BEFORE THE RISE OF SILICON VALLEY, monopoly was a pejorative in the dictionary of American life. Of course, the dirty word was joyously pursued. Businesses always aggressively aspired to achieve a state of complete and total dominance over markets. Most modern economics textbooks would describe that ambition as healthy and normal. Still, monopoly was a culturally unacceptable and politically dangerous goal to blare. Except in a few isolated cases, the true forerunners of today’s giants, that goal was hardly ever vocalized in Thomas Jefferson’s native land, which romanticized competition as the best hedge against dangerous concentrations of power. Even as the American government stopped doing much to actively constrain monopoly in the 1980s, companies continued to respect the old tradition of paying homage to the virtues of rigorous competition.
Then along came the new giants of tech. Silicon Valley’s biggest companies don’t merely crave monopoly as a matter of profit; its pundits and theorists don’t merely tolerate gigantism as a fact of economic life. In the great office parks south of San Francisco, monopoly is a spiritual yearning, a concept unabashedly embraced. Big tech considers the concentration of power in its companies—in the networks they control—an urgent social good, the precursor to global harmony, a necessary condition for undoing the alienation of humankind.
At their most idealistic moments, the tech giants drape their pursuit of monopoly in grandiose rhetoric about human rights and connection—a lofty sense of self-mission that makes the growth of these networks an imperative; their size becomes an end unto itself. They aspire to escape competition, to exist on their own plane, so they can fulfill their transcendent potential. Their dangerous dream has such a firm footing because it has such a long pedigree. Silicon Valley’s craving for monopoly stretches back, strangely enough, to the counterculture of the 1960s, where it emerged from the most lyrical of visions of peace and love. More specifically, it begins with a crown prince of hippiedom.
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STEWART BRAND WOULD DRIVE his truck down the San Francisco Midpeninsula, through the dissipating fog of the early sixties. The sticker on his bumper protested, “Custer Died for Your Sins.” On his exposed chest rested a string of beads. Citizens of the acid scene, of which Brand was a leading light, thought of him as an “Indian freak.” It was a romance that first stirred when a family friend asked Brand to photograph the Warm Springs Reservation for a brochure, and that culminated in his marriage to Lois Jennings, an Ottawa. To Brand, the child of an advertising executive, Native Americans were a revelation. His father had written a script for the conformist consumerism of the fifties, and Native Americans were the living, breathing refutation of it.
Like so many white men before him, Brand found authenticity on the reservation that felt painfully absent in his own life. The reservation was a refuge, a bastion that stubbornly refused to partake in planetary destruction and clung to a “cosmic consciousness.” In an especially groovy mood, Brand once quipped, “[Indians] are so planetary they also tend to be extra-planetary.” To spread the values that he first found in Warm Springs, Brand created a small troupe of dancers that performed a multimedia show he called “America Needs Indians.” Replete with flashing lights, music, and projected images, the show was “a peyote meeting without peyote,” in Brand’s telling.
This spectacle was an early glimpse of Brand’s career as an impresario—one who would shape the future of technology. His gift was to channel the spiritual longings of his generation, and then to explain how they could be fulfilled by technology. He made his case in books and articles, but those were his relatively square undertakings. He created a new genre of publication that, more or less, hyperlinked to the texts of his fellow travelers. Long before TED, he created a chin-tugging conference circuit.
Brand would come to inspire a revolution in computing. Engineers across Silicon Valley revered Brand for explaining the profound potential of their work in ways they couldn’t always see or articulate. Brand gathered a devoted following because he brought to technology a rousing sense of idealism. Where politics failed to transform humanity, computers just might.
That dream of transformation—a world healed by technology, brought together into a peaceful model of collaboration—carries a charming innocence. In Silicon Valley, this naive belief has been handed down through ages. Even the most hard-nosed corporations have internalized it. What began as a stirring dream—humanity tied together into a single transcendent network—has become the basis for monopoly. In the hands of Facebook and Google, Brand’s vision is a pretext for domination.
