Malcolm: It's fun to see Bush win and how he feels about the technology and their comments, they're so enthusiastic. What pleased me most was the appointment of John Ashcroft as Attorney General.
Alex: Oh my god, yeah.
Malcolm: For anyone in the Bush administration, John Ashcroft has a very, very, very specific meaning to us because he is public enemy number one; it's anathema to liberals and the left, and you'd think it's anathema to tech, too. so connected, with the derivation of the right to privacy, technology has to be sacred, and some kind of Christian conservatism, conventional technology has to be a threat, like, "We're polypagans or whatever. We don't want the Christian dad. It's him who's in charge," but they like John Ashcroft, and John Ashcroft likes technology. Always support technology, always support the Internet. And the deal with the tech was, "I'm going to drop the Microsoft antitrust case, I'll let you make whatever rules you want." I agree." This is the product of years and years of Ashcroft's "I agree" button terms and conditions, instead of limiting what Internet services can do and how they interact with their services. What." The deal is that the ISPs are will sell access to the government as a result of the right to privacy to any information that the government cannot access due to the right to privacy, and the government cannot be another customer for this service private.
Laura: Your book is fun to read, because today's generation of prominent tech leaders — people like Thiel and Musk who have better reasons — make so much more sense. Rather, they seem to be part of a very long line of beliefs, especially since Peter Thiel is actively involved in Stanford's ideological culture, The Stanford Review. I believe he has a scholarship to the Hoover Institution. Looks like it's not new.
Malcolm: No, not at all. Thiel serves on the board of directors of the Hoover Institution. So he took this job. But it doesn't just go from Hoover to Thiel, we have David Packard in the middle, recognized as one of the founders of Silicon Valley.
Laura: It's P for HP.
Malcolm: It's P for HP. David Packard , a six-foot-tall Stanford football player, received voluntary support from the administration. He had to take Hewlett with him because they really didn't like Hewlett because he wasn't six feet tall. But David Packard is not just a conservative. Not only is he a member of the Hoover Oversight Board, but he's also awesome. He was not satisfied with personally bailing out the American Enterprise Institute, which had become one of the most important conservative organizations in decades and privately maintained it with his own wealth. He was Nixon's Under Secretary of Defense during Vietnam. It is part of the federal bureaucracy. And then, of course, Reagan became president, and he was in close contact with the Hoover Institution and the conservative circle at Stanford. They had his picture all over their offices before he became president. He is their great hope.
Laura: How important is technology in this story? Because, in a sense, this is a very traditional story of staying in power in a very traditional way: being in government and then promoting and perpetuating the ideology in writing through think tanks and by approving grants and papers that support your views. and what you want. politics, it's all low-tech stuff.
Malcolm: When did I start this project, or, I think, when most people think of Silicon Valley and ask, "What is Silicon Valley's signature product?" they think of personal computers, maybe they think of those silicon transistors. . But when I look back on history and think of a Palo Alto product, it was a nuclear missile. It was a gun pointed at the head of the world: "If America falls, we'll blow the brains out of the world." This is a Palo Alto technology project. Think of the early use of the Internet to connect with friends they didn't know before. The first use of the Internet was to launch Iran-Contra. He exploited the radio systems of the Panama Canal Zone to carry out massacres throughout Latin America to win the Cold War.
Alex: Gopher wasn't looking for the Monty Python lyrics? There is more?
Malcolm: It was really about classifying future murder victims. That's what these things do. And they spend a lot of time saying, “Yes, computers can be used for many things. If we want to export to Idi Amin or if we want to export to Shah, they could use it to track time or whatever.
Laura: All we think about on the internet is branding, which is very successful. We said, "Oh yeah, like Friendster and Myspace and Grooveshark or those big internet companies" and really it's just minor patches.
Malcolm: And if you think about the first laptop, what was the first laptop for? Well, they are used by foreign secret agents who are connected to an encrypted network so that they can talk to Oliver North and implement shadow government policies with 15 people around the world without supervision. It's not easy. This requires this new communication technology. And this is the Internet.
Alex: Wow. This is a killer app do you think Malcolm?
Malcolm: It really is. Cold War is a killer app.
Alex: Well, Malcolm, thanks for talking to us today. By the way, the book is great.
Malcolm: Thanks for the invite, guys.
Laura: Malcolm Harris' new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, is out now.
Alex: The Politics of Everything is co-produced by Talkhouse.
Laura: Emily Cooke is our executive producer.
Alex: Lorraine helped Cademarto in this episode.
Laura: Myron Kaplan is our audio editor.
Alex: If you love The Politics of Everything and want to help, one of the things you can do is rate and review the show. Any feedback helps.
Laura: Thanks for listening.
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