[JKCalhoun]

Silicon Valley is different in my mind because, well, back in the 1970's, it was arguably not evil.

Woz and the nerds were making machines at home, later hooking them up to one another with the janky telephone service as the interconnect. And this kid, just getting a taste of BBSs in Kansas in the mid 1980's, was so envious of the outrageous number of BBSs in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, San Jose…—all strange names to me. But I saw that they were all in California.

When a job offer got me to move out to the Bay Area in the early 90's there was still a kind of soft echo of those times. Plenty of electronics recycling warehouses you could wander through (and recognizing some of the same faces, often older men, as you moved through your morning circuit to the next warehouse). Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, etc.

I had a career there, raised a family there. I watched the dot-com boom/bust, the rise of the internet, Google, and the slow decline of the hardware focus of "The Valley".

When the last of my daughters left the nest, the wife and I sold the house and I retired back to the Midwaste where the two of us grew up. Weird Stuff Warehouse had recently closed up shop and that seems now as fitting a time as any to have said goodbye to The Valley.

[wslh]

I conjecture that what you're describing was deeply tied to the size, quality, and spirit of that original community (and consumers). A relatively small cluster of tinkerers, shared physical spaces, and a sense of discovery created a moral atmosphere very different from today's massive global tech hub shaped by billions in capital.

To put the scale shift in perspective: Apple sold only a couple of million Apple IIs in that entire era. Today, the iPhone sits in the multi-billion range since 2007. Once a technology ecosystem expands by three orders of magnitude, its culture cannot remain the same.

The early Valley wasn’t "good" in an absolute sense, it was simply relatively small, intimate, and guided by shared values. As growth, global competition, and finances took over, the culture changed in ways that were probably inevitable.

[cmrdporcupine]

All that is different is that you and I have had bargaining power and scarcity far far beyond the average skilled worker.

That bargaining power came from our ability to surf the crest of the wave that was over and over crashing through existing industries, turning them on their head with the promise and practice of automating via computation. In many cases deskilling the jobs of other workers.

We could play the part of magicians who knew these arcane arts and get paid accordingly.

There is precisely zero guarantee that any of this will continue. In the latest wave it seems like it is we ourselves who are being submerged beneath the wave.