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BEFORE STEWART BRAND COULD REMAKE technology, he needed to mold the sixties. It is a story that begins, as many tales of the prehippie years do, a bit aimlessly. After boarding at Exeter and graduating from Stanford, Brand enlisted in the army. His experience in the barracks ended unhappily, but it also supplied him with a measure of organizational acumen and managerial chops. These skills never did fail him, even after he placed tabs of LSD on his tongue. (He began messing around with acid in 1962, when it could be procured from legitimate medical experimenters.) Brand was the master of the uptight, straitlaced tasks that flummoxed most of his long-haired friends—renting a hall, publicizing an event. When he linked up with the writer Ken Kesey and his storied posse of drug-dabbling Merry Pranksters, he represented the “restrained, reflective wing” of that Day-Glo band of hipsters, at least in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s travelogue through the emerging counterculture. Though Brand wore a top hat with a flower, and he spoke in impish aphorisms, he remained a neatnik with a filing cabinet.
His pièce de résistance was organizing the Trips Festival, the greatest of the Acid Test parties that Kesey’s crew hosted in San Francisco to celebrate their favorite drug. Brand put together a program for three days of psychedelia, which helped launch the 1960s, as we now know them. Among other things, the extravaganza introduced the Grateful Dead to the world; it gathered six thousand hippies and gave them a sense of belonging to a culture, or rather a counterculture. Brand placed his obsessions center stage on the first night of the festival, giving the America Needs Indians troupe prime billing.
All the lights and images that Brand deployed were like LSD, an attempt to artificially induce a heightened sense of consciousness. America needed Indians, and it needed acid, too. A jolt to rouse the country from its gray flannel numbness. In time, Brand would ascribe the same mind-bending powers to computers. But before he celebrated those machines, he didn’t much like them. Everything the nascent counterculture would come to despise—the mindless submission of the herd, the tyranny of bureaucracy—could be reduced to a pungent symbol, the computer. When Brand later looked back on the sixties, he recalled, “Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control.”
Across the bay in Berkeley, criticism of the computer could be heard in the earliest rumblings of the New Left. Mario Savio, the oratorical leader of the Free Speech Movement on campus, compared the oppressive forces at the university (and in society) to technology: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels.” But the metaphor was often more specific. As Savio put it: “At Cal you’re little more than an IBM card.” Indeed, protesting students strung computer cards around their necks, with holes stamped through them to read STRIKE. They mockingly wrote, “Please do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me.”
This critique was more than fair. To begin, there was IBM, the opaque corporation that manufactured the machines. By the late 1950s, IBM controlled 70 percent of the domestic computer market, with no true competitor trailing it. This monopoly was a product of savvy engineering, but also of the full support of the Pentagon and other branches of the state. (These subsidies helped the United States overtake first-rate European engineers, who enjoyed no such state support.) IBM named one of its first models, the 701, the “Defense Calculator,” to pander to its primary market. Nearly all of the 701s it manufactured were rented to either the Defense Department or aerospace companies. A few years later, the NSA subsidized the development of a new model, a collaboration called “STRETCH,” so long as the machines could be calibrated to suit the agencies’ distinct needs. Paul Ceruzzi, a careful, nonideological historian of technology, has bracingly described the era: “U.S. computing from 1945 through the 1970s was dominated by large, centralized systems under tight controls, and these were not at odds with the Soviet political system.”
The machines, in fact, looked perfectly malevolent. Until the 1970s, most computers were massive, immovable blocks, like the behemoth institutions that used them. Whole rooms were required to house these early models. Because these instruments were so expensive and delicate, they were guarded vigilantly. To submit data, supplicants approached a window and handed punch cards to white-coated, skinny-tied technicians, a group invariably described as a “priesthood.” These punch cards resembled nothing so much as a multiple-choice form, that essential instrument of bureaucracy. This clinical approach suited the postwar elite, with its technocratic bent and obsession with efficiency.
Stewart Brand believed many of the worst things that one could say about computers. And yet, he held out hope that they might remake the world for the better. In part, the flicker of optimism was generational. Baby boomers grew up in a world steeped in technology—rock and roll, automobiles, television. They enjoyed modernity far too much to mount a full-throated counteroffensive. As Theodore Roszak, the New Left theorist, later explained: “Side by side with the appeal of folk music and primitive ways, handicrafts and organic husbandry, there was a childlike, Oh Wow! confabulation with the spaceships and miraculous mechanisms that would make Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and the television series Star Trek cult favorites.”
