It\u2019s become a common refrain among a certain set of Silicon Valley elite: They\u2019ve been treated so unfairly. Case in point: Even after their bank of choice collapsed spectacularly \u2014 in no small part of their own doing \u2014 and the federal government moved with dispatch to guarantee all its deposits, tech execs and investors nonetheless spent the subsequent days loudly playing the victim.<\/p>\n
The prominent venture capitalist David Sacks, who had lobbied particularly hard for government intervention, bemoaned a \u201chateful media that will make me be whatever they need me to be in order to keep their attack machine going.\u201d Michael Solana, a vice president at Peter Thiel\u2019s Founder Fund, wrote on his blog that \u201ctech is now universally hated,\u201d warned of an incoming \u201cpolitical war,\u201d and claimed \u201ca lot of people … genuinely seem to want a good old fashioned mass murder,\u201d presumably of tech execs.<\/p>\n
It was a particularly galling display, a new high for a trend that\u2019s been on the rise for some time. Amid congressional hearings and dipping stock valuations, the tech elite have bemoaned the so-called techlash against their industry by those who worry it\u2019s grown too large and unaccountable. Waving away legitimate questions about the industry\u2019s labor inequities, climate impacts and civil rights abuses, they claim that the press is biased against them and that they\u2019re besieged on all sides by woke critics.<\/p>\n
If only they realized just how good they have it, historically speaking.<\/p>\n
It was mere decades ago, after all, that the Silicon Valley elite faced the active threat of actual, non-metaphorical violence. The most adamant critics of Big Tech of the 1970s didn\u2019t write strongly worded columns chastising them in newspapers or blast their politics on social media \u2014 they physically occupied their computer labs, destroyed their capital equipment, and even bombed their homes.<\/p>\n
\u201cTechlash is what Silicon Valley\u2019s ownership class calls it when people don\u2019t buy their stock,\u201d author Malcolm Harris tells me. \u201cToday\u2019s tech billionaires are lucky people are making fun of them on the internet instead of firebombing their houses \u2014 that\u2019s what happened to Bill Hewlett back in the day.\u201d<\/p>\n
A 1987 article in this newspaper makes his point. When William Hewlett retired from the company he founded, Hewlett-Packard, or HP, as it\u2019s known today, The Los Angeles Times dedicated a full paragraph to the various threats of violence that the billionaire faced in the 1970s:<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 1971, radical animosities directed at the upscale Palo Alto community and Stanford University campus brought terror into the Hewletts\u2019 lives: The modest Hewlett family home was fire-bombed. In 1976, son James, then 28, fought off would-be kidnappers. The same year, a radical group called the Red Guerrilla Family claimed responsibility when a bomb exploded in an HP building.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris is the author of \u201cPalo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World,\u201d the book that is currently the talk of the town \u2014 it just hit the L.A. Times bestseller list \u2014 though not for the reasons that the valley\u2019s elites might prefer. It\u2019s a robust, sprawling history that\u2019s intensely critical of the Great Men of tech history, and even more so of the systems they served. It\u2019s been received enthusiastically, as an overdue corrective to the industry\u2019s potent penchant for self-mythology.<\/p>\n
And some of the most potent mythologies, of course, rely on omission. Take, for instance, the popular narrative that whiz kids such as Hewlett and Steve Jobs started the computer revolutions from their garages in Palo Alto, where their starkest opposition came in the form of square old corporations such as IBM and Xerox \u2014 and not actual, bomb-throwing revolutionaries.<\/p>\n
Harris\u2019 work reminds us that this was far from the case. There was a movement far more organized, far more militant, and far more sharply opposed to the Big Tech companies of the day than anything we\u2019ve seen in the last 10 years, and it\u2019s not even close.<\/p>\n
When we think of the 1960s in California, we think of disparate, panoramic happenings in an explosive decade; the war in Vietnam, the rise of the computer, the student protest movement, and so on. But Harris argues that the computer revolution didn\u2019t simply coexist with the war \u2014 it fueled it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese developments weren\u2019t just connected,\u201d Harris writes, \u201cthey were the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Intel and Hewlett-Packard revolutionized microchips, alright, but they sold them to the U.S. military, which used them to guide the weapons of war it was deploying in Southeast Asia. To the students, activists and organizers of the so-called New Left, Silicon Valley was hard-wiring the war effort. It was an instrument of oppression, and it had blood on its hands.<\/p>\n
All this set the stage for a revolt against Silicon Valley\u2019s core operators. Palo Alto radicals \u201csingled out Stanford\u2019s industrial community and its role in the Vietnam War specifically and capitalist imperialism generally,\u201d Harris writes. \u201cAnd once they got their collective finger pointed in the right place, they attacked.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not a euphemism either. They really, quite physically, attacked the people and infrastructure of Silicon Valley that were connected to the war effort.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe New Left tried to blow up more or less every computer they could get their hands on,\u201d Harris says. \u201cAnd since both were likely to be found on college campuses, they got their hands on a bunch of them.\u201d (At the time, remember, there was no PC \u2014 computers were still room-sized machines.)<\/p>\n
The reasoning was simple: These computers were making the war possible, both by providing the physical hardware for missile targeting systems and such, and by processing data used to plan combat missions. The war caused untold suffering and death; dismantle the war machine, hamper the war effort. So that\u2019s exactly what members of Stanford\u2019s left organizers, affiliated with groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), tried to do.<\/p>\n
