A flash from the past

Wired magazine's Steven Johnson, in an article outlining the evolution of Silicon Valley into a bastion of staunchly liberal politics, recalls a different time (1960s-90s) when idealistic, technology-influenced libertarianism was ascendant.

"Few people have a better vantage point to observe the shifting worldview of Bay Area technologists than Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well, one of the first online communities, and organizer of the first hacker conference in the 1980's.

“The people I knew in the Whole Earth Catalog were libertarian, and so was I, in a knee-jerk sort of way," Brand says. 'I bought Buckminster Fuller's line that if the world suddenly lost all of its politicians, everybody would carry on without a hiccup, but if it suddenly lost all its scientists and engineers, you wouldn't make it to Monday--and therefore don't focus on politics, focus on real stuff.'

"Steve Jobs called the Whole Earth Catalog 'one of the bibles' of his generation. It fused the counterculture's interest in community with a technologists's obsession with tools that might expand human freedom and self-sufficiency.

"The crescendo of Silicon Valley libertarianism would come in the 1990s, with the inflation of the original internet bubble. Empowered by that influence, public intellectuals from the tech sector offered up pronouncements that were genuinely antagonistic to the state, most famously John Perry Barlow's bombastic 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cybperspace:

'Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome
among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.'