Brand’s own prophecy about technology came in a series of epiphanies, only one of which was induced by drugs. Sitting atop his apartment building in the hipster enclave of North Beach, he covered himself in a blanket. A string of thoughts passed through his mind. Why weren’t the buildings in front of him arrayed in perfectly parallel lines? Damn, must be the curvature of the Earth. Definitely, the curvature of the Earth. Hmmmm, you know, with all those satellites staring down on the planet, why isn’t there a photograph of the Earth? Not just a photograph, but a color photograph. Not just the Earth, but the WHOLE Earth. If there were a picture of the whole Earth, man, that would change everything. Thus began Brand’s campaign of heckling NASA into releasing a color photograph of the whole Earth. He soon hitchhiked east to sell buttons on college campuses, which trumpeted his demand. This crusade, quixotic as it now sounds, helped awaken the environmental movement.
A second epiphany built on the first. Returning from his father’s funeral, he pondered how he might spend the chunk of money he had just inherited. He began to think about all his friends who had decamped to communes. It was easy to see why the communes grabbed hold of his imagination. Starting with the Summer of Love in 1967 and continuing through the annus horribilis of 1968, hundreds of thousands of young Americans, driven by hope and fear, went to live off the grid in self-sufficient collective communities. They sprouted villages with names like Drop City and Twin Oaks, in places like the New Mexico desert, the Tennessee mountains, and the Northern California forests. (By one estimate, the commune population swelled to 750,000 in the early seventies.) Sitting on the plane, Brand had the notion that he might drive a truck to these settlements to sell tools and other goods that would help the communards thrive. “This was a way to be of use to communes without actually having to live on one,” he would later joke.
His truck never quite took off, but the core concept morphed into something much bigger and more resonant. He created the Whole Earth Catalog, which was really more like an entirely new literary genre—or what Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation.” During its four years of existence, the Whole Earth Catalog sold 2.5 million copies and won a National Book Award. The subtitle of the catalog was “access to tools.” There were plenty described in its pages, though it didn’t actually sell any, except from a storefront that Brand operated in the heart of what would become Silicon Valley. The catalog pointed readers toward calculators and jackets and geodesic domes, as well as books and magazines. The goods themselves were less important than the catalog’s theoretical arguments about them. In an early issue, it announced:
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
Brand’s manifesto distilled the thinking of the commune movement and then advanced it in crucial ways. Technology, he argued, had created the ills of the world. Only technology could solve them. Tools, liberated from the hands of the monopolists and militarists, could empower individuals to become more self-sufficient and more self-expressive. Power Tools to the People, you could say. If some of these sentiments sound familiar, it is because they have echoed in dozens of Apple commercials over the years.
In a way, this was a theory of radical individualism and self-reliance—a forerunner of Silicon Valley libertarianism. But Brand had studied the works of such thinkers as Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan. All of his intellectual heroes wrote about the importance of looking at systems and networks. This was where the notion of the Whole Earth came in. Brand wanted his readers to think ecologically, to see how everything relates to everything else, to understand their place in the web of life. As the back cover of the catalog phrased it, “We can’t put it together. It is together.”
The Whole Earth Catalog is a foundational text of Silicon Valley—which helps account for the culture of the place. Despite the venture capitalists and the Teslas, Silicon Valley remains infused with the trace residue of the commune. It’s the reason that CEOs sit in the middle of open offices that ostensibly eschew organizational hierarchy, wearing the same T-shirt as the lumpen-programmer across the room. And even though Silicon Valley’s monopolies exist for the sake of profit, they view themselves as revolutionary agents, elevating the world to the state of oneness that Brand spent his life chasing. As Fred Turner has written in his important book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, “[The catalog] helped create the conditions under which microcomputers and computer networks could be imagined as tools of liberation.”
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WHEN JOBS DESCRIBED THE Whole Earth Catalog as a “bible” to his generation, he really meant to his generation of techies and hackers, the vanguard of geeks that revolutionized computing. All the rudiments of personal computing were, more or less, developed by the late sixties. Thanks to DEC, the Massachusetts hardware company, there were new examples of massive mainframes shrunk to more approachable microprocessors. Designers at Stanford had created the mouse. The Defense Department had wired the first internet. Visionary technologists like Doug Engelbart (inventor of the mouse) had imagined a future where machines played a much more intimate role in the lives of everyday people. But they spoke in jargon—and the machines were still too expensive, too large, and too confusing to be placed on office desks, let alone into homes.
