it? Peter Thiel bankrolled the Seasteading Institute to construct floating city-states beyond the reach of any flag, and Tony Hsieh spent $350 million trying to conjure a new urban order out of downtown Las Vegas. Balaji Srinivasan preached the “network state.” The people who built software could build a society, too, and the state was legacy code. These ventures either never got off the ground or collapsed in spectacular fashion.
In the 2010s, the tech companies began styling themselves as the primary forces of progress in American capitalism. Their products, the story went, were connecting the world, fueling righteous revolutions, and giving the marginalized a voice. The companies became the champions of woke capitalism. Racial justice trainings and pronoun protocols were paired with free kombucha and dry cleaning. Meta stocked tampons in the men’s rooms.
The disdain came first. Robert Noyce famously ran Intel (founded in 1968) as an experiment in flat, anti-hierarchical management and viewed Washington as a distant irrelevance. The style became known as the “Californian ideology,” quasi-hippie bohemianism mixed with libertarian contempt for the state. That convenient self-image required ignoring an inconvenient history that the federal government was the semiconductor industry’s indispensable early customer. The Apollo program bought the chips that made Silicon Valley possible, the Defense Department built the first version of the internet, and the Reagan administration came to Noyce’s aid when Japan threatened to displace Intel. The disdain was real, but the independence was mythology.
By the 2000s, the anti-state mythology had grown more ambitious. If government was unnecessary, why not build civilization without it? Peter Thiel bankrolled the Seasteading Institute to construct floating city-states beyond the reach of any flag, and Tony Hsieh spent $350 million trying to conjure a new urban order out of downtown Las Vegas. Balaji Srinivasan preached the “network state.” The people who built software could build a society, too, and the state was legacy code. These ventures either never got off the ground or collapsed in spectacular fashion.
In the 2010s, the tech companies began styling themselves as the primary forces of progress in American capitalism. Their products, the story went, were connecting the world, fueling righteous revolutions, and giving the marginalized a voice. The companies became the champions of woke capitalism. Racial justice trainings and pronoun protocols were paired with free kombucha and dry cleaning. Meta stocked tampons in the men’s rooms.
https://prospect.org/2026/07/14/silicon-valley-needs-washington-intel-facebook-meta-zuckerberg-openai-anthropic/