Despite unleashing the phrase “Web 2.0” on an unsuspecting world, Tim O’Reilly can be considered one of the computer industry’s good guys. The books released by O’Reilly are a cut above the usual illiterate tat that passes for software documentation and O’Reilly himself seems to have a genuine belief that technology can be used for altruistic purposes. Having said that, I find his dogged adherence to Silicon Valley’s dominant mindset (markets=good/government=bad) difficult to go along with.
For example, a recent New York Times op-ed piece by O’Reilly pondered the convergence of the web and mobile devices. In the piece O’Reilly argues that truly open platforms—as opposed to proprietary systems offering restricted access to developers—empower market forces to create innovative new products:
Both the personal computer and the Internet flourished in an environment of free-market competition. Tim Berners-Lee did not have to submit his idea for the World Wide Web in 1991 to a “state-of-the-art testing lab.” All that he needed to unleash a revolution was a single other user willing to install his new Web server software.”
But as many people know, when Berners-Lee was building the foundations of the “Web” he was working for CERN (the European Centre for Nuclear Research), a massive government-sponsored enterprise that can hardly be described as “an environment of free-market competition.” Going further back, the very infrastructure of the Web–the packet-switching network that allows multiple computers to serve as nodes in a communications network–was pioneered by an agency of the U.S. Defense Department, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Again, the Pentagon isn’t the first outfit that comes to mind when the phrase “free-market” is uttered.
So one wonders why entrepreneurs and advocates of the software industry are reluctant to acknowledge the contribution of government-financed “Big Science” to the IT revolution. Perhaps because the involvement of monoliths such as CERN and the Department of Defense jars with the mythology of Silicon Valley, a place whose Romulus and Remus are Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. The founders of Hewlett-Packard famously started their company in a garage, and this template of go-it-alone innovation has provided the template for some of the most successful firms that have followed in HP’s wake, most notably Apple and Google.
Yet one also wonders whether this willed overlooking of how taxation created an environment that facilitated individual achievement doesn’t have a political tinge. After all, Silicon Valley is not only where the future is created—it’s famously also the place where vast fortunes can be accumulated very quickly. The immense wealth that can suddenly descend on the lucky/smart (tick according to your view of the Web 2.0 phenomenon) individual is a factor in the ever-growing income disparity in the United States.
The populist upsurge affecting American politics is a sign of unease about this widening chasm between the have-nots and the have-everythings. It now seems even presidential candidates are no longer terrified about discussing better funding for government programs. But those who might have to pay more to support these schemes—including the IT industry’s portion of the richest 1 percent who paid 27.6 percent of all U.S. federal taxes in 2005—mightn’t be entirely happy about the resurrection of “Big Government.” And what better way of hampering such a Progressive agenda by denying that tax-funded organization ever did anything useful?