Innovations don’t magically appear or simply proceed on the basis of some scientific logic; the culture prods them into existence. The notion of personalized computing had yet to cohere. It was arguably Brand who crystallized the ideas that would inspire the engineers to make that leap. The Whole Earth Catalog transposed the values of the counterculture into technology. And over time, he began to show how the computer—that monstrous invention of big institutions—could be harnessed as a tool for personal liberation and communal connection.
It is an important fact of technological history that the outskirts of San Francisco were the national epicenter of both psychedelics and computing. Because of that geographical confluence, young engineers were unusually open to Stewart Brand’s message. That was especially true at Xerox’s famed freewheeling cauldron of creativity, its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). One of the chief engineers there, Alan Kay, ordered every book listed in the Whole Earth Catalog and assembled them in an office library. Over the years, Kay would lavishly credit Brand for pointing toward the future: “For us at PARC, he was the guy who was giving us the early warning system about what computers were going to be.”
Having absorbed Brand into their work, the PARC engineers let him hang out in their lab. He would describe what he saw in a seminal article that he wrote for Rolling Stone in 1972. The article was a vivid, energetic piece of New Journalism: “The most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.” Brand depicted the computer scientists exactly as he wanted to see them—as the great emancipators of technology: “Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” The engineers had indeed begun to develop machines that were a decade ahead of their time, and too radical for the corporate suits at Xerox to fully comprehend. Their most legendary prototype was a computer with many of the elements that would later appear in the Macintosh—no coincidence, because Steve Jobs was enraptured by the innovations he witnessed in a highly mythologized visit to PARC in the winter of 1979.
But what made Brand’s article so influential is that he took the impulses of the engineers and translated them into pithy phrases—and these pithy phrases, in turn, gave direction to the work of the engineers. Brand painted a glorious image of computing. What the communes failed to accomplish, the computers would complete. “When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over: We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things . . . like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction . . . of sentient interaction.” Two years later, when he grew this article into a book, he injected an important new phrase into the lexicon: “the personal computer.”
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IT DOESN’T BODE WELL for the world that the lineage of the tech companies stretches back to the communes. That experiment ended in shambles—the communities dissolved into cults of personality, small villages riven by rivalries. All the gorgeous visions of democracy and collectivism culminated in authoritarianism and crushing disappointment. In 1971, Stewart Brand pulled the plug on the Whole Earth Catalog after four years of publication. To honor the retirement of his zeitgeist-bending creation, he threw a “Demise Party.” A thousand catalog devotees journeyed to the extravaganza, another of his performance pieces. He gathered his hippie friends in the Palace of Fine Arts, an imposing old-world edifice down by the San Francisco Marina. Brand strode through the event wearing a black cassock, a tuned-in Grim Reaper.
Even a rugged optimist such as Brand found it hard to push away dark thoughts at this nadir. His marriage collapsed. Thoughts of suicide would linger in his head. But his faith in technology remained undimmed. Brand hadn’t cared that deeply about politics and hadn’t spent much time pondering the nature of capitalism. His concerns were far more spiritual. What he still craved was the sensation of wholeness—the profound belonging and authenticity he associated with the reservations and communes. They didn’t harbor a shred of alienation. They were at one with humanity. It was the same craving he felt when contemplating that missing photograph of Earth. This thinking was the exact opposite of Ayn Rand’s vision of libertarianism; a hunger for cooperation, sharing, and a self-conscious awareness of our place in a larger system. Brand could express this sentiment only in gusts of rhetoric that would never survive rigorous analysis, except for the force with which they were exhaled: “Ever since there were two organisms, life has been a matter of coevolution, life growing ever more richly on life. . . . We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that’s our only choice.”
However eloquently expressed, such thoughts weren’t entirely original. Brand borrowed heavily from others, especially Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic turned pop icon. Unlike his stuffy colleagues, McLuhan engaged with the culture as it was lived in the sixties—not the work of modernist novelists and action painters, but television, radio, and movies. He was lithe and gnomic, a strangely appealing fixture on TV talk shows, not to mention a perfectly deadpan actor in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. It was often hard to tell what he actually believed, given his penchant for explaining himself in seemingly profound, and profoundly opaque, paradoxes. (“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say,” he once admitted.) But even his muddiest prophecies could easily be mined for zippy, quotable formulations.