First, they attempted peaceful tactics, such as a pressure campaign to halt the manufacture of napalm. It didn\u2019t work. So, taking their cues from the Black Panther Party, which was at the time perhaps the most powerful and influential radical left group in the nation, Stanford students \u2014 and even faculty \u2014 adopted direct and militant tactics. They published maps of the high-profile tech companies and research offices in Palo Alto that had won defense contracts or were otherwise involved in the war effort.<\/p>\n
After the U.S. military bombed Cambodia, the student left escalated its tactics by targeting the very data processing infrastructure that was aiding the war effort.<\/p>\n
They occupied the Applied Electronics Laboratory in Stanford itself. The AEL was an on-campus lab that was carrying out classified research for the war effort for the Pentagon, and students moved to shut it down. The occupation ended with a major concession: that classified military research no longer would be conducted on campus, and that its resources would be used instead for community purposes.<\/p>\n
The victory helped inspire copycat actions across the country \u2014 and even more militant ones. Students and activists bombed or destroyed with acid computer labs at Boston University, Loyola University, Fresno State, the University of Kansas, the University of Wisconsin, among others, causing millions of dollars in damage. The explosion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison killed Robert Fassnacht, a postdoctoral researcher who, unbeknownst to the saboteurs, had been working late at night. IBM offices in San Jose and New York were bombed too.<\/p>\n
With momentum at their backs, Stanford radicals decided to up the stakes, and to occupy an even larger target: The Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, an off-campus research center that was overseen by the university\u2019s board of trustees, and that had won enormous military contracts.<\/p>\n
\u201cStanford is the nerve center of this complex, which now does over 10% of the Pentagon\u2019s research and development,\u201d activists wrote in a flier promoting the action. It lambasted the \u201csocialized profits for the rich\u201d generated by the SRI, and how it was used to \u201cproduce weapons to put down insurgents at home and in the Third World.\u201d<\/p>\n
This flier had a map too, with the pertinent Big Tech buildings circled; Hewlett-Packard, Varian, SRI. It was labeled \u201cHow to Destroy an Empire.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a militant movement, and it was effective. It deterred investment in the war effort, made universities rethink their involvement with the Department of Defense, and it contributed to the eventual withdrawal and policy reforms won by the broader antiwar movement.<\/p>\n
So why don\u2019t we remember it much? Why do we remember the summer of love and communitarian counterculture and the Whole Earth Catalog \u2014 but not a violent struggle over the deployment of technology and those who profited from it?<\/p>\n
Or as Harris puts it: \u201cWhy are we more likely to hear about the Yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon than SDS successfully bombing the Pentagon?\u201d<\/p>\n
One reason is pretty simple: It\u2019s a feel-bad story that complicates the narrative that has grown increasingly central to how we understand the history of how our technology was invented and produced.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Silicon Valley in particular, the clear anti-tech strategy of the anti-war movement is inconvenient for the predominant \u2018hippies invented the Internet\u2019 narrative,\u201d Harris says, \u201cso many of the region\u2019s historians have shunted that part aside.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the fear remains. Even if there\u2019s been nothing resembling organized threats on their well-being \u2014 guillotine memes on Twitter don\u2019t count \u2014 today\u2019s tech elites can certainly feel the resentment brewing.<\/p>\n
Maybe that\u2019s why they\u2019re so sensitive to the suggestion that the government rescue of SVB was a \u201cventure capitalist bailout\u201d \u2014 that it was more special treatment for a constituency that drives Model Xs to their Tahoe ski chalets, that wants to reap the rewards of investing in world-changing technologies while bearing so little of the actual risk. Much of today\u2019s most visible tech set knows that lots of people don\u2019t like the inequality they represent, the preferential treatment they seem to enjoy, and the forces their companies and investments have set in motion.<\/p>\n
They surely see Amazon workers and Uber drivers becoming increasingly agitated and organized, and openly pushing for change against gross inequalities. They see movements for gender equality and climate justice at Google and Microsoft.<\/p>\n
They see the outrage over the fact that, like its forebears in Hewlett-Packard and earlier Silicon Valley companies, the newest iteration of Big Tech has become a major defense contractor too \u2014 Google, Amazon and Microsoft have vied to provide cloud, AI and robotics to the military \u2014 and they see movements opposing it, as in the #TechWontBuildIt effort, where tech workers campaigned to reject such projects. (And hey, HP is still a defense contractor.) They see backlash against social media companies giving authoritarian regimes the tools to commit atrocities. If they knew to look, today\u2019s tech elites might see a lot of the same kindling that was laid on the ground in the combustible \u201860s.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey think about this stuff constantly, but it\u2019s in the build-a-killer-robot-army way, not the Patagonia way,\u201d Harris says, referring to the former Patagonia billionaire Yvon Chouinard, who gave away his entire company as a means of combating the ills of extreme wealth.<\/p>\n
In other words, they\u2019d rather keep up the flame wars on social media and build survival bunkers in Montana than address the social ills their critics charge them with exacerbating.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they are very, very worried,\u201d Harris says. If history is any precedent \u2014 perhaps they should be.<\/p>\n
Brian Merchant is the Los Angeles Times\u2019 technology columnist.<\/p>\n