PHOTO: magazine cover illustrating a Silicon Valley "tech bro" for a cover story on the culture of young high-tech computer designers in Silicon Valley, California who are so "politically correct" they forced an executive to resign after it was revealed that he contributed money in support of an anti-gay marriage measure on the ballot in California. See p. 52 of the print edition article by Joel Stein, "In Defense of the Silicon Valley Tech Bro. Arrogant, Entitled and annoyingly indispensable," Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Aug. 11-24, 2014, cover, p. 46-52, published online as "Arrogance Is Good: In Defense of Silicon Valley," businessweek.com posted Aug. 7, 2014
"Silicon Valley has its own politics, too. Call it liberalitarian (sic). The fact that liberal and libertarian positions sometimes conflict -- smaller government and gun control, helping the poor, deregulating industries --doesn't bother most, since they think about politics so rarely. When they do, it's generally to prove who is the more politically correct. Mozilla co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Brendan Eich was discovered in April to have given $1,000 to support California's anti-gay marriage proposition back in 2008. He was forced to resign. That doesn't happen in the fast-food chicken industry." (Quoted from Joel Stein, "In Defense of the Silicon Valley Tech Bro. Arrogant, Entitled and annoyingly indispensable," Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Aug. 11-24, 2014, cover, p. 46-52, published online as "Arrogance Is Good: In Defense of Silicon Valley," businessweek.com posted Aug. 7, 2014)
PHOTO: The native California granddaddies of Silicon Valley, who hated the stuffy and formal back east companies they had known, cultivated a casual dress culture in the company they formed. Dave Packard loved wearing a Western bolo tie and he aped the Colorado Western cowboy spirit. See the book by Michael S. Malone, "Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company," Portfolio Penguin Group, 2007 about Hwelett-Packard compnay founders William Hewlett and David Packard.(Note: Bill Hewlett lived 1913-2001 and Dave Packard lived 1912-1996). See previous post Bill & Dave by Michael S. Malone (5/22/07)
As someone who spent three years working in Silicon Valley, I became acquainted with the casual California culture, which is in stark contrast to the formal suit-and-tie dress codes I encountered working for companies "Back East," which is a phrase West Coasters often use to refer to people east of the Rocky Mountains. (Note: rightwing politicians love to call Californians and Oregonians the "Left Coast" as a derisive reference to libertarian or liberal politics. Of course, I always like to remind them Oregon voters banned gay marriage and also remind them where Republican President Ronald Reagan started his career, amongst all those Hollywood liberals in California.
When I was working in Silicon Valley two decades ago, it was still dominated by the hardware integrated chip and computer guys who were designing the computers we use today. Software designers had an important role, but they were not in charge and often had no background in engineering or science as did most all silicon chip designers. In fact, many software people had only liberal arts degrees and considered themselves artists and not engineers. After the dot com bubble occurred a decade ago, the young, arrogant and so-called "dot snots" who had taken over in Silicon Valley, experienced their first big failure and humbling before they rose up from the ashes and created the current Silicon Valley cloud computing technology that has been embraced by everyone world-wide and is best epitomized by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who popularized social networking -- something that a stereotypical anti-social computer nerd and hardware engineer would have never done.
It is interesting how the debate between liberal vs. conservative vs. libertarian is an old one -- the former Oregon State University Professor W. Dorr Legg considered himself a conservative, and even founded the present day gay Log Cabin Republicans, but many people labeled him as more a libertarian because he was a pioneering co-founder of the gay homophile movement that pre-dated Stonewall in 1969. See previous post "Gay marriage discussion in 1953 vs. 1963 and today" (12/16/13).