McLuhan claimed to make no moral judgments about the impending future he described, yet his passages about new technologies were often tinged by euphoria. In his books, McLuhan had predicted that new technologies could, if handled judiciously, tie the world together into a network: “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”
McLuhan hinted that this network had the potential to wrap like a magical bandage around the world, closing its wounds without any trace of a scar. The fragmentation of humanity was an understandable concern for a generation born in the shadow of a total war and living under the constant threat of a nuclear conflagration. There was a more personal form of fragmentation that plagued postwar America, too—a sense that all the paper-pushing and file cabinets had divided workers from their creativity, rendering them miserable, isolated automatons. But that plague of alienation, McLuhan suggested, was hardly implacable.
The healing powers of the network could be found in McLuhan’s famous maxim: The medium is the message. Technology was the thing that mattered. He heaped blame upon Gutenberg’s invention, print, a medium he believed divided the world, isolating us from our fellow humans in the antisocial act of reading. “The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialization,” he lamented. It produced a “desert of classified data.” His critique was actually a lament—he longed for the world before print, for oral culture, with its face-to-face interactions. The perfect technology would revive the spirit of that bygone culture, but on a planetary scale, transforming the world into one big, happy tribe. Or, it would become a “global village,” to use his other cliché-destined phrase—and the warmth of that village would counteract destructive individualism and all the other fragmentary forces in the world.
Most promising of all the new technologies was the computer. It is true, McLuhan saw potential downsides to the invention and to the global village he described—rumors might travel fast, privacy might not survive all the new opportunities for surveillance. Still, his descriptions of the computer echoed Brand’s. McLuhan also passionately craved wholeness and then some, which he described rhapsodically:
Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to bypass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by [twentieth-century French philosopher Henri] Bergson. The condition of “weightlessness,” that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace.
Eternal life, eternal peace . . . the devoutly Catholic McLuhan had ventured beyond political prophecy to a more biblical form.
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EVERY SIGNIFICANT technological development since has come wrapped in McLuhan’s aspiration: the desire for machines to usher in a new era of cooperation. That’s what J.C.R. Licklider meant when he explained how his invention of the Internet would erase social isolation: “Life will be happier for the on-line individual.” And how Tim Berners-Lee described the possibilities of the World Wide Web he created: “Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world.” The dream of stitching the world into a global village has been embodied in the nomenclature of modern technology—the net is interconnected, the Web is worldwide, media is social. And the dream has fueled a succession of grand collaborative projects, cathedrals of knowledge built without any intention of profiting from the creation, from the virtual communities of the nineties to Linux to Wikipedia to the Creative Commons. It’s found in the very idea of open-source software. Such notions of sharing were once idealistic gestures and the reveries of shaggy inventors, but they have become so much the norm that they have been embraced by capitalism. The business plans of the most spectacularly successful firms in history, Google and Facebook, are all about wiring the world into one big network—a network where individuals work together, in a spirit of altruism, to share information.
There is a theory of knowledge embedded in this celebration of sharing: the notion that individuals can achieve only a limited understanding of the world while reading and thinking at their own desks. Before the arrival of the new technologies, information, like the isolated scholar, was atomized. But now, information can be sorted and processed by a much larger community—that could correct mistakes, add insights, and revise conclusions. Technology enabled what H. G. Wells once called the World Brain, or what Wired editor Kevin Kelly called the hive mind.
The assumption that undergirds this strain of technological thinking is that humans aren’t simply self-interested economic creatures. Linus Torvalds, the engineer who created Linux, argued, “Money is not the greatest of motivators. It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion.” At times, this collectivist view of human nature was difficult to discern. The representative figure of early computing was the hacker—a radical individualist, who liked to thumb his nose at big institutions. Hackers were portrayed as loners, glued to their seats and screens; they were geniuses who depended on nothing more than their self-taught acumen. (One prominent metaphor depicted the early inhabitants of cyberspace as pioneers on an electronic frontier, bravely setting forth on their own.) But in the end, the hackers were misunderstood figures. They wanted nothing more than to belong, to subsume their brilliant selves in an even more incandescent whole, to lose themselves in the poetry of community.
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BUT THERE WAS TENSION in the dream. Contradictions that wouldn’t easily melt away. On the one hand, the technologists aspired to create a world liberated from the control of mega-institutions. The old hatred for the likes of IBM never did fade. On the other hand, they created networks that were designed to be all-encompassing and unrivaled. There can be only one global village. These structures were the greatest business opportunities ever imagined—and only the innocence of faith could blind one to the possibility that they would fall into the hands of big firms. In the end, the technologists’ disdain for authority was really just a stance, an emotionally gratifying one, and it wasn’t the meat of the vision. The more important thing was the wholeness.
