Stavroula Pabst
These days, tech companies are publicly warming up to the defense sector. Department of Defense spending is increasingly going to large tech companies including Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Oracle, and IBM. Open AI recently brought on former U.S. Army general and National Security Agency Director Paul M. Nakasone to its Board of Directors. And a growing clan of Silicon Valley-based “techno-patriots,” including the likes of Anduril’s Palmer Luckey and Andreessen-Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, seem eager to prove that the technology industry can alleviate the United States’ geostrategic and economic weaknesses — if awarded the military contracts to do so.
But the increasingly public relationship Silicon Valley enjoys with the Pentagon is no sudden development. Rather, Silicon Valley was made by — and in the service of — a U.S. government and military eager to establish dominance over its adversaries in the Cold War and beyond. Namely, extensive and consistent post-war era government funds, and especially military contracting, overhauled the American technology industry, transforming the once-quiet region surrounding Mountain View, California into the bustling tech metropolis it is today.
A (military) history of Silicon Valley
Tech industry enthusiasts are eager to attribute Silicon Valley’s success to free market entrepreneurship, where great ideas born in suburban California garages took off through hard work and grit. In reality, regional post-war era entrepreneurs and researchers had help from a U.S. government eager to spend on research and development: in a sustained Cold War with the Soviet Union, competition in the technology, space, and arms sectors was stiff.
No comments:
Post a Comment