‘Change the World’ idealism is dying in Silicon Valley. We’ll miss it when it’s gone

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.

Yet the idea that tech can help us “change the world,” as the old mantra would have it, is hardly left-wing. Internet culture, on the contrary, has always been a libertarian-infused mélange that celebrates individual liberty, social tolerance, and collective empowerment through technology and free markets. At its best, it’s a big tent of hopeful ideas about the future, and a beacon for creative thinkers of every stripe. Its better spirits are very much needed today amid the often-gloomy conversations about the impact of AI.

---

It’s worth remembering that the freewheeling creative culture of San Francisco in the 1990s was the petri dish for an exceptionally rich crop of innovations.

At Wired magazine, co-founder Louis Rossetto preached a libertarian gospel of tech revolution in its pages while an unlikely crew of young writers and programmers all but invented the website as we know it—including the still ubiquitous banner ad.

Craig Newmark, a socially awkward young programmer from New Jersey, found himself in the middle of an early tech party scene where people were experimenting with ideas like virtual reality, and he wanted to offer tips; he’d end up inventing a new type of community marketplace, and the idea of a “sharing economy.”

The open-source software movement, partly a political project to protect the freedom to tinker and prevent corporate oligarchies from stifling innovation, would become a cornerstone of the technology industry.

It was on the rooftop of the Industry Standard that a young techie from Nebraska named Ev Williams huddled with colleagues and decided their startup should focus on a tool they would call Blogger. It was a pre-cursor to social media, and Williams would go on to co-found Twitter.

A key tenet throughout was that New Economy entrepreneurs could do well and also do good. From its earliest days, Google’s guiding principle was “don’t be evil,” even as it built a money-spinning machine for the ages. It was the norm for startups to have a mission separate from financial success.

It wasn’t by chance that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began attending Burning Man, the famous annual happening in the Nevada desert, before their Stanford research project had even become a company.

The shared values of the internet era, brilliantly heralded by Wired, can usefully be thought of as the Burning Man Compact.

Just as the event brought together renegade dirt-campers and billionaires alike to build a utopian city in the desert, so too the internet-enabled New Economy would bring less hierarchical organizations and communities, and more innovative, satisfying, and productive ways of working.

Politically, the industry was equal parts liberal and libertarian, and was perhaps best reflected by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, created to protect the denizens of cyberspace from an overreaching government. It was a matter of liberty: “hands off our internet” was the rallying cry, echoing civil rights battles of yore.

This compact began to fray in the 2010s as the scrappy upstarts of the early days grew into globe-spanning giants with untold power and influence. Social media was tuned to reward conflict rather than community connection, and peoples’ confidence in tech eroded as the big platforms became misinformation machines and tools for political manipulation. Young employees dove into progressive politics and the social justice movement, and talent-hungry companies moved to accommodate a growing list of political demands from the left.

Then the ructions of the Covid era tore the fragile consensus apart—a split embodied by Elon Musk, who was a Burning Man enthusiast even as he morphed into fire-breathing campaigner against many of the values it embodied.

Now, a new version of techno-optimism is ascendant, perhaps best articulated in a 2023 essay by Marc Andreessen. A cheerful, fresh-faced internet idealist himself when I first met him in the mid-1990s, Andreessen is now among the world’s wealthiest venture capitalists, and his once-liberal politics are no more; his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” asserts that free-market techno-capitalism is a miracle contraption that will solve every problem, so long as we all work hard and banish the ideas of “The Enemy,” such as “tech ethics” and “trust and safety.”

Over the past year, under Trump, this ideology has morphed into support for government-backed techno-capitalism and America-first nationalism, with private crypto-currencies and the unregulated pursuit of artificial intelligence at the heart of the enterprise.

The vibe in San Francisco has already shifted to reflect this worldview. Tech firms were quick to abandon their once-proud commitments to diversity and defense of immigrants following the 2024 election and quietly acquiesced to Trump’s attacks on once-scared cows like higher education, free trade and the rule of law. Military technology, long shunned in startup land, is now the hottest sector for venture capitalist investment outside of AI. “Builders,” a term crafted to flatter the leaders of for-profit technology startups while subtly downgrading other endeavors, are the new heroes.

Trae Stephens, co-founder of the weapons startup Anduril Industries and a protege of far-right investor and provocateur Peter Thiel, recently gave a speech in Washington about the need for “patriotic” investment so that America could do the “hard things,” like build data centers and rockets and nuclear power plants fast enough to beat the Chinese.

But this set of ideas about how tech might change the world for the better doesn’t have the same appeal, either as a communal value system or a roadmap for personal success

In San Francisco, the epicenter of the AI boom, the population of young people is now just barely creeping up after a sharp pandemic-era decline—a striking contrast to the influx of scores of thousands of twenty- and thirty-somethings that accompanied the dot-com boom, and then the rise of the smartphone. AI companies are hiring, but not as fast as the champions of the internet era are cutting back; tech employment in the city remains well below its peak. Money is pouring into the industry, but most of it is for computing power, not people.

Meanwhile, both of San Francisco’s prestige art schools have shuttered, victims of high costs, limited support from the local moguls, and the lack of job prospects for would-be attendees. Fifteen theatre companies have closed. It’s not clear how anyone who isn’t a superstar technologist is supposed to get in on the AI action.

When I walk the streets of SoMa and the Financial District these days, the sidewalks on most days are still strikingly empty compared with pre-pandemic times. The entrepreneurs I meet are younger and more money-obsessed than ever, consumed as much with anxiety about fundraising and competition and the uncertainties of AI as with excitement about the future. Even for teens and college students, financial success is what matters most.

At the very least, the pro-Trump tech elites have done a terrible job selling the idea that AI, and technological progress more generally, will be a blessing for us all. Top executives including Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are among the least-liked public figures in America. Opinion polls show little trust in the tech industry, and widespread fears about what artificial intelligence will bring—even among young up-and-comers.

This rejection, for those on the receiving end of it, is misunderstood as a messaging problem—one that Trae Stephens recently proposed to solve by buying Wired. His suggestion drew scores of hosannahs from followers on X, who shared his lament that the magazine had become too critical of the industry and its leaders.

It’s telling that this crowd still craves the authenticity and credibility of Wired, forged in the idealism of an earlier time. They don’t seem to realize that its influence flows from the very values they are so determined to deride.

Their energy would be better spent thinking more broadly, and less ideologically, about the impact of their endeavors on society. As we saw clearly in the internet era, belief in the benefits of technological progress doesn’t have to be a partisan political issue. Nor does trying to do the right thing by humanity stand in the way of business success: just ask Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist (which he still mostly owns) eventually yielded a massive fortune.

It’s certainly true that a lot of the high-minded aspirations of earlier times turned out to be empty talk; the internet behemoths, indeed, have arguably done at least as much societal harm as good. Yet it’s sad to see that taken as evidence that only the self-interested pursuit of financial riches can be the driving principle of technological progress.

Andreessen’s venture capital firm, which now manages more than $90 billion in assets, has become the biggest political donor in America during this election cycle, spending more than $115 million so far on the mid-terms as it seeks advantage for its crypto and AI investments. There’s nothing very entrepreneurial, or inspirational, in that.

The idealistic, ambitious, and joyful culture that gave us the internet might be demeaned as weak and soft-headed by Trump-aligned tech leaders with a narrow anti-regulation, pro-military agenda. But even today, belief in the idea that we can and should intentionally push technology to benefit everyone in society isn’t what’s wrong with Silicon Valley culture. It’s part of what’s right.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.