That is the reason that the history of computing follows such a predictable pattern. Each pathbreaking innovation promises to liberate technology from the talons of the monopolists, to create a new network so democratic that it will transform human nature. Somehow, in each instance, humanity remains its familiar self. Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it. The personal computer came to be dominated by a single innovation-inhibiting firm (Microsoft). Access to the Internet soon required handing over substantial monthly sums to telecommunication toll collectors who carved up the map into zones of barely challenged supremacy (Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner). Meanwhile, one site (Google) emerged as the portal to knowledge; another (Amazon) as the starting point of all commerce. And even though we can talk about social networks in the plural, really only one (Facebook) encompasses nearly two billion individuals.
There’s always been a strange, unacknowledged convergence in the thinking of technological dreamers and the rapacious industrial monopolists of the Gilded Age. Both like to imagine escaping the rigors of competitive capitalism; both wax elegiac about the virtues of “cooperation,” which they invoke as a matter of economic necessity. There are certain systems—the telephone and telegraph are classic examples—that simply never would have flourished in a competitive market. The costs of setting up a massive network are immense. Imagine the expense of laying down all those lines crisscrossing the continent. The inefficiency of rival networks is too great. We must, therefore, forgive the size of the firms that provide these essential services—and give them space to cooperate with the government and other big firms so that they can prudently eliminate waste and make disinterested strategic choices. This was what the visionary Theodore Vail, who built AT&T in the first decades of the last century, claimed: “Competition means strife, industrial warfare; it means contention; it oftentimes means taking advantage of or resorting to any means that the conscience of the contestants . . . will permit.” Even the railroad barons, the most conniving creatures that capitalism ever created, extolled the virtues of altruistic collaboration. J. P. Morgan himself sincerely believed this gospel. As the biographer Ron Chernow writes, “America’s most famous financier was a sworn foe of free markets.”
Such arguments are increasingly familiar in Silicon Valley. It’s the premise of a whole shelf of books on strategy. (Sample title: Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy.) The most important prophet of the new monopoly is an investor named Peter Thiel. He isn’t just any investor. His successes include PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX, an almost unrivaled record of sniffing out winners before they become chic, which suggests a deeper understanding of technology and its trajectory. Thiel can be a wildly idiosyncratic thinker, which has justly earned him opprobrium in recent years. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he supported Donald Trump. He also quietly bankrolled retired wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against a gossip site. All these pernicious extracurricular activities distract from his core strength: He’s a more rigorous thinker than the others in his field. Though he mouths many of the libertarian clichés of his social set, he has a talent for explaining his underlying assumptions. Thiel abhors the values of Darwinian competition. Indeed, he dismisses competition as a “relic of history.” In a short treatise called Zero to One, he wrote, “More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.” By idolizing competition, we fail to appreciate the values of monopolies. Without having to worry about rivals, monopolies can focus on important things—they can treat their workers well, they can focus on solving important problems and generating world-changing innovation. They can “transcend the daily brute struggle for survival.”
It’s pretty clear that most of his colleagues in Silicon Valley agree that monopoly is the natural, desirable order of things. That’s why start-up companies no longer dream of displacing Google or Facebook, but launch themselves with the ultimate aspiration of getting bought by the giants. (On its shopping expeditions over the years, Google has acquired two hundred companies.) In the tech industry, fierce corporate rivalry is regarded as an impossibility, and anathema to the very essence of the network. For the most part, the tech giants respect an entente cordiale among themselves. Apple, for instance, used to insist that its rivals never poach from its ranks of employees. The coziness can be gleaned from the balance sheets: Google pays $1 billion each year so that Apple will use its search engine. While he was Google CEO, Eric Schmidt also served on Apple’s board. Like nineteenth-century European powers, each company does little to impinge on the other’s sphere of influence, competing only on the fringes of empire. Marc Andreessen, one of the Valley’s most venerable characters, is blunt about this tendency toward monopoly: “The big technology markets actually tend to be winner take all. There is this presumption—in normal markets you can have Pepsi and Coke. In technology markets in the long run you tend to only have one, or rather the number one company.” That is the nub of it: In Silicon Valley, everything is one; it’s always been one.