During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, I edited a newsmagazine out of San Francisco called The Industry Standard that both lived and chronicled the birth of the Internet economy. Across the city, there was an exuberance in the air, infused with an idealistic belief that the emerging Internet would empower people in untold new ways and make the world a better place.
We knew it was a bubble moment, and that the lofty ideals were weighted with contradictions that would eventually bring us back to earth. But in the magazine, and at the boozy and jam-packed Friday parties we hosted on our rooftop, we reveled in being part of the internet revolution, confident we were on the right side of history.
Today, the effervescent, counterculture-inflected techno-optimism of that era, which defined the internet industry for the better part of 30 years, is quickly fading away. It’s a victim, in part, of its own failed promises. But it’s also an unfortunate casualty of the country’s political wars.
It’s now fashionable in tech circles to dismiss the old idealism as naïve and self-indulgent. The powerful cadre of right-wing tech executives who’ve risen to power in the second Trump Administration dismiss it as something they consider even worse: a manifestation of “radical woke left” ideology, as the President put it not long ago in denouncing the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. They are championing a very different version of techno-optimism, one that dispenses with inclusive humanist values in favor of a militaristic nationalism and a harshly Darwinian view of capitalist